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Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

Sydin posted:

Thanks for reminding me that for like half of book six every other page is "and then Harry and Hermione turned the corner and saw Ron and Lavender making out."

What book was it where Harry tried to catch his crush on the rebound and then stormed out of the date in a fit of rage because she wouldn't stop asking him about her ex getting murdered by Wizard Hitler? Five?

Yeah, that was five.

And he stormed out because she wouldn't stop crying and he absolutely could not handle someone crying around him.

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Butternubs
Feb 15, 2012
The books skipped a bunch of stuff with the students starting a resistance when Hogwarts gets taken over by nazis. That is like 10 times more interesting than harry ron and hermione farting about in the woods. Show me some magic guerrilla warfare. I want to see Neville firing spells at death eaters from the back of a flying toyota hilux show me the Hogwarts peoples liberation front.

ungulateman
Apr 18, 2012

pretentious fuckwit who isn't half as literate or insightful or clever as he thinks he is

Zore posted:

Yeah, that was five.

And he stormed out because she wouldn't stop crying and he absolutely could not handle someone crying around him.

eh, this feels uncharitable. he was also an emotional wreck after, you know, having the person in question die in front of him, because of his own stupid sense of 'fair play', so he probably didn't want to date someone who was going to spend a lot of time reopening both of their emotional wounds over it. it's one of the better cases of stupid teenagers not knowing what the hell they're doing in the series. it's nobody's fault.

Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

ungulateman posted:

eh, this feels uncharitable. he was also an emotional wreck after, you know, having the person in question die in front of him, because of his own stupid sense of 'fair play', so he probably didn't want to date someone who was going to spend a lot of time reopening both of their emotional wounds over it. it's one of the better cases of stupid teenagers not knowing what the hell they're doing in the series. it's nobody's fault.

I mean Harry being a dumb rear end in a top hat teenager in book 5 is a pretty explicit theme of the book, with the ending literally being that if he hadn't been such a petulant child Sirius would not have died. Its honestly some of the stronger writing in the series because of that.

Sydin
Oct 29, 2011

Another spring commute
You can't put that all on Harry though, Sirius IIRC was also acting like a petulant rear end in a top hat because the Order was rightly keeping him hidden, and he egged Harry on multiple times to do dumb poo poo and when Harry or his friends said no he'd get all sulky and go "Well I guess you're not as cool as James after all" which was exactly the thing to say to push Harry's buttons at that point in time.

Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

Sydin posted:

You can't put that all on Harry though, Sirius IIRC was also acting like a petulant rear end in a top hat because the Order was rightly keeping him hidden, and he egged Harry on multiple times to do dumb poo poo and when Harry or his friends said no he'd get all sulky and go "Well I guess you're not as cool as James after all" which was exactly the thing to say to push Harry's buttons at that point in time.

Oh undoubtedly, Sirius had a really toxic relationship with Harry and handled everything really poorly. But he was also a man with arrested development from being in hell prison for the majority of his adult life before being forced to go and live in the home he grew up in where he was abused without ever being allowed to leave.

It was a bad situation all around, but Harry absolutely fed into it and made some really poor choices. And the ending drives home that there were about four or five things he could have done that would have avoided the worst case scenario if he had stopped just getting angry and lashing out.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
It's one of the stronger parts of the series really, that it's openly about people being damaged and emotionally unstable and making mistakes because of that, not just because the story requires them to. Instead of photogenic melodrama, 'teen angst' results in an absolute mess because everyone's angry, horny and petty.

ungulateman
Apr 18, 2012

pretentious fuckwit who isn't half as literate or insightful or clever as he thinks he is
well, everyone is angry and petty. you can definitely tell it's written by a middle aged woman from how unhorny it is

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Harry is implicitly pretty horny iirc. Mind you, it's probably for the best all the teenagers aren't as sexualised as most other authors and animes would make them.

