I'm Sick of Harry Potter

Tweet

I used to really love the Harry Potter series. I wasn't happy with the last two books and really despised the way it ended. I felt like J.K. Rowling rushed the last book so the movie studio could hurry up and put out another movie using the same cast. (And I was never a fan of the movies -- in fact they ruined the books for me because once the movies started coming out, it changed the way I saw the characters when I read the books. Whatever picture I had painted of them in my mind was replaced with the actors who played them.) Anyway. It's been 10 years since the last book came out, and I don't understand why the mania surrounding that series has never died down. The media is constantly sharing "news" about the Hogwarts universe that the author decides to share online, and at this point it just feels like it's being milked for all it's worth. (The most recent "news" I read was that Harry Potter's grandfather's name was also Harry Potter. I mean really, why does anyone need to know that? Who cares?) Now everyone is going hog wild (or Hogwarts wild) over it being the 20th anniversary since the first book's release. I couldn't care less. I can't become nostalgic for something if it never goes away. I also don't care for how those books changed the standards for YA fiction, not necessarily for the better. Before YA novels were short, maybe 200 pages or less. Now they are all 500+ epic novels when they really don't need to be. Even my favorite YA authors from my own youth are latching onto that trend. I'm also burned out on all the fantasy knock-off Harry Potter books cluttering store shelves. I get daily emails on ebook deals and it's the same boring plots regurgitated over and over again -- young kids going to some magic school getting into some kind of major conflict that disrupts the order of things, and only they can save the day (and usually some kind of love triangle is thrown in the mix.) Ugh. And it's not just those fantasy books that are epic novels, non-fantasy genres are way too long too. Personally I like reading shorter books, and as a YA author, I prefer writing shorter books. I hate this publishing trend. If a book is too thick I won't even attempt to read it unless it sounds really good or something about it draws me in. A lot of books just seem to be overly long for the sake of having more pages. Anyway. I wish Harry Potter would go away for a while so maybe I could one day go back and enjoy the series again. Like I said, you can't miss something or grow nostalgic for it if it never goes away. But it seems like millennials don't want to ever give up anything, and this series obsession is proof of it. Everything else that was popular at some point in time fades away for a while after it's had its run, but not Harry Potter. Why is that, I wonder?