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HIJK posted:In Harry's defense he was a dumbass 14 year old and the contest was age restricted for a reason. The second challenge is particularly egregious even given Harry's circumstances though. He sits on the egg for months without even bothering to try and prepare for the next challenge despite his friends constantly going "uh Harry you might want to check out that egg at some point?" and even when Cedric comes up to and flat out tells him how to solve the puzzle Harry ignores him because he's mad Cedric is banging his crush. Then when he finally gets peer pressured into checking the egg out and learns he's gonna have to go under water he does... nothing. Just flat out absolutely does nothing. In fact he does less than nothing because even when Crouch Jr. all but feeds him an answer via Neville and the magical underwater plants book Harry brushes it off with "yeah that's great Neville now stop bothering me with that nerd poo poo." Like the thing with the first challenge is yeah, it's Crouch Jr. who gives Harry the idea to use the accio charm. But Harry then flags down Hermione and says "hey I'm begging you you gotta help me learn this charm, like we gotta work day and night so I can do this loving thing or I'm dead" and then he actually does put in the work to master it. Similarly he learns a whole grab bag of offensive, defensive, and survival/navigation spells for the maze. It's just the second challenge where for whatever reason Harry puts in absolutely zero effort every step of the way. Cranappleberry posted:Hermione steals Moody's supply after his death. Oh right I forgot they used polyjuice right at the beginning of the book. I always get the first and second flights from Privet Drive confused.
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Apr 17, 2022 22:28
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Sydin posted:The second challenge is particularly egregious even given Harry's circumstances though. He sits on the egg for months without even bothering to try and prepare for the next challenge despite his friends constantly going "uh Harry you might want to check out that egg at some point?" and even when Cedric comes up to and flat out tells him how to solve the puzzle Harry ignores him because he's mad Cedric is banging his crush. Then when he finally gets peer pressured into checking the egg out and learns he's gonna have to go under water he does... nothing. Just flat out absolutely does nothing. In fact he does less than nothing because even when Crouch Jr. all but feeds him an answer via Neville and the magical underwater plants book Harry brushes it off with "yeah that's great Neville now stop bothering me with that nerd poo poo." I mean...that sounds like a pretty typical 14 year old to me, not taking something important seriously, being jealous of his crush's boyfriend and resenting him for dating her, ignoring someone he pities but doesn't actually like.
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Apr 17, 2022 22:30
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HIJK posted:In Harry's defense he was a dumbass 14 year old and the contest was age restricted for a reason. harry does change between books 4 and 7, he gets shoutier and stupider and much less interested in being nice to people who aren't useful to him in some way the tragic toryfication of a nice young man
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Apr 18, 2022 00:47
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Me, freebasing polyjuice potion so I can act out all the parts of my favorite stage musicals.
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Apr 18, 2022 00:57
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Harry being bad at the Triwizard Tournament is partly that he's kind of an idiot that Crouch has to shepherd through everything, but part of that is also that Harry has absolutely no reason to give a poo poo about the dumb tournament. He never wanted to participate, he was conned into it by an obvious malevolent scheme. He has absolutely no interest in the prize, and sees the whole thing as a big hassle that makes his friends and schoolmates kinda hate him for the audacity to be put in hilariously dangerous situations in the name of School Pride. Why should he put in more than even the token effort necessary to not die in this farce?
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Apr 18, 2022 01:15
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Its dawning on me Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the one men's action fantasy tournament arc (tm) I don't care about.
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Apr 18, 2022 01:24
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also, it's still not adequately explained how they didn't find the bubble-head charm, which is taught as curriculum and also was ubiquitous the next year. Not that the bubble-head charm would have been very effective for Harry other than being able to actually breathe and say the words for spells instead of some aquatic equivalent. But it's not just about surviving underwater for an hour- that's just the biggest most, present problem. You gotta research what's actually IN the lake and what it could do to you. Also, bring tools to help (like a knife). Also, using magic or just common sense to move quickly. Harry didn't even remove his robes. all-in-all the bubble-head charm works for survival but otherwise kinda sucks as a solution and they still didn't find it. Barty Crouch Jr. came up with an elegant solution and HP was too dumb to figure it out so Dobby had to save his rear end AGAIN
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Apr 18, 2022 01:41
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Do you ever notice that they try to make Harry's dad look like a monster for bullying an out and proud nazi that calls the dude's girlfriend a slur? Like the k-word or n-word?? And that when he was 17 he invented a spell that slashes you open and is hard to heal? Why in gods name would he get any kind of redemption.
