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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2c0LZ1A:
nervous-breakdown-hat reblogged your post and added:
This is incredibly interesting because I have a lot of friends as little as two or three years older than me […] who have incredibly nostalgic fondness for these books, but I fall firmly on the nothing but Harry Potter and fanfic side of the generational divide in terms of what I was reading in middle school and early high school.
Yep! My littlest sister didn’t read any of the Anne McCaffrey books. Because she was exactly the right age for Harry Potter.
Which means that I was just entering college when Harry Potter came out. I was just a couple of years older than that target market. And so, I wasn’t reading YA fiction, and I’d moved on from the romantic fantasy stuff and was pretty immersed in academic shit and not reading for pleasure anymore.
I read Harry Potter, but the whole time I was aware that I was too old for it. It didn’t have the same hold on me as it did my little sister.
What’s more, Harry Potter’s sheer ubiquitousness meant that it had this veneer of respectability. The romantic fantasy stuff usually had horrible covers that I would hide because I didn’t want anyone to see what I was reading and mock me. I used to just hold pieces of paper so they covered the book I was reading, so no one could see the, like, topless blue-haired chick cowering from an anatomically improbable dragon, and shit. They were so embarrassing.
But Harry Potter? Adults loved that shit, and everyone thought it was cool, even kids who didn’t read, so there was no danger of getting mocked for reading it. Except that I was too old, and I had a 15-page paper due on Beowulf or some shit.
And I didn’t discover Internet fanfiction until I graduated college, I think.
nervous-breakdown-hat reblogged your post and added:
This is incredibly interesting because I have a lot of friends as little as two or three years older than me […] who have incredibly nostalgic fondness for these books, but I fall firmly on the nothing but Harry Potter and fanfic side of the generational divide in terms of what I was reading in middle school and early high school.
Yep! My littlest sister didn’t read any of the Anne McCaffrey books. Because she was exactly the right age for Harry Potter.
Which means that I was just entering college when Harry Potter came out. I was just a couple of years older than that target market. And so, I wasn’t reading YA fiction, and I’d moved on from the romantic fantasy stuff and was pretty immersed in academic shit and not reading for pleasure anymore.
I read Harry Potter, but the whole time I was aware that I was too old for it. It didn’t have the same hold on me as it did my little sister.
What’s more, Harry Potter’s sheer ubiquitousness meant that it had this veneer of respectability. The romantic fantasy stuff usually had horrible covers that I would hide because I didn’t want anyone to see what I was reading and mock me. I used to just hold pieces of paper so they covered the book I was reading, so no one could see the, like, topless blue-haired chick cowering from an anatomically improbable dragon, and shit. They were so embarrassing.
But Harry Potter? Adults loved that shit, and everyone thought it was cool, even kids who didn’t read, so there was no danger of getting mocked for reading it. Except that I was too old, and I had a 15-page paper due on Beowulf or some shit.
And I didn’t discover Internet fanfiction until I graduated college, I think.
