My First Dislike!

So, our youtube channel has been going for ten months. We haven't been able to make many of the videos that we planned on yet, but this week we reached a momentous milestone.

One of our videos got its first dislike.

This might seem like a sad thing, but it was on our most popular video The Nightmare Nose Sucker, or Why Babies Fear the Bulb Syringe. This particular video has gotten quite a few views, and it's one I'm particularly proud of.

Here it is in case you want to watch it. I'd forgotten how fat Kevin is in this video.

The reason I'm kind of excited about the dislike, is that it means that the video is reaching more people than just family and friends. Generally family and friends don't dislike your videos, so if someone pushed the dislike button, it's because they don't know you and they're judging the video on its own merit. It has almost 500 views, and it has 2 likes and 1 dislike.

I think it's like getting your first negative critique when you write a book or make a movie. Even though it could be upsetting, it's also a sign of recognition.

I had a previous youtube channel, and it had some pretty popular videos (they were mostly music videos I made while learning how to video edit) and I received dislikes and likes from that, so this is nothing new to me, but it marks a historical day for our family video channel.

Yay for the beginnings of success!

However, it got me thinking, what kind of person dislikes a video? I mean, unless it's a REALLY bad video? Even if I don't like a video, I never think about clicking the dislike button. I've never even clicked the dislike button. If I don't like something, I stop watching it and move on to something else.

Grig and I were talking about this last night, and he told me that he occasionally dislikes things if they are really bad.

It made me wonder why do other people dislike things.

Feel free to tell me, I'm curious.

Reasons Why I'm Not a Fan of Harry Potter

Back when I was in 7th grade, a girl in my class came up to me and said, "Have you tried reading Harry Potter yet?  It's really good."  Being an avid reader, I was always willing to try new books.  So, I read it.

At the time, there were only three Harry Potter books written.  At first, I really enjoyed Harry Potter.  The books are well-written, the story line is fun and exciting, and the setting was foreign.  (Which is probably because its based off of the British school system.)  Though the idea of a magical school for children wasn't really original (Tamora Pierce had already written about quite a few, as had some other authors I was reading at the time), I was a fan of those kind of books and enjoyed them.  I really liked Harry too.  He was a good hero character.

When the fourth book came out, I read it as fast as my hands could get a hold of it.  It took me a day to finish it.  I liked that book too.  However, I began to see a pattern in Rowlings books that I didn't really like, though I could appreciate.

This is a completely personal preference, but you can argue with me if you want.  Rowling was notorious for having a twist at the end of every book.  However, by the second book, I had discovered that the twist was almost always the same, in a way that I didn't like.  I'm the kind of person who likes the main character.  I usually become the main character when I read, so I like someone who I can identify with, who is moral, and tries to do the right thing.  At this point, Harry had all those qualities.  However, I also like this protagonist to have the world hanging on their shoulders and to have the bad guys out to get them.  In other words, I like the story to center around the main character.

However, over and over in Harry Potter, it would appear to be about Harry.

*Spoilers ahead*

In the first book, it seemed like Snape was out to get Harry.  In the end, he just happened to get in the way of the bad guy's plot.  It had nothing to do with him at all.

In the second book, it appeared that someone was trying to set Harry up, but again, it was just innocent little Ginny being manipulated.

The third book was my favorite at first.  It appeared that the prisoner of Azkaban was trying to kill and take revenge on Harry, which is my absolute favorite plot sequence.  The whole book I remember thinking, "Don't be another twist, I like the way this is going!"  Unfortunately it was.  The prisoner was just after Ron's rat.

I was a little disappointed, but then the fourth book came out.  Really, that's probably still my favorite book!  I really enjoyed it, and I was really looking forward to the fifth one. 

Between the fourth and the fifth is when the movies began to come out.  Really, the acting was pretty horrible at first, but that didn't get me down.  The ever growing hype was beginning to though.  I had liked Harry Potter before it became a cult, so the fact that everyone was liking it didn't annoy me too much.

That is, until the 5th book came out.  Just as quickly as I devoured the fourth book, I consumed the fifth, and to my horror discovered that someone had turned Harry into a monster!  What had happened to the stalwart hero that I had learned to love?  Somewhere between the fourth and fifth book, Harry had become an obnoxious, angsty, shallow teenager!  To my horror, I found that I simply didn't like Harry the character anymore.  My love affair with Harry Potter began to find itself on shaky ground.

