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Liquid Communism posted:The twins were selling them out of their shop later on too, now that I do a bit of googling. Which is again, some side-eye at Rowling, having your good guys casually selling essentially magical roofies. I forgot that the magical roofies worked on fatphobic and misogynistic rules. loving Rowling.
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Apr 27, 2022 06:14
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I read "weight of the boy" as in it works like anesthesia and you need more for larger people, but I probably shouldn't give Rowling the benefit of the doubt.
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Apr 27, 2022 06:36
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Skwirl posted:I read "weight of the boy" as in it works like anesthesia and you need more for larger people, but I probably shouldn't give Rowling the benefit of the doubt. I think that's how it's intended, though I probably shouldn't bother to be fair. Interesting to note that she's obviously assuming in that case that love potions are used by girls on boys and not vice versa (or same-sex of course gay kids don't exist after all), so it may be her honking great internalised misogyny that leads her to minimise the issue so much.
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Apr 27, 2022 06:52
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Actually kinda funny that Rowling's one of the few authors I can think of with noticeable contempt for and ignorance of sports and video games. A lot makes sense considering she's writing more or less in the tradition of early to mid 20th century British children's fiction with really no examination of any of its issues, and then trying to turn that into a more mature story halfway through.
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Apr 27, 2022 06:54
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Runcible Cat posted:Interesting to note that she's obviously assuming in that case that love potions are used by girls on boys and not vice versa (or same-sex of course gay kids don't exist after all), I read this as Fred and George assuming that Ginny is heterosexual and a girl, so she is probably going to give it to a boy if she does buy one. If they had been talking to Dean or Dumbledore about it they might have switched up the pronouns. Are there any examples of boys using love potions on girls?
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Apr 27, 2022 07:08
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Grundulum posted:I read this as Fred and George assuming that Ginny is heterosexual and a girl, so she is probably going to give it to a boy if she does buy one. If they had been talking to Dean or Dumbledore about it they might have switched up the pronouns. It's not just about Fred and George as characters, in the whole series love potions are exclusively a thing girls use on boys. Not sure if it's more down to Rowling believing only girls are really into romance and love, or if she just doesn't know how to write a boy's attraction to a girl and thus avoiding it wherever she can. Or if she feels like it would have been rape if it was a boy doing it.
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Apr 27, 2022 08:22
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Bootleg Tanya Grotter translations are on scribd. If your child likes Harry Potter, introduce them to the superior russian knockoff.
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Apr 27, 2022 09:24
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Bootleg Tanya Grotter translations are on scribd. If your child likes Harry Potter, introduce them to the superior russian knockoff. Bootleg Tanya Grotter Potter, you are named after what I somehow expected this post to become.
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Apr 27, 2022 09:50
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Skwirl posted:I'd recommend the Patricia Wrede dragons books. In the same veign, the How to Train Your Dragon books are fantastic. Absolutely nothing to do with the films what-so-ever. 
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Apr 27, 2022 10:14
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I got my niece started on T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon's pen name. Mostly fantasy and horror stuff, but her couple of middle-grade fantasy novels are under it as well.) She really enjoyed A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54369251-a-wizard-s-guide-to-defensive-baking Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 10:23
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Liquid Communism posted:I got my niece started on T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon's pen name. Mostly fantasy and horror stuff, but her couple of middle-grade fantasy novels are under it as well.) Ursulav is so good. She's written a bunch of stuff aimed at younger audiences under her own name, too; my 7yo daughter enjoyed the Dragonbreath and Hamster Princess series a lot, although Castle Hangnail (a standalone aimed older than those series are, but a bit younger than Defensive Baking) is probably her fave. She'll probably be old enough for Defensive Baking and maybe some of her other stuff as Kingfisher, like The Raven and the Reindeer, soon. Skwirl posted:I'd recommend the Patricia Wrede dragons books. These are also good and a personal fave of my daughter's, along with Jessica Day George's Dragon Slippers trilogy. And if you're looking for a whimsical boarding school fix she's currently on her second readthrough of Gordon Korman's MacDonald Hall series, which I remember fondly from my own youth and did not, as far as I know, turn out to be morally bankrupt.
