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Zesty posted:It was written by a committee of idiots trying to check all the boxes. Isn't it entirely the product of Rowling?
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Oct 9, 2020 23:27
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Worse. The films aren't the result of a committee trying and failing to reconcile mutually exclusive viewpoints and to create a shoggoth that appeals to everyone. It's the result of a single idiot trying and failing to tell what they consider to be a good story.
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Oct 10, 2020 02:27
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You don't have playlists! I want to watch these in order! 
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Oct 13, 2020 07:27
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Who What Now posted:Mom Weasley turned Bellatrix into a dessicated mummy-corpse, that's got to be a form of dark magic beyond Snape's papercut spell. So dark magic can't be all that uncommon. In the movies she just explodes. Shame we didn't get that. That sounds cooler.
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Nov 7, 2020 02:40
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I think I said it in this thread before, but like by sheer accident Rowling created one of the most scathing satires of modern liberalism, centrism, and the 90s End of History mythology ever written. Like I honestly believe if it wasn't for all her tweets and the mountains of evidence we have showing what a piece of poo poo she is, that future generations might mistakenly think HP was a brilliant work of satire on par with A Modest Proposal. I mean she literally, by accident, created the metaphor of a magical world of wonder where the literal foundations house a racist murder-beast. Hogwarts is literally built on racism.
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Feb 15, 2021 14:15
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, she fatted fatly.
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Feb 22, 2021 23:27
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rollick posted:Those pics take me back to the days of browsing Elfwood on dialup and wishing I could draw as good. Holy gently caress Elfwood. I remember them! I haven't thought of them in like a decade! Aaand they're apparently closed since 2016? Alas. Was hoping for a nostalgia voyage.
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Mar 24, 2021 12:20
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Wasn't there a good let's read/sporking of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality here? I meant to read it but never got around to it.
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Apr 15, 2021 17:07
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Can anyone account for Macavity's whereabouts during WW2?
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Sep 6, 2021 10:47
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FunkyAl posted:"Molly, I've built a magical robot to help around the house" Why would a post-scarcity society with chattel slavery ever bother inventing a robot?
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Dec 17, 2021 19:18
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The thing about wizards vs muggles is that, and I think I legit made this post earlier, Rowling has created a narrative where her racist villains are actually 100% correct. There is literally nothing a muggle can do that a wizard of similar means cannot, while the world's strongest, sexiest, smartest, hardest-working, luckiest, wealthiest, greatest muggle will never be able to cast the simplest of spells. Wizards are objectively a superior class of being to muggles. Like other than the nonsense about muggle-borns 'stealing' their magic, everything the racist villains in the original series are saying is loving, like, true. It's like writing a story about how racism is bad, but then portraying every single black character in it as a 4chan caricature. She's telling us that racism is bad, but she's showing us that it's actually correct. I mean, hell, the entire loving basic premise and appeal of Harry Potter is that it is loving cool as hell and really fun to be a wizard. The entire fantasy that draws in its fans is 'boy, wouldn't it own to be part of the master race?'
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Jan 30, 2022 07:43
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Zesty posted:
Obviously they are still wrong but like my point is that Rowling wrote a story where the people claiming to be the master race actually loving are. Like you cannot make a story about how racism is bad when your story also includes the premise that one race is superior to another and where the main appeal of the story for its fans is how fun and cool it would be to be part of that master race. Again, if I was writing it I would do the reveal that blood purity is like IRL ‘race science’ and complete nonsense. It’s all a lie that the wizards promulgate to keep their old boys club exclusive, and muggle-horns are just lucky randos chosen now and then to help get some new blood in and also the occasional prodigy who has enough native talent that they cannot be ignored. Like the parallels are right there and it’s telling Rowling chose to write a universe where race science is correct. Presto posted:Except this superior class of people doesn't understand simple mechanical devices and thinks a monetary system based on prime numbers is a swell idea. Harry and Hermione and even Ron and others have no problem. It is a question of desire, not ability. Wizards choose to be luddites. A muggle cannot choose to cast a spell.
