Harry Potter Makes Me Sick

Found it difficult to concentrate in the library today, too many distractions. There was a moment when it appeared there was a child bouncing on a trampoline but on closer examination it was a hairy Spanish student perched on the edge of a swivel chair, nursing a nervous muscle disorder in both calves. To his right sat a 70 year old, signed into someone’s Facebook account (could have been his own I suppose), but the details were masked with hunched shoulders, effectively smothering the monitor.

I had earlier left the cinema having been exposed to yet another Harry Potter and the first question I ask is am I the only person that hasn’t been taken in by this hype? There are many things that piss me off about Harry Potter, for a start there’s the whole twig-waving thing. If these wands were used to cast an incidental spell, then I could live with that, but they are used to create vast nuclear blasts. At least with The Lord of the Rings you get to see swords, bows, crossbows and arm to arm combat with believable villains and heroes who are not obsessed with their looks and their passage through puberty.

Then there’s the name itself, Harry Potter, there, it happened again, I cringed, every time there’s a need to type out those 11 letters I involuntarily cringe and why the long titles? They are annoying. Movie titles should be 2 to 3 words long, so you can bring them into conversation, like I went to see The Godfather last night, and yeah it was amazing, the thought of bringing the whole title of HP7 into conversation makes me want to vomit.

There’s also something quite irritating about Daniel Ratcliffe, it’s probably just the face, it’s the kind of face that attracts playground bullies with some ease; it’s the smugness, the goodness and the stiffness. It’s partly due also to Rowling’s plodding style of writing, yes I have read extracts in Waterstone’s, half-tempted to buy one of her earlier novels, just to see what all the hype was about, but it never got to the purchase stage. This plodding style is also evident in the Grint and Watson characters, which are nearly as irritating as Ratcliffe’s. I suppose I’m really trying to say that Harry Potter makes me sick.

The masses have been duped by the hype. I’m good at playing the hype game, I have an Iphone and a MacBook Pro and provide unpaid publicity for the Apple Corporation whenever the opportunity presents. You could scribble ‘fuck off wankers’ on the big screen and adult Harry Potter fans would still lap it up. Anyway why are we so obsessed with self-pitying children? We are being dummed down by dross. I’ll say it again because it feels good and it neutralises the cringe feeling, Harry Potter is shit. But Harry Potter (see, I just cringed again) is typical of the trend towards our culture of regressing adults back into children, and in doing so exploiting their purchasing potential. I’ve also heard adults at work talking about finishing a whole Harry Potter novel in a weekend, well so what? It’s a fucking children’s novel you morons!
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