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Back when I was dating I used to frequently use 'do you prefer the first half or second half of the Harry Potter series' as a conversation piece, and I found it very interesting that men seem to be very inclined towards the first half and women very inclined towards the second half. Over a good sample of educated women who felt very passionately about Harry Potter, plus general social occasions for men to chime in. Personally feel the whole enterprise goes off a cliff as the word counts expand and the magic contracts from Phoenix onwards, but also potentially a good indicator of women preferring a more emotionally-driven story.
I only read through them once some years ago.
Book 3 was generally pretty good, but I disliked the time travel, because I wanted things to make sense (in retrospect, a little odd of a desire, given, for example, that quidditch exists). I didn't especially care for book 5. I didn't like the hallows in book 7. Book 6 was probably my favorite overall.
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That's fascinating. As a male who read the 4th-7th books when they came out, I primarily recall being severely disappointed by the 7th book, in a large part because of the quality of writing in the action scenes. And perhaps I'm seeing connections where there aren't any, but I have to wonder about this apparent male/female pattern and the terrible quality of action in so many movies and TV shows that are pushed for their female leads and female production team these days.
Off the top of my head, the awful combat action in shows like Disney's Echo and Amazon's Rings of Power come to mind, but perhaps the most stark example is The Matrix: Resurrections, which was directed by the woman version of one of the male directors of the original Matrix trilogy, and which was about as severe a drop-off in quality of action as you can get in a franchise, with the combat barely comprehensible half the time and not making any sense from the combatants' point of view all of the time. This is in contrast to the first film (and even its 1st 2 awful sequels) which had very clearly visible combat where each movement by each combatant made sense (within this fictional wushu-inspired universe) and flowed into one another as if they were attempting to mime out what a real fight would look like where 2 combatants are really trying to kill each other with all their might. Unlike the 4th film (directed by a woman), the 1st 3 films (directed in half by the same person, but as a man), displayed an understanding that a fight scene is more than just 2 people waving their feet and fists around each other in fancy looking ways.
And this is where I'm probably projecting or jumping to conclusions, but with the well-known difference between men and women in terms of "thing-oriented" and "people-oriented," I wonder if men are more scrutinizing about action scenes actually making sense, while women are more accepting of them if the underlying emotional thrust is there. As a man, when I read/view a scene in which 2 people are fighting, I pay attention to how each person reacts to each punch or kick and get disenchanted when I see them behaving in ways that don't make sense given their motivation in the moment to survive and kill the other guy; for women, perhaps they're less bothered by it and just think the important part is "A defeated B at the cost of C, which leads to D," and the how that defeat occurred is just extraneous details.
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Hot take: Philosopher's Stone is the best Harry Potter book. As the books go on, the worldbuilding and plotting stand up less and less well to the more serious subject matter (this becomes very clear by the end of Goblet of Fire), and the tone shift is dertimental to the series overall. (Yes, I get the idea of "books and audience grow up with the character", but it just doesn't work all that well.) Philosopher's Stone is an excellent children's book; the later books are still probably better than average for YA (not that I could be sure; most YA is of the sort that I've never been interested in reading), but are only as beloved as they are because people liked the first book(s).
(My wife agrees with me that Philosopher's Stone is the best, but has a higher opinion of the end of the series than I do.)
I think the thing about the setting of Harry Potter is that almost all fantasy (whether by male or female authors) is written by worldbuilding autists who have a 2000 page lore codex / community wiki either in their head or on paper before they finish the first half of the first book. Rowling isn’t like that, she didn’t and doesn’t care about canon, the setting and its internal consistency and its rules were not hugely or even at all important to her except in the vague sense of what ‘felt’ right, she is not in that Tolkien tradition, she’s more like earlier authors of fairy tales, maybe. Personally I like that quality, it makes the stories feel quite different to most other fiction in the genre, lends it almost a surreal feeling.