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Jan 31, 2022 00:20
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Jazerus posted:i mean, you're definitely supposed to be charmed by the people around harry, but from book 2 onward it's supposed to be clear that the system doesn't work. the school board and courts are trivially corrupted by a known nazi in book 2, and then the minister is shown to be a moron in book 3; in book 4, everyone from the ministry is either overly zealous in upholding a clearly pedantic and hypocritical legalism, or a complete buffoon. the ministry is quite clearly consistently operating at a sub-bojo level of competence throughout the series, even very early on. I've said it a lot but Harry Potter is seriously one of the most brilliant and masterful satires/parodies of the End of History, liberalism, and centrism ever put to paper. Just, like, by accident. If Rowling didn't give us mountains of evidence via Twitter and interviews and poo poo of what an idiot she is, people in future generations would probably think she was some brilliant leftist satirist tearing down the status quo in a scathing and comedic critique. Like the books almost go out of their way to point out that Voldemort and the fascism he embodies are a symptom and not a cause and that the rot is endemic to the wizarding world and has permeated basically every aspect of its culture and society, and yet they act like when he's defeated hooray, problems are over forever! Like it's not even just a leftist reading; Harry is textually weirded out by the racist statue in the Ministry the first time he visits, well before Voldemort's take-over. The book goes out of its way to point out the rot is already there and Voldemort is just a symptom, and even has Harry loving notice it. Not to mention how coming of age stories usually have the protag recognizing their own agency and to some extent gently spurning their mentor/parental figure as they come into their own; instead Harry is proudly and explicitly 'Dumbledore's man' to the very end, despite the books going out of their way to point out how problematic Big D is. Like it's so loving on-the-nose. The books go out of their way to show that the system is completely rotten to the core and that Voldemort and Grindlewald and all the other villains and problems are symptoms of this rot and will keep being produced until meaningful change is enacted, and yet at the last minute our heroes all decide that actually fighting and dying for this perverse staus quo is cool and good. Rowling made a masterpiece by complete accident and I have no idea how to really process that.
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Feb 12, 2022 16:20
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Jazerus posted:who rules wizard russia anyway? tsar nicholas IV or zombie wizard lenin? You mean Ivan IV?
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Feb 28, 2022 20:42
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Did Rowling get radicalized or something? Like I know the signs were always there, but she seemed a lot better at hiding it for years. Like she's so ridiculously cruel and petty that it honestly seems shocking there was ever a time where she was able to maintain the facade of 'progressive with some problematic elements in her works.'
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Mar 8, 2022 17:14
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Zore posted:Yeah, there's a really weird culture that's radicalized a lot of British celebs and as they've gotten more and more backlash over it they've all double or triple downed. Honestly Rowling isn't even as bad as some of the others like Graham Linehan who blew up his entire life including his marriage, career etc because he had to keep being worse and worse to trans people. I suppose it might also be the fact that wealth insulates you from consequences so you don't have to bother being anything but your most primal self because, what are people going to do? But yeah, I'm someone who's gone on record in this thread thinking that the signs were so obviously there that the books read as deliberate satire and critique of liberalism and centrism, but even then modern day Rowling is so vicious and mean that I legitimately have trouble imagining how she was ever able to convince people she was anything other than what she is.
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Mar 8, 2022 17:35
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Jazerus posted:i mean yes the books are clearly satirical, but the thing is that rowling wrote an entirely different satire than whatever she was aiming for, which is why people were consistently stunned by her shittiness before it really sunk in that yes, she's just Like That. for all of their faults, the books themselves basically present a world where the right-wing is consistently wrong about everything and prone to fascist violence, and liberals and centrists buy into a status quo that is still riddled with racial stereotypes and genuinely believe things like "house elves want to be slaves", "goblins don't care about anything except gold", etc. when it is patently obvious from the perspective of the reader that these are roles the other magical peoples have been forced into at the point of a wand. I know, that was my argument. My argument which I've said verbatim in this thread is that by accident Rowling wrote one of the most biting, scathing, and brilliant satires and critiques of liberalism and centrism ever put to paper. She introduces and deftly shows that systemic problems require systemic solutions and that liberals are unable and unwilling to provide. She goes out of her way to show how Voldemort and the bigotry he represents are symptoms of the broken system, and yet treats the defeat of Voldemort as tantamount to the defeat of the system of injustice. Like Harry literally gets the idea to become a cop given to him by a Neo Nazi. It's incredible. If Rowling didn't go out of her way to show us what she is, I sincerely believe that future generations would consider Harry Potter a work of genius and her name would go down with the likes of Jonathan Swift. Harry Potter is one of my favorite things and a brilliant work of satire, just for none of the reasons the author intended. It's incredible. It's why I love the Shrieking Shack and could listen to it endlessly. By sheer accident Rowling created one of the great works of leftist criticism. I mean heck, the comparisons of Voldemort to Trump are even quite spot-on. An insane narcissist who co-opts an existing fascist movement and who all the liberals then focus on, and once they're defeated the liberals act like the problem of fascism and the underlying issues that spawned the fascism have been solved. Noseless man bad!
