That said, this is sour grapes.
I have been marveling, having just finished the sixth Harry Potter book at the depth that Rowling's work has reached. Her target audience has aged, mostly at the same rate as Harry, and all the teen angst, all the first date jitters, all the zeitgeist of youth is counterpointed by the demands of manhood. I have watched her write him from a mostly innocent boy, beset by bad relatives, into a young man who is rapidly taking on the mantle of leadership, of standing up to both the outright evil of Voldemort and the sleazy, half-truth evil of the Clintonian Ministry of Magic. I see nuances and subtleties in her work that are not present in Pratchett.
I find it to be the choice of McDonalds vs. Burger King. Both fine products, but they are different and distinct. For him to whine about her making money is much akin to the small businessmen who complain about Walmart. (That is, "OK, now what are you going to do to change your business to compete?")
There's no accounting for the taste of some people.
Nice comments. I have been intrigued by the same thing myself. Her style of writing has gradually become more adult as have the story lines. Her books are 'growing up' with her target audience.
It will be interesting to see where she takes it now. Probably in ten years time we'll start to hear comments like 'I remember back when Harry Potter was for kids'.
If those young actors that play Harry, Hermione and Ron are lucky and play their cards right they could have jobs in film for the rest of their lives. It makes me wonder though if we'll ever have to see love scenes in the future Potter films...
Nah. Until I read the article, I thought that I might agree.
Pratchett pokes a little gentle fun at Rowlings' silly statement the she had not thought of HP as fantasy while she was writing it. And at the Beebs' stupid claim that fantasy had been stuck in a rut, where "an idealised, romanticised, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves".
Pratchett's novels are some of my favorites. At his best, he is a satirist as skilled as Twain or Swift.