"It's The Next Harry Potter!"

I finally saw Twilight, but I'm not here to review that. It really wasn't bad enough or good enough for me to care enough to analyze. What I do want to rant on a little is the hype it received when it was hot.

I don't know why this bothers me so much... but...

I hate trendwatchers. Twilight has been called "the next Harry Potter", probably by the same drooling idiots who called Kurt Cobain "the next John Lennon". Frankly, I'm getting sick of every new book being called "the next Harry Potter". Any time a book sells more than three copies lately, somebody labels it "the next Harry Potter." The phrase has very quickly become so overused, that it instantly fills me with rage. They said it about Lemony Snicket - did that really catch on? They said it about Eragon - anybody seen an Eragon T-shirt lately? Bedsheets? Candy bar? No? Why, just the other day I was using my Golden Compass toothbrush while wearing my Spiderwick Chronicles underwear! Seriously, though, none of these are bad properties, and they are perfectly deserving of whatever success they get. But that doesn't mean we'll see conventions and theme parks dedicated to them.

So I wish Twilight a world of success, and I didn't totally hate the movie. I haven't read the books, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume their popularity was well earned. But can we please stop the comparisons? It's apples and oranges. If we're judging it by content, then it should be compared to other vampire stories. But if we're just judging it by success, you might as well call the Nintendo Wii "the next Harry Potter."

IMO, Harry Potter was the next "Chronicles of Narnia" (1950). And Narnia was the next "Wizard of Oz" (1900). See a pattern here? You needn't start looking for "the next Harry Potter" until 2050! Even if you want to call Harry Potter "the next Star Wars", there's still a 20 year gap.

There probably won't be a successor to Harry Potter for a while. Possibly not in your lifetime. Get over it. Get on with your life. Continue to read and enjoy movies, but quit looking for things. Pottermania is the kind of thing that happens unexpectedly, not while you're looking for it, and definitely not when you try to force it. If you try to predict one of these things, I will laugh at you, and I will lose respect for you, and I will steal your car and run over your dog with it.

Moving In

Note, I'm transferring a lot of my old blog entries from MySpace. If you go to this blog through the main page, you should see my posts in chronological order. But if you are using Google Reader or other such site/program, then my posts might show up in the order I transfered them, which won't make a bit of sense. But from this point on, my posts should show up in a sane order again.