Harry Potter was popular for exactly the same reason His Dark Materials, Percy Jackson, and Artemis…

tgraywrites: > Harry Potter was popular for exactly the same reason His Dark Materials, Percy Jackson, and Artemis Fowl were. > > Fantastical magic layered over a highly trope-based version of the familiar. > > That’s simply the ideal formula for “popular with tweens”. > > What was Harry Potter except that heightened familiar taken to its absolutely highest most twee extent? The magic made maximally fantastical with literally no interest in consistency because tweens didn’t care about that either? > > Who else did similar aesthetics at the time? Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. > > Yes, they were much better at it, but they were also less laser fixated on that specific audience and they sent up the ludicrous twee rather than playing it straight. > > Yes, Earthsea and the Edge Chronicles both did wizard school and fantastical kids adventure better but they didn’t found it in the heightened everyday that allowed kids to project themselves into the story, imagining it happening to them at any moment. > > It’s also why the HP series kind of fell apart by it’s letest entries, because it began to lose the heightened twee and fantastical elements to try and build a cohesive story for an older audience that the original world was not meant to support and JKR wasn’t a talented enough author to deliver. > > HP tried to enter the age range and tone of His Dark Materials and failed because the world couldn’t support it and the author had nothing to say. The final books coasted on the success of their earlier entries entirely, they’d have failed on their own. > > But that foundation of fandom was enough. It had scratched the tween itch of a potential self-insert wish-fulfilment fantasy without questioning the world around them their parents told them to accept. > > With that pure distilled 90s tween appeal foundation of course it did well. > > You know who else did that, but with self-awareness? > > A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. > > It was just too dark to inspire quite the same degree of easy-reading and never even tried to be the wish-fulfilment fantasy Harry Potter was. > > This is also why you see the repeated pretty implicitly racist content through the books. > > That’s just heightened British 90s twee. Our society was packed with under-the-surface racism. > > JKR was just never even slightly able to unpack and disassemble that, so she packed it all in. It’s why you got a “happy to be slaves” race and a character mocked for trying to save them. It’s why you got openly racist caricatures instead of real names. Because that’s what our society did, and JKR had nothing to say about it. > > Really the only reason there wasn’t also homophobia is that 90s British schools operated entirely under the basis that homosexuality did not and could not exist. > > So you get Dumbledore gayed in post entirely because HP was grown up now and JKR wanted to be a good dinner party liberal. There was no thinking involved, no planning, no thought of what of our world should or shouldn’t be included in advance. No thought of what our world could or should be. > > If it fit one of the two criteria for inclusion it was in. If it wasn’t then it was ignored. The world was how it was and that was good. No wonder Harry Potter ended happily with the world exactly how it started and the title character as a magical cop. > > Of course our leaders and schools loved it and promoted it constantly - it told kids that Britain is great and good exactly how it is. Slavery? Just don’t think too hard about it, the author didn’t, look, colorful sweets! > > TL;DR - JKR didn’t do much world built as just stuff in every heightened stereotype of British 90s society at once and then every fantastical magical thing that came to mind as it happened. > > That, it turns out, was simply exactly what a tween audience of the time loved.