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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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I'm proud to say I have never read the books or seen any of the movies. And I'm over 40.
You were probably too old for it when it came out. I'm in my 30s, probably right in the cohort that was at the older side of the targeted age as the books were releasing, and felt too old for it pretty quickly.
I'm afraid to say that book slapped when I was a kid, but the hype elevated once the movies started coming out.
Imagining a world where Eragon had a good movie, it'd probably change the trajectory of a lot of things
Same for me friend, I was really into it as a kid because I was blissfully unaware of everything it really meant. I was fed the slop and I liked it
I was into the first 5, but had super checked out/aged out of them after that. I was like 14 when the 5th one came out. By 6 and 7 I was old enough to realise “oh these actually kinda suck”. Not in a political sense, I just thought the actual books themselves were mid a.f. once I reached my later teens
I was 10 when the last one was released, it really hits different when you still play with sticks
The movies really got the boost from having a John Williams score. Even his work on super mid movies is incredibly memorable.
The movies aren’t that bad. Critics, academies, and even the general public at the time held them all in high esteem and they are well made.
I didn’t even like the story after Goblet of Fire but calling the movies mid is really underselling them.
We played stuff from the Harry Potter soundtrack in band one year
The first ones came out when I was in middle school. I remember hearing about them a lot. I had some friends that read them. They are still huge Harry Potter dorks.
I think he's like 10 or so in the first book. Since kid's media tends to really work for kids slightly younger than the protagonists, I feel like someone would have had to have been in their later elementary school years (~3rd-5th grade in burgerland) for it to really take hold.
Middle school is kinda pushing it lol.
I know several people who are my age or older who have basically only read Harry Potter.
I've posted this before, but it still horrifies me. I know a couple who quit Harry Potter when Rowling publicly went full TERF. Now they exclusively read . . . Harry Potter fan-fiction.
I literally talked to this friend a few months ago about reading and he just said he was thinking of reading Harry Potter again.
I feel like shonen manga or superhero comics or just not reading anything would all be a step up from that
Nah, I'm sorry, but age is not a factor here. For people into fantasy, the opening 45 minutes of the first movie are fucking amazing. Doesn't matter how old you are, it takes a person right back to their childhood.
Fantasy lovers never lose that dream, to be magical and/or live in a magical place.
The books were mid and you missed nothing, but very few scifi/fantasy series got a complete set of movies at that level of quality, and that's a pretty novel concept even today. So many competing books with arguably superior aspects get canceled after season 2 or end up feeling like filler slop.
Many of us grew up with LotR and HP wondering why there are so few tv shows and movie adaptations of similar quality.
In a better timeline we would have an equivalent adaptation of every Dark Tower novel.
Which funnily enough, actually riff on the sneech from quidditch except instead of being a sports ball, it's just a hand launched guided drone bomb that kills children and is wielded by omnicidal cultists of the Crimson King who seeks to use tortured psychic neurodivergent children's unmarked the universe.
Stephen King is a shitlib but there are many strokes of genius in that series which make it still one of my favorite fantasy/sci fi works of all time.
The dark tower getting a good adaptation would be nice, but my ideal would be a really good Wheel of time series. It would have to be LONG but that's also what would be so appealing about it
Currently it is in the hands of Mike Flanagan, who previously worked on Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep (a Stephen King adaptation that was good, and Fall of the House of Usher which is a Poe adaptation which was also real good. Given all the stuff he has worked on (good and not so good) I think he is perfect for it.
As far as longevity I really hope his take on it lives up to the hype because there are seven very dense books to adapt (excluding Gunslinger which advantageously was originally written as a standalone story and is fairly short).
They could both milk the series for a lot and also result in a very great adaptation since there are a few novellas too. It's both a blessing and a curse that there is so much material because it's going to require some incredible creative vision but also has the potential to span a decade of television.
And unlike GoT this epic fantasy tale actually got finished...
So, at the time the first book came out I was 14 and lived in a group home, and to have a fascimile of 'school' (I had yet to be enrolled at the local HS) one of the staff stuck me in a room and tried forcing me to read Harry Potter and I adamantly refused because it read like such crap after a few pages. Mind you, I was already a teen and had been reading Dragonlance stuff by Weiss and Hickman for a few years, so this fantasy world seemed rather dull to me. To this day still never had any interest.
Same. I disliked the idea of them from day one. I have loudly refused to read them or participate in anything related although there's been plenty of people in my orbit trying to get me to read them or watch the movies.