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Runcible Cat posted:I'll still defend Prisoner of Azkaban as best of the bunch. After that one was when she apparently transcended editors and the books went to poo poo. I still enjoy how that book ends up setting up the bitter hatred between a werewolf and a man with a silver hand, and how both characters never meet again and play no role in each other's deathor downfall. But yeah. The first book and Azkaban are both, at the very least, good for what they are. I think Chamber of Secrets is irredeemable except as the brilliant satire of liberalism that I still maintain HP accidentally is. Rowling writes a story that pretends to be about racism and yet Harry never expresses any strong feelings for or against racism and in fact his only real feeling on it is that he hopes no one thinks he is racist. Peak lib. loving Ron has the stronger reaction. Also it just does some real amateurish writing mistakes. That book in particular is back when, and in fact the origin of, Voldemort as a dark mirror to Harry and a 'there but for the grace of God go I' to him. Voldemort is what Harry could haven been if Harry did not have his support network and his alleged intrinsic good nature. Harry should have been the one to find the diary, have a friendship with Riddle throughout the whole book, maybe get seduced to some racist thinking by Riddle, or butt heads with him but otherwise still really like him, and then have the reveal actually, you know, mean something to him and be more personal. Like it's really basic writing poo poo. Especially if you're writing a book about racism for children. "Racists can seem like decent and nice people and can indeed have good qualities, but in the end they have to choose between being good people or bad people and they have chosen the latter." But yeah. It's after Azkaban that you get the dive bomb into either trash or, as I maintain, accidental brilliance.
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Oct 3, 2025 23:22
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Problem with Harry getting the diary is you wouldn't have the whodunnit aspect, which was pretty fundamental to the structure of each book.
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Oct 4, 2025 00:56
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YaketySass posted:Problem with Harry getting the diary is you wouldn't have the whodunnit aspect, which was pretty fundamental to the structure of each book. I think you still could, in the hands of a hypothetical competent writer. If done right it could be incredibly creepy with the blackouts, missing time, weird evidence etc all stacking up. Basically a sort of unknowing Jekyll and Hyde setup.
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Oct 4, 2025 02:46
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In retrospect, the craziest fumble in Chamber is not having Ginny get sorted into Slytherin. So much of what’s going on with her in that book makes a lot more sense if she’s unexpectedly isolated from her brothers (who all love her) and instead thrown into the bad guy house; there would have been opportunities for our main characters to get some perspective on Slytherin from someone who isn’t an inveterate racist; and it would have also made it way easier to have Harry and Ginny actually interact and build some kind of relationship dynamic with each other if she had played Quidditch against him (while perhaps resenting Malfoy for being the rich kid who could buy his way onto the team). Zoran fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Oct 4, 2025 |
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Oct 4, 2025 03:31
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YaketySass posted:Problem with Harry getting the diary is you wouldn't have the whodunnit aspect, which was pretty fundamental to the structure of each book. The first four anyway
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Oct 4, 2025 03:49
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Air Skwirl posted:They're loving great books. He's an alcoholic ex cop that uses his connections in the NYPD to solve crimes they've overlooked. He also quits drinking fairly early in the series if the drinking is an issue, he goes to AA meetings a lot. I haven’t read any Scudder but I enjoyed the handful of Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery books I read, about a habitual burglar who keeps getting roped into murder investigations. Nothing groundbreaking but fun romps as I recall.
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Oct 4, 2025 03:50
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Zoran posted:In retrospect, the craziest fumble in Chamber is not having Ginny get sorted into Slytherin. The problem is that Rowling doesn't want to do a nuanced Slytherin, they're just all evil.
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Oct 4, 2025 04:05
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Autumn Fella posted:I haven’t read any Scudder but I enjoyed the handful of Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery books I read, about a habitual burglar who keeps getting roped into murder investigations. Nothing groundbreaking but fun romps as I recall. The Bernie Rhodenbarr books are a lot of fun, the Scudder books are a bit more gritty.
