i was about 19 when the Harey Porber thing was popping off. for a fear years, i used to hang in a chain bookstore cafe near my house to read on days/mornings/evenings off, and made friends with several of the staff. it was in a sort of slow half-decaying strip mall and quiet. except on the book launch night, when it was suddenly a nuthouse.

most of the adult worker commentary on it was like, "its intense, but it's good kids are reading". but it had all the hallmarks of an incredibly organized national marketing campaign. like it seemed to come out during those seasonal public school reward programs for reading books / getting pizza, and the bookstore franchise was all geared up for it with corporate directives on how to layout the store, games that could be played, and keep the line moving once sales started. i have to emphasis how dead this big bookstore was. like the regulars were people who got coffee+newspapers, and transients that took the wrestling mags into the bathrooms to have a quiet, undisturbed beat off.

nobody on staff had ever heard of this prior. most thought it was going to be another corporate failure, but at like 730 or whatever suddenly the mostly dead strip mall parking lot is PACKED and kids in costumes are flooding in, running around, being wizards or whatever. i skedaddled immediately, because it was not a quiet place to read that evening.

i was way too old to be interested in a kid's story about a magic middle school kid. it was absolutely marketed as a kids book for kids. i only ever watched the movies, because special effects are cool. i remember the little kids getting older as time went on, talking about how the kids in their stories were older too and the themes were darker and characters they liked DIED! that was like around the time i was reading about the Red Wedding or Oberyn Martell getting his skull crushed by The Mountain That Rides and was like 🙄

Wasn’t an adult at the time, but a bit too old to get into it either. So I didn’t have the fully fleshed out perspective, but the impression I got was that it was drawing in adult readers who weren’t already fantasy readers and ergo not familiar with the tropes and stereotypes of the genre. So the unoriginal elements appeared novel to them.

As far as why this particular series: my best guess is that it came down to the marketing. Maybe invoked some nostalgia in adult readers for older novels/series like Narnia.