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Mar 8, 2022 18:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think the key concept that a lot of people don't seem to really get their heads around most of the time is that there actually isn't some universally objective unification of all political issues on the political spectrum so it turns out people respond to separate issues differently rather than just being a straightforward single spot on a spectrum. We are talking about an author who wrote a story where people in the 1930s are villains for wanting to prevent WW2 and the Holocaust.
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Mar 8, 2022 21:12
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Sydin posted:I'm not an expert but she's big into feminism and from what I understand feminist theory in the UK developed with a trans-exclusionary bent to it. The whole "TERF island" thing is that there are a lot of UK feminists who on paper you'd expect to be allies are actually weirdly vocal about their transphobia. She's not big into feminism either though. She says she is, but she isn't. The HP books are misogynistic as all hell. Like Rowling is not a TERF. She's not a feminist, let alone a radical one. She just hates, among other people, transpeople.
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Mar 8, 2022 21:56
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They werne't just local fascists. Like Lucius was, if I recall, Voldemort's right-hand man or at least inner circle even during the first war. Yeah, Operation Paperclip and stuff and lots of Nazis got away with their crimes, but that was usually because the Nazis were somehow in possession of unique talents or something that made nations see them as a valuable asset. Lucius turned state's evidence after the first war, so it makes sense the Malfoys would get away with it then, but after the second war? Lmao. Even with how nothing meaningful changed and how lovely liberals are - and realistically Rowling captures that - I still feel like the Malfoys would have explicitly been made an example of considering that this time around they had nothing useful to provide the state and are second time offenders. Then again, Trump led an insurrection and didn't face any consequences for it whatsoever so I suppose, yet again, Rowling is better at capturing how worthless libs are in the face of fascism than anyone might expect.
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Apr 10, 2022 03:40
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Draco's a kid and Harry's a dumb enough idiot and cryptofascist that I can see him going to bat for him. But it's more Lucius I find it hard to believe that he would not be at the very least basically soft exiled and cut out of society as a pariah. Like dude was Hitler's right-hand man twice and the second time around didn't have the option of turning state's evidence as an out.
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Apr 10, 2022 08:38
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Lottery of Babylon posted:A few people have mentioned this detail, but it's not actually true. Karkaroff turned state's evidence after the first war, but Lucius didn't; he just falsely claimed he was under the Imperius and bribed a bunch of people to acquit him. Huh. Did the movies maybe have the plot point about Lucius going state's evidence? Or is this legitimately something like 'beam me up Scotty' where it just is completely the imagination of the audience and somehow became widely accepted as a canon thing.
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Apr 11, 2022 00:45
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Boba Pearl posted:How come there's never been a David Attenborough documentary about a magical / alternate dimension??? I felt this is what Avatar should have been instead of Dances with Smurfs. Just make it a nature/anthropology documentary about some alien planet and its weird native flora and fauna. Like I feel llike it's fairly obvious that's basically what Cameron's interest was in Pandora, too.
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Apr 13, 2022 03:36
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Rotten Red Rod posted:The worst sin any woman can commit in a Harry Potter story is being ugly or TOO hot. How dare anyone be anything other than above average pretty?! It's anyone, not just women. Her ire is most pronounced against women, because Rowling is a misogynist, but it's really a universal rule. The Shrieking Shack bring it up; if you're anything more than a 6 or less than a 4 you're evil.
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Apr 13, 2022 08:00
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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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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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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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Babe Magnet posted:it's kind of a big part of centaur mythology To be fair, Centaurs are also with the exception of Chiron kind of universally assholes who cannot co-exist peacefully with civilization. They are literally the idea of the wilderness given form, as are most Greek mythical monsters and foes. Despite this, I seem to recall Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition having them as Chaotic Good. Point being, while I agree that rape is an enormous part of classical Centaur mythology, it's also not really part and parcel of modern fantasy that uses them. That said, yeah, Rowling absolutely intended it to be implied rape.
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Apr 19, 2022 09:21
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BigglesSWE posted:I mean I think the second movie really soured the enthusiasm big time, because it cemented just how short sighted the creative decision clearly are in this particular series. Clarence, the boy who was literally blown to pieces in the first movie? Yeah he’s back, no idea how. Here’s an assistant that fawns over Newt and is never brought back again. Jacob remembers things now! How? Dunno, maybe Queenie broke through somehow, not the biggest leap I guess but also Queenie is using the imperius curse on him, which the other books established is a very nasty thing to do. Jacob was super charming, and I suppose in theory Queenie was fun but the execution was off. All the other characters were pretty meh to bad. Like the cop was awful, Creedance Clearwater Revival was boring, and Newt could probably have worked but as a supporting character not the lead.
