I’ve started reading Jumper by NameDoesNotMatter. I would like to formally apologise about all the harsh things I’ve ever spoken about that film.
Fine, the cast is unlikeable and the action scenes are just fisticuffs in the air, but my god, in comparison to the teenage dreck that is the book, it’s a masterpiece. At least they tried to build a credible back story for the main character.
In the book, he literally thinks everyone is out to sexually assault him (and somehow they seem to), he solves his problems by throwing money at it, instead of any actual creativity, and the author desperately tries to portray him as a mature-for-his-age adult, despite the fact that his first reaction to anything is crying followed by petty revenge.
I’m just flicking through the pages, pausing at any plot bits, and then flicking on.
An absurd amount of marketing, mainly. Very easy to shove YA/childrens books down kids throats, they don’t have a lot of natural exposure to literature. Fuck, eragorn was the best example of the YA industry pushing a bad series (they even tried a movie series), I remember loaning it from my school library and being legitimately confused as to why it was becoming popular. I ended up finding a weird romance+fantasy series at the time that I largely consider as not being actually good, but remember finding it way more engaging. Maybe it’s better now that kids are largely terminally online.
It’s really my biggest gripe with it. There’s better fantasy, better wizard centric fantasy, and better YA books out there. It’s not great by any means, and I’m not surprised that I dropped the series without finishing it as a kid because I was reading much better stuff by the time the last few books came out.
Honestly I kind of liked the eragon books though if asked I couldn’t say why.
The attempted movie adaptation was horrible though
same. It was long enough ago that I have no real recollection of why but I thought they were good. I even saw the movies. I guess kids aren’t very picky
