naamahdarling:

hasufin:

swanjolras:

okay, most of what i do re: harry potter is criticism, and hp is flawed in such a number of ways, but sometimes i just sit here and

i mean, you all have a comprehension of just how drastically harry potter changed literature, yeah? like. it revitalized it. it blew the literary scene apart. the new york times had to create a separate bestseller’s list for children’s lit just because harry potter existed. harry potter changed reading.

so many people on tumblr were born in the ‘90s. when the first book came out, most of us couldn’t read. but we grew up in a world where everyone, everyone, everyone was reading harry potter, no matter how old they were; we grew up in a world where the most popular story in the entire world was a fantasy children’s book.

it’s sort of difficult to grasp, sometimes, the extent to which harry potter is not just a book. the extent to which what is basically a series of fun, interesting, and fairly good novels is such an enormous, enormous part of our lives, a cultural touchstone, a truly universal reference point, something so many people have shaped their lives around, a foundation for all of the stories we would read and watch for the rest of our lives– for so many of us, the first books we ever loved

the extent to which so many of us can’t call ourselves “fans” of harry potter, because it would like being a “fan” of, like, having lungs.

it’s not even about liking it or disliking it. it’s just a part of us.

This reminds me an awful lot about Starbucks.

No, seriously. Before Starbucks, America was a coffee wasteland. Coffee was a thing you got at diners and drivethroughs. It was a cheap hot thing you put made palatable with tons of cream and sugar, and most people (but waning!) had a coffee machine at home.

Starbucks told us that we could like coffee. That coffee could be an enjoyable thing, that it could be a status symbol and a ritual. That there could be a place where you go for coffee, and you enjoy it.

As a coffee snob, I think Starbucks’ coffee is awful. But Starbucks is why we have better coffee. Starbucks created the market space for third wave coffee shops and artisanal roasters. They reintroduced “espresso”, “latte” and “cappuccino” to the American lexicon.

We need stuff that’s heinously popular. That’s how culture works.

The cultural impact of the original 3 Star Wars movies was something literally phenomenal, something absolutely ubiquitous that changed the landscape of entertainment so fundamentally that things haven’t been the same since.

It was very much like Harry Potter. I know JK is le problematique but the books were fun, creative, and exciting, got a LOT of kids into reading in general and fantasy specifically, and gave us all some mew common cultural touchstones.

I feel very fortunate to have lived through both, and I wonder what will be next.