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Agreed, HP will be a timeless classic such as LOTR

TheDuke86 wrote:Agreed, HP will be a timeless classic such as LOTR

LOL no it won't.

I prefer The NeverEnding Story over Harry Potter!

Propulsion wrote:I prefer The NeverEnding Story over Harry Potter!

That damn wolf use to scared the **** out of me as a kid

Are we going to leave out H.R. Pufnstuf

Dallane wrote:

TheDuke86 wrote:Agreed, HP will be a timeless classic such as LOTR

LOL no it won't.

Of course that is your opinion and I can say for sure that neither of us can predict the future so who knows.

Although with 510milliom sold, and the 2nd place is 310 sold for a series, evidence so far suggests it will.

TheDuke86 wrote:
Although with 510milliom sold, and the 2nd place is 310 sold for a series, evidence so far suggests it will.

Sales really don't say anything when it comes to timeless classics. You won't find a lot of examples of classics among best sellers lists and vice versa.
You won't find Dostoevsky, Kafka, Wilde, Balzac, Shakespeare and many many others on the list of best selling authors.
But Twilight series would be on the list and now it is already pretty much forgotten. 50 shades of grey sells good, but same story, was advertised very well and became really popular at one point, but it's fading really quickly.
This all comes down to marketing and being entertaining.

I of course can not predict the future aswell, but my prognosis for HP is it will stay popular only as long as they keep working on marketing +1 or 2 generations after that. Then it might become a winnie the pooh kind of thing: everyone heard about it, parents suggest their kids to read it, but not that many actually do.
In the future market will have a lot of books similar to HP to offer, it already does, they just aren't advertised enough and didn't get their movies.

TheDuke86 wrote:

Dallane wrote:

TheDuke86 wrote:Agreed, HP will be a timeless classic such as LOTR

LOL no it won't.

Of course that is your opinion and I can say for sure that neither of us can predict the future so who knows.

Although with 510milliom sold, and the 2nd place is 310 sold for a series, evidence so far suggests it will.

Saying that a childrens book series is going to become a classic like LOTR is beyond retarded. Go back and actually looks at the books instead of bowing down to them. They are all terribly written. Notice how all her new stuff blows and you don't hear about it?

Tolkien basically created a genre - all HP books did were touch a chord with a group of kids that had already been bewitched by other magicy things in the huge childrens marketing machinery. Take Disneys Sorcerors apprentice and things like that for example; Harry Potter is not really new, it's just a new way of presenting those stories.
Without Tolkien things like forest dwelling arrow shooting elves, mining dwarves and vicious orcs would all be folklorical myths. Treants and trolls would be legends known in Scandinavia to just the old people, used to scare children in bedtime stories. Tolkien made all this come to life in a new genre called fantasy and at best, Potter is able to ride on his substantial coat tails.

I agree with JC; if you know fantasy (and here I include a childhood spent playing D&D and Warhammer, etc) then you will have extremely limited interest in HP as you have read and seen things far better than that could ever be. To be fair though, for someone without a fantasy background even HP is a reasonable entry point as she does have a few original ideas. Better HP than no fantasy in your life at all I suppose.

yet from a story-telling perspective, Tolkien falls awfully short in my eyes. Both for his lackluster world-building and his uninspired story arcs - then again, they were intended as children's bedtime stories and from that perspective I think they are awesome.

If you can get past the book sizes, I think you're far better off with (of course) Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, or more recently, Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles or Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive (which I consider superior to his Mistborn trilogy). A song of ice and fire does a brilliant job creating the political scene, but I dislike George Martin's prose style.