Dear Escapist friends,
pretty soon the... eagerly anticipated (?) sequel to J.K. Rowlings Fantastic Beasts and where to find them is gonna come out in theaters and this has gotten me thinking: was the Harry Potter series at any point genuinely good? Like practically every person my age I grew up with the Harry Potter books (I have mixed feelings about the movies) and for someone in the same situation asking this question might be a bit like asking if Christmas was ever any good. Of course Harry Potter is good. It brought so much joy to us when we grew up. Was it, though? Let's approach this question without the sentimentality I, and many others, bring to this particular franchise.
There are elements to the Harry Potter series that, I think, mostly hold up. The good old hero's journey, the campbellian monomyth has been adapted countless times, some of them well, but what I respect the Harry Potter series for is that it mostly manages to distract the reader from how basic and straightforward its actual plot is. Looking at the series as a whole it's about a boy growing up to defeat an evil tyrant, at this point we're expecting something better even from video games. What works about the Harry Potter series is that each book is individually interesting, even if they never really add up to much. Each book poses a mystery. Where's the Philosopher's Stone and who's the one trying to steal it? What's in the Chamber of Secrets and why is it important? Who is Sirius Black? Who put Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire? What's with the visions haunting Harry, now that Voldemort has come back? What are Horcruxes? While Rowling actually manage to conclude this series in a satisfying way? (The answer to the last one is "No.", for the record.)
It's not much a surprise that most of what Rowling has been writing outside of Harry Potter have been murder mystery crime novels, at their best the Harry Potter books are structured in a similar way. They present a mystery, they give the reader, generally, enough clues to figure them out for themselves and they have all the little red herrings and surprising twists the genre needs to keep the reader engaged.
What I'm also gonna give to the series is the fact that it mostly does worldbuilding right. Not that it has good worldbuilding, mind you, what we find out about the series' society of wizards makes less and less sense, the more you think about it works because it tells you just little enough to keep your interest alive while never telling you so much that you start to wonder how in the hell it's all supposed to work... which the books don't have much an answer for. The books convey an atmosphere that's genuinely fairly unique, a specific equilibrium between the morbid and the cozy, the sort of thing that can be embarassingly comforting to read on on a winter's night, even as an adult, when you realize that a lot of it isn't exactly good. It's a specific flavour or urban fantasy, somewhere between better Tim Burton, worse Terry Gilliam (He should have gotten to direct these movies, goddammit) and saner Jean Pierre Jeunet. Not quite goth but somewhere in the same hemisphere.
There are also elements to the books themes that I'd defend. What it all amounts to, a diverse group of people settling their differences and coming together to fight a villain and his henchmen, most of them aristocratic figures obsessed with "purity of blood" and quietly enabled by a corrupt ministry that keeps a democratic appearance while being almost entirely in the pockets of rich, pure-blooded families is... well, there's at least some semi-functional social commentary there. Rowling does a lot to cheapen these themes and it's rather humourous how her commitment to them seemed to wane, the more money she made but, you know, at least it's there.
For all that does work about Harry Potter, there's also a lot that doesn't, though, and frequently it doesn't get brought up because people aprroach it with more good will than it deserves, mostly for reasons of personal childhood nostalgia. I don't mean to dwell on formal issues like both the hero and the villain being remarkably dull characters (To give credit where credit is due, it does have a pretty strong supporting cast), how the story ends in an awfully anticlimactic fashion and what exactly Rowling was thinking when she came up with shady, hook nosed goblins running the magical banking system. Okay, no. I know exactly what she was thinking when she came up with that.
The fundamental flaw of the Harry Potter series is, that it's not nearly smart enough to correctly handle the themes it approaches. For an entire generation of kids and teenagers they became, rather than a series of simplistic adventure novels one may look back fondly as an adult, a persisting guideline for their own political self expression. Harry Potter, whatever its qualitites may be, became the Atlas Shrugged of progressive centrists. There is a number of amusing, if frustrating, anecdotes from the ComicCon panel and I urge everyone looking for a distraction from the tiresome leftist diatribe I decided to go on while talking about a series of childrens books, to read it:
https://ew.com/movies/2018/07/21/fantastic-beasts-impeach-trump/
while I, more than most people, think that a persons political views should, essentially, be rooted in their personal ethics and while I think that opposing fascism because you relate it to the ideology of villains you read about in a children's book is better than... well, not opposing fascism, I think this is indcative of the greater flaws of the series and the dangers of not being able to move on from it as a grownup.
