I thought I'd explain my anger at the new Harry Potter film being moved from November release to a July 2009 release. A lot of the reaction on the web has had to do with the release film version of the Stephanie Meyer book Twilight. To me it has nothing to do with Twilight. I am not part of the Twilightverse yet; I've not read the books (yet) and I couldn't give a flying f**k about it (yet). I have no doubt that all of this will change very soon but I am first reading everything by Anthony Horowitz and then Garth Nix before I get onto Meyer.
The thing is, I have been becoming irritated with a certain arrogance in the whole Harry Potter franchise. I find JK Rowling to be patronising and often rude to her fans, I was disappointed in the last book and I wasn't the least bit impressed when she brought out two copies of Beedle the Bard and her fans were told they wouldn't be getting their hands on it. (This has now changed and Beedle the Bard is on sale on Amazon). She gets away with appearing to be a charitable saint but I get the feeling that some fans are better than others. She thinks the public have taken their pound of her flesh, she doesn't want to be owned by us and she has responded with aggression instead of just growing up and ignoring her own nagging doubts and insecurities.
In the past year I have read books by Philip Pullman, Garth Nix, Anthony Horowitz and William Nicholson. I believe that JK Rowling is neither the first nor the best of this new generation of young adult fantasy authors. If I try to take an objective view of all of this I will say that JK alienated a large portion of her readers (who knows, maybe I am the only person on Earth who read arrogance into her smug little attitude and her failure to answer all of the questions she promised she would answer).
Having detached myself successfully from an obsession with the world of Harry Potter and having discovered many other weird and fantastical worlds (my favourite being the world of Shade's Children) the news of the delay has come down to this: like millions of film fans across the world, I was really, really looking forward to the release of this film in November 2008. I'd planned to take the day off work so that I could watch the first mainstream screening in Leicester Square and I was quite (but not excessively) excited. Now I am disappointed. I feel messed about by Warner Brothers; worse, I feel treated like an idiot. All of this just adds to my generally diminishing feelings towards the franchise as a whole. I think that is all for now.
