Writing for generations
After some recent trends, I finally decide to read the Harry Potter books.
And I came away with something I didn't expect.
I came away with an understanding of what makes a generationally beloved classic.
It isn't authorial skill. Rowling is certainly talented, but, at least at the time, she was also relatively unpolished, and the series has plenty of rough patches. Uneven pacing, awkward plots, exposition dumps, two-dimensional secondary characters. I could write quite a few lines about what might be fixed. And I probably will at some point.
But none of that matters.
Because a generationally beloved classic is almost never the best book of a generation. A generationally beloved classic is the book that most perfectly captures what that generation yearns for.
Hogwart's School of Wizardry did that for millennials, just as the quest to destroy the One Ring did so for the boomers.
Boomers grew up hearing tales of recent history, and the heroism of previous generations, who got us through the great depression, and the great war. Their father, or grandfathers, or both, were heroes. But they were left growing up in the 1950s, a near-ideal time of growth, happiness, and prosperity.
Near-ideal isn't ideal. Humans need goals. The boomers were left with no great struggles to fight, no great tasks to do, nothing that could make them feel like they measured up.
So they invented something. A new struggle. A moral struggle. They decided that, because the great depression, and the great war, had happened when the institutions of Western Civilization existed, therefore those institutions were responsible. That those institutions needed to be torn down, gutted, and rebuilt in the new Boomer Morality.
This was their great quest, what allowed them to imagine themselves heroes. As an added bonus, it allowed them to imagine that the men who fought WW2 were not. They were, after all, adherents of the old creed.
When the hippies took to the streets, chanting "fascist scum, your time has come", they meant the very same people who had fought the Nazis.
Lord of the Rings dovetailed perfectly into this narrative. Its central struggle, its great quest, is not a martial struggle or a political struggle, but a moral struggle... the quest not to seize an object of power, but to destroy one.
Frodo was not some great warrior, or wise wizard. He was an innnocent, whose virtue was moral worth. The young, unaccomplished, and very small man had to resist the temptations of power, and to destroy it, because it was wicked.
Is it any wonder that the boomers decided to tear down and hollow out the institutions of society, rather than inherit and incrementally improve them?
Even to this day, any younger person who seeks power, wanting to improve the world, is subjected to any number of brain-dead aphorisms about Boromir and the Ring.
Never mind that Tolkien never intended any of this. Never mind that the Ring wasn't a symbol of anything. It was a ring. It was evil not because it represented power... it was simply evil because it was made by evil for evil purposes, and possessed a malign will of its own.
LOTR, the way the boomers read it, fit perfectly into their worldview, and they imagine themselves perpetual revolutionaries, always fighting the evils of power, even now when they are 70 years old and own everything.
Which brings us to millennials. They grew up in the world that the gutting of Western institutions left us. They went to government schools run by characters straight out of a Franz Kafka novel, sent there by parents who inexplicably hated them from the time they were old enough to talk.
When they yearned, they didn't yearn for a great moral struggle, or to tear anything down, or to be revolutionaries.
They yearned for a society that cared about them, for parents who loved them, for a civilization that saw them as the future, and invested in them accordingly.
They wanted to go to Hogwart's. They wanted get a letter by owl, telling them that the reason they didn't quite fit wasn't because they were inadequate, but because they were special.
They wanted to be the special ones, the chosen ones, the boys and girls who lived. And that last sentence may sound a bit conceited... until you realized that when they wanted to be special, they wanted to be special in precisely the way that Harry Potter was special, the way that every child in a healthy family is naturally special... not because he is talented or great, but because his mother loved him.
This is what saved Harry Potter in the inciting incident of his young life. This is what millennials wanted for themselves. Not to be astronauts and war heroes and rock stars, but to fit into a place like Hogwarts. To be mentored by wise and caring elders like Dumbledore. To be part of a community. To have mothers who loved them.
To write a story like this isn't necessarily to understand a generation, because it never seems to happen except by accident.
It is, rather, to help a generation understand itself.
That's why fan fiction, with visions like this picture, matters. Not because it has so large a footprint as to change the world, perhaps, but because it represents the spirit of an age.
It tells us what people want. And if we look carefully, it tells us why.
https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/2120972131521409278?a=iew-GN0MAIV3ugA3SYs&s=20
I’m Gen X and read the first Harry Potter hard cover book, as an early twenty something adult in the late nineties.
Bought it with my own money.
Money earned on stage as a musician & filmmaker who grew up dreaming of being a scientist, and astronaut.
Who also dreamed of being a dragon rider of Pern, or a worm rider hopped up on spice, and had lightsaber duels w my lil bro - with bootleg flashlight versions after the movie premier that Christmas Eve because Mattel hadn’t released the original toys yet.
And even in my twenties I appreciated the cleverness of and her writing style, her build up of characters and showing not telling…
The intricate highs and lows of the hero’s journey and that of his true friends.
Her wit with descriptions like “Diagon Alley” (Diagonally). House Slytherin (snakes). Etc
In other words one has to be careful defining what generation an author speaks to, or who gets placed into a
broad brushed definition of “a generation.”
