If you want more than two words, keep reading. Let's go back to the year , near the release of the penultimate sixth Harry Potter book. I worked in a library by this time, and I saw my high school girlfriend's mom there from time to time. This sort of things happens in small towns. You see your high school girlfriend's mom once in a while. She finds out you haven't read the Harry Potter series and she decides to buy you ALL the hardcovers because "you'll want them for your kids someday.

This sort of thing happens in small towns. Your high school girlfriend's mom gives you books for kids that you don't even have yet. I started in on the first book, and I kept reading Harry Potter throughout the summer. Partially because the books were such a nice gift, partially because there was some rekindling going on between me and my high school girlfriend, and I thought reading Harry Potter, the one thing my high school girlfriend and her mom could agree on, would help this situation in some way.

I don't remember thinking, "This is gonna get me laid. And while this isn't the purest of motivations, it carried me through five books. Unfortunately, this "rekindling" ended up consisting of one kiss, one time sleeping in the same bed together EXTREMELY platonically , and me getting heroically drunk with my high school girlfriend's grandfather, which was kind of fun and also even weirder than it sounds.

It is a certain kind of insanity to read only five of the seven Harry Potter books. I'll admit, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But there were some things about them I didn't love. I didn't love Quidditch. I never understood the purpose of that. You're in fucking wizard school. You can fly. Why would you use these abilities to play a sport? That seemed nuts to me. An infinite world of possibility, and you're like, "Okay, but let's shoot hoops or something.

In a world of snake men, do sports even matter? I'm also not a fan of magic, in general. There's basically always a thing to fix a thing. What problem cannot be solved when magic is real? Eat this thing and grow gills. Use this gizmo and be invisible. Magic can feel, to me, like one deus ex machina after another, except it's really not traditional D.

Why is there even a Slytherin? They should sort people to that house and then immediately a trap door would open under their dining hall table and dump them into lava.

Duh, guys. Magical creatures aren't that cool to me. Because we've already seen them. Centaurs, unicorns, 3-headed dogs, adorable owls. How about, I don't know, a pig made entirely out of eyeballs or something, or a porcupine with human male genitalia in place of spines? A pornupine, if you will. Because of the way I binged the books, I found the resetting of characters and setting to be pretty tedious.

But I didn't, so it was. Rowling should get into making an omnibus edition, a version of the books in one giant tome, all the repetition and other stuff edited out so that it's meant to be read in one go. Has anyone on the internet made this? Surely someone on the internet has made this. Finally, is there no Child Wizard Protective Services in this universe? How did Harry get sent back to live with those jerks all the time? I guess instructors at wizard schools don't have that whole mandatory reporting of abuse thing.

You don't have to agree with me on any of these points. But you can't convince me that I enjoyed any of these things about the books. Why should reading choices be any different? I'm not the first person to float the theory that some things have to enter your life before a certain deadline. This is easy to accept, in general, and very difficult to accept when things get specific.

For example, I say that if you haven't seen The Princess Bride before the age of, let's say 13, it will never occupy the same space in your heart that it does for someone who grew up with it. Goonies , same deal. If you don't read Jack Kerouac before you're 25, chances are you'll see him as a shiftless layabout. By the way, a good sign that you're too old for Kerouac is the use of terms like "shiftless layabout. Harry Potter wasn't a huge phenomenon in the U. Yes, I know it was first published in With that, I think it's fair to say that Potter Fever really hit the US somewhere around the year , and didn't peak for several years more.

Hell, the first Leakycon wasn't until Here's my personal problem with this timeline. In , I was just old enough to not want to do anything that could be remotely perceived as being "for kids. Also yes. If Harry Potter had hit it big five years earlier or five years later, I think things would have been different.

As it stood, I could drive a car when Harry Potter hit it big. I could go wherever I wanted. That, to me, at that age, was a magic that overpowered boy wizards and thick books. For me, for about a decade, the world was filled with references and reverence for Harry Potter that, though inoffensive, weren't my jam.

This sort of thing doesn't bother me too often because I don't travel in the world of pop culture. Pretentious as it sounds, I travel more in the world of books, and even "popular" books are fairly marginalized in pop culture. For example, The Da Vinci Code was insanely popular as books go, and in , the year of its release, that James Blunt song "You're Beautiful" came out. Is there anyone who hasn't heard that song?