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Oct 4, 2025 05:10
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An insane mind posted:Are the books any good, I know my opinion of her writing might not come of terribly charitably but 20 million copies isn't bad and the series seems to have had good reviews? I'm just wondering if she managed to write this without inserting her personality. They're so bad they sold like absolute dogshit until she 'leaked' that it was her pen name. A pen name, I gotta remind you, she took from Robert Galbraith Heath, an absolute horrorshow piece of poo poo who pioneered conversion therapy and experimented on (primarily black) prisoners in Louisiana. RoboChrist 9000 posted:I still enjoy how that book ends up setting up the bitter hatred between a werewolf and a man with a silver hand, and how both characters never meet again and play no role in each other's death or downfall. If anything, Bellatrix Lestrange is the secondary villain of the last three or so books. Kills Harry's last parental figure while mocking him. Mocks him even more because he can't muster the hate to use dark magic against her for it. Tortures Hermione in front of him for funsies. Kills Dobby when he tries to break them out. Kills Tonks, is implied to have also killed Lupin right after. One of the ones who, previously, tortured Longbottom's parents into catatonics. Does she get comeuppance from the protagonists? Nah, she gets taken out by Rowling's self-insert housewife. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Oct 4, 2025 |
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Oct 4, 2025 08:35
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I thought Hermione was Rowling's self-insert so she could mary Ron? Wasn't that also why the Weasley's won a lot of money because she realised 'she' couldn't be married to a poor?
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Oct 4, 2025 09:39
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muscles like this! posted:The problem is that Rowling doesn't want to do a nuanced Slytherin, they're just all evil. So much so that "what if a good person was put in evil house" was the entire premise of the 5 hour long play that she didn't actually write.
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Oct 4, 2025 09:45
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An insane mind posted:I thought Hermione was Rowling's self-insert so she could mary Ron? Wasn't that also why the Weasley's won a lot of money because she realised 'she' couldn't be married to a poor? In Prisoner of Azkaban, it was mentioned that they won a lot of money that they immediately blew over the summer break on a vacation to Egypt and school supplies for their kids, it was effectively all spent before the plot of the book started. It was presented as the equivalent of winning a few thousand dollars as an office party door prize; a nice little influx of cash to splurge on some things with, but not a long term solution to their poverty. In Goblet of Fire, Fred and George won their bet on the Quidditch World Cup, but the guy they made the bet with swindled them, so Harry basically gave them his tournament winnings at the end of the book so he could fund their joke shop. Otherwise, the Weasleys spend the entire series dirt poor because that sets them up to contrast with the Malfoys and the other evil rich pureblood families.
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Oct 4, 2025 10:15
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Money doesn't make a ton of sense in the series anyway. The last book throws out you can't just create food, but everything else is basically covered by magic. Unless Wizards have a horrible taxation system, it wouldn't surprise me.
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Oct 5, 2025 04:53
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bobjr posted:I think the Shrieking Shack people found a super old interview when the books were still being written where she was asked about being a fantasy author and what fantasy authors/books she liked, only for her to talk about how she thinks most authors suck and the genre isn’t good because of that, and it felt like a really early warning sign. Huh, she was a precursor to J. J. Abrams?
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Oct 5, 2025 07:46
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bobjr posted:Money doesn't make a ton of sense in the series anyway. The last book throws out you can't just create food, but everything else is basically covered by magic. The only time money seems to matter is when you're at a school, which is something that people tend not to talk about. Wizard education is weirdly expensive. Everything from books to uniforms to sporting equipment cost money. And it is also kinda weird that there seemingly isn't a market for used school books.
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Oct 5, 2025 08:32
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Alhazred posted:The only time money seems to matter is when you're at a school, which is something that people tend not to talk about. Wizard education is weirdly expensive. Everything from books to uniforms to sporting equipment cost money. I guess when the entire country only has 1,000 students at a time (according to JK's lying brain, but it's actually more like 300) the economy can't support anything but a huge markup on absolutely everything.
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Oct 5, 2025 08:37
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Alhazred posted:And it is also kinda weird that there seemingly isn't a market for used school books. Wizard IP protection has to be something really horrific. Well, either that or textbooks disintegrate at the end of the school year.
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Oct 5, 2025 09:04
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Runcible Cat posted:Wizard IP protection has to be something really horrific. That's what the monster book in PoA is for. Just eats them all on July 1st.
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Oct 5, 2025 09:11
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bobjr posted:Money doesn't make a ton of sense in the series anyway. The last book throws out you can't just create food, but everything else is basically covered by magic. It's incredibly on brand that they have the means to create a post-scarcity society and prefer to be slaveowners and cops instead.
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Oct 5, 2025 10:58
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YaketySass posted:It's incredibly on brand that they have the means to create a post-scarcity society and prefer to be slaveowners and cops instead. I mean you know, the same is pretty much true of IRL humanity. It would not be sustainable - but neither is what we have going now. But as it stands we have enough. The issue is and has been for decades distribution/allocation and not actual scarcity. In terms of basic human needs and most human wants, there is legitimately no scarcity on a global scale. But yeah, just more for my whole 'the best political satire ever written, by accident.'
