The Harry Potter Generation Needs to Grow Up

[MsAmerica]

Okay, personally I haven't read any Harry Potter. At some point I peeped into one of the books to flip through it before making a commitment to what was already a series, and it looked dull and derivative, so I passed. But I'm sure many of you read some HP, so I thought this article might be of interest. So if you don't like it, don't yell at me. (I'm posting a longer excerpt than I normally would because I know accessing the NYT has become more difficult.)

The Harry Potter Generation Needs to Grow Up
By Louise Perry

It’s been almost 20 years since the final Harry Potter book was released. The wizarding world is still generating interest — book sales remain strong, and the 2023 video game Hogwarts Legacy topped 40 million sales. HBO is working on a TV adaptation of the books, set to be released next year.

But the relevance of the franchise is waning. “We’ve seen our audience age up,” conceded a Warner Bros. executive of the recent spinoff films...

You don’t see this with fiction like “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Sales of those books may rise and fall in response to new film or TV adaptations, but those franchises aren’t bound to a particular generation in the way that Harry Potter is bound to the millennials. Perhaps that is partly a consequence of the fact that, as children, millennials experienced the release of both the Harry Potter books and the Warner Bros. films as a series of multimedia events that were skillfully hyped.

But there are also politics at play. Ms. Rowling foregrounds ideology in her books, and that means that her novels feel dated in a way that others do not. Conceived over 30 years ago, the Harry Potter books are very much a product of 1990s liberalism: a moment when World War II still occupied a central space in the cultural imagination, and when it was still possible to believe that the best bits of the old political order could be retained alongside a gentle incorporation of the new.

That’s why millennials like Harry Potter a whole lot more than younger generations do. The story captures a worldview that is no longer attractive to young people jaded by the experiences of economic decline, political polarization and spiraling identity politics. They have fallen out of love with Harry Potter because they have fallen out of love with the worldview the series represents. Which is to say that young people have fallen out of love with liberalism....

Harry Potter both reflected and reinforced the politics of readers who came of age during the postwar liberal era. One 2014 study, cited by Hillary Clinton during a speech on the importance of libraries, suggested that reading Harry Potter increased sympathy toward immigrants, gay people and refugees. In another piece of research, published in 2013, Anthony Gierzynski, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, with the artist Kathryn Eddy, tested the hypothesis that millennials who read Harry Potter ended up mirroring the political ideals of the books more than those who didn’t:

We found that Harry Potter fans tend to be more accepting of those who are different, to be more politically tolerant, to be more supportive of equality, to be less authoritarian, to be more opposed to the use of violence and torture, to be less cynical, and to evince a higher level of political efficacy...

Liberalism is not the human default. It is a style of doing politics that can be sustained only in a society that is peaceful, affluent and high-trust all at once — a rare combination in our species’ history. Under such conditions, we might well see a widespread tolerance of free speech, a rejection of political violence and a popular faith in democratic processes. But when a society becomes more fractured and more threatened, those ideals may be quickly abandoned, and the aging elites who oversaw the process of decline will not be looked on kindly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/opinion/harry-potter-millenials-liberalism.html

Sure is.

An American hack criticising a work of English literature? Bloody cheek. Oh well, when Louise Perry has written a global phenomenon and is as rich and famous as JKR she'll be entitled to her jibes, but until then she can stfu.

nonsense word salad!

So millennials are both snowflake liberals but somehow simultaneously (despite it being comprehensively accepted that they are significantly poorer than their parents at the same age, due to graduating into economic recession etc.) "the aging elites"?

Plus the wank about "a moment when World War II still occupied a central space in the cultural imagination." I'm her exact target audience, not just a millennial but someone literally smack bang in the middle of the millennial age range, and not even my grandparents remember WW2!

Not to mention the fact that the assertation "the relevance of the franchise is waning" is contradicted by the paragraph immediately before it outlining the ongoing success of everything HP related. You can't say that's solely down to millennials, there aren't that many of us - and surely because of our snowflake liberalness we're all supposed to be boycotting JKR anyway!

