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JohnSherman posted:Dumbledore, the only man Voldemort feared, was dead, and the trio needed to find and destroy all the remaining horcruxes. I'm curious, what exactly did you expect to happen? Voldemort just sits on the sidelines while Harry, Hermione, and Ron destroy his soul between studying for NEWTs? I didn't expect anything because I made it all up for a joke.
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Nov 15, 2014 04:31
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Mercury Hat posted:Oh man, I remember that happening now. I downloaded it, that library carpet is a distant memory of mine. I have no idea if I have it around or not on some old hard drive. LOL. I still remember that carpet too. Someone probably took the photos of the book late at night, sitting on the floor of the break room in the library. I remember that some of the pages were really blurry because they just took ONE photo per double-page spread and moved on. No duplicate photos -- and all the photos were in sequential order. On a few pages, the text was actually running off the edge of the photo frame so you couldn't read the entire page. They probably photographed the entire book as fast as they could, before they could get caught.  I remember that some people in Japan got their books three days early due to a shipping error by Amazon. And at least one store accidentally put the books out in their store a few days early and sold a few. Word got out and the book publisher sent someone around to the store to make them put the books away.
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Nov 15, 2014 05:45
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Mercury Hat posted:Oh man, I remember that happening now. I downloaded it, that library carpet is a distant memory of mine. I have no idea if I have it around or not on some old hard drive. Thanks for looking! I meant the bad fanfic versions being passed off as the real thing (who doesn't want to read about awkward double dates in Morocco in the midst of the world falling to poo poo?) but looking back at my post I was pretty unclear. I remember seeing pictures of the carpet leak when I rejoined the world after I finished the book. My favorite leak was on a list of book 5 rumors on a fansite. Along the normal crap like Harry was going to become an animagus or hook up with Ron or something was somebody saying an acquaintance of theirs had a contact at the publisher and Harry gets expelled from Hogwarts. I blew it off until I actually got the book and then I started laughing really hard.
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Nov 16, 2014 00:37
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https://fanfiction.net/s/2818538/1/The-Seventh-Horcrux I have a vague feeling that this one was passed off as the real thing pre-release.
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Nov 16, 2014 21:33
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Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody I'm pretty sure that this is the true story behind Book 7. Clearly.
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Nov 16, 2014 21:57
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cptn_dr posted:https://fanfiction.net/s/2818538/1/The-Seventh-Horcrux It definitely was but not by the author - some random person started circulating it that way.
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Nov 17, 2014 11:30
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Can you believe its been four years since harry potter ended?
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Nov 18, 2014 03:05
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The last book was published on 7/21/07. I miss all the chatter and speculation about the books. It was fun. 
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Nov 18, 2014 03:27
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Stravinsky posted:Can you believe its been four years since harry potter ended? well, almost
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Nov 18, 2014 08:33
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Has Harry Potter ever really ended? In our hearts? I should probably change the thread title at some point.
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Nov 18, 2014 15:26
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I managed to dodge most of the leaks and fake books at the time, so when book seven came out I bought it on the way to work that morning and read it before my shift. (apparently all our customers were home reading it too, so I wasn't really needed  ) Still took two or three hours. I suppose it's not really relevant, but I haven't really thought about Deathly Hallows since I finished it. I'm all nostalgic.
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Nov 18, 2014 15:42
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The idea of the last book was better than the actual book was. The anticipation to quality ratio was probably the worst of the series. I think we would have had a better book if Rowling had taken some more time off but I imagine the pressure she was under was enormous.
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Nov 19, 2014 01:47
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Has Harry Potter ever really ended? In our hearts? never
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Nov 19, 2014 06:26
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It's been almost four years since it was almost four years since Harry Potter ended.
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Nov 19, 2014 06:30
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Paragon8 posted:The idea of the last book was better than the actual book was. The anticipation to quality ratio was probably the worst of the series. I don't think there was anything wrong with the seventh book, but I agree. I was really disappointed that it was shorter than Phoenix. People complain there's too much camping, but that's a crock of poo poo. There wasn't nearly enough camping. There were, like, six pages of camping at the most. There was more than enough story in the seventh book for it to be the longest book in the series by a wide margin - and, in fact, a while before the seventh book came out, J.K. said that it would be the longest, but apparently that didn't work out.