I for one find that her work speaks to all generations, and the kid in all of us.
We didn’t just want to be the best; we were repeatedly told we were the best from the womb by the same Boomers who ended up treating us all the other ways Boomers treat their kids once we grew up and were no longer cute and five years ahead of the other kids.
And regarding Hogwarts—Hogwarts is the very institution we dreamed of getting into: an ancient, intact institution still taken seriously by the people of Western Civilization, exclusive, meritocratic with a reasonable dash of nepotism, proud of itself, serious about identifying and turning out top talent, staffed by the best of the best, headed by an Elon Musk-tier luminary who holds to the values and can’t be bought, permitting competition to let our iron sharpen iron, not so excessively concerned with safety culture that it perverts our development, marked indelibly in every nook and cranny with the organic contributions of the people who came before, uncorrupted by talentless, bureaucratic, backstabbing, soul-crushing administrative parasites like Dolores Umbridge (to the point that an entire book was dedicated to how horrible it was that the government finally shoehorned her in and she went around ruining, vandalizing, immiserating, and disenchanting everything she touched, sullying the very name and fabric of the institution). And we didn’t just want it out of nowhere, we were told we were getting it.
See, here’s the thing about our upbringing: the Boomers, the kids’ books, and the cartoons were actually really, REALLY good at telling us about the old and new glories of the West and its institutions. We had Wishbone, Ducktales, the Disney and Warner Bros. wartime classics on VHS, Owl from Pooh, those cartoons about the American Founders, Schoolhouse Rock, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, October Sky, Apollo 13, the Boy Scouts, and the hymns and scriptures if our parents were active Christians. That’s part of the cruelty of how things turned out: Lucy very deliberately showed us the football from every angle, in every lighting, in 4k resolution, before brutally ripping it away from us. Before saying, “But actually, these things are bad and you’re bad for wanting them and I’m dynamiting them now before you get a chance to inherit them and carry the torch ahead, and simultaneously, I’ll fill your young head with the conviction that you’re meant to do just that…wait, why are you so grouchy and posting Anakin memes—I DIDN’T MEAN LIKE THAT!”
They told us all about Hogwarts, and then when it was time to give it to us, they flipped the script and murdered it in front of us. Suddenly we weren’t geniuses anymore. We weren’t the hope of the future. We were inexplicably unsuccessful, video gaming layabouts whose past successes meant nothing and who needed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Our punishment was to be marooned on a desert island with no one and nothing to work with and condemned for not reinventing NASA on that island by the time Gramps got back from his cruise. Our punishment was to watch every less deserving person in the world, even our outright enemies who wanted us dead, given those beautiful owl letters to attend Hogwarts’s final generation before the sculptures were melted down, the living paintings taken away, the friendly ghosts exorcised, the stairwells immobilized, the dovecotes abandoned, the Room of Requirement walled off, the floating candles exchanged for LEDs, the gardens slashed down to lawns, the water polluted, the wands locked away, the Quidditch abolished “for safety,” the old icons put on trial and crucified for the “sins” of our fathers. And despite everyone telling us we would be leaders, not one of us was ever consulted and asked if this is what we wanted done to our and our children’s inheritance. And it wasn’t. Not one of us wanted this, save the Hermiones who swallowed every slogan in their zeal to demonstrate their ability to parrot floods of information while never once rising above midwittery.
We love Hogwarts because we watched it die.
Generation X (roughly mid-1960s to early 1980s) came of age as the boomer cultural revolution was already institutionalized and as the Cold War wound down without a clear successor struggle. Many were the original “latchkey kids,” raised with comparatively little supervision amid rising divorce rates, stagflation, and a media landscape (MTV, early cable, independent film) that rewarded detachment. The yearning that emerges is for autonomy, competence, and an exit from both parental and institutional theater. Their cultural touchstones tend toward anti-heroes, self-reliance, and ironic distance, think the self-sufficient survivors and cynical observers of certain 1980s–90s science fiction, or the “whatever” posture of grunge and early internet culture. Success is framed less as joining a loving community or leading a moral crusade and more as carving out a private competence that does not require permission or group validation.
Generation Z (roughly late 1990s to early 2010s) grew up after the major institutional gutting was already complete, inside always-on digital environments, post-9/11 security culture, the 2008 financial crisis, and later the pandemic. Many report high rates of anxiety, economic precarity, and a sense that both offline institutions and online platforms are unstable or extractive. The recurring yearning is for legible rules, stable status, and protection from social and economic volatility, often expressed as a desire for clear hierarchies, skill based competence, or tightly moderated communities that filter noise. Stories and aesthetics that resonate frequently feature high-stakes competence under surveillance or scarcity, rapid skill acquisition, or the restoration of order after institutional failure, rather than pure belonging (millennial) or revolutionary moral purity (boomer). Digital native forms short form, narrative, game like progression systems, tightly policed online spaces function for many the way Hogwarts or the quest to destroy the Ring did for earlier cohorts.
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