The madness of the fans pushed me over the edge. Like I told someone yesterday, if I am already unsure of how I feel about something and people began making too big of a deal about it, then usually I find myself disliking it.  I'm not a crowd follower, and I don't want to be one of many.  I enjoy being unique.  It would have been different if I still could love Harry, because I liked him first, but as the character deteriorated into self-pity, I found myself feeling less and less empathy for him.

In my opinion, heroes are meant to be strong and selfless.  They are meant to be as much like Christ as its possible for a human to be.  No, I don't like my book characters to be perfect.  They all need their flaws and their growing, but at the time I read Harry Potter Book 5, I WAS a teenager.  If I was going to be able to identify with Harry Potter as a teenager, it would have been when I was a teenager, right?

Yeah, that's what I thought, but I couldn't find common ground with the new Harry Potter, and the way that she treated her adults as well just made them all look incompetent.

I still read the 6th and 7th book, but it wasn't when they first came out.  I just read them whenever.  I watched all the movies (and couldn't stand Ron's actor), but I just had lost of lot of my Harry Potter fire.  The books just weren't what they had been either.  Harry grew up a bit, but to me, the books had lost a lot of their magic.

I'm not going to lie, J. K. Rowlings' world still fascinates me.  I've read some pretty neat crossovers where other main characters from other series went into Harry Potter's world and took Harry's place as the main character.  I still like Rowlings' world.  I just don't like Harry anymore.

We'll probably still own the books and possibly the movies, but they will never be my favorite.  I appreciate what they have done to help children learn to enjoy reading, but I like Peter and the Starcatchers and some other children's series much more.  The Harry series is still well-written and fun, but personally I'd rather read something else.

Bedtime Stories

Ever since Kevin was born, Grig has been trying to read him bedtime stories every night.  Some nights we're better at it than others, but we've tried to be consistent.  At first, it was easy because Kevin couldn't move so he had to sit still to listen to the stories.  Grig is a very expressive reader and I rarely hear the same story twice, even when he's reading the same book!  Grig often changes the story to make it more entertaining.  Even though Kevin probably really didn't care at that age, we all still enjoyed the time together. 

Then came the time when Kevin would no longer sit still and really wasn't interested in the cardboard things that didn't move.  He wanted to be active, and it became harder to read to him.  Short stories were key during this stage.  The faster the pages turned, the more Kevin cared.

Finally, we reached a new level.  Kevin loves books now!  His current favorite is one that my parents gave us when he was born.  It's called Eight Silly Monkeys.  It's basically Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed but with a clever twist.  The monkeys' heads are also sticking out of the book so Kevin can touch them.  He loves the rhyme.  Every time we start, he sits down and begins to bob his head up and down, which is his version of dancing.  Then he slaps the book in time to the rhythm and likes to help turn the pages.  He also loves a Mother Goose Rhyme book that we have.  Rhymes and rhythms seem to be the current trend, but he also likes books about him.

We've made an effort to help our son enjoy reading because it is something that Grig and I enjoy very much.  Grig is a freelance Editor for beginning authors and he majored in Creative Writing.  I write books in my spare time as well.  We want our children to love to read, because it is something we love so much.

We also have a lot of books for them to read.  We wouldn't want them to go to waste.  Reading is something that our family has put a high priority on.  I have the theory that there is no one on this earth who doesn't enjoy reading.  People who think that they don't like it just haven't found the right book yet.

During my college years, I had a roommate who told me she hates reading.  That just wouldn't do!  So, every night I tried to read to her out of Percy Jackson; The Lightning Thief.  She started getting into it.  However, the semester got busy, and it didn't look like I would have time to finish it with her.  I had told her that when we finished it, I would buy us icecream and we would watch the movie, and so she took it upon herself to finish it on her own time!  That was better than anything I could have hoped for.  She liked the book, and she spent the whole movie complaining about how different it was from the book.

Ah, true success.  A budding reader in the making.  She even took the next book in the series to start reading, but I don't think she finished it before I got married and moved out with all of my books.

If you think you don't like reading, try a different book.  Harry Potter (though I do have some issues with the series) has done wonders for the youth of the next generation.  I think that series has done more to promote reading amongst children than any other book series ever!  That's quite an achievement.

If you keep exploring, you're bound to find a series you like.  Once you do, reading will cease to become a chore and will become an adventure!