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Oct 5, 2025 12:17
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YaketySass posted:It's incredibly on brand that they have the means to create a post-scarcity society and prefer to be slaveowners and cops instead. That's another weird thing, there's like three professions you can choose from: Cop, teacher or weird shopkeeper.
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Oct 5, 2025 12:18
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Alhazred posted:That's another weird thing, there's like three professions you can choose from: Cop, teacher or weird shopkeeper. I mean it's the whole lack of worldbuilding. For what it is, credit where it is due, while the magic system isn't well thought out, Hogwarts itself is fairly well done. Part of why it's resonated so well with fans. It's a lot like the original Star Wars trilogy. We get enough of Hogwarts to get a good sense and vibe for it, a sense of history and place, but then also there's enough left blank that there's lots of room for imagination to have reign. Hogwarts is good. But the rest of the world is very clearly an afterthought. Insofar as can be told the entirety of the British wizarding world exists to support a single school. It's like some kind of parody of academia or something. We need cops independent of the school, obviously, because of the whole Voldemort plot, but other than basically that, the only glimpses of the wizarding world we see is stuff that is directly related to the school in some capacity. Which is an unforced error because while it is a boarding school, the kids have plenty of freedom and trips to Diagon Alley and poo poo. Like a lot of issues with the worldbuilding, a lot boils down to Harry being incurious and disinterested in the world of magic and wonder he lives in. Which, I mean, granted, fair, that world sucks. But he doesn't think that. He becomes a part of the system. He's a loving cop.
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Oct 5, 2025 12:41
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You can also be a
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Oct 5, 2025 12:42
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Or ve a tabloid news writer.
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Oct 5, 2025 14:32
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There's also a hospital, which doesn't know about the practice of suturing wounds despite it being around for thousands of years. And, uh, sports teams. It's pretty funny and indicative of the shallow world building that the three locations a fancy shop boasts about are London, Paris, and the podunk town right outside the school.
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Oct 5, 2025 14:34
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Didn't wizards not know about plumbing either? Which is just so so dumb.
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Oct 5, 2025 14:42
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Rowling accidentally creates the implicit canon that not only have Wizards not kept up with Muggle inventions over thousands of years, but indeed that Wizards have forgotten many of the Muggle technologies and practices they would have already known for hundreds if not thousands of years before they decided to Wizards Going Their Own Way into their own secret ethnostates. What's Rowling's educational background? Don't tell me she studied History or anything, please. Because, yeah, her takes read to me a lot like what I would expect to hear in the 90s from some random person who never studied history beyond what they half-remembered from high school, either never went to college or did not study history there, and have had most of their knowledge of history informed by television. Like you know the type. Their understanding of the world basically goes from Caveman Times -> Greece and Rome -> Medieval Times -> Colonial Times -> World War 1 -> WW2 -> Now (with a few more steps for post 90s stuff.) And they have very rigid and definite ideas of the sort of technologies and beliefs people did and did not have in each category, and often these are wrong. Like, you know, how most laymen when it comes to history think plate armor was a medieval thing, as were castles and poo poo, when a lot of that is either only around for a specific part of the middle ages or else entirely part of early modernity. A lot of people think toilets and plumbing is a lot more modern and recent than it is, so yeah, Rowling probably just assumes that indoor plumbing was invented after the breakup, rather than the actual implication that Wizards just forgot the technology. Although that still doesn't excuse why she's so insane as to think they just poo poo wherever when even loving wild animals will tend to have designated making GBS threads areas in their lairs.
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Oct 5, 2025 16:35
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Reading this thread as a Brit really does feel like Bender’s reaction when Fry mistakes Los Angeles for a dystopian future
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Oct 5, 2025 16:42
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vegetables posted:Reading this thread as a Brit really does feel like Bender’s reaction when Fry mistakes Los Angeles for a dystopian future Children of Men is a Harry Potter movie
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Oct 5, 2025 18:25
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Wingnut Ninja posted:It's pretty funny and indicative of the shallow world building that the three locations a fancy shop boasts about are London, Paris, and the podunk town right outside the school. It happens. I live in Fairfax county, VA, and there used to be a sushi restaurant chain (can't remember the name) that had locations around the world, including the local mall. So if you went to their website, their list of locations was like: Tokyo, Honolulu, New York, London, Fairfax... One of these things is not like the others.