It also seems very odd for a 'Warner Bros. executive' to suggest the influence of HP is waning given the amount HBO (which now comes under the Warnes Bros discovery umbrella) is spending on the new series...

People are worried about the growth in AI generated content, but if this is the dross real humans come out with, it can only be an improvement...

Louise Perry’s writing generally gives social conservatism-verging-on-tradwife vibes. People on here do like her because she is gender critical and anti porn, but her entire notion that young women should marry young, have babies, and not prioritise higher education, careers, or sexual adventures separates her in no obvious way from some of the worst excesses of the misogynistic right to me.

She's not endearing herself to me.

Rubbish. The Harry Potter books are still huge, they will be around for a long time imo.

Your post was long and waffly, and I lost interest half way through. I don't think your opinion on the HP books is of particular importance if you haven't even read them.

I haven't read them either, but my Gen Z dd absolutely bloody loved them as a child and still turns to them as her favourite "comfort read" even now. My Gen X DSis and BIL also both love them, and my friend's primary school aged grandchild is obsessed with them, so it definitely isn't just the millennials.

I think this is nonsense. I grew up with them, and started reading the first one to my DS as soon as I thought he could understand it with a bit of explaining from me (I think he was five and a half or so, I was very eager 😆). Until that point, he’d been very reluctant to read his phonics books from school because they were boring, he couldn’t see the point, and he was falling behind. He loved the first HP so much that he then threw himself into learning to read so that he could read them for himself.

He’s finally achieved that aim, at just turned seven. He and his school friend took their copies into school every day for several weeks and read the first book again, together, without an adult to help them. This is a child who used to cry and beg not to read aloud, choosing to read with his mate over all the other things he could be doing. Thank goodness for Harry Potter!

They are timeless books with themes which are relevant to anyone in any place.
You clearly have an agenda.
All the more ridiculous to post this piece of nonsense when you haven’t even read the books.

What a load of cobblers.

Bullshit. And lots of the people who first read Harry Potter were Gen X like me, not Millennials. In any case, why would you want people who felt like this to 'grow up'?!:

'accepting of those who are different, to be more politically tolerant, to be more supportive of equality, to be less authoritarian, to be more opposed to the use of violence and torture, to be less cynical, and to evince a higher level of political efficacy..."

I hate this emergent culture of uninteresting journalists telling people what they should and shouldnt enjoy and scouring to find ridiculous ways to justify it. Why should people who enjoy things be bothered that others dont? Surely enjoying books is great!

I am GenX with one parent born pre WWII and one firmly in boomer generation. I read some of the Harry Potter books while commuting in the late 90s. Millennials did grow up with the books sort of but JKR is genx barely as she was born in '65. So what has liberal 90s got to do with anything? Tbh the whole excerpt read like the writer had an opinion she then retroactively applied to the HP franchise without much mind paid to reality. JKR is a product of the turbulent 70s and Thatchers 80s. like anyone British in their 50-60s now. That was not an oasis of liberalism even when we had a labour government. I am not sure what she is on about frankly.

There was a period of "things are going to get better" in the late 90s - Brit pop, cool Brittania etc. and HP is associated as it was being published and getting made into films at the same time. The fact that they are bloated and over written (sometimes underwritten) and dated just puts them in the same category as Stephen King books and most popular fiction... Never as good as you remember and much better authors are unfairly overlooked (particularly in genre fiction). I don't think there is much you can say about the political affiliations of people who were spoonfed a book series from early in their lives, the Potter books hark back to old stories set in boarding schools, the characters were overwhelmingly white and there was a magical monoculture... JKR stole from writers that she would have read as a child like Blyton and Jill Murphy. Everything changes and stays the same.

I would think the point was obvious.

The point was that I thought others might be interested.

And, judging from the number of replies, I was right.

It’s a very short thread, by MN standards.

Perry concludes her piece:

I now wonder if the Harry Potter books themselves functioned as something like a Mirror of Erised for my generation. They reflected an image of the world that we so wanted to be real: a world that was ancient and magical, where even children had the ability to identify and vanquish evil. It was beautiful in its moral simplicity. It was also too good to be true.

Well, does a bear shit in the woods? Isn't she just describing any children's book ever?