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Nov 19, 2014 07:47
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LaughMyselfTo posted:I don't think there was anything wrong with the seventh book, but I agree. I was really disappointed that it was shorter than Phoenix. People complain there's too much camping, but that's a crock of poo poo. There wasn't nearly enough camping. There were, like, six pages of camping at the most. There was more than enough story in the seventh book for it to be the longest book in the series by a wide margin - and, in fact, a while before the seventh book came out, J.K. said that it would be the longest, but apparently that didn't work out. My big issues were with the sudden introduction of the Deathly Hallows. It felt like Rowling was backed into a corner slightly with Horcruxes and pulled something else out to get out of it. The final battle at Hogwarts felt really rushed and so many deaths happened "off screen." It would have been nice to get a few more chapters of decompression as well rather than the jarring epilogue. Ultimately I think people really bonded with the HP series because of the setting more so than the characters and spending so much time out of Hogwarts is jarring to a reader who fell in love with it.
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Nov 19, 2014 13:30
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Inveigle posted:The last book was published on 7/21/07. I miss all the chatter and speculation about the books. It was fun. I was 16 going on 17 when the last book came out...there are 7 year olds who weren't even alive...is this what aging feels like?
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Nov 19, 2014 14:21
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A. Beaverhausen posted:I was 16 going on 17 when the last book came out...there are 7 year olds who weren't even alive...is this what aging feels like? Basically yes. I first felt it as: there are 7-year-olds (now teenagers, actually) alive today who lived there entire lives in a post-9/11 world. Also when I check IDs and realize that people born in '96 can now buy booze and tobacco.
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Nov 19, 2014 17:32
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A. Beaverhausen posted:I was 16 going on 17 when the last book came out...there are 7 year olds who weren't even alive...is this what aging feels like? I saw Back to the Future in theaters. You know, the film from 1985 where Michael J Fox travels back to the distant world of 1955? Next year it will be thirty years from 1985.
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Nov 19, 2014 17:34
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cptn_dr posted:https://fanfiction.net/s/2818538/1/The-Seventh-Horcrux Yay, thanks! Perfect reading material over Christmas. Paragon8 posted:My big issues were with the sudden introduction of the Deathly Hallows. It felt like Rowling was backed into a corner slightly with Horcruxes and pulled something else out to get out of it. I agree, though I think the characters were a pretty big draw too. Otherwise we wouldn't have all those crazy Snape fans. I remember reading the book early in the morning (we preordered it on Amazon and they actually did a pretty good job delivering all the books early the day of, though we were out of town for the book 5 release and it got stolen off our porch), getting to about a hundred pages from the end, and realizing it wasn't going to wrap up well. I wouldn't have had a problem with the Deathly Hallows if we'd gotten more foreshadowing; I think the fact that nobody in all the wild mass guessing all over the world guessed that plot twist was not a good thing.
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Nov 19, 2014 17:38
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A. Beaverhausen posted:I was 16 going on 17 when the last book came out...there are 7 year olds who weren't even alive...is this what aging feels like? My GF at the time and a couple of friends all went out to pick up the book during the release party then went to have a few drinks around the corner. The place was practically silent because everyone else apparently had the same idea and were all reading the book.
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Nov 19, 2014 17:49
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Has there been any other book release (say, in the past 50 years) that was met with such expectation as Book 7? I can't really think of anything. Say what you will about JKR, but she was hugely influential in making reading popular again with kids. I suppose the hype/excitement surrounding Book 7 was similar to people viewing the finale episodes of television shows like M*A*S*H, The Sopranos, and Lost.
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Nov 19, 2014 18:03
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Not within the past 50 years I don't think, but people had the same anticipation for chapters of Dickens' work way back when. The anticipation for book 7 kind of reminded me of that for a sporting event: I hadn't seen so many people anticipating and debating what would happen and planning parties since the Red Sox got to the World Series in 2004. I was eighteen when the 7th book came out and about to go off to college. Finishing the last book genuinely felt like the end of my childhood, and a lot of my friends felt the same way.
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Nov 19, 2014 18:51
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Inveigle posted:Has there been any other book release (say, in the past 50 years) that was met with such expectation as Book 7? I can't really think of anything. Say what you will about JKR, but she was hugely influential in making reading popular again with kids. The closest is probably Song of Ice and Fire, but since GRRM is going to die before he writes the final book I don't think it will be that much.
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Nov 19, 2014 19:14
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Inveigle posted:Has there been any other book release (say, in the past 50 years) that was met with such expectation as Book 7? I can't really think of anything. If you want to expand it just a little past 50 years, then the release of The Return of the King was a pretty major event.