Sydin
Oct 29, 2011

Another spring commute
Yeah Harry is horny as gently caress from book four onwards or so. Ron meanwhile has book six where he and Lavender are all but outright stated to be loving like rabbits any chance they get. Granted, nobody else in the story really gives a poo poo about romance much though. Which is probably for the best to be honest: you can argue that a series focusing on a class of hormonal teenagers should be more horny, but Rowling is pretty bad at writing romance and even worse any time she even remotely hints at the sexual aspect of romance, so best that she just didn't really focus on it at all outside of a few rare instances.

Zore posted:

Oh undoubtedly, Sirius had a really toxic relationship with Harry and handled everything really poorly. But he was also a man with arrested development from being in hell prison for the majority of his adult life before being forced to go and live in the home he grew up in where he was abused without ever being allowed to leave.

It was a bad situation all around, but Harry absolutely fed into it and made some really poor choices. And the ending drives home that there were about four or five things he could have done that would have avoided the worst case scenario if he had stopped just getting angry and lashing out.

I haven't read the books in 6-7 years, but I remember thinking that the worst things that happened in Order were more the result of the adults around Harry not realizing he's a 15 year old shithead who needs to be sat down and told what's going on in even the broadest possible strokes instead of leaving to ruminate. Instead they tell him gently caress all so he understandably comes up with the worst misunderstandings possible about why he wasn't made a prefect when his friends were, or why Dumbledore refuses to so much look him in the eye for like a full year, or why every time he tells somebody from the Order anything they just go "that's great we'll handle it, now shut up Harry." Also everything having to do with setting him up to learn how to do the wizard equivalent of clearing your mind to resist mindreading from somebody he openly loathes and who openly loathes him in turn was so asinine it bordered on plot hole. Like okay, Snape is better at resisting mind control than McGonagall, fine, whatever. I reckon McGonagall still could have taught Harry how to do it better simply by virtue of the fact that Harry wouldn't go into open revolt being taught by her like he does with Wizard Incel.

Zetsubou-san
Jan 28, 2015

Cruel Bifaunidas demanded that you [stand]🧍 I require only that you [kneel]🧎
finished Book 2 and oh boy was that a lot rear end-pulls

amigolupus
Aug 25, 2017

What's really stupid is that while Dumbledore used the excuse of being afraid Voldemort would read Harry's mind to not tell him anything, he eventually admits that the real reason he tried to keep Harry out of everything is because he wanted Harry to keep being an innocent child. There's just so many things wrong about it. A) Harry's already a focal point in this war because Voldemort's targeting him, and he already asked why Voldemort wanted to kill him when he was eleven, B) Harry's not a kid, and is just two years away from being considered a legal adult by wizards C) Harry grew up in an abusive home and had to yearly deal with Hogwarts being a massive death trap, that poo poo will make you grow up fast.

It also doesn't help that the only one who wanted to tell Harry everything was Sirius, who everyone thinks is just being biased, while Molly is just shouts everyone down with how Harry's too young.

VanSandman
Feb 16, 2011
SWAP.AVI EXCHANGER

amigolupus posted:

What's really stupid is that while Dumbledore used the excuse of being afraid Voldemort would read Harry's mind to not tell him anything, he eventually admits that the real reason he tried to keep Harry out of everything is because he wanted Harry to keep being an innocent child. There's just so many things wrong about it. A) Harry's already a focal point in this war because Voldemort's targeting him, and he already asked why Voldemort wanted to kill him when he was eleven, B) Harry's not a kid, and is just two years away from being considered a legal adult by wizards C) Harry grew up in an abusive home and had to yearly deal with Hogwarts being a massive death trap, that poo poo will make you grow up fast.

It also doesn't help that the only one who wanted to tell Harry everything was Sirius, who everyone thinks is just being biased, while Molly is just shouts everyone down with how Harry's too young.

Book 5 really is the strongest thematically. Harry also has to deal with Governmental Censorship and targeting. It really is 'all the bullshit of the previous books comes home to roost.'