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Apr 18, 2022 01:45
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Boba Pearl posted:Do you ever notice that they try to make Harry's dad look like a monster for bullying an out and proud nazi that calls the dude's girlfriend a slur? Like the k-word or n-word?? And that when he was 17 he invented a spell that slashes you open and is hard to heal? Why in gods name would he get any kind of redemption. Look, he really wanted to gently caress Harry's mom, and isn't "wanting to gently caress someone so much that you'll try to get their husband and son killed so you can swoop in afterwards" really what being a good person is really about?
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Apr 18, 2022 01:50
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hermione turns into a furry briefly in one of the movies and that's the only time we see a furry and honestly am i just meant to believe that there are no furry wizards? huh??? no animagus is not the same thing do not @ me
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Apr 18, 2022 02:05
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Piell posted:Look, he really wanted to gently caress Harry's mom, and isn't "wanting to gently caress someone so much that you'll try to get their husband and son killed so you can swoop in afterwards" really what being a good person is really about? Don't forget his other redeeming qualities of 'being an emotionally and physically abusive teacher for 18 years because he kinda felt bad about getting his crush killed.' I mean hell we see him display exactly 1 (one) moment of moral courage in the book where he even he is disgusted at how beyond the pale Dumbledore's plan to use a child as a sacrifice is and fights against it despite his own personal animus towards Harry. Only to back down before the text immediately goes on to show that actually sacrificing children is cool and good.
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Apr 18, 2022 02:24
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Mx. posted:hermione turns into a furry briefly in one of the movies and that's the only time we see a furry and honestly am i just meant to believe that there are no furry wizards? huh??? The woods around hogwarts is nothing but upper classmen getting rutty in new bodies
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Apr 18, 2022 02:55
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How far are we from JK stating that Jesus was a wizard and points to the feeding of the 5000 as proof?
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Apr 18, 2022 03:13
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It is kind of funny how Harry explicitly does not want to do the tournament, is perfectly willing to drop out, but ends up needing to do it anyway or he might be punished in some way? I remember the movies have the rules guy say the rules are absolute, so presumably something bad happens if you disappoint the magic cup.
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Apr 18, 2022 04:17
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harry just loves poo poo rules that much, thats why he became a cop
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Apr 18, 2022 04:20
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Book 4 needed to make the consequences way more apparent, I'm still very unclear why he has to compete. Also, if the rules are so binding that if your name pops you have to compete no matter what, why can you cheat???
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Apr 18, 2022 04:30
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I love how the second task had the whole crowd sitting around the lake waiting for them to return. The first task had at least dragon fights (and I recall the movie version was pretty cool) where a big cheering crowd can take it in like a gladiator fight, but what’s the crowd gonna do for the second one? Just wait and see if a bloated corpse floats up instead of the competitor?
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Apr 18, 2022 04:35
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Harry is Jesus in book 7. It's like a bullhorn. And not just the super obvious things at the end either. Whether it's being betrayed by a
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Apr 18, 2022 04:35
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When I was younger I got caught up in the idea that Dumbledore's actions, even if they weren't actually willfully evil, were more harmful than he meant them to be, for Harry, and for the world in general. Things like continuing on with the house system, not actively punishing the virulent racism in the school, stuff like that. The interpretation I really like even at this point can be summed up as '80 years ago you were a revolutionary. 40 years ago you were a progressive. Now you're the sort of old conservative you used to hate'. So its been really bizarre to see him turn into 'Wizard Jesus: this one was gay (he never scored)' Still like the setting, but only for what others do with it, often going completely against everything JK stands for. That is the version I care about and remember, not floorshitting wizards and Dumbles actively stopping people who wanted to stop Nazis. Holy Crap JK is awful
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Apr 18, 2022 04:41
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The thing is, like, the last few books are clearly building towards Harry making the realization that Dumbledore, while he may have had his heart in the right place (he didn't but the books think he did), was still a father-surrogate and now that Harry was becoming an adult, he needed to move out from the shadow of his father and become his own man. Harry needed to live his life on his own terms and stop simply doing what Dumbledore told him. Except he didn't. The last few books are a coming of age story where the main character actually decided 'nah, I'd rather not.' Nothing is learned.
