I’m done arguing against the single argument you’ve made time and time and time again. For my rebuttal, simply look four comments up from this one. Goodbye.

There is fan merch of The Room. Theme parks don’t need a popular franchise connected to be popular, so long as there’s a rollercoaster and something fun for the whole family. People will happily spend money on nostalgia and fitting in with others, or on gifts for someone you think likes the thing.

All of this is, once again, an appeal to popularity. It has nothing to do with the quality of the books. And you saying the book isn’t bad despite bad plot, world, characters and implications just condemns your judgement.

First, it’s only a measure that people consume the media, not that they enjoy it. Hate-watching is a thing, as you can tell from a comment higher up. Or they watched because someone else wanted to watch (or they thought someone else wanted to watch).

Second, enjoyment does not reflect quality. People can like bad media. I like the second D&D movie, and even I can only rate it’s quality as “fine”.

Third, even at the height of its popularity and among its strongest fans, there are flaws galore in the books. Even ignoring the racism, sexism, ablism, slavery, “ugly is bad” mindset, and all that, there’s also stupid plot decisions and lazy world building. Of all the fanfics on AO3, well over a third of them are fix-fics.

I do think a lot of that popularity was because it came out when internet forums were a novelty. If you’re used to only one or two people liking the same book as you, then you see thousands liking the same book, that book must be popular.

Then the popularity fed itself. Movies, merch, games, everything was done to capitalise on the “popularity” of a new series, and this introduced it to a new audience. Media started to talk about the new book series that people were going mad for. People who didn’t read the books wanted to find out what everyone was talking about. Time passes, and people look back on the books with nostalgia goggles. Even you, when defending the book, can only point to its popularity as an argument.

The actual book doesn’t matter. It’s popular because it’s popular.

“We’re all trying to find the guy who supports Hitler”