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Rotten Red Rod posted:Also the only queer character in the entire franchise was boyfriends with wizard Hitler, after which he never had another romantic relationship ever again No, no, there was a gay student called um Guyshagger McNotintogirls he was just never mentioned because.
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Mar 28, 2022 05:26
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HIJK posted:Love to see nazis show up in my magical movies that are supposed to be about how cool animals are Indiana Jones was right there to rip off. Newt heads for Outer Exoticistan or Foreignwazia to find the Atomic Snotgobbler but oh no Nazis are looking for it too to make it a War Weapon! Running around, punching, cute magic animals, humorous stereotypes, in the end the Nazis get their plans foiled, their faces punched and their snot atomically gobbled, hooray hooray. But nooo, JK thinks she's Dark and Morally Complex these days, so we got... this poo poo.
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Mar 28, 2022 09:44
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I could see "appeasement bad" coming up as well. "gently caress Muggles."
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Mar 29, 2022 14:02
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Lottery of Babylon posted:According to the author, Dumbledore really never got with anyone else: 4) Family-friendly romance with Wizard Hitler!
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Apr 3, 2022 20:17
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Beartaco posted:Okay so I'm rewatching the Crimes of Grindlewald in "anticipation" for the new film. Muggle/Wizard relationships is a blatant allegory for... something. Miscegenation, LGBT relationships, whatever. The point is the opposition to such relationships is treated in the books as a bigoted stance. Much like how Grindlewald claims he wants to stop the holocaust, he also claims in the film that he wants to decriminalize such relationships in his speech to Queenie. The whole situation is so loving bizarre. I've finally given in and watched the first 2 FBs (yay Sky marathons) after despising them from reviews, and one of the main reasons I didn't get round to it till now was the first film trying to present wizards as an oppressed minority. Which. Does. Not. loving. Work. At all. Especially with the earlier canon that UK wizards and witches just thought being burned was funny. Wizards are not in any danger from muggles. And muggle/wizard intermarriage is being forbidden by the wizards in this don't forget; they're the ones in control of the situation; they're not the victims here. (And that Rowling saw fit to write this ohhh-we're-sooo-oppressed-by-scary-muggles set in this time period when black people (and others) were actually genuinely seriously oh my god loving oppressed and interracial marriages/relationships were forbidden/quite possibly fatal may be the most disgustingly tin-eared crap she's ever written and by god she's come out with some stonkers. What was anyone involved with this thinking?) But yeah, by any reasonable metric US wizard society is a fascist separatist police state. It seems to be entirely run by the aurors, it can condemn wizards to immediate execution with no oversight or appeal, it's perfectly happy to let wizard kids be abused (eg Credence & co) and sanction wizards who try and protect them. While waving at the Protocols of the Elders of Muggledom as an excuse. These are the guys we're supposed to be on-side with? Going by the first 2 films they even seem to be trying to get you to sympathise with Grindelwald; fighter of fascists. In the beginning of the 2nd movie when they're transferring him there's even a throwaway line about how he keeps persuading his guards to sympathise with him so they've cut his tongue out and it's just... WTF. OK, I'm all for deplatforming nazis, but come the gently caress on Jesus Christ what. But I don't think that's even deliberate. There's just no... political understanding going on. At all. No philosophy. No agency. She genuinely does not seem to understand what are good and bad things to do. Dumbledore and Grindelwald aren't debating fairness or ethics or morality or anything; it's just G is The Bad Guy and D is The Good Guy and the only thing G needs to do to win is kill D so he needs to get scary black cloud thingy guy on-side because he's the only one who can kill D. There's no conflict caused by love or sentiment or nostalgia; they can't kill each other simply because they did a blood-brother spell thing. It's all insanely mechanical. It creeps the gently caress out of me.
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Apr 4, 2022 16:33
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Zesty posted:Some people are just born wrong. - JK Rowling Come to think of it, does the 3rd film have any explanation for the Dumbledore-baby-outta-nowhere twist at the end of #2, or was Grindelwald just lying? Edgar Allen Ho posted:They're going to be magical scarlet pimpernels saving aristocrats from the guillotine, and no knowledge or understanding of the french revolutionary period will be displayed. Napoléon will be revealed to be but a puppet of the dread liche Guy Malfaisance de l'Estrange de Malfoy-Mailly. He will be defeated by the british wizards alone. His crimes will include real sicko poo poo, and being french. Being French is the worst bit of course.