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Nov 19, 2014 19:46
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Inveigle posted:Has there been any other book release (say, in the past 50 years) that was met with such expectation as Book 7? I can't really think of anything. Say what you will about JKR, but she was hugely influential in making reading popular again with kids. I'm not strictly sure if Rowling really made reading popular with kids as much as she demonstrated YA as a fertile ground for commercialisation. To that point I think Twilight's final volume probably had as much hype behind it as Book 7.
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Nov 19, 2014 19:48
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Trin Tragula posted:If you want to expand it just a little past 50 years, then the release of The Return of the King was a pretty major event. Huh! I never thought about that but I think the LotR books were still pretty obscure at that time (1955 was when RotK was published). The LotR books were mostly read by college kids and academics familiar with Tolkien's works. I'd still love to read some accounts of the excitement of people waiting for that last LotR book. I remember checking out a lot of hardback 1st editions of LotR books from libraries when I was a kid. Paragon8 posted:I'm not strictly sure if Rowling really made reading popular with kids as much as she demonstrated YA as a fertile ground for commercialisation. Harry Potter was not a YA series, even if the final couple of books were a bit dark. Twilight and Hunger Games are YA. Inveigle fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 20:29
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Inveigle posted:Harry Potter was not a YA series, even if the final couple of books were a bit dark. Twilight and Hunger Games are YA. But Harry Potter, however low it ranks on the "non-literature to literature" scale, certainly ranks higher than Twilight or The Hunger Games. Could... could literary qualities not depend on target audience? 
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Nov 19, 2014 22:39
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Paragon8 posted:
I'm not sure about that solely because I feel like the hype and appeal of the Twilight books was predominately females (not all but a strong majority) whereas HP appealed to both men and women at a much more equal level so had many more people that would be hyped for the final volume.
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Nov 19, 2014 22:48
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Inveigle posted:Harry Potter was not a YA series, even if the final couple of books were a bit dark. Twilight and Hunger Games are YA. I think HP has enough growth for the last 3-4 books to be considered YA. It's a very interesting series in that respect and I think that's part of what sets it apart from other series. YA as the popular genre it is today wouldn't exist with HP so I think it's fair to mention them in the same sentence. Without HP laying down the blueprint for commercialisation I doubt we would have seen Twilight and the Hunger Games be as successful. Marketing machines somewhere along the way identified the "next" HP in commercial terms. Joose Caboose posted:I'm not sure about that solely because I feel like the hype and appeal of the Twilight books was predominately females (not all but a strong majority) whereas HP appealed to both men and women at a much more equal level so had many more people that would be hyped for the final volume. Yeah, I think that's fair. Certainly in volume. I think the individual passion with Twilight fans was definitely there,
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Nov 19, 2014 23:34
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Trin Tragula posted:If you want to expand it just a little past 50 years, then the release of The Return of the King was a pretty major event. Did people really care about LotR when it was published? Tolkein was just an old crazy British guy writing fanfiction about Norse mythology, not yet a beloved nerd icon. Inveigle posted:Harry Potter was not a YA series, even if the final couple of books were a bit dark. Twilight and Hunger Games are YA. You can't seriously believe this. Harry Potter almost single handedly set off the avalanche of YA novels, you can't use some semantic bullshit to make it totally different. It's a YA series, sorry icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 00:46
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icantfindaname posted:Did people really care about LotR when it was published? Tolkein was just an old crazy British guy writing fanfiction about Norse mythology, not yet a beloved nerd icon. There was graffiti on the London Underground between Two Towers and Return of the King saying stuff like "Frodo Lives!" so it had some level of popularity at the time.
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Nov 20, 2014 00:58
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icantfindaname posted:Did people really care about LotR when it was published? Tolkein was just an old crazy British guy writing fanfiction about Norse mythology, not yet a beloved nerd icon. Tolkien's popularity got so intense that he had Americans calling his house in the middle of the night and British hippies literally camped on his lawn. It was a big deal.