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Oct 5, 2025 19:31
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Rowling accidentally creates the implicit canon that not only have Wizards not kept up with Muggle inventions over thousands of years, but indeed that Wizards have forgotten many of the Muggle technologies and practices they would have already known for hundreds if not thousands of years before they decided to Wizards Going Their Own Way into their own secret ethnostates. Hey! They poo poo on the floor and then apparated it to be someone else's problem. Like civilised beings. Also they don't know what belts are. No i will not explain why newt scamander wears a belt.
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Oct 5, 2025 19:34
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Arthur jinxing an airplane so it can fly
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Oct 5, 2025 20:20
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Rowling accidentally creates the implicit canon that not only have Wizards not kept up with Muggle inventions over thousands of years, but indeed that Wizards have forgotten many of the Muggle technologies and practices they would have already known for hundreds if not thousands of years before they decided to Wizards Going Their Own Way into their own secret ethnostates. https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/what-did-jo-rowling-study-at-university-french-classics-both/ She got a BA in French from University of Exeter and took some classes on Greek and Roman civilization or mythology. Which I think all fits. I loving hated how all the movies mispronounced the French stuff wrong and then the audiobooks followed suit starting with Book 5 I wanna say. The "t" is silent in Voldemort, dammit! And in the first audiobook they correctly pronounced Bezoar, but after the movies, and in Book 6, poor Jim Dale has to call it a "bee-zoer" like Alan Rickman did in the movies. It'll never stop irking me.
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Oct 5, 2025 20:24
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To Jim Dale's credit, he pronounced Voldemort without the T and even L'Estrange as la-strawnj. Pretty sure Stephen Fry was not as rigorous, but then again, that's probably up the producers/directors of the audiobook
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Oct 5, 2025 20:37
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Wait, you weren't meant to pronounce the T in Voldemort?
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Oct 5, 2025 20:40
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Air Skwirl posted:Wait, you weren't meant to pronounce the T in Voldemort? It's derived from french, and in french the T would be silent. I don't think there's any indication in the series either way how Voldemort pronounces it, but considering he's an English wizard proud of his long ancestry of English wizards dating back to when the school was founded a thousand years ago by an English wizard, it doesn't strain credulity to me that he'd pronounce the T. Like, I never got the impression Voldemort deliberately chose his name for its french meaning, any more than Remus Lupin was deliberately named "wolf wolf" by his parents years before he was made a werewolf.
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Oct 5, 2025 21:11
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Considering that Voldemort is going around in public under the Edgy Supervillain Name he made up for himself when he was a middle schooler, we should all be lucky Tom Riddle wasn't conducting a reign of terror under the alias of Vlad DarkScythe or some poo poo
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Oct 5, 2025 21:15
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Rick and Voldemorty
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Oct 5, 2025 21:21
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I mean, if she studied Greco-Roman history, she ought to be aware they had shitters
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Oct 5, 2025 22:02
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The whole 'wizards poo poo on the floor' thing is... weird. Ok, so in the books, the castle has modern plumbing and toilets and no one makes any comment on that. But! The chamber of secrets, created one thousand years ago, is hooked up to one of these modern day bathrooms. While indoor plumbing is older than you'd think , these are modern style toilets and sinks, so not that old. So, either wizards have had modern bathrooms for a millenia, or they renovated the castle relatively recently and randomly hooked up the snake pipe to the sink pipes without looking into it. A fan pointed this out to Rowling at a convention and Rowling went with the second option. There's also another scene where Dumbledore says he was wandering around the castle at night and needed to piss, and then found a room full of chamberpots that vanished his mess (foreshadowing the room of requirement). So again, waste disposal and bathrooms are a solved problem (in some ways I do wonder why they bother with piping away the waste, if they can just vanish it). No need to poo poo on the floor, even without magic. In the series itself, no, there's no suggestion they poo poo on the floor, just a minor writing mistake. Years later on, the hogwarts facts twitter or whatever it was called, which was 'official' and worked with Rowling to get info, but wasn't run by Rowling, said they poo poo on the floor and vanished it before copying muggle toilets. So it's this- Rowling did a minor worldbuilding oopsie, came up with a sort of reasonable excuse, and then in as her brain started melting post-series/billionairedom, she shat out a weird little thing, having forgotten not only what she'd writing, but common sense and decorum, or someone operating in her name did so. Mazerunner fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Oct 5, 2025 |
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Oct 5, 2025 22:37
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