Is there anyone actively trying to avoid that song who has been successful? Maybe there's someone who hasn't been to a wedding since , but it seems unlikely. Meanwhile, avoiding The Da Vinci Code was easy. Not to avoid its existence, but to avoid most of its contents, all you had to do was never pick it up.

Harry Potter transcended the world of books and became huge in the world of pop culture. It was the first book I experienced as unavoidable. And there were times you almost felt like a traitor for being a bookish person who didn't like Harry Potter. It was the biggest thing to happen in books in forever. It got people reading. This was a book that had people lining up for a midnight release, which is something I can't EVER remember happening for a book.

I remember a time when people lined up for concert tickets, I remember waiting in a line outside the theater to see the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. But a book? Who waits in an outdoor line in the middle of the night for a damn book?

Only the true book fans. The truest of the true. Only they will be able to say that, once upon a time, they waited in line for the release of a book. I wanted to be a part of something like that. Parents, and heroes, have feet of clay.

Call it a loss of youthful idealism, or call it pragmatism, it is what allows us to survive in the adult world. And this is the struggle facing Harry Potter fans. At the time, the Potter books—with their well-rounded female characters and their rejection of the idea of aristocracy—were progressive. Now they are historical. The acres of Harry Potter fan fiction have allowed its Millennial audience to rewrite the stories to fit their own values, easing their discomfort while still luxuriating in the nostalgic setting of the British private-school system, an institution designed to perpetuate elitism.

This fan-creator relationship is a peculiarly modern one, a mixture of entitlement and intimacy: In their lifetimes, Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl were not troubled by consumer revolts over their personal opinions or their plotlines. Her post raised questions about sexual violence, early transition, and the climate of intimidation that surrounds discussions of these topics. She argued that her own experience of domestic violence had taught her the value of single-sex spaces, but also wrote about her sympathy for transgender victims.

This counted for little to her critics. It is understandable that transgender people feel weary and harassed; their identities and their bodies have been conscripted into a culture war.

Many feminists who support Rowling feel the same. Some of the social-media reaction to Rowling has been vicious, and many of the most outraged posts have shown a notable lack of interest in her disclosure of sexual assault. Instead of being confronted, though, this conflict was made simply to disappear.

Again, this is part of a desire for the world to be simple. The lines are not so easily drawn now, and the modern left finds it hard to parse clashes between two oppressed groups, such as conservative Muslim parents and LGBTQ-friendly school curricula.

This emotional synthesis of reader and writer happens only with books we love when we are young. I am sad, but strangely relieved, that my own beloved Terry Pratchett is safely dead. An even more blatant example of racism from Rowling can be seen in the goblins.

This one is very straightforward. The goblins are naturally skilled bankers with long, hooked noses and beady eyes. Not to mention the fact that she basically only exists in the story to serve as the exotic love interest for the main white character before he eventually gets with the white girl. Another message that readers seem to interpret in a positive way, despite the actual text showing the exact opposite, is the role of the Hogwarts houses.

This one especially pisses me off, because the obnoxious grouping concept that was popularized by Harry Potter was adopted by other young adult novels and now permeates fiction culture. In the books, Gryffindor is where the bravest and most moral people go, Slytherin is where the bad people go, Ravenclaw is where the smart people go, and Hufflepuff is where everyone else goes. Once again, she ultimately just plays on stereotypes and group division.

Well, that leads to the third and final reason why I hate Harry Potter. I have a theory for why Harry Potter is so popular. I think that it plays with a very certain part of the human mind, a desire that most, if not all of us possess, especially in this modern world: the desire to be special. Make them relatable and likeable, even with faults to make them more realistic to the average person. Then, make everything about the main character.

Everything that happens must relate directly to Harry. Every event that happens seems to somehow relate to Harry or his past. Every teacher favors Harry, except for the few who dislike him, because of his past. That just makes him more special. Everything is about Harry. This in itself is not a bad thing. But ultimately, art serves as a reflection of real life in some capacity. The way we think about the books that we read, and the way that we incorporate those thoughts into our own actions are necessarily a product of our real world experiences, and they necessarily will affect our real world actions, especially when we allow ourselves to be affected emotionally to such an extent as many people do with Harry Potter.

It sets an unrealistic emotional expectation that can never be matched by real life experiences.