The problem is not the HP setting is too fairy-tale-like and unsystematic (as you say, this is very much a valid choice), but that (in the later books) it tries to have it both ways. The magic in HP is actually much more well-delineated and "systematic" than in Tolkien. The problem is that (a) rules for how things work + (b) ignoring the rules when they don't suit + (c) taking things seriously, adds up to something that just doesn't work well. You can have perfectly good stories with any one or two of these, but all three together, not so much. In HP, (a) and (b) were kind of baked in by the style of story (and naturally increased over time as more material piled up), so quality decreased as (c) increased.
Tolkien is kind of interesting as a comparison point. His world and its history are incredibly detailed (though it's not really correct to say that he had a huge fixed canon that didn't change as he wrote -- it's really only the published materials that stayed consistent with each other, and even then he retconned The Hobbit), and he's good about making things like troop movements and strategy and so on check out. But the magic is not well-defined at all. The Wizards and the wielders of the rings of power (and many of the more powerful Elves) clearly have magical, uh, powers, but what exactly those are is never made clear. What's more, it's actually important for the tone of the story that this is the case! If Gandalf's or Saruman's or Sauron's (or Galadriel's or Elrond's) powers worked according to some Brandon Sanderson-like magic system, or for that matter like Rowling's (even setting aside the inconsistencies), The Lord of the Rings would be very different, and much worse, for the change.
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I loved the fact that she tried to dip into things that were more serious with Goblet of Fire, things became far more "real" with the introduction of other schools, and I thought the length was more appropriate to what would happen in a school year.
That said, I've re-read Philosopher/Sorcerer's stone at least 6 (?) times and Goblet of fire ~3. The later books I've probably only re-read once. I don't think you can beat the first one all-in-all.
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Interesting, I agree that the first three books have a certain magic and innocence to them that's strongly diminished in the fourth and practically gone by the last three books. It almost felt like they were written by two different people. Personally I'd say book 3 was the best.
Magic and innocence is an interesting perspective; when I saw this question, my immediate thought was that the first half was very much "books for children". There is an innocence there for sure, but also a simplicity, with a distinct lack of logic involved in the world and plot (as HPMOR demonstrated).
Rowling's characterisation remained a weak point throughout the series, but the later novels at least managed more coherent, logical plots as well as a greater maturity in themes and even prose. The two halves are very much written for different audiences. A child coming to the series now would enjoy the first half and probably struggle with the later entries. A child who grew up with the books probably found them all enjoyable. An adult returning to the series would probably speed through the first half to get to the more interesting latter books. An adult reading them to a child would likely enjoy the whimsy of the initial books and grow weary of the length and tedium present in the later entries.
It is interesting that Rowling seems to have shifted the age of her books’ intended audience at about the same pace that her actual audience aged. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other author who did that. But then, I suppose I can’t think of any other children’s authors who had such a massive and devoted following while they were in the middle of publishing a series.
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Heh, sounds like a good trick. That's probably true, or at least it used to be back in the 2010s. Now it seems like every woman absolutely hates the entire Harry Potter franchise because of the whole Terf thing with its author. Seems ridiculous to me that peole can't separate one political opinion of the author from the books, but I guess they really liked the politics of the books originally.
Possibly relevant= the books were originally aimed at a young male demographic, that's why she initialled her name and made the main character a boy. As it got more popular she got more freedom to express herself.
I'd say it's firmly in the guilty pleasure channel for most young UMC women, but definitely get a lot more 'literally Hitler' from those born before 1997 or so.
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Huh, weird. I fall into that too.
In my mind GoF screwed up in creating the killing curse, which neuters all the magical dueling opportunities; and in bringing V back two thousand pages before he'd get killed. Keeping him awake but in the wings for three books was too strung out, leading to the weird need to do Horcruxes + Hallows in the last book.
There were some decent set pieces in the second half, but for the most part the whimsy came off.
Yeah. Vibes-based but I feel like the last 3 books contained like a tenth of the worldbuilding and new magic introduced compared to the first 4, especially since Goblet was very much 'Look at this vibrant world of wizardry' then 'bang we must gaze at our navels and be sad for 3 books'
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