Harry Potter presents a narrative with simple morals. There is nothing wrong with that, especially not considering that it was written for a very young target audience, the problem is, it applies these morals to a variety of issues that, while a few layers of abstractions removed from it, are very much rooted in reality. In short, Harry Potter is the attempt of an obscenely privileged person to write about the struggles of class, race and status and with all due respect, she's not nearly smart enough to do so in spite of her own privilege. Rowling, I'm sure, meant well when she chose to depict various types of insitutional evil through simplistic caricatures like Lord Voldemort, Cornelius Fudge, Dolores Umbridge or Lucius Malfoy. The inhumane totalitarian, the corrupt politician, the everyday sociopath, the rich fascist. What she failed to convey in her depiction of institutional evil is an understanding of the actual institutions, why the magical society embraced a figure like Lord Voldemort and why, realistically, another one will eventually take his place once he's death.
There is a lot to be said about the Star Wars series, a franchise that does have a few things in common with Harry Potter, one of them being that it's also targetted towards an audience of adolescents, but to George Lucas' credit: After he got the simple narrative of the original trilogy out of his system a part of him did realize that the story wasn't told quite yet, that there's more to it, that there was something to be elaborated on. The original trilogy expected us to accept that there was an empire, that it needed to be overthrown and that there was a potential for something better. The prequel trilogy, for all it's flaws, rather than following Luke, Leia and Han in building a better world, decided to look back and ask "Why was there an Empire, how did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader and where exactly did it all go wrong" and that's one of these questions a lot of media is afraid to ask "Where did it go wrong". We're obsessed with hero that represent the very best of humanity, our potential, but very rarely does entertainment media confront us with what we are at our worst.
We get some idea where Lord Voldemort came from but we fail to learn how exactly he managed to rise to power. To gain support. To maintain it long after his apparent death. And this is where the series stumbles. Where it doesn't live up to its own potential. It still, overall, promotes positive morals, there's very little about it that'd strike me as genuinely harmful for a person growing up the way something like Twilight is (And believe me, I could have a field day with it) but the worst thing a fan of it could do is failing to move on from it.
Contrary to the memes, I don't think that Harry Potter is the dullest franchise in history. I mean, it's not the Marvel Cinematic... you know what, no, low hanging fruit. A lot about it is still enjoyable, there's a lot about it I remember fondly and maybe the Fantastic Beast movies will add up to something worthwhile that positively recontextualizes the series as a whole, unlikely as I find it. Still, there's a lot about it that's very easy to citicize if one approaches it with a critical mindset. So that's my personal answer to the question posed in the title of this thread. Is it actually any good? Sure, it's fine, I guess.
That sure was a roundabout way to get there, wasn't it?
pretty soon the... eagerly anticipated (?) sequel to J.K. Rowlings Fantastic Beasts and where to find them is gonna come out in theaters and this has gotten me thinking: was the Harry Potter series at any point genuinely good? Like practically every person my age I grew up with the Harry Potter books (I have mixed feelings about the movies) and for someone in the same situation asking this question might be a bit like asking if Christmas was ever any good. Of course Harry Potter is good. It brought so much joy to us when we grew up. Was it, though? Let's approach this question without the sentimentality I, and many others, bring to this particular franchise.
There are elements to the Harry Potter series that, I think, mostly hold up. The good old hero's journey, the campbellian monomyth has been adapted countless times, some of them well, but what I respect the Harry Potter series for is that it mostly manages to distract the reader from how basic and straightforward its actual plot is. Looking at the series as a whole it's about a boy growing up to defeat an evil tyrant, at this point we're expecting something better even from video games. What works about the Harry Potter series is that each book is individually interesting, even if they never really add up to much. Each book poses a mystery. Where's the Philosopher's Stone and who's the one trying to steal it? What's in the Chamber of Secrets and why is it important? Who is Sirius Black? Who put Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire? What's with the visions haunting Harry, now that Voldemort has come back? What are Horcruxes? While Rowling actually manage to conclude this series in a satisfying way? (The answer to the last one is "No.", for the record.)
It's not much a surprise that most of what Rowling has been writing outside of Harry Potter have been murder mystery crime novels, at their best the Harry Potter books are structured in a similar way. They present a mystery, they give the reader, generally, enough clues to figure them out for themselves and they have all the little red herrings and surprising twists the genre needs to keep the reader engaged.
What I'm also gonna give to the series is the fact that it mostly does worldbuilding right. Not that it has good worldbuilding, mind you, what we find out about the series' society of wizards makes less and less sense, the more you think about it works because it tells you just little enough to keep your interest alive while never telling you so much that you start to wonder how in the hell it's all supposed to work... which the books don't have much an answer for. The books convey an atmosphere that's genuinely fairly unique, a specific equilibrium between the morbid and the cozy, the sort of thing that can be embarassingly comforting to read on on a winter's night, even as an adult, when you realize that a lot of it isn't exactly good. It's a specific flavour or urban fantasy, somewhere between better Tim Burton, worse Terry Gilliam (He should have gotten to direct these movies, goddammit) and saner Jean Pierre Jeunet. Not quite goth but somewhere in the same hemisphere.