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Apr 18, 2022 04:51
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How does anyone know if the sorting hat isn't just picking houses randomly? Or it knows someone should be in Hufflepuff but it puts them in Slytherin just for a laugh. What I'm getting at here is, is the sorting hat just a huge dick?
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Apr 18, 2022 04:59
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molly (or the dad?) weasley did say you shouldn't trust something if you cant see where it keeps its brain
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Apr 18, 2022 05:01
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Wizarding society is completely and utterly hosed up and the sorting hat has been in place for centuries so...
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Apr 18, 2022 05:58
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As I recall the hat was originally Godric Gryffindor’s and his response to the need to segregate students for no real reason. The Harry Potter setting is fun and I think one can certainly enjoy it, especially with the movies which can pick and choose easier what it wants to include in the canon from all the fluff. The way the wizarding world works is really falling apart the more specific you make it, which is exactly what JK decided to do with it over time. I’m re-reading the Discworld novels and despite being more of a parody of fantasy, the magical aspects feel so much more easy to wrap your head around, because it’s not treated as a cheat code to life in the way the spells and stuff in Harry Potter does.
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Apr 18, 2022 06:21
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It's a few pages back, also, but speaking of the founder; one of the best things ever is how Pottermore or one of the HP official tweet feeds once said that we could not call Salazar Slytherin evil and that he was a complicated man. Maybe I'm a moral zealot, but I feel like when someone is so outrageously racist that they put a racist murder snake in a school for the sole purpose of periodically emerging to murder 'racially impure' children, that it is a very easy and simple judgment call to say that person is comically evil.
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Apr 18, 2022 06:41
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how dare you say hitler was evil, all we can say is he was complicated
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Apr 18, 2022 08:23
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Mx. posted:how dare you say hitler was evil, all we can say is he was complicated Say what you will about Hitler, but he is the only person who killed Hitler.
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Apr 18, 2022 08:29
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Mx. posted:how dare you say hitler was evil, all we can say is he was complicated When Downfall was released (and before it became a meme-mine on YouTube) there was a bit of controversy in Germany I believe because the movie had the daring to show that Hitler was not, in fact, a cartoon villain who ate puppies for dinner and drank Jew blood with his morning coffee. He was a human with a monstrous outlook on the world and he led his country to nightmare-inducing crimes against humanity, but also a man who loved his dog, his lover, could show kindness to his staffers (while at the same time call for the immediate execution for those he thought betrayed him). It is possible to show that a horrible man had other sides of him without minimising in any way his horribleness, is what I’m saying. We can’t really do that with Salazar Slytherin though, because literally everything we know about him is that he was a cartoonishly evil co-founder of a school. There’s no other information in the canon I’m aware of that speaks of him in any other terms so yeah I’m not buying it. In other news: https://twitter.com/jennyenicholson/status/1515925852806033409?s=21&t=XrOOf1rNfrW6o2L_jqG3mA
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Apr 18, 2022 09:19
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Maybe I'm a moral zealot, but I feel like when someone is so outrageously racist that they put a racist murder snake in a school for the sole purpose of periodically emerging to murder 'racially impure' children, that it is a very easy and simple judgment call to say that person is comically evil. The goal wasn't to kill all the muggle-borns. It was to scare them into leaving the school or forcing the school to shut down until they reopened with just pure and half-bloods. BigglesSWE posted:We can’t really do that with Salazar Slytherin though, because literally everything we know about him is that he was a cartoonishly evil co-founder of a school. There’s no other information in the canon I’m aware of that speaks of him in any other terms so yeah I’m not buying it. Hey, he made is own wand. And it wasn't the traditional Ollivander Wand. It was made of snakewood with a basilisk horn core. Also he was best friends with Gryffindor according to the sorting hat. All the founders were friends. So there's that to consider.
