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.
*whispers* a lot of people don’t like the first season and they say going on to the next seasons is better (of buffy)
I should probably just skip to whenever Spike shows up. Though I have at least watched “once more with feeling.”
See I missed Buffy when it was on. It aired from 1997 to 2003. I graduated high school and went into the military in 1997. I didn’t really have regular access to TV again until…1999? (Living in military barracks with the only TV access being the one in the common room). I got my first computer that was mine in 1999, but I don’t think we even had Internet access for another year or two. So basically if it was the late 90s or early 2000s I probably missed it.