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Apr 27, 2022 12:06
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Ugh even when I was reading the books uncritically Fred and George rubbed me the wrong way. They're supposed to be these wizard joke masters, but all they make are roofies and vomit pills. Is there really such a market for pranks? And why do the most popular ones actually make you physically ill? It seemed to me more like a bullying shop than a prank shop. You prank your friends - the things they sold were for torment. Unless that was the joke? I just can't tell with Rowling anymore.
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Apr 27, 2022 14:25
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The Shriekcast pretty aptly compares them to the Paul brothers where their idea of jokes and pranks is to just be assholes. Also they make their money not from the joke shop but because they are backroom arms dealers.
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Apr 27, 2022 14:36
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Skwirl posted:Do 12 year olds in 2022 give a poo poo about Harry Potter though? I feel like there should be new YA novels they're obsessed over. Like modern 12 year olds know about Harry Potter for the same reason I know about The Beatles, my/their parents were obsessed with it, right? My daughter is a few years younger but yeah, they do. I've seen Hogwarts costumes at Halloween, one of the school holiday activities at the drama school was themed around the franchise, etc. It's not the dominant cultural force it was but it's a thing kids know.
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Apr 27, 2022 15:04
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The Owl House is extremely gay and riffs on Harry Potter and basically giving the middle finger to Disney in its final season.
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Apr 27, 2022 15:14
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Not a Zoomer (More like a zellenial) but I remember hearing about He-man and the like through older people online. I also thought older SNES games were cooler than the brown shooty-man garbage of the 7th gen
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Apr 27, 2022 15:50
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Tenebrais posted:It's not just about Fred and George as characters, in the whole series love potions are exclusively a thing girls use on boys. Yeah Rowling is almost certainly somebody who only conceives of rape as strictly something men to do women. Even in the subplot where a woman flat out rapes a man, repeatedly, for months/years on end, it's portrayed less as Merope being a monster and more an unfortunate expression of her upbringing and that she should be pitied after she stops feeding Riddle daterape drugs and he immediately bails on her. Rotten Red Rod posted:Ugh even when I was reading the books uncritically Fred and George rubbed me the wrong way. They're supposed to be these wizard joke masters, but all they make are roofies and vomit pills. Is there really such a market for pranks? And why do the most popular ones actually make you physically ill? Don't forget that it's said multiple times that the twins have basically dedicated their lives to making Filch's life miserable, because what's even funnier than bullying your fellow students is harassing the squib who can't fight back. e. I think Shaun hit the nail on the head in his video that the books are just kinda weirdly and consistently mean spirited, and it feels like there was an active effort to excise those elements from the movies because they make all the "good guys" come off like absolute loving assholes.
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Apr 27, 2022 17:03
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Everything with the twins reminds me of the ads I'd see in the back of a Boy's Life magazine from the mid 90s, real Lil Stinker energy.
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Apr 27, 2022 18:57
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ONE YEAR LATER posted:Everything with the twins reminds me of the ads I'd see in the back of a Boy's Life magazine from the mid 90s, real Lil Stinker energy. Arthur Weasley, a man who definitely owns multiple flying household objects, is obsessed with Muggle gizmos because he wants to build that hovercraft with a vacuum cleaner motor. 
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Apr 27, 2022 19:12
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You know what's kind of funny, Arthur's character would make 1000x more sense if he was trying to get wizards to understand how cool and necessary television is. All of his weird knick knackery could've been old radio sets and wave stations and just poo poo he's stealing to try and make a camera or a TV or getting a TV station set up. Like trying to hotwire a generator out of the ca- I'm just writing fanfiction at this point I think.
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Apr 27, 2022 19:18
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Sydin posted:e. I think Shaun hit the nail on the head in his video that the books are just kinda weirdly and consistently mean spirited, and it feels like there was an active effort to excise those elements from the movies because they make all the "good guys" come off like absolute loving assholes. This is because Rowling, although from Scotland, has the joyless, cruel heart of a true Englishwoman. What I am saying is that to give an English power over you is to invite your own suffering. Suffer not the English to hold power.
