/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17896851]

What made Harry Potter appeal to women?
We know that it appeals to women FAR more than men. I know some of you will say because it's YA trash and really simple sentences make retard chicks like it, but lots of shitty books are written like that and never take off like they did.

Harry Potter doesn't feature female protagonists, the romance is not obviously significant, (there's no obsessive man with long running story beats of sexual tension) It's clearly not twilight, or anything obviously tailored to cheap and easy junk for women. What's making women love this book?

What's the secret formula here for this book that marketed to women so well?

[Anonymous No.17896874]

it is better to have a side character than the protagonist, the protagonist has to have flaws and you see his insecurities in his POV

a female side character has none of that and she can be a mary sue like hermione, all my female friends that are into harry potter say the same thing

>Harry is so lucky to have Hermione as his friend :)

[Anonymous No.17896878]

>>17896851
it appeals to children without outright saying it's children's book and women are eternal children.

[Anonymous No.17896896]

>>17896851
It had one of the more capable female protagonists in children's lit, and (at least in the beginning) a rich and whimsical world.

[Anonymous No.17896904]

It’s written by a woman. Men literally cannot understand it.

[Anonymous No.17896919]

>>17896851
>We know that it appeals to women FAR more than men

Who's we? Why are you pretending your opinion is shared by some sort of group?

[Anonymous No.17896922]

>>17896851
because it's YA trash and really simple sentences make retard chicks like it

[Anonymous No.17896925]

the fantasy of female-male friendship

[Anonymous No.17896931]

For me, it's Harry enslaving Veela with life-debts fanfiction

[Anonymous No.17896941]

It a was shilled super hard by satanic occultists as preconditioning for NWO. Since it became popular by force, women loved it because it enjoyed social dominance and that is the only thing that appeals to women.

[Anonymous No.17896953]

>harry potter bad

[Anonymous No.17896986]

>>17896941
Tell me more

[Anonymous No.17897030]

>>17896851
I saw a post on here once about how the character of Snape is basically the ultimate fantasy expression of a woman's dual mating strategy- a simp who is so pathetic that he carries on looking after hers and chad's offspring after they've died, even giving his own life to protect chad's kid because he's still simping so hard for the woman two decades after she's died. I wonder how much of the rest of the series is full of these little revelations of the author's unconscious? Haven't read the books since I was a kid.

[Anonymous No.17897054]

>>17896874
True, hermione is the smartest and best and pretties whatever mary sue. Is that really enough though? i mean it's possible, i just think again why would it stand out when lots of books have mary sues and don't pan out with women. It feels to me like it has to be some kind of combination of this trash, and non-threatening motifs that make women like it.

>>17896878
For sure, that's true. I just think there are too many books like that which didn't murder the sales floor like this series, so that makes me think there has to be a little bit more to it. Not in the literary sense, but in a marketing sense.
>>17896931
Yeah there's a lot of fetish smut fanfiction written by teenage girls, i wonder if that has something to do with it. Like somehow it's really easy for people to project their own sexual characteristics on the characters, more so than others, and that's part of why women like it.


>>17896953
i mean come on, it's an okay children's book that grown women have formed their identities around. There's some kind of marketing shit involved.

[Anonymous No.17897055]

Woman simultaneously view themselves as the disadvantaged underdog as well as the hottest piece of ass in the room. They like HP because they project onto Harry who is a poor, disadvantaged orphan who also gets his knob slobbed by an entire hidden society. It is the perfect fusion of ego and self-pity.

[Anonymous No.17897060]

>>17896851
I started watching the movies with my wife because i had not watched some of them before, and I noticed that the plot writing is fucking garbage even for hollyjew standards. Like when Harry potter starts liking his friend's sister out of nowhere is a pathetic plot, and also when the whole lord voldemort being an allegory for racism/discrimination is borderline fucking corny. I don't understand how somebody over the age of 14 can find any appeal in these garbage books.

[Anonymous No.17897066]

>>17897030
That IS an interesting point

[Anonymous No.17897069]

If it were written by a man, he'd have married Luna.

[Anonymous No.17897075]

>>17897055
>It is the perfect fusion of ego and self-pity.
hmmmmmmmmm...... definitely something to think about. But is that significant compared to other YA books that did not turn out so successful?