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Apr 22, 2022 07:16
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I mean it's hard to have tension in a story where the main villain is, from the start of the books, known to have not only failed to kill an infant, but to have failed at it so badly that he died in the process. We are asked to be intimidated by a man who literally failed to kill a helpless infant.
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Jul 19, 2022 01:38
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Also the minority is a Jewish caricature out of Der Sturmer that is literally kidnapping children. Like it's loving wild to me that a AAA game in the year of our lord two-thousand and twenty-three has 'literal blood libel' as the plot.
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Jan 6, 2023 11:42
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I still cannot believe that in the year of our lord two-thousand and twenty-three a AAA video game is coming out where the plot is literally just blood libel.
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Jan 9, 2023 14:00
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Yeah. The Transvestigations people are like only a few years away from declaring that actually women in general do not exist and never have existed and the very idea of women is a lie perpetrated by the Jews or whatever and that it's men in drag all the way down. It's really wild stuff.
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Jan 21, 2023 09:46
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'Open world game where you are a student at a wizard school' sounds like fun. I'd like that game. This game looks kind of meh, and is an evil piece of hateful propaganda made by an evil fascist, but like yeah, talking about just the quality of the game: I think it's going to live or die on how well it sells that core fantasy. I feel like Bully sold the core fantasy of being in a wacky boarding school pretty well. Can this live up to or exceed that standard? Because yeah. Right now it just kind of seems like Skyrim in Harry Potter cosplay, rather than an actual wizard school game. EDIT: Like the appeal and focus should be 'here's a cool school and the weird and interesting teachers and students you'll be interacting with.' Not 'you can torture people lol' and 'here's the race of ungrateful untermenschen you need to remind of their place.'
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Jan 21, 2023 23:11
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To be fair, weren't Rocksteady similarly a 'lol who?' dev before Arkham Asylum? Like I seem to recall there being some game within the last 20 years, and I think an open world one at that, which had a pedigree of jack and poo poo and yet managed to completely blow everyone away. Granted, I would be shocked if this game is anything better than 'okay' and any deeper than a tide pool, but still.
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Jan 22, 2023 13:32
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I can't believe the game about putting down a racial uprising of child-stealing bankers that look like they would have been seen as a bit extreme for Der Sturmer and based on the writings of a lady who pals around with self-admitted fascists was made by a Nazi.
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Jan 22, 2023 13:39
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Rotten Red Rod posted:The Avengers game was supposed to be a sure seller as well and look how that turned out. I don't think it's success is assured at all - word of mouth means a LOT and if people know it's a 6/10 or below it'll hurt sales. While fascists really hate Marvel and Disney, except Avatar, the Avengers game wasn't quite part of the culture war the way this thing is. I don't think fascists buying the game to own the libs is going to be enough to make it a hit in and of itself, but I mean, I dunno, could the spite-buy audience be enough to push it from 'middlingly successful' to 'successful by the standards of its publisher'? We know that nine times out of ten when gamers say they wont buy something due to principles, they will, but is there any data on how often they will buy something they say they will on principles?
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Jan 24, 2023 03:39
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I mean isn't part of it that it's ancient Mesopotamian demon magic since the whole thing isn't merely that Hollywood is full of degenerates pushing some nefarious trans agenda, but also that it's part of some insane Illuminati conspiracy stretching back to Biblical times?
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Jan 25, 2023 08:17
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Star Wars was a romantic and idealistic story about love and forgiveness triumphing over cynicism and hatred. Luke saves the day not by listening to the instructions of the 'wise' old masters but instead by listening to his heart, staying true to his beliefs, and choosing idealism over pragmatism. Part of what makes the sequels so gross is how they fail to understand the emotional and thematic climax of the entire franchise. The Emperor is not defeated when Anakin yeets him down a pit; he's defeated the moment Luke turns off his lightsaber and chooses forgiveness over anger. It's a complete story that ends in a moment of thematic triumph. Harry Potter on the other hand, yeah. It's a liberal centrist fantasy and has a non-ending. It's part of why the Trump = Voldemort comparisons are, hilariously enough, kind of spot on. Voldemort is defeated but neither the fascist movement he co-opted nor the systemic issues that created and sustain that fascist movement are at any point addressed. Nothing has been solved and no meaningful victory has been achieved. It's a story that ends with nothing meaningful being achieved or addressed. Unlike Star Wars, the same villain coming back again is entirely thematically appropriate because, you know, Rowling has by accident written the most incredible satire and parody of liberalism I'm aware of.
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Jan 25, 2023 10:17
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She and Elon are in some kind of incredible arms race to see who can be the most pathetic person twitter now that Donnie isn't there.
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Jan 30, 2023 05:00
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