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Apr 5, 2022 21:54
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Beartaco posted:I know they get a bad wrap but those movies are pretty good. I am entirely down with the concept that anyone who hoicks Excalibur out of the stone gets to kick the Windsors out of Buckingham Palace and institute indoor corgi polo. Go King Bob!
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Apr 6, 2022 14:19
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Mx. posted:oh well that's good, because rowling has always treated asian culture with the proper respect yeah, a Chinese unicorn is in charge of picking the ultra-boss-super-wizard so now Racism And Appropriation Are Officially Over apparently.
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Apr 9, 2022 12:07
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Sydin posted:It lends credence to my theory that JK plotted out DH less as a cohesive narrative and more as a series of setpieces she came up with and wanted to hit: Harry gets into a broom shoot-out with Voldemort, Harry escapes an attack on a wedding, Harry digs a grave for Dobby along the coastline, etc but then didn't actually bother thinking through the justifications for or consequences of what happens in those setpieces, outside of character deaths. So everything between the big setpieces is either boring as poo poo or doesn't make much sense. Well, it's for sure how FBB2 seems to have been shat out as well, so makes sense.
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Apr 11, 2022 19:06
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JethroMcB posted:
Did I miss something in 2? (Probably quite a lot; it was loud and incoherent and annoying.) Was there any clue that he was actually a brother or a nephew or anything other than some random Dumbledore second cousin once removed or whatever? Vaguely related, why does anyone never think of checking with Muggles? (j/k JK I know why not.) "Who am I?" "Well Muggles keep these things called passenger lists so all we need to do is get the one from the ship you were on, read it to find out how many other babies were there then cast jeremykylius on their relatives to find out which one was you." Newt needs a trip to Paris? Get a lift from some East Anglian with a sailing boat rather than some overcharging Portkey smuggler who'll probably shop you for a few extra galleons anyway. Etc.
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Apr 12, 2022 15:09
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Rotten Red Rod posted:I believe Grindlewald reveals it to him in the final scene of the movie. He tells him his name is Aurelius Dumbledore, phoenix shows up, he blows a chunk off a mountain. As far as I can remember there's been no previous mention of a missing Dumbledore baby and we're not given any idea of how he's related to the other Dumbledores; son? Nephew? Second cousin once removed? One of the embarrassing inbred village Dumbledores the rest of the family pretends don't exist? We're obviously all supposed to wet our knickers over the reveal that he's ~eeeee A DUMBLEDORE~, but big whoop, who cares, it's essentially meaningless anyway. Just more of this weird fascistic obsession with ~bloodlines~. Guy A. Person posted:I was rewatching the Jenny Nicholson video on FB2 the other day in anticipation of hot takes on the new movie, and she mentioned the fact that Newt is basically put on a "no travel" list which then never comes up again at all. It would have been an actually insanely clever thing to tie Jacob in here and why his presence is important: while the wizards are running through the various wizarding travel methods (e.g. "they'll have someone watching the Floo Network and put extra constraints on port keys" etc) you could have Jacob chime in with "why don't we just charter a boat?" or whatever. Yeah! This! The movies could be salvageable if someone halfway sane and competent had got a go at the scripts, but: Rotten Red Rod posted:Apparently what happened is someone had the idea to make a documentary-style movie about Newt, and JK Rowling stepped in and totally overhauled the whole project. What's unsaid is she clearly has no interest in the Fantastic Beasts part (or at least lost interest after movie 1) and viewed it as vehicle to tell the Dumbledore story she's clearly much more interested in. It's actually kind of funny watching her try and shoehorn magic animals in at plot points to justify the title, though it doesn't make up for the scary oblivious fascism apologia etc.
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Apr 12, 2022 19:51
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Rotten Red Rod posted:It's probably due to Johnny Depp's whispercore acting but he does explicitly say "your own brother seeks to destroy you". Ah right, I missed that, thanks. Not that it mattered thanks to the retcon oh god how is she so bad at this?
