Hogwarts Legacy

I'm beginning to feel this way about Star Wars. I would have been happy with the original 3 movies, and always wanted more. With comics, novels and video games filling the gap. with the mixed bag of movies and TV shows we've had since then, the story feels stretched thin and watered down. We could have had a stand alone classic trilogy. But instead we've got this mixed bag, of some okay movies, some bad movies, some okay television shows, and some awful ones.

I read 3 1/2 Twilight books. My girlfriend kept on recommending them, and I gave it a genuine shot.

There were a few issues with the writing that I think caused them to greatly suffer as books.

The books are written from the First Person Perspective of Bella, rather than a Third Person narrative. While it is possible to write a really compelling First Person book, and I realize this was probably intended to be an homage to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein original novel, here it fails to drive the narrative further and instead actually pushes away the reader.

In Frankenstein, the first person narrative was an excellent way of hiding events to build suspense. When you knew that the Creature was supposed to be coming, you couldn't see what it was doing. You could only see the Doctor, and his panicked preparations, only to too late realize that it had murdered his wife. By omitting parts of the precursor, the climax would arrive as a shock and the reader could experience the all-at-once flood of emotions along with the character, instead of being prepared for it in advance so that the character's heartbreak is muted by an "we already saw that" spoiler.

In Twilight, the first person narrative is used in the opposite way. We watch all the build-up, but then the first person narrative is used as a way to avoid writing a satisfactory conclusion. The books have horribly weak endings. They are one of the rare examples of books that were drastically improved by a movie adding in things that weren't in the books.

What Stephanie Meyer would do was write an entire book leading up to a massive showdown at the end. Then, when that showdown would occur, Bella would not be present to witness it, so the readers would not get to read the showdown that the entire book had built up to. First book, a massive build-up to Edward vs Other Vampire in a fight to the death... but the Bella bonks her head and sleeps through the fight, so you don't get to see that fight take place. Second book, a massive build-up to Edward & Family vs the Evil Vampire Clan. Bella doesn't show up to the battle, so you don't get to see that fight take place. Third book, a massive build-up to Vampires & Werewolves together against Evil Vampires. You guessed it. Bella's not there for the fight, so the reader doesn't get to read it.

The first person narrative becomes Meyer's excuse to not have to write a satisfactory conclusion for all the cool stuff she spent the whole book hyping the reader up for. Imagine going to watch Avengers Endgame, but when Thanos's forces fight against the combined might of the MCU, instead you miss that entire battle sequence, and instead you just watch a scene of Spider-Man's "Ned" character sitting in his bedroom playing with his Legos and saying "Gee. I really hope the Avengers are okay. *phone beeps* Oh good. Peter says they won. Thanos is dead. That's great news. But I guess Tony Stark died too. That's a bummer."

That is what the Twilight books did. Denied the reader all of the action at the end, in favor of watching a whiny character who complains that they aren't getting to see the action, which is just parroting the feelings of the reader who invested 300 pages of reading to get to this fight scene and now is forced to miss it because the book requires the reader to babysit Bella instead of watching something interesting.

You're a wizard