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Nov 20, 2014 00:58
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icantfindaname posted:You can't seriously believe this. Harry Potter almost single handedly set off the avalanche of YA novels, you can't use some semantic bullshit to make it totally different. It's a YA series, sorry The Potter books belong more in the classification of "children's literature" and "MG" (Middle Grade) books. Additionally, bookstores list the Potter books as children's books. I have several friends who have worked for the past 25 years as managers of various bookstores who have said that the Potter books are classified under children's books, although they do admit that the wild success of the Potter books later led to the popularity of the YA genre. You might also check out Seth Lerer's "Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter." And here's an interesting post/discussion about whether the HP books are kid's or YA. The majority think that Potter is a kid's series. http://www.sfnovelists.com/2011/09/15/is-harry-potter-ya/ Also, this: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/24/books/the-times-plans-a-children-s-best-seller-list.html "The New York Times Book Review will print a separate best-seller list for children's books starting on July 23. The change is largely in response to the expected demand for the fourth in the Harry Potter series of children's books, editors at the Book Review said. Some publishers have been advocating such a move for months, complaining that a cluster of popular children's books can keep deserving adult books off the lists. On Feb. 27, 2000, for instance, a third of the places on the hardcover fiction list had children's books: three Harry Potter books, ''The Legend of Luke'' by Brian Jacques and ''Bud, Not Buddy'' by Christopher Paul Curtis."
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Nov 20, 2014 01:28
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HIJK posted:Tolkien's popularity got so intense that he had Americans calling his house in the middle of the night and British hippies literally camped on his lawn. It was a big deal. But that was almost a decade after Lord of the Rings was first published. The books were certainly initially popular, but not the cultural phenomenon it became after the paperbacks were released.
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Nov 20, 2014 01:48
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icantfindaname posted:Did people really care about LotR when it was published? Tolkein was just an old crazy British guy writing fanfiction about Norse mythology, not yet a beloved nerd icon. Tolkien was already a well-respected author off the back of The Hobbit, which had been widely and positively reviewed, and sold well enough for his publisher to ask politely if he wouldn't mind writing a sequel; ten years, one war, and Farmer Giles of Ham later, he brought them this enormous thing that was completely unpublishable, and it then took about three years to actually get it on sale, partly because paper rationing (not ended until 1953, and it took a while after that for the supply to fully recover) meant they couldn't possibly print enough copies of a single-volume edition to keep up with expected demand. That's why we have three volumes, and the cliffhanger at the end of The Two Towers followed by nearly a year's gap is surely one of the best accidental marketing decisions ever made. The thing had British and foreign fan clubs before 1954 was out, both within and outwith existing SF/F fan contexts (I know this because my grandmother started one). As each volume was released the number of positive reviews only grew, it kept selling in cartloads through the rest of the 50s, and there's every chance it would have gone stratospheric sooner than it did if it hadn't taken ten years for a paperback edition to arrive.
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Nov 20, 2014 02:15
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The Tolkien books became very popular in the U.S. in the late 1960s, partly due to their being reprinted in cheaper paperback editions by Ballantine Books and Houghton Mifflin around 1965. Tolkien took the opportunity to revise parts of the books for the official 2nd edition of the books. I remember that the three Ballantine paperback book covers of the LotR went together to form one big panorama image of the war. You could even buy a huge poster of the image. Additionally the story of the great war of Middle Earth intersected with the Vietnam war, which appealed to hippies and college kids. Inveigle fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 02:19
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Inveigle posted:The Potter books belong more in the classification of "children's literature" and "MG" (Middle Grade) books. Additionally, bookstores list the Potter books as children's books. I have several friends who have worked for the past 25 years as managers of various bookstores who have said that the Potter books are classified under children's books, although they do admit that the wild success of the Potter books later led to the popularity of the YA genre. I think it's wrong to classify them as either children's or YA novels, as a series. In my mind, the first three can easily be classified as children's books, and the last two solidly as YA books, if you look at the content and thematic evolution. I think part of the reason that HP was so successful was that it was so long-lasting compared to many series, and we did get that evolution throughout the series, as opposed to simple plot progression. Sato posted:I was eighteen when the 7th book came out and about to go off to college. Finishing the last book genuinely felt like the end of my childhood, and a lot of my friends felt the same way. Same for me. I remember I'd just got back from renting my first apartment where I was going to university, and I had taken some good French smokes back with me. I recall sitting in my truck around 10 or 11 that night, smoking a few, thinking, "what the gently caress am I doing waiting for a kids' book?" and still being completely stoked anyway. I'll honestly be curious if other generations react to it in the same way, because, speaking for myself, I think it wouldn't have been the same if I'd simply read the series straight through over the course of a few months when I was 10 or 12.
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Nov 20, 2014 07:47
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I read the first two books when I was almost 11. Book five came out just before I turned 15. I think future generations will enjoy the books, but only we will have had the experience of growing up with the books, being the same age as the characters every time a book came out.
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Nov 20, 2014 09:35
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I plan on giving my kids one book per year starting on their eleventh birthday
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