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Apr 12, 2022 20:13
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Zore posted:The Fantastic Beasts movies were supposed to sort of adapt this but Rowling derailed it into instead going into Dumbledore and Wizard Hitler poo poo without really accounting for the fact that our main characters are mostly bumbling comedy characters meant for a fun movie about magical animal hijinks. The first movie vacillates between that and going into some insanely dark poo poo with child abuse and how fascist wizard USA is for some reason and the second movie+ almost completely drop the whole whimsical naturalism angle so you have Don't forget that in the first movie fuckup cop Tina Goldstein has had to Hand In Her Badge and been banned from cop HQ for punching the woman who's abused Ezra Miller's character into manifesting shrieky dark murdermagic thing. Said woman knows about wizards and keeps preaching against them but hasn't had her mind wiped because... JKR couldn't be arsed to think that much about it I guess? Or is she meant to be a squib and no-one cares what squibs do to other squibs? And yeah, Wizard Hitler is easily the most relatable character in these movies. Wizard society sucks! It's horrible! Who wouldn't want to change it? I have a bizarre suspicion that he's "supposed" to be a Jeremy Corbyn-alike and she thinks left-wing demagogues all gloat in private about how they're going to institute pogroms once those suckers who want a better world vote them into power... Zore posted:But for real the existence of Obscurials is loving wild considering how much child abuse we know Harry and Neville went through growing up. Like you'd think if that was an important setting detail you might explain how a child beaten and locked under a staircase for 11 years or one who keeps getting almost murdered by his relatives for not being magical enough managed to avoid it. You'd think wizard child protective services would be an essential and well-funded part of wizard government just to avoid poo poo like this, but apparently all the funding goes to Aurors.
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Apr 13, 2022 11:50
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Cranappleberry posted:and to do this day people think it was the polio. Mass obliviation!
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Apr 13, 2022 16:11
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josh04 posted:https://twitter.com/Ch1KeronS/status/1514111163247771648?t=XheDS__XMJzkZOmltzhwiA&s=19 Well, no, there's still her sister, who keeps mindwiping her muggle boyfriend to make him stay with her and now works for Wizard Hitler.
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Apr 13, 2022 17:08
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The main black character in Fantastic Beasts is Leta Lestrange. She's a cop, oh and her dad drugged and raped her mom, because we can't just have one rape plot in the family adventure film. So when Yusuf's dad went to the Aurors and complained that Lestrange had mind-controlled, kidnapped and raped his wife and assaulted his son when the boy tried to stop him, we can safely assume they told him it was a domestic dispute and they wouldn't be getting involved, right?
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Apr 14, 2022 08:37
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I won't say movie would be better if it was a 120 minute Jude Law/Mads Mikkelsen sex scene. I also won't say it wouldn't. I will say that's the only thing that could conceivably make me pay money to watch it.
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Apr 14, 2022 09:34
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Mx. posted:girl created a world where a potion can give you a vagina, zero problems with long term use and no strings attached Imagine being so stuck in that biology is destiny mindset that you're NO NO NOT EVEN WITH MAGIC about it. FFS.
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Apr 17, 2022 09:29
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Cranappleberry posted:my point is, it doesn't necessarily have to make sense. It's magic and the system already doesn't make sense. If people want to project themselves into a fantastical world and be who they wanna be or imagine characters in that setting being who they wanna be then there is no downside to that. The author doesn't have ownership over fantasy. Oh yeah, but the point I was trying to make is it's so bizarre that she can't even accept gender changes as a possibility in a fantasy where you can literally make up whatever the gently caress spells you want. Genderus Conversus! Accio Testiculos! Expelliuterus! Author says NO.
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Apr 17, 2022 18:47
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Mameluke posted:Really the kids should have killed Umbridge themselves. Points if it's in a sort of ironic Roald Dahl way that doesn't make the kids culpable It's never mentioned what actually happened but all of her kitten plates now have the kittens eating/playing with a chunk of something recognizably Umbridge.
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Apr 19, 2022 16:15
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Liquid Communism posted:Hard to train another generation of kids to casually brutalize the natives if you don't dehumanize them at home, after all. But it wasn't racist because sometimes they'd let suitably rich and powerful natives' kids in too!
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Apr 24, 2022 11:29
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Rotten Red Rod posted:That's what people thought this franchise was building towards, because Dumbledore famously defaults Grindelwald in 1945. But these movies are set far before that, so unless there's a massive time skip in the next two movies (assuming they happen), you'll never actually get to see Grindelