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[This post was requested by b, who wanted me to write about the enduring popularity of Harry Potter. If you back me on Patreon for $5 or more a month, you too may be randomly selected to tell me what to write.]
Because something had to be.
This paper is one I find absolutely fascinating. The authors created an artificial music market: participants could listen to an unknown song by an unknown band, rate it from one to five stars, and optionally download it. The fourteen thousand (!) participants were divided into two groups, one of which could see how often the song had been downloaded by other participants, and one of which could not. The first group was further divided into eight “worlds”: participants could only see the downloads from their own world.
The results are perhaps not surprising. In the social influence condition, there was more inequality in which songs were downloaded: the songs that were most popular tended to stay popular. (The effect was larger when the songs were ranked in order of how popular they are.) The social influence condition also caused more unpredictability: the distinct “worlds” were far more different from each other than randomly selected groups of participants from the independent condition were. Assuming that rank in the independent condition is an accurate measure of quality, then success in each of the worlds is positively correlated with quality, the best songs rarely do very poorly, and the worst songs rarely do very well. But it was quite common for an objectively mediocre song to shoot to the top of the charts, perhaps because an early participant happened to like it, and this snowballed.
Of course, in the real world, social influence is a far stronger force than it is in this study. You could pretty easily listen to all 48 songs in the study, and no doubt many people did, but it is impossible to read every book published in the course of a year. In fact, most of the ways we choose books to read– other than, of course, serendipitously stumbling across an excellent book in a bookstore or library– depend on social influence: recommendations from friends, book reviews, awards, bestseller lists.
Quality is an explanation of why a book has an ordinary amount of popularity: for instance, the popularity of George R R Martin’s Sandkings is no doubt because it is a wonderfully chilling horror novelette. (Seriously, check it out.) But I don’t think he improved that much as a writer between Armageddon Rag (which was an utter commercial disaster) and A Feast for Crows (his first bestselling novel). And it is certainly not because of any virtue of Martin’s that A Song of Ice and Fire got adapted into an HBO show while, say, the Lilith’s Brood series did not.
(I am so mad at HBO. When I was in high school, I quit reading ASOIAF until it was done, because I didn’t want to reread four thousand-page books every half-decade when the books came out so I could remind myself who the fuck the characters were. “All I have to do is avoid Martin fansites until the series is over,” I said to myself. “It’s not like it’s going to be turned into a wildly popular TV show and I will have to excuse myself from conversations at parties lest I have the ending spoiled.” Ha ha bloody fucking ha.)
(This is the TV show watchers’ revenge for all the gloating I did about the Red Wedding, isn’t it?)
Anyway, Harry Potter is not normal popular. It is stupidly, wildly, amazingly popular. It is a mistake to judge a children’s book by the same standards that you judge an adult’s book, but even as a children’s book Harry Potter is solidly good-but-not-great: I would put it roughly in the same class as A Series of Unfortunate Events or Animorphs, not as good as the Time Quintet. And yet there is only one of these book series where, despite not having reread the books since high school, I am familiar with the names of two dozen minor characters. (Marcus Flint, Lavender Brown, Terry Boot, Blaise Zambini…) Normal popularity is easily explicable by quality. Stupid, wild, amazing popularity is due to luck.
I am not sure what particular set of events caused Harry Potter to become more popular than A Series of Unfortunate Events, or if it was simply a lot of people’s individual decision to recommend this particular book. But it is easy to answer the question of why they’re so popular now, which is because they have been popular in the past, and therefore there exist many people who want to recommend the series to others and read it to their children, and even those who haven’t read the series know whether they’re a Gryffindor or a Ravenclaw.
Thing of Things 
If you like that paper, one of it’s authors has a book expounding on the general theme. It’s quite good: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Once-Know-Answer-ebook/dp/B004DEPHGQ
One thing I don’t like about the paper is the only information it gave was the number of downloads. Now, certainly that is an interesting figure, but I’d love to see the effect of a 5-star ranking system or a word-of-mouth forum. I suspect that would have a somewhat different dynamic. But still, it is an interesting experiment. I suspect it explains much of how mass culture works.
All the same, I think people will be wildly resistant to these ideas. We just don’t want to believe that success is random. We just don’t. It’s scary.
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Wow I just read Andrew Gelman of this book today. Weird
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Should say: “Andrew Gelman’s review of this book”
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Let me add, one of the core theses of the book is that we’re really good at giving post hoc explanations as to why things happened the way they did. However, we suck at turning those insights into actionable predictions. Which is to say, it is easy and fun to do the former, but such efforts seldom generalize to let us make good predictions for the future.
So yes, perhaps factors X, Y, and Z were indeed instrumental in Harry Potter’s rise. We can look at the broad web of cause/effect and pick out a few things that seem salient. However, we don’t see the 10^1000 other little events that also happened, that each in their small way made conditions right for the salient points to apply. If those conditions were different, then the “salient points” might be unimportant.
{Insert tedious discussion of the butterfly effect.}
{Insert another tedious discussion of black swans.}
Harry Potter landed at a certain place and time. Its social context was to some degree unique. In fact, the story goes that a whole string of publishers passed on the book. Looking back, that seems foolish. However, their oversight seems obvious only in hindsight. Furthermore, even studying the “business case” of Harry Potter in detail, you’re unlikely to see enough to catch the next flash of lightning. After all, the next flash of lightning probably won’t be a children’s book.
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With hindsight you also have the benefit of being able to follow a thread back, while forgetting about the books that didn’t make it.
It’s like terror attacks/crime/etc. You can look back at the history of the perpetrator and point to experiences that they person had that fit in a story to explain the eventual outcome, but there are usually plenty of people with similar experiences who don’t do the same.
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I think Harry Potter is significantly more popular than works of comparable quality for the same reason the most popular things in pretty much any category are popular: they’re accessible. They’re fantasy, but have a lot of universally appealing themes and plots.
Side note: apparently the last book came out in 2007. This deeply disturbs me; I distinctly remember reading it on the day it was published, and also being a lot older than that year suggests.
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You think A Series of Unfortunate Events could ever have become as popular as Harry Potter? No way. Not because it’s not as good but because if it had ever gotten close it would have provoked a much, much bigger corrupting-our-children backlash.
“It’s about a boy and he goes to wizard school and saves the world and it’s really exciting!”
“That’s nice. At least you’re reading something.”
“It’s about a bad guy stealing from three kids and one girl is almost forced to get married and she’s only fourteen and they go on the run and–”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to read any more of those books, sweetie.”
Animorphs could have been a mega success. It’s harder to notice that it’s about child soldiers with PTSD trying to commit genocide.
“It’s about these kids and there’s these aliens they have to fight against by turning into animals and there’s also a good alien but he doesn’t usually have a mouth so when he turns into a human he really likes cinnamon buns and they go to space to fight in spaceships sometimes and it’s really complicated–”
“That’s nice. I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”
I agree with the point you’re making but I don’t think it’s the only think keeping ASOUE down. ASOEU is getting a show now that its fans are adults. Harry Potter got movies when its fans were children. Animorphs got a TV show while it was still running.
A possible factor is the quality of the Animorphs TV show, compared to the Harry Potter movies, which aren’t great but look stunning.
But I suspect you’re right and the difference between a work like Animorphs with a dedicated, medium-sized fandom and a work like Harry Potter that everyone’s read and most people like is mostly down to luck.
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To be fair, one factor in Harry Potter’s success was how controversial it was among Christians, which caused a lot of adults to buy the thing to find out what the fuss was about. It’s unclear to me whether the controversy about ASOUE would have had a similar effect.
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Yeah but I also think Harry Potter is.. idk, blander, in a lot of ways, which probably makes it better ultra-mainstream material. For instance, Lemony Snicket has a really distinct narration style, which is probably something people are likely to either love or hate, whereas HP has all its narrative style dials set to ‘default’.
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I agree that that’s a thing that happened. I think, though, that Harry Potter was controversial among (a specific subset of) Christians for reasons that, very obviously, didn’t mean anything to anyone who wasn’t one of those (specific kind of) Christians. An atheist, or a belief-in-belief Christian or cultural Christian, knows on the face of it that there’s no way Harry Potter is going to make anyone vulnerable to Satan.
Whereas “it’s trying to sell kids on hopeless depression” requires actually reading the books to evaluate.
Okay, I notice that I can imagine a world where an alternate Tacitus is arguing that, because you had to actually read ASOUE to assess the allegations, but didn’t need to read Harry Potter, obviously ASOUE had an advantage, and that’s why so many more people read it at first, so it was inevitable that it became the more popular series.
But I still think there would be something really fundamentally different about a world where a book with the themes “everything sucks, adults are not to be trusted, and pedantry is awesome” ended up vastly more popular than a comparable work with the themes “death is sad but ultimately good in some undefined way, good triumphs over evil, forgiveness is important” given that the latter set are so much more popular than the former. I would bet that more people either agree with Harry Potter or want their children to agree with Harry Potter than ASOUE.
And I can’t really imagine a world where an alternate Tacitus is arguing that of course people gravitate toward books that challenge their values and fundamental viewpoints and that make them think and make them sad, over stirring books that reaffirm what they already believe in and care about. That would require that humanity be different.
I mean, I still agree with the point you make in your post.
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Roald Dahl’s books were very popular, and the usual explanation for that is “of course kids like stories that show adults as evil figures getting punished”.
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Most of Dahl’s books are a fair bit more hopeful than ASOUE, even if they are about adults being jerks.
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Dahl’s books have jerk adults but they also have non-jerk, reliable, trustworthy adults like the grandmother in The Witches. Some of Dahl’s child protagonists have more than acceptable parental figures. The Baudelaires have… Mr. Poe.
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Yeah, but Harry Potter is a British series, I assume it became popular in the UK first, and we don’t really have a big enough population of seriously off-the-wall Christians for that. Certainly when I read about the books being denounced as Satanist for the first time it was Americans who were doing it.
I think it’s that Hogwarts is the ultimate escapist fantasy for children. People have done the “magic school” concept before, but Rowling really brought it to life and made it the star, especially of the first book. I didn’t start reading the series till my mid-teens, but everyone I know who read it when they were young enough was disappointed when they didn’t get owled an acceptance letter on their 11th birthday.
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Granted, I’ve not read Animorphs, so I can’t make a full comparison here. But I think you’re substantially underselling the Harry Potter books in terms of quality. Rowling is nothing special prose-wise, certainly, but I think she has a knack for storytelling that’s quite rare and at least as important. I agree her popularity is in large part a result of snowballing, but I think I would also put her work on a higher level than that of other authors, like Stephanie Meyers, who have had massive success thanks to snowballing. A Series of Unfortunate Events didn’t have the snowball. I think it could have, but I also don’t think it’s as good as Harry Potter.
If I had to guess, Rowling will still be read a hundred years from now, which is the result of her being both popular and good, whereas folks with only one of those will be largely forgotten.
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I haven’t read Animorphs. ASOUE struck me as having a single joke, and one I didn’t like very much.
Harry Potter had a tremendous amount of invention, especially earlier in the series and a lot of variety of emotional tone.
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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone wasn’t anything really special, but Book 4 was really something.
There does seem to be a threshold of popularity where people just start getting into it just because everyone else is and they want to see what all the fuss is about…
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I think The Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) is the stand-out.
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Tastes differ, of course, but it’s obvious that Harry Potter is much better than the mass-produced preteen sci-fi that is Animorphs. Among those who’ve read both growing up, I expect that many would enjoy rereading HP, but most would drop Animorphs after a single book, if they even got that far. A Series of Unfortunate Events fares better, but while it’s entertaining in its own way, it basically has one or two gimmicks and that’s it. The only serious contender is the Time Quintet, but it’s too different in genre to compete.
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Obvious that Harry Potter is much better? How so?
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I’ve reread both Animorphs and Harry Potter within the last couple years, and I’m not sure I would agree with your assessment. The actual prose in Animorphs is lacking, probably due to the mass production, but there’s an interesting story and surprisingly adult themes if you can get past that. Among other things, I think the series provides a good introduction to topics like consequentalist ethics, the issues surrounding terrorism/WMDS, imperialism and proxy wars, overcoming genetic determinism, and personal identity issues.
Sure, there are lots of corny jokes and rehashed descriptions, so I can’t exactly call the series well-written, but there’s no other children’s books that stuck with me the way that Animorphs did (aside from perhaps the Ender series, but those aren’t really children’s books in the same sense as Animorphs).
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I’ve read much worse prose than either Animorphs or HP but otherwise I agree with you.
It does vary by ghostwriter and there are a lot of plot and theme threads that got dropped and never followed up on, but it’s the most thought-provoking children’s book series I know of. And it was always more ambitious than Harry Potter. Love triumphs over evil and death is sad but good for undefined reasons… are less original and less applicable to daily life than the themes Animorphs usually dealt with. But besides that, HP has a tight hold on the reins thematically: love is the thing that triumphs over evil, always and forever. Death is the next great adventure. Animorphs would look at an issue, illustrate an argument for one side, illustrate another argument for that side, illustrate an argument for another side, complicate the whole issue because it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and really never gave a simple answer like trusting in God-in-the-person-of-Dumbledore or just loving very hard and knowing it would be enough to move mountains.
Can’t argue about the lackluster plotting in a few of the books but I ADBOC “mass-produced preteen sci-fi” and I sometimes recommend Animorphs to adults. Who generally like it.
I’m really interested in hearing more about blacktrance’s reactions to Animorphs and HP.
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I thought that Animorphs does not support consequentialism, even when it discusses it. Some examples with spoilers that I’m thinking about:
When Alloran asks , then I’m not sure the authors necessarily agree with him. And there’s the time in #52 when the Animorphs “give [their enemies] a fair fight” and wait for them to morph dangerous animals before starting to fight them. (These enemies all end up dead. Could the Animorphs have just knocked them unconscious while they were still in human form?) And the general idea behind (much of) the conflict with the Yeerk Empire, especially in #19: the idea that what body you were born into makes a difference, and you have a right to control that body.
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Sorry, the thought-speak quote disappeared: it was “What does it matter if you kill them with a tail blade or a shredder or a quantum virus?”
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I’m not sure it’s possible to tell what the Animorphs narrative supports in many cases, unlike HP.
That said, to the extent that it’s against Alloran in that case, I thought it was against making the goal “get rid of Yeerks” rather than “preserve free species” and giving up on saving people. That maybe if they had tried harder, they could have had their cake and eaten it too.
On the other hand, “could we have done better?” is also a recurring theme. I’m not sure the narrative can be said to take a side on that theme in general.
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Incidentally, the thematic complexity of Animorphs is part of the reason I placed it in the same category as Harry Potter. (I dinged it for its poor writing and the awful, awful ghostwritten books.)
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Sorry if this is off-topic, but I’ve written down some more of my thoughts on Animorphs, with spoilers.
Yes, I’ve at least thought it’s not clear what the main characters’ morality contains. However, it does seem to me (partly from browsing #23 in French without reading it all) that they believe in a duty to do the right thing even at huge costs. And from what I remember of #45, punishing a wrongdoer also seems very important to Marco then. These ideas also remind me of the ending of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. So maybe Animorphs is more about the importance of being moral than about what exactly that means? In fact, #48 ends with:
Her choice earlier in that book might not be consequentialist, either, though maybe she just thinks power from Crayak can be predicted to corrupt her even when the Ellimist’s power hasn’t corrupted him.
It also seems to me, at least in the last book, that once the Animorphs have made a choice, they don’t think much about trying to help those whom that choice has hurt, and they don’t explicitly say that this is because they’re better at other things, and others are better at helping those people. When Jake explains why he moved out, that might be a case where he’s in a unique position to help, but that whole situation isn’t described in much detail.
And the whole conflict over bodies might have been solved early on with the morphing power…
Even just giving the morphing power to the almost hundred people in the peace movement could have made a big difference. This makes me think of how the Animorphs have fewer members and fewer changes in membership than the Baby-Sitters Club, even though there are much higher stakes to not joining, too. For example, in #40, Marco tells Mertil “we could use all the allies we can get”, but I don’t remember anyone contacting Mertil again either with “we could use someone to shoot a captured Dracon beam” or “we could use someone to watch the children while all the other adults and adolescents are fighting”. (And if #40 says that it’s wrong to say “when almost everyone can heal their injuries in minutes, then the few exceptions should not be sent to the front”, then that might not be a very consequentialist position, either…)
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A deal with a near-omniscient being who seeks to maximize pain and destruction is a bad idea, from a consequentialist perspective, even if it sounds good on the face of it. Maybe especially then. Of course power from Crayak is a bad idea. We already have a book where someone takes him up on his offer and everyone dies.
I would say the thing with Mertil is more complicated than “should people who are more vulnerable be kept away from the front lines?” IIRC, Ax says he was under the impression that the academy didn’t admit vecols, referring just to Mertil’s inability to tolerate morphing technology, not even to the injury he sustained later. So the question is at least as complicated as “should people who are more vulnerable be kept away from the front lines, given that, if they are, they will be viewed as subhuman scum and shunned?” (sub-Andalite scum, if you prefer) and Mertil is a fighter pilot, so his own physical abilities are relatively less relevant than they could be. He only gets injured when his fighter is shot down. His injury wouldn’t prevent him from flying again or even be any impairment at all in a space battle. It’s unlikely that he’s a major liability. If the Andalites have a manpower shortage, he may be an asset. It’s hard to tell if they have a manpower shortage or a manufacturing bottleneck preventing them from fielding as big an army as they’d like. Given what happens in the Andalite Chronicles, I think it’s at least partly a manpower shortage. I don’t think Mertil is taking a position away from anyone else. There’s also the possibility, however faint, of revealing that one of the great military heroes was a vecol all along and improving Andalite society’s treatment of vecols in general. That’s a long shot and a long-term concern that’s less pressing than the war, but overall, the effects on Andalite society in general are probably positive.
As for the effects on Mertil, I would say that’s up to Mertil to decide, but Animorphs seems to take the position that not fighting a known threat has a corrosive effect on noncombatants.
I wouldn’t say that Mertil joining the military is a bad idea from a consequentialist standpoint. Something to be done with slightly more reservation and consideration than usual, maybe.
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The absolute meanest thing I ever read about the success-to-quality ration of Harry Potter is that JK Rowling cashed in on being a “pretty young divorcé on public relief, with her baby and her book.”
Essentially, the idea is that Rowling went public with her situation after PoS was published, and her life story was really appealing. From thereon, her fame and HP’s snowballed.
I read it here, among a lot of complaining about DHs: http://www.redhen-publications.com/postmortem.html
(It’s the second last bit.)
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It’s kind of embarrassing that I immediately noticed that you spelled Blaise Zabini’s name wrong.
As to the question why it’s still popular and often referenced, even though most fans are now adults? Well, what else is there to reference? It used to be the Bible, but how many people read that anymore? Far safer to reference Harry Potter. People will at least get those jokes. 😉
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Sadly, I’ve never gotten around to reading A Series of Unfortunate Events. However, I was head-over-heels into Animorphs in the years just before Harry Potter became big. And I can tell you as someone who is still very fond of both series, there’s just no comparison when considering the plot consistency and overall writing quality. Animorphs was a hurried one-installment-per-month franchise, and it shows.
That said, some other children’s series probably are at the same level of quality as Harry Potter but didn’t become so hugely popular. I could speculate as to other reasons for Harry Potter’s success (Harry epitomized the hero’s journey towards defeating the most powerfully evil force of all time as an obvious underdog, and paved the way towards glorifying nerdiness), but I’m at work and shouldn’t start rambling.
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I think there is a massive reinforcement effect. This is partly good (by studying a shared reference, people can learn together, and establish shared concepts to communicate with, etc) and partly bad (people start to assume it must be really good, or sometimes really bad, if it’s that popular).
Although I also think people under-rate Harry Potter. I agree that the prose, and some of the plot holes and characterisation are so-so. But I think the characters are great, both the main characters people tend to fall in love with, and the minor characters I somehow remember, and the world-building (not how much it makes sense, it doesn’t, but how memorable and evocative it is), and the overall arc.
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I’m really intrigued by this comment because I never liked any of the main characters except maybe Hermione and never knowingly knew anyone who did. What did you like about Harry?
What did you like about the overall arc?
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there is something about it. It’s not just popular for reading, it’s the most fan fictionalized story ever. There’s something about the world which makes you just want to play in it.
Very little of it is original: anyone who knows the Worst Witch stories will recognize copious recycling and the magic-school setting is a staple of teen magic fantasy.
I don’t think it can be just attributed to luck. It hit enough of the right notes and didn’t drive people away with too many jarring things.
There are stories I love more but almost all of them are one where I also know individuals who found them barely readable. I’ve never encountered someone who was alienated like that from HP.
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I would be very interested to know how many of the original crop of people who read Harry Potter were casual fans (just read it, went “that was neat, I’m gonna read the next one when it comes out”, and moved on) versus how many were fandom fans (created and/or consumed fanworks with some regularity). The absolute enormity of the fandom, then and now, suggests to me there was an unusually high proportion of the latter, compared to other series, but I might be overestimating.