[Anonymous No.17897084]

>>17897060
Yes we understand that women don't care about the plots or quality of narrative fiction anon.

[Anonymous No.17897088]

>>17896878
/thread

[Anonymous No.17897095]

Has anyone here read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?

[Anonymous No.17897098]

>>17896941
Yeah it definitely brought wicca into the mainstream. Those pearl clutchers were right

[Anonymous No.17897118]

>>17897075
The ultimate metric for success is luck.

[Anonymous No.17897147]

>>17897118
Well it's actually IQ and then conscientiousness. luck isn't a metric, it's not a unit. I get what you want to say, but it's imprecise language that relies on people's willingness to ignore the definition of a word to make sense.

instead of "metric" you should use the word "ingredient".

[Anonymous No.17897158]

>>17897118
yeah it very well could have been luck that made harry potter well read, but i don't know if luck could carry 7 whole books this far.

[Anonymous No.17897182]

Because it's a book for children.

[Anonymous No.17897219]

>>17897147
Thank you for demonstrating why autists will never get past middle management. The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.

[Anonymous No.17897278]

>>17897084
That's not what I'm saying, roastie. I get that women find the memories of their chilhood endearing, and that's okay, however I don't get the grown adults obsessing over this as if they were children.

[Anonymous No.17897310]

I've just finished my draft of a children's novel. Before I move into the editing phase, I want to write an essay about why I think Harry Potter worked so well (for its first three or four books, at least.) There's a lot of revisionist history about it and nobody seems to be interested in judging whether or not it's an effective children's story, which it of course is. The same books appeal to women and children in the same way that the same movies appeal to men and children - there's no real secret about that.

In my opinion it's better to forget the older audience entirely and focus on what makes it work for its target market of middle schoolers. I flipped it open to near its climax and read the following lines, all within roughly a page of one another.

>They had been given special, new quills for the exams, which had been bewitched with an Anti-Cheating spell.
>Professor Flitwick called them one by one into his class to see if they could make a pineapple tap-dance across his desk.
>Professor McGonagall watched them turn a mouse into a snuffbox...
>[His old nightmare] was now worse than ever because there was a hooded figure dripping blood in it.
>One hour of answering questions about batty old wizards who'd invented self-stirring cauldrons...
>"I needn't have learned about the 1637 Werewolf Code of Conduct..."
>The Weasley twins and Lee Jordan were tickling the tentacles of a giant squid, which was basking in the warm shallows.

It is so fucking whimsical it is exhausting, but also sandwiched in there with complete casualness is "a hooded figure dripping blood." When I read it as a kid, and I think when most kids read it, they do not give a fuck about the Voldemort. Kids care about all the whimsical stuff. But brains are wired to remember stories, not one-off whimsical ideas. Everything but the central conflict of the story and things directly involved in it are disposed of when it's packaged for archival. The strongest memories that remain after the first reading of a story, for most people but especially kids, are of what happened at the end and of whether or not they had fun with the rest of it. The conflict is there only to ensure the former need is fulfilled and everything else services the latter need. That's basically my thesis for why it worked and became a cultural monolith in a way that none of its imitators or predecessors did. (I think of Earthsea, which was written prettier but was obsessed with its central conflict and did not bother worrying about whether or not it was fun.)

[Anonymous No.17897342]

>>17897075
The setting is perfect for a self insert. I used to day dream all the time as a kid. I used to daydream about being in the star wars universe, camp half blood, narnia and others. The most easily imagined daydreams I had were ones of Hogwarts. For example, to daydream about being a demigod at camp half blood I would ultimately have to pretend that one of my parents wasnt my parent. To daydream about statwars was limited space travel and intergalactic politics. To daydream about Hogwarts I could invent as many characters and situations as I wanted without ever running into problems with worldbuilding because Rowling is a hack. Its absolutely ripe for self inserts

[Anonymous No.17897357]

>>17896851
Men don't read.

[Anonymous No.17897377]

>>17897030
Harry is a rich kid jock who marries his boyhood sweetheart and becomes a cop, doing nothing revolutionary for the rest of his life, just going along with the established, and established as shitty, order. Rowling's got issues.

