Karma Chameleon wrote:If you had to choose between twilight and harry potter which would you choose? Why?
warrior cats
...Okay, okay, I can actually give a serious answer, too, but the answer would probably still be 'neither' if you cut it short.
Harry Potter was a big part of my childhood. I've always been an avid reader even as a kid, but HP was my first step towards reading longer and more complex stories.
I have a ton of nostalgia for everything surrounding this series. The excitement of reading the first book and wanting
more, the almost agonizing wait for the new books to be released, the suspense of not knowing what would happen next... I grew up with this series. Characters from these books became rolemodels to me. My younger self would've picked HP in a heartbeat.
I also read along as the Twilight books came out, courtesy of two friends and a sister who liked them. I don't think these books would ever had stood a fair chance with me, to be honest. Back then I had no interest whatsoever in romance as a genre overall, so even if I'd found the books to be well-written, they'd still have missed my interest.
My memories of reading Twilight mostly boil down to being mildly disappointed by all the actually interesting things the books
hinted at existing, but never fully went into because they weren't relevant to the love story.
I always said I'd rather read a series about Carlisle, because his whole backstory is more compelling to me than any of what happens in the actual plot, whoops.
But, back to now. I haven't been a kid or a teenager for... a while now. And I've gained the ability to look at the writing, and the people behind the writing, more critically.
And I cannot, with good conscience, stand behind either of them.
I think disliking Twilight has always been easier for me, because I had no emotional connection to it. It was always easy to point at the series, point out the unsettling amounts of misogyny, abuse and racism, and say 'this shouldn't be supported'.
Harry Potter
did mean something to me. So growing up and becoming aware of its own problems with racist and antisemitic stereotyping was rightfully uncomfortable. And finding out that rather than growing from her mistakes, the author has only made herself more and more infamous for
adding controversy to her books and her own person... well, yeah, that hurt.
My heart aches, thinking about the fact that an author I admired as a child turned out to be Just Another Bigot. It
did feel dramatic to find out about her transmisogyny and overall transphobia. Because of how much the series she wrote had meant to me.
I don't know how to accurately describe what it feels like, now. I'm a bookseller who has to stock this author's titles because my boss would never skip on the guaranteed success of whatever she puts out.
So inevitably, I'll eventually be standing there with her new novel in my hands at work. As a trans person. And try not to feel partially guilty whenever I sell someone a copy.
But, needless to say, knowing how the author feels about me and my friends has significantly curbed my enthusiasm for Harry Potter.