There are also elements to the books themes that I'd defend. What it all amounts to, a diverse group of people settling their differences and coming together to fight a villain and his henchmen, most of them aristocratic figures obsessed with "purity of blood" and quietly enabled by a corrupt ministry that keeps a democratic appearance while being almost entirely in the pockets of rich, pure-blooded families is... well, there's at least some semi-functional social commentary there. Rowling does a lot to cheapen these themes and it's rather humourous how her commitment to them seemed to wane, the more money she made but, you know, at least it's there.
For all that does work about Harry Potter, there's also a lot that doesn't, though, and frequently it doesn't get brought up because people aprroach it with more good will than it deserves, mostly for reasons of personal childhood nostalgia. I don't mean to dwell on formal issues like both the hero and the villain being remarkably dull characters (To give credit where credit is due, it does have a pretty strong supporting cast), how the story ends in an awfully anticlimactic fashion and what exactly Rowling was thinking when she came up with shady, hook nosed goblins running the magical banking system. Okay, no. I know exactly what she was thinking when she came up with that.
The fundamental flaw of the Harry Potter series is, that it's not nearly smart enough to correctly handle the themes it approaches. For an entire generation of kids and teenagers they became, rather than a series of simplistic adventure novels one may look back fondly as an adult, a persisting guideline for their own political self expression. Harry Potter, whatever its qualitites may be, became the Atlas Shrugged of progressive centrists. There is a number of amusing, if frustrating, anecdotes from the ComicCon panel and I urge everyone looking for a distraction from the tiresome leftist diatribe I decided to go on while talking about a series of childrens books, to read it:
https://ew.com/movies/2018/07/21/fantastic-beasts-impeach-trump/
while I, more than most people, think that a persons political views should, essentially, be rooted in their personal ethics and while I think that opposing fascism because you relate it to the ideology of villains you read about in a children's book is better than... well, not opposing fascism, I think this is indcative of the greater flaws of the series and the dangers of not being able to move on from it as a grownup.
Harry Potter presents a narrative with simple morals. There is nothing wrong with that, especially not considering that it was written for a very young target audience, the problem is, it applies these morals to a variety of issues that, while a few layers of abstractions removed from it, are very much rooted in reality. In short, Harry Potter is the attempt of an obscenely privileged person to write about the struggles of class, race and status and with all due respect, she's not nearly smart enough to do so in spite of her own privilege. Rowling, I'm sure, meant well when she chose to depict various types of insitutional evil through simplistic caricatures like Lord Voldemort, Cornelius Fudge, Dolores Umbridge or Lucius Malfoy. The inhumane totalitarian, the corrupt politician, the everyday sociopath, the rich fascist. What she failed to convey in her depiction of institutional evil is an understanding of the actual institutions, why the magical society embraced a figure like Lord Voldemort and why, realistically, another one will eventually take his place once he's death.
There is a lot to be said about the Star Wars series, a franchise that does have a few things in common with Harry Potter, one of them being that it's also targetted towards an audience of adolescents, but to George Lucas' credit: After he got the simple narrative of the original trilogy out of his system a part of him did realize that the story wasn't told quite yet, that there's more to it, that there was something to be elaborated on. The original trilogy expected us to accept that there was an empire, that it needed to be overthrown and that there was a potential for something better. The prequel trilogy, for all it's flaws, rather than following Luke, Leia and Han in building a better world, decided to look back and ask "Why was there an Empire, how did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader and where exactly did it all go wrong" and that's one of these questions a lot of media is afraid to ask "Where did it go wrong". We're obsessed with hero that represent the very best of humanity, our potential, but very rarely does entertainment media confront us with what we are at our worst.
We get some idea where Lord Voldemort came from but we fail to learn how exactly he managed to rise to power. To gain support. To maintain it long after his apparent death. And this is where the series stumbles. Where it doesn't live up to its own potential. It still, overall, promotes positive morals, there's very little about it that'd strike me as genuinely harmful for a person growing up the way something like Twilight is (And believe me, I could have a field day with it) but the worst thing a fan of it could do is failing to move on from it.
Contrary to the memes, I don't think that Harry Potter is the dullest franchise in history. I mean, it's not the Marvel Cinematic... you know what, no, low hanging fruit. A lot about it is still enjoyable, there's a lot about it I remember fondly and maybe the Fantastic Beast movies will add up to something worthwhile that positively recontextualizes the series as a whole, unlikely as I find it. Still, there's a lot about it that's very easy to citicize if one approaches it with a critical mindset. So that's my personal answer to the question posed in the title of this thread. Is it actually any good? Sure, it's fine, I guess.
That sure was a roundabout way to get there, wasn't it?