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
One of the big themes in young adult fiction, with Harry Potter being absolutely no exception, is the absolutely familiar feeling to teenagers that adults are completely loving useless at dealing with problems, and there's a good chance telling them about your problems or god-forbid asking for help will make them either ignore you, actively use them against you, or charge in to make them worse.

BIG FLUFFY DOG
Feb 16, 2011

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.


Ghost Leviathan posted:

One of the big themes in young adult fiction, with Harry Potter being absolutely no exception, is the absolutely familiar feeling to teenagers that adults are completely loving useless at dealing with problems, and there's a good chance telling them about your problems or god-forbid asking for help will make them either ignore you, actively use them against you, or charge in to make them worse.

You still feel like this when youre an adult unfortunately

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine
I've never read any of the Harry Potter books, are they any good?

:ohdear:

JethroMcB
Jan 23, 2004

We're normal now.
We love your family.
yeah they're fine

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

They vary in quality substantially from one to another.

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine
I think I saw one of the movies but then the next one had spiders and I nope'd the gently caress out?

:shrug:

VanSandman
Feb 16, 2011
SWAP.AVI EXCHANGER

Schadenboner posted:

I think I saw one of the movies but then the next one had spiders and I nope'd the gently caress out?

:shrug:

In a later book, the spider dies.

Sydin
Oct 29, 2011

Another spring commute

Schadenboner posted:

I've never read any of the Harry Potter books, are they any good?

:ohdear:

They're fine. That said as I've already stated if you want an easily digestible YA-ish story about wizards living alongside modern society, read the Bartimaeus Trilogy for a much better story. I burned through the first book in a couple lunch hours this week and it holds up exceedingly well.

If you are going to read Harry Potter then make sure sure you buy the books second hand or find them online through uh, other means, because Rowling is a TERF piece of poo poo and doesn't deserve a cent of your money.

Barudak
May 7, 2007

I recommend reading the first, possibly the second, then putting them down and walking away because consequenceless time travel gets introduced in book 3.

AARD VARKMAN
May 17, 1993
I recommend you read all of them multiple times and base your entire life around the franchise, personally.

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

TheAardvark posted:

I recommend you read all of them multiple times and base your entire life around the franchise, personally.

What happen at teh end of you avatar's gif?

:ohdear:

Sydin
Oct 29, 2011

Another spring commute

TheAardvark posted:

I recommend you read all of them multiple times and base your entire life around the franchise, personally.

:hmmyes:

Roth
Jul 9, 2016

Read A Series of Unfortunate Events instead

Ashsaber
Oct 24, 2010

Deploying Swordbreakers!
College Slice

Feldegast42 posted:

Did anyone ever read that fanfic that imagined Harry as a radical athiest incel that reddit loved

I read a chapter or two, saw it brought up elsewhere by someone trying to show how good it was and to try and impose its version of magic rules on someone else's goofy fun piece, leading to a really good takedown, that IIRC goes something like: 'In HPatMoR it is a big deal that Harry is the first one to ever do a partial transmutation, since it has always been an all or nothing thing. Meanwhile in cannon, Neville's teapot is skittering up the wall on spider legs/trying to get into a mousehole/is furry.' I also remember that the guy who wrote the story never read one of the books or watched one of the movies, and thought it was all stupid and he could make a better one after reading like wikipedia summaries.

amigolupus posted:

What's really stupid is that while Dumbledore used the excuse of being afraid Voldemort would read Harry's mind to not tell him anything, he eventually admits that the real reason he tried to keep Harry out of everything is because he wanted Harry to keep being an innocent child. There's just so many things wrong about it. A) Harry's already a focal point in this war because Voldemort's targeting him, and he already asked why Voldemort wanted to kill him when he was eleven, B) Harry's not a kid, and is just two years away from being considered a legal adult by wizards C) Harry grew up in an abusive home and had to yearly deal with Hogwarts being a massive death trap, that poo poo will make you grow up fast.