[Anonymous No.17897385]

>>17897310
>It is so fucking whimsical it is exhausting, but also sandwiched in there with complete casualness is "a hooded figure dripping blood." When I read it as a kid, and I think when most kids read it, they do not give a fuck about the Voldemort. Kids care about all the whimsical stuff.
This, it's absolutely this. What Harry Potter gets so very right is the setting, the world it is set in. I remember as a kid I did not care about the big plot at all, I just liked the idea of chocolate frogs and screaming plants and weirdly funny ghosts. Call it world building, everyone's favorite tranny hating woman got it so right. It's all about the world and the setting.

[Anonymous No.17897405]

>>17897385
But the problem is that if you focus completely on that and forget to include a conflict, you lose too. KU is littered with unpublishable "fun" settings where the central conflict is incompetent or nonexistent. In Harry Potter, you didn't give a fuck about Voldemort, but your brain did. I have more to say about this than I can structure in a 4chan post but I'll probably shill my essay here when I've written it.

[Anonymous No.17897453]

>>17896851
You know how Dark Academia is a thing now and women like it a lot? This is also why they liked the 10th and 11th doctors of Doctor Who. Harry Potter has the same sort of wardrobe and aesthetic.

[Anonymous No.17897455]

>>17897158
I don't agree that its just luck, though realistically only the first 2-3 books are needed to reel people into the series. The rest can be meh and people will keep reading just because they've already formed an attachment to the characters and world.

[Anonymous No.17897477]

>>17897310
The whimsy mixed with more serious stuff is also why Lemony Snicket and Roald Dahl work, in fact together with C. S. Lewis, they and J. K. Rowling form their own subgenre. They all feature oppressed young children, often orphans, with ridiculous adult guardian figures, only for them to get past it and enter some kind of magical or otherwise wondrous adventure world, and whimsy is a big part of it.

[Anonymous No.17897486]

>>17897453
>Dark Academia
Wasnt that a 2010 niche tumblr thing?

[Anonymous No.17897516]

>>17897377
Well she is a Blairite, a staunch supporter of the Status Quo whos only whish is to continue her current way of life without too many shakeups, and so her characters will reflect that. Harry is a role model Blairite, he becomes a Magical Gestapo member to serve his community and the status quo, he marries someone related to his friend so that he won't jeopardize it too much by marrying some from it or cause it to break by estranging himself from them due to his own duties. His own claim to fame was stopping the person who wanted to uproot the old system and by continuing in his fathers footsteps by becoming a Quidditch player.

[Anonymous No.17897524]

>>17896851
Same reason girls seem to like Boku no Dogshit Academia. It's a fucking shounen. But a really-well executed one.

[Anonymous No.17897531]

>>17897524
cont.
They like shounen because shounen is for boys. Boys are children (forget the male part). Women are children. QED

[Anonymous No.17897545]

>>17897524
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is in no way a "shonen". The protagonist basically gets one power and that is flying on a broomstick. Later books, or the ones I read, don't follow a "shonen" structure at all, either. Your brain has been rotten by anime if that's the best comparison you can think of and I think I need to tell you to G O B A C K

[Anonymous No.17897565]

>>17897545
Harry is definitely good at magic. Did you forget about casting spells? He does more than broomstick shit

[Anonymous No.17897593]

>>17897055
This. One of the strongest moments of this is when Harry finds out he has a loaded bank vault left in his name - it I’d framed as like any other part of his discovery of the world of magic, i.e. another “wonderous surprise of the week” and so Harry basically can act meek through the whole thing and “just passively be made aware of his riches”. Basically Harry is permitted to not even need to think about the fact he just accepted a fortune he did nothing to earn.

[Anonymous No.17897597]

>>17897095
I have. Jews should be hanged.

[Anonymous No.17897608]

>>17897565
>Harry is definitely good at magic.
He's mediocre at best, even after he makes decent progress in the fourth book.

[Anonymous No.17897640]

>>17897486
Its gained a bit of popularity again. I think more to that anons point it had a sort of comfy halloweenie aesthetic that appeals to girls.

[Anonymous No.17898023]

>>17897608
Not that anon but Harry is often regarded to be good at defense against the dark arts, he aces those tests, and he's coached by Lupin and the fake Moody in books 3 and 4 outside of his proper class time, then even by Snape in book 5 with occlumency, within which book he also sets up Dumbledore's Army as its leader teaching people spells. By the time of that book it's pointed out that he does a remarkably good Patronus, even Hermione has a hard time by comparison.