Harry Potter has a couple of qualities that make it good for fanworks (I could swear I’d read a very nice essay on the topic, but I can’t find it now.) It’s got a huge number of characters, and one of the things Rowling does really well is characterization work, so that all those people are relatively distinctive. No matter what kind of personality you want to write about, they’re probably in there somewhere. The world is immense, suggesting a great many things right below the surface that you can explore in your own work.
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Animorphs suffered a lot from its Goosebumps-like format of many short books. It was hard to get access to every single book in order without long delays or expense, and the constant reintroduction got tedious.
Who could have expected that children’s books needed to get *longer* to become more popular?
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Keep in mind, the alternate possibilities to “Harry Potter becomes a mega hit” include not only “instead book Y becomes a mega hit,” but also “no children’s book becomes a mega hit.” In fact, this seems far more plausible. At the time, much of the discourse around Harry Potter was not surprise that it was successful as opposed to some other book. The surprise was that kids were reading. That alone was enough to generate a huge amount of press.
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> And it is certainly not because of any virtue of Martin’s that A Song of Ice and Fire got adapted into an HBO show while, say, the Lilith’s Brood series did not.
With all due respect to Lilith’s Brood, I disagree. The Song has a combination of pedantic world building, brutal realism and sheer monumentality that few other works posses (none that I know, really).
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What I like about ASoIaF in particular is that it’s not cliché fantasy, but also not cynically deconstructive of fantasy (which would be the easy way out). It’s reconstructive of fantasy.
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Like Tacitus alluded to above, I think that one factor that can’t be overlooked with regards to Harry Potter’s mega-success is how well-suited it was for adaptation into a movie series, especially at the time.
Each book was long enough to provide enough material for a feature length movie (later books were long enough that the movies had to cut a bunch of stuff out, but that’s nothing new in the movie business). The release schedule kept the number of books manageable for the pre-MCU movie business, and ensured that the movies wouldn’t lag too far behind the books. The setting was relatively easy to adapt into a live-action movie: most of the story was set either in a single location or various semi-real places in (near) present day England, the vast majority of the characters could be played by human actors, and the few that couldn’t were achievable with early 2000s CGI.
Contrast that with the other two series that you mentioned. Before the Netflix series, A Series of Unfortunate Events got a movie adaptation in 2004. The movie tried to adapt the first 3 books of the series in one installment, and it turned out as well as you’d expect.
Animorphs, meanwhile, has way too many books for a movie series to be feasible unless they were to just outright ignore the plot of the books. It got adapted into a TV series, but this was way before the Golden Age of Television, children’s TV was even further behind, and the books involved stuff like shapeshifting and weird aliens that at the time would have been pretty much impossible to faithfully adapt on the budget of a live action kid’s TV show, and an animated one wouldn’t have been feasible for reasons that the Pop Area explains here. These factors, combined with other problems like bad writing, meant that the Animorphs TV show was unpopular and short-lived.
Of course, that still leaves the question of why the Harry Potter books sold well enough to get a movie adaptation of the first book with a $125 million (roughly 175 million in 2017 dollars) budget. By comparison, the first Twilight movie had a budget of just $37 million (~43 million in 2017 dollars) and the first Hunger Games movie had a budget of $78 million (~84 million in 2017 dollars), and of course both of those came after Harry Potter had demonstrated that movie adaptations of YA books could be really, really successful.
Still, if JK Rowling had pulled a JD Sallinger and refused to take any movie deals, I doubt that Harry Potter would have become nearly the cultural milestone that it did.
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Another wrinkle to this discussion is that while financial success and cultural impact are definitely correlated, they don’t always go together.
The most striking example of this is James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar (the fact that I have to be that specific when referring to it says something in itself). I have a friend who is in that movie’s (small) fandom, and on multiple occasions she has complained about how hard it is to find other fans of the most successful movie in history.
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Probably most of Avatar’s success is because of the 3D visuals. Personally, the visuals were the only thing I liked about it. Otherwise, it’s just naive environmentalist / anti-capitalist propaganda.
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Since we’re talking about kids books here, did anyone ever read the “Enchanted Forest Chronicles” series? Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons, Talking to Dragons. I read them when I was growing up and I just loved them. Very fun stories with positive messages.