And this is probably a large part of why from book 5 onwards people were jumping onto the idea of Dumbledore being secretly evil. Because at that point if you believe you can actually keep someone innocent and out of the fight after the fight has shaped their whole life you are either deluding yourself or talking out your rear end.

Really didn't help that the conclusion to the whole war with Voldy involved Harry basically just walking into a death curse, so for pretty much the last 13-17 years anything fans tried to write about the universe defaulted to Dumbles being capital E EVIL, or just really loving incompetent and stupid.


Can I say that I really, really don't get where so many people find their love for Snape from? I mean, aside from wanting to gently caress the version they have in their minds, of course. Dude had one friend he really cared about, who cared about him, then after getting an in with the magic Neo-Nazis and joining them to improve his own social standing he gets pissed that his childhood crush, a member of the group the magic neo-nazis hate most, doesn't marry him and instead marries the good looking rich jock who A) bullied him, and B) is not a magical neo-nazi. He gets so pissed he brings part of a prophecy to wizard Palpantine so that he can have his crush's son and husband killed.

Maybe he thought that if Lily was single again she would instantly get together with him, because she was nice to him when they were kids. I cannot see it possibly ending in a way that didn't involve brainwashing or dungeons though, most people would be unwilling to romance a person who put on their family after all.

And then he spends over a decade helping encourage Slytherin to be a racist cesspit by rewarding them unconditionally and keeping them from facing consequences, while taking out his rage on the jock house because his own poor decisions pushed his crush away from him and he didn't think she cared about her baby enough to die for it.

People think he is a good person, why?

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

Dumbledore was a bit deluded, he even says 'its all my fault, I hosed up" (I think, that might have been a different book). One of his primary character traits is being an old and powerful wizard that hasn't completely lost touch with reality as opposed to, as far as it seems, all the other ones.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Ashsaber posted:

People think he is a good person, why?

Because that was the thesis the story was trying to present.

Especially if you checked out on caring about the characters in the final two books where everybody's an rear end in a top hat anyways, and didn't bother to pay much attention to JK Rowling's shallow and petty backstory that she came up with later. The first book in the series was all about how despite Snape picking on Harry on a personal level, he was a good guy with good intentions doing good things, and the final two books spent a pretty hefty chunk of time trying to tell the same story about him, where he does the worst thing possible, but then contrived an elaborate explanation where it was the right thing to do and he was doing the right thing all the way up to the end. I don't think it really worked well at telling the story it wanted to tell, but that was the point of Snape even being in the story at all. Once again, Harry's (and the reader's) first instinct about a person was still wrong. What a twist.

And then Snape's character background being about carrying his high school experience way too far into adulthood is just kinda how Rowling writes. Most of her characters had all their formative moments in high school, and it's why everybody married their high school sweetheart, including Bill who married a girl he met at a high school event. Even Voldemort we see with firm roots in his childhood and high school.

Ashsaber posted:

And then he spends over a decade helping encourage Slytherin to be a racist cesspit by rewarding them unconditionally and keeping them from facing consequences, while taking out his rage on the jock house because his own poor decisions pushed his crush away from him and he didn't think she cared about her baby enough to die for it.

I mean that one's just the fact that the house system encourages the teachers who are at the heads of houses to indulge in the same sort of arbitrary rivalry.

I feel like if the story were supposed to be about people growing up and maturing, we'd find out at the end that there was actually no big differences in the houses and all of the stuff about Slytherin was just Harry's perspective on his arbitrarily designated house rivalry that he discards with age, but the series is more about holding onto the past.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Snape is the fantasy of the horrible abusive teacher/parental figure really caring for you deep down.

Sydin posted:

They're fine. That said as I've already stated if you want an easily digestible YA-ish story about wizards living alongside modern society, read the Bartimaeus Trilogy for a much better story. I burned through the first book in a couple lunch hours this week and it holds up exceedingly well.

If you are going to read Harry Potter then make sure sure you buy the books second hand or find them online through uh, other means, because Rowling is a TERF piece of poo poo and doesn't deserve a cent of your money.