[Anonymous No.17898034]

>>17898023
His skills are incredibly niche, and while he was trained in occlumency, he remained pisspoor at it. Sure, he got good at a few things. That doesn't mean he wasn't a mediocre magician.

[Anonymous No.17898076]

>>17897597
>Jews should be hanged.
What does that have to do with HPMOR?

[Anonymous No.17898099]

>>17898034
Pretty much. Harry maxed DEX at the cost of low INT.

[Anonymous No.17898693]

>>17897516
>His own claim to fame was stopping the person who wanted to uproot the old system
I don't think Voldemort had any goals about uprooting the old system, he just wanted to corrupt it.

[Anonymous No.17898765]

Jungian archetypes + excellent worldbuilding + good dropping of hints of the overarching plot

[Anonymous No.17898779]

>>17896851
Speaking of which, is it just me or is there no such great thing like HP these days?

[Anonymous No.17898806]

>>17897219
Actually i'm fucking rich as fuck.

[Anonymous No.17898818]

>>17897278
>That's not what I'm saying, roastie
there are no women on 4chan, stop jerking off. It's not really useful. The point is to deduce what they DO cling to, not what they don't care about.

It's simplistic and easy to grasp pre digested thoughts. Sure, but that's not enough on its own.

[Anonymous No.17898855]

>>17898818
>there are no women on 4chan
You'd be surprised at the thriving community of spinsters over at /adv/

[Anonymous No.17898872]

>>17896851
Women read more books than men so more are going to like a popular book.

[Anonymous No.17898881]

>>17898855
That reminds me one of my friends found termites in his house too, so now he has to fumigate it.

[Anonymous No.17898905]

>>17898693
The point still stands, he was planning on doing MASSIVE changes to the status quo, because going from an Elective Police State to an Ethnocentric Police State ruled by a God-King through Terror and Fear isn't a small change. But then again, you could also argue that's nothing new to the inhabitants of the accursed land called Albion.

[Anonymous No.17898974]

>>17898034
He even became an auror. I'm not saying he wasn't piss poor at some things, but he was not below average and was above average at some things enough that it got him a career job that requires obvious competence.

[Anonymous No.17899026]

Was it ever actually clearly explained how Harry beat Voldemort and got the scar as a baby? I remember finishing the series as a kid and never really getting it. I don't remember them explaining it in the movies either other then "the power of love".

[Anonymous No.17899123]

>>17899026
I dont know shit about HP, but if the whimsical worldbuilding being talked about is an indication, did the story/world need more reason than ‘the power of love protected him’?

Not talking about quality here, more about how fitting it would be for the story.

[Anonymous No.17899153]

>>17899026
The explanation literally is "Love is the strongest magic spell there is"
The reason Voldemort couldn't just blow up the Dursley household one summer is because there was a magical barrier made of love around the house

[Anonymous No.17899304]

>>17899123
It might but they never bothered to explain how it worked, at least I don't remember them ever doing so. Unlike other magic spells where its clearly explained what they do and how you do them.
>>17899153
Was it ever explained how to use power of love magic though?

[Anonymous No.17899311]

>>17897545
Shōnen is not a genre, it's a demographic. It's for boys under the age of 18, just like Harry Potter being middle grade fiction. Harry Potter could be considered Shōnen.

[Anonymous No.17899432]

>>17899026
From what I remember:
1. His mother is told to get out of the way, but voluntarily dies for him, giving him magic protection because "love"
2. Voldemort's abra kadabra ricochets off of him and hits Voldemort instead

[Anonymous No.17899670]

>>17896851
Women want to fuck Harry or Malfoy.

[Anonymous No.17899681]

>>17899026
I never understood that. Surely Lily wasn't the only person who died in those circumstances protecting a loved one. Even if love is somehow the only thing that counters Avada Kedavra, wizards should be aware of that by then.

[Anonymous No.17899717]

>>17899681
They were also a particularly powerful wizarding family, already well-known before they died. More importantly, Harry Potter is the protagonist.

[Anonymous No.17899780]

>>17896851
This was by far the best ship.

[Anonymous No.17899801]

>>17899717
Wasnt the mom a mud blood? I get that Harry's the protagonist so special stuff gets to happen to him, but since the entire series is a consequence of that act you'd think JK Rowling would've added more to it then that.