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Apr 18, 2022 10:35
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Sometimes the space racist is your friend, or a popular author from your youth.
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Apr 18, 2022 11:09
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI5ytm_bFl8 James Somerton did a good video on the latest Fantastic Beasts film (and the franchise and Rowling as a whole). I also really liked his earlier video about his disillusionment with Rowling over the years.
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Apr 18, 2022 11:48
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That was a fine watch. It’s only 20 minutes too. Last 8 are patreons.
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Apr 18, 2022 13:22
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2IGyUXQPk8 when 44 seconds of Family Guy has a more satisfying take on fighting Hitler,
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Apr 18, 2022 13:38
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https://twitter.com/ColumboFanAcct/status/1515890735328940032
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Apr 18, 2022 13:41
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BigglesSWE posted:As I recall the hat was originally Godric Gryffindor’s and his response to the need to segregate students for no real reason. They had to segregate the students because while the founders all agreed that there should be a school for magic, they could not agree on who should be taught. Gryffindor wanted to teach only the brave. Ravenclaw wanted to teach only the smart. Slytherin wanted to teach only purebloods. Hufflepuff was willing to teach anyone that was willing to learn. And that's why the Houses are divided into the Jocks, the Nerds, the Nazis and the Rest.
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Apr 18, 2022 13:55
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Cranappleberry posted:Also he was best friends with Gryffindor according to the sorting hat. All the founders were friends. So there's that to consider. Doesn't really reflect good on the founders that they were friends with the proto-nazi.
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Apr 18, 2022 14:03
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Zesty posted:That was a fine watch. It’s only 20 minutes too. Last 8 are patreons. Yeah he's had some issues with Youtube recently (because it has lovely policies for his kind of thing) and is trying to shift more to Patreon.
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Apr 18, 2022 14:11
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I know it was said a while back, but it really is incredible how not only is 'Fantastic Beasts' a completely inappropriate name for what the films are actually about, but also that both 'Crimes of Grindelwald' and 'The Secrets of Dumbledore' are far more accurate names for the tone and content of the films. Also you know, how the only really good parts of the entire franchise are those bits in the first film of Newt and Jacob being awkward buddy 'cops' (buddy zoologists?) dealing with magical beastie hijinks.
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Apr 18, 2022 14:34
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:
Well you'll be pleased to know that they barely interact in the new one. Also the movie brings back Yusuf Kama (the guy who wanted revenge against the Lestrange family) and tries to pull a Snape where he infiltrates Grindelwald's group but then proceeds to do nothing with it. His double agent move is to just kind of hang out and then at the very end he beats up some Grindelwald followers.
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Apr 18, 2022 14:44
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I know it was said a while back, but it really is incredible how not only is 'Fantastic Beasts' a completely inappropriate name for what the films are actually about, but also that both 'Crimes of Grindelwald' and 'The Secrets of Dumbledore' are far more accurate names for the tone and content of the films. It's pretty clear where JKR's skills lie (whimsical magic slice of life) and where her actual interests lie (edge lord "dark" poo poo with overt yet cowardly political overtones). You can see it in her other books, like the detective novels where the killer is yet another crossdresser and the main guy saves a lady from falling by grabbing her by the boob, or in the Ickabog, which is supposed to be a children's bedtime fable but is full of horrific death (and a message you should be always nice to murderous monsters so they will calm down and be nice too). What's bizarre is that I have to think she could have sold "The Dumbledore Saga" as its own spinoff instead of tacking it onto this franchise. Was it a WB mandate? Is this seriously what SHE wanted? It's just the weirdest choice possible and it's alienated most of the fanbase. Which I'm sure doesn't bother her too much since she has nothing but contempt for HP fans, but still.
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