Luckily, the insane popularity of the franchise means it's not exactly hard to borrow the books from someone you know or the local library.

Barudak
May 7, 2007

People like Snape cause he's decently good looking in the film and its not like daddy issues cant apply to fictional characters.

josh04
Oct 19, 2008


"THE FLASH IS THE REASON
TO RACE TO THE THEATRES"

This title contains sponsored content.

Alan Rickman's real good, but we're listening to the book three audiobook and Snape should have been fired for the scene where he covers one of Lupin's classes and spends the whole thing insulting, screaming at and threatening the children because they're loving up his terrible plan to out Lupin as a werewolf. What a loving wanker.

ungulateman
Apr 18, 2012

pretentious fuckwit who isn't half as literate or insightful or clever as he thinks he is
I mean, that's every scene where Snape is 'teaching'

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
As said, this is one of those things that is just normal for British boarding schools.

Asgerd
May 6, 2012

I worked up a powerful loneliness in my massive bed, in the massive dark.
Grimey Drawer
Dumbledore really should have just made Snape the assistant janitor instead, since he's shockingly incompetent at teaching anyone anything.

FunkyAl
Mar 28, 2010

Your vitals soar.

Asgerd posted:

Dumbledore really should have just made Snape the assistant janitor instead, since he's shockingly incompetent at teaching anyone anything.

In this timeline, Snape invents a series of perfect household cleaning potions and becomes rich beyond his wildest fantasies. He is like the wizard version of Mr. Clean, and is known for his lustrous, washed hair

W.T. Fits
Apr 21, 2010

Ready to Poyozo Dance all over your face.
Another reason Snape's a piece of poo poo would be his treatment of Neville. Yeah, he makes all the Griffindors he teaches miserable, but he especially goes out of his way to fixate on both Harry and Neville. And we know why he hates Harry, but we're never really given a good reason of why he seems to go out of his way to make Neville's life a living hell.

And today I finally realized it's because he blames Neville for not being the one that Voldemort went after that night. If Voldemort had gone after Neville instead of Harry, Lilly wouldn't have died. Snape knows that it's his own fault for telling Voldemort about the prophecy to begin with, but rather than accept responsibility for it, he twists it around and projects the blame on Neville and takes out his frustration and anger on him. Which is compounded further when you remember Neville's poor home life as a result of his parents being tortured into insanity by Snape's old buddies after Voldemort's fall from power.

But it's okay, because Snape had a creepy obsession over was secretly in love with Harry's mom, so he really was a good person all along. :barf:

Big Dick Cheney
Mar 30, 2007
Snape sucks!! I hate him!

Sydin
Oct 29, 2011

Another spring commute

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Snape is the fantasy of the horrible abusive teacher/parental figure really caring for you deep down.

He doesn't really care about Harry deep down though? He just gets emotionally manipulated by Dumbledore into protecting Harry as "atonement" for getting Lily killed. He loving hates Harry from the second they meet until his dying breath where he just wants to look at Harry because his eyes remind him of Lily's. Even when he goes off on Dumbledore about his plan including Harry's death, it comes off more as "then why the gently caress did you make me go through all this by telling me I was fulfilling Lily's dying wish" vs him actually caring about Harry at all.

I think if the movies had cast/makeup'd somebody to look more like the ugly, greasy, incel described in the books then Snape would be a far less popular character than he is. Alan Rickman was just way too magnetic and skilled as an actor to hate anybody he played.

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Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
A Series of Unfortunate Events in audiobook form are all on youtube, or were last year.

Although you SHOULD give Daniel HandlerLemony Snicket money

Also, Rowling should have decoupled the racism from being a founding principle of slytherin. Spread racists around all the non-hufflepuff houses. Being sneaky, ambitious, pragmatic whatever doesn't stop you from being a good guy. Like Lando or Vegeta. They can be assholes for good.

Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Jun 6, 2020

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