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Apr 27, 2022 19:22
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JethroMcB posted:Arthur Weasley, a man who definitely owns multiple flying household objects, is obsessed with Muggle gizmos because he wants to build that hovercraft with a vacuum cleaner motor. Lol, I actually sent away for this. You get a set of instructions that was way too short and vague to actually be useful to anyone, let alone a preteen without access to power tools (as if my parents would ever let me take apart the vacuum cleaner for this). This was in the 90s, they were seriously still running this scam then - I wouldn't be surprised if it was still in Boys' Life today, if it's even still a thing.
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Apr 27, 2022 19:23
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OPAONI posted:This is because Rowling, although from Scotland, has the joyless, cruel heart of a true Englishwoman. No, she is English. She's from Gloucestershire.
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Apr 27, 2022 19:25
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Yeah, you could keep about 90% of the joke if instead of being perplexed by literally anything Arthur was instead a huge Muggle-Weeb who has accidentally backed himself into being a bog-standard middle age dude that the Wizarding World treats like he's this radical member of a counterculture. "Oh I don't listen to the Weird Sisters, I listen to this band you probably haven't heard of from Liverpool." "I haven't watched a Quidditch match in years. But did you see the scores for last night's football game?" "Butterbeer? No we don't keep any in the house. Can I interest you in a (insert whatever the English equivalent of a Bud Light is here)." Play up that he's managed to back into the exact same tastes as Vernon and you could like actually do something with it. Zore fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 19:28
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As someone who thinks soccer is the most boring sport in the world, watching quidditch would be much more boring.
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Apr 27, 2022 19:39
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A spectator sport that revolves around a thing no-one can see.
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Apr 27, 2022 19:43
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Boba Pearl posted:A spectator sport that revolves around a thing no-one can see. I mean, it's loving magic, there's no reason you couldn't have fancy sportscast overlays even for the live audience showing the current location of the flying walnut and stuff without leaking that information to the players.
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Apr 27, 2022 19:49
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For book recommendations if your kid is in elementary school you can't go wrong with Deltora Quest or the sequel series. Fun easy reading fantasy stores with a nice dark edge.
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Apr 27, 2022 20:28
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Arthur Weasly gets into classic series Simpsons, makes it his mission to introduce it to wizardkind
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Apr 27, 2022 20:53
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Arthur Weasley is the Jack Parsons of the Wizarding world
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Apr 27, 2022 20:55
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ToxicFrog posted:I mean, it's loving magic, there's no reason you couldn't have fancy sportscast overlays even for the live audience showing the current location of the flying walnut and stuff without leaking that information to the players. You'd think that, but then they held the second task of their bloodsport under a lake where the audience just kind of sat around for an hour waiting for someone to surface, then the same thing for the third staring at a hedgerow. Zore posted:Yeah, you could keep about 90% of the joke if instead of being perplexed by literally anything Arthur was instead a huge Muggle-Weeb who has accidentally backed himself into being a bog-standard middle age dude that the Wizarding World treats like he's this radical member of a counterculture. Arthur's another point where Rowling's classism shines through. He's supposed to be the example to Harry of what a normal dad would be like, and seen as a harmlessly eccentric good guy. He's also the government's expert on non-magical technology, and doesn't really conceptually understand television or electricity in the mid 1990's. Harry, an 11 year old mostly raised in a cupboard, understands technology better than he does. But he has the job, rather than any of the dozen or so first-gen wizards who come out of Hogwarts each year with families still living in the normal world keeping them up to date, because even as a 'poor' pureblood, he's of the Right Breeding. Charming while it was a fairytale, but once the story turns serious... Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 20:55
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The whole thing with Arthur's job though is that it's a dead-end, two-person department shoved into a glorified janitors closet that nobody in the ministry takes even remotely seriously because anti-muggle sentiments are the norm among the Ministry higher ups. It's implied that outside of his weird muggle obsession he is by all rights a pretty competent wizard, but he's happy with his lovely job because it overlaps with his hobby and nobody's in a hurry to promote him out because he's looked down on for his muggle sympathies. IIRC in book six there's a whole plot point where the new PM tells Arthur "gently caress you and your dumbass hobby, you're way too competent to be wasted playing with muggle toys and are now heading up one of my new anti-Death Eater task forces" to which Molly is all proud and Arthur is just depressed because now he doesn't get to justify his collection of spark plugs as being for work. As for letting a more competent muggle-born who actually understands basic facts about muggles taking over Athur's job, again the ministry thinks the whole department is nonsense and don't give it much thought one way or another. There's probably some clause in the ISS that says your government has to set up some kind of mechanism for protecting muggles from magic and so the Ministry did the absolute bare minimum to abide by it.
