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christ i fucking hate harry potter :)
you are neither bad nor wrong if you love harry potter and i still treasure you
i suspect there is a lot of really good stuff to be mined from any well-written and evocative fantasy series no matter how reflexively its premises may put some others off
and if it's any consolation if i actually read any of it it might evolve to something like, say, the deep love-hate i have of doctor who
but christ i fucking hate harry potter <3
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(To make a more valuable and serious contribution here: I think what puts me off about HP is the innate elitism of its premise. 'Cause that's EXACTLY what puts me off about Doctor Who. You can't achieve Time Lord status. You have to be part of the Special Elf People race. I hate Special Elf People races. I like my weird supernormal genre fiction to be as democratic as possible. If I don't have ANY chance of growing up to punch gods in your world... hard pass. :) )
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Oh, and of course, likewise Vampire: The Masquerade. If you don't have the Gift Of The Special People Thing, you are profoundly unlikely to have any meaningful effect on reality, and you are going to be constantly reminded of it by your culture. Fuck that noise.
Note that the "Blue" narrative in Parallax is basically the story of a Young Adult Novel Heroine who was handed the McGuffin by Special Elf People... and finds out in the first 8 pages it don't work so good. ^__^
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even worse it has sliding scale of "elf"
human<hunter<vampires/werewolfs<ghooooosts<mage BS
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@001zlnv There's some neat detail in there, but it's all just so adolescent powertrippy. It ended up just reminding me of some of my deeply embittering acquaintances with goth-pagans in college who would spin EXACTLY that kind of magickqxzhal fantasy as a blatant metaphor for their own insecurity, or as a way to cut other people down by defining them as "muggle" equivalents. >_<
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@zebratron2084 although I will say it lead to my favorite, "not knowing the genre conventions" story.
My vampire had screwed up trying to drink dinner, and was now drunk, and in possession of one extremely dead barfly. I was not aware that the game expects you to just huck them in a dumpster or something and nothing comes of it except humanity loss.
So my vampire sets out on a very elaborate plan to hide the body perfectly, while committing a series of weird crimes such as carpet theft, breaking into sewers, a brief bit of weekend at bernies, and finally walking the body to the bottom of Lake michigan, and burying it under a large boulder.
30 minutes of real world time later and someone finally points out that you don't need to do any of that. And my vampire suddenly has a reputation for obsessive, if slightly incompetent victim hiding.
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That pretty much perfectly fits any Ventrue I've ever known...
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@001zlnv @zebratron2084 I just giggled for about two minutes straight because of this story, thank you. XD
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@zebratron2084
that is pretty much how it shook out when I tried to play it in college