I liked Harry Potter as well, at least at the beginning, but I want to say by the 4th, or maybe 5th book I really got turned off by the series. It went from a fun magical school adventure with some serious moments and darker undertones to an entirely miserable story with friends fighting against each other, people dying, war, misery, etc.
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I liked EFC and thought it was okay but I can’t say I think the messages are extremely revolutionary. I can only read “fairy tale marriage is silly… But at the end of the series yeah there’s still marriage” so many times.
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IMHO, social ratings help because it attracts attention and because it encourages readers to stick with it, but it also helps to have quality. I’ll give Shakespeare a longer try than some other writers because other people think he’s good, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
IMHO, what makes Harry Potter work, in descending order of importance:
1) The early books’ world building is really appealing. The world is whimsical and magical. Lev Grossman’s Magicians series plays with this idea – how much we really WANT there to be a secret world of magic.
2) The characterization is very effective. People end up with favorite characters – Snape, Luna, Hagrid, Fang, Drago, etc. I can’t put my finger on why, exactly. Some combination of flaws, vulnerability, and admirable qualities, IMHO.
3) The hero’s journey is well done and effective. Adolescents like the idea that there’s a secret world where they will meet fast friends, discover hidden talents, powerful patrons, and be recognized and admired as a hero.
4) Sometimes the metaphorical themes really click. (Sometimes not, of course).
5) Sometimes it’s pretty funny and whimsical. How can you not love the “probity probe?”
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As a point of information, my third-grade daughter, who is a reader, is currently enthusiastically reading The Mysterious Benedict Society, which is over four hundred pages of text. She isn’t interested in Harry Potter, though she is aware of it. At the risk of over-generalizing, I wonder if the Harry Potter phenomenon isn’t specific to a single generation.
FWIW, I am older than that generation. I borrowed my niece’s copy of the first book when visiting over Christmas. I thought it was OK, but nothing spectacular. The next year I borrowed the second book. I only got about halfway through. I thought it was OK, but nothing spectacular. I have never gotten around to finishing it.
I don’t think that Harry Potter will disappear, but its being the phenomenon it was: that was of the moment.
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At the time, press coverage in the UK centred around the theory that British young adult fiction had got into a rut with publishers and authors targeting people who bought books for children, rather than the children themselves. (This is consistent with my wife’s experience of being a teenager who read a lot of fiction at the time, though not with my sister’s). According to this theory, Harry Potter really was better than the competition at that time and place.
The other point is that Harry Potter had crossover appeal to adults from day 1, and was AFAIK the first YA novel to acquire an adult fandom in this way since YA fiction became a Thing.
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I would suggest that Harry Potter’s epic success was in a large part do to the fact that it prioritizes being pleasant for everyone to read and avoiding turning anyone away over being the best book for hardcore fans. The hero is bland enough that everyone can identify, and faces exaggerated versions of widely shared challenges rendered novel by the magical setting but without taking itself too seriously and scaring off readers who find fantasy too silly/niche (“you mean it’s that stuff about elves and tiny people and dragons”). Additionally,no prior knowledge or complex world building (england…but with magic..done) is needed to get into the story. Every book is a self-contained adventure revolving around universally familiar schoolyard conflicts involving characters you grow to love. In marked contrast to most authors Rowling is totally willing to throw internal consistency overboard so every book can be breezily read with only a dim notion of the earlier books (Why doesn’t Dumbledore make use of all his houselves as an internal intelligence agency so he always knows who the bad guys are?).
In short Rowling write the book equivalent of your pop chart toping autotune single giving up novelty and artistic excellence to inoffensively appeal to everyone (some fringe christians crazies don’t count).
Expanding on what you said, I want to suggest that social pressure is only effective if you share the same general affect but can’t turn haters into fans. Also the fraction of your friends who are fans makes a big difference. Thus interest in a book with virtually unanimous positive reception can spread like a virus and even a few hardcore fans can nucleate extreme popularity even if it’s only decent. . In contrast,a book that strikes most readers as amazing but has a non-trivial number of haters will never experience contagious popularity because the haters prevent any sense of consensus or the feeling that everyone is enjoying it.
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I had some thoughts on this that grew into a full post: http://bartlebysbackpack.com/2017/06/why-is-harry-potter-popular-a-rebuttal/
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