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Apr 27, 2022 21:38
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ToxicFrog posted:I mean, it's loving magic, there's no reason you couldn't have fancy sportscast overlays even for the live audience showing the current location of the flying walnut and stuff without leaking that information to the players.
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Apr 27, 2022 22:54
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GodFish posted:For book recommendations if your kid is in elementary school you can't go wrong with Deltora Quest or the sequel series. Fun easy reading fantasy stores with a nice dark edge. Oh my god thank you. I hadn't thought about Deltora Quest for like a decade or two. Those things ruled. I think my mom still has them plus the art book featuring Deltora's fantastic non-terf beasts. They are going in my kid's library when they're born. I don't think Emily Rodda even built any tree houses in her own honour. josh04 posted:No, she is English. She's from Gloucestershire. Not scottish. Just an english woman who moved to Edinburgh, bought a historical manor house, then bought the neighbouring property to demolish it. Now she has two Hogwarts-themed treehouses and a whole separate bungalow to write in, instead of that pesky historic house. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 23:47
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Haha I did actually buy my harry-potter-loving niece the deltora quest series for christmas and she was very excited
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Apr 27, 2022 23:51
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at the time deltora quest and animorphs kinda felt like "we've got young adult literature at home" vs harry potter but looking back they both hold up infinitely better
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Apr 27, 2022 23:53
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Sydin posted:Don't forget that it's said multiple times that the twins have basically dedicated their lives to making Filch's life miserable, because what's even funnier than bullying your fellow students is harassing the squib who can't fight back. There's also how they made Percy's life absolutely miserable for... wanting to excel at school? Like, there's playing pranks on your sibling, then there's trying to seal them inside a curse-filled tomb. You could also probably trace Ron and Ginny's animosity toward Percy to them finding the twins' pranks funny and clearly Percy must've done something to deserve being their target all the time.
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Apr 28, 2022 00:48
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Emily Rodda wrote a bunch of great kids fantasy series. There's also Rowan of Rin, which I absolutely loved. Deltora Quest ended up having like three separate continuations, it was great.
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Apr 28, 2022 08:06
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Deltora Quest is the good poo poo, yeah. Interesting too in taking some elements from adventure games, including puzzles and riddles the reader is invited to try to figure out before the characters do, and having what's quietly one of the most bizarrely psychotically dangerous fantasy settings for creatively lethal creatures and monsters. (Did I mention the author is Australian?)Violet_Sky posted:Not a Zoomer (More like a zellenial) but I remember hearing about He-man and the like through older people online. I also thought older SNES games were cooler than the brown shooty-man garbage of the 7th gen I mean that's pretty understandable, the brownbloom shootyman decade was dire as gently caress, while the SNES era has actually aged pretty reasonably, especially sandwiched between 8-bit jank and first-generation 3D jank. Also easy as poo poo to emulate.
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Apr 28, 2022 10:40
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The janky early 3D Harry Potter games were way better than anything that came later, at least. 1 and 2 were bizarre spooky Hogwarts platformers and amazing. Fliiiiiiippendo! 3 and 4 were clones of the LotR games. 5 and 6 were weird school sims. 7 and 7-2 were loving cover shooters. I do have a soft spot for 6 because they replaced marking your objectives with having you follow Nearly Headless Nick around the castle. Also, saw footage of Johnny Depp trial on the news at work and godamm. He does not seem well. His testimony is akin to a senile 90-year-old except the dude is what, 50-something? I don't envy the jury that had to sit through days of Johnny Depp. And then they keep cutting to Amber Heard doing this dead-eyed middle distance stare. Standout moment was when he pulled away from the mic and there was what seemed like minutes of him ranting mute. Talk about a fall from grace. It's real weird when they cut to photos of them from their marriage. Depp looks like a different person.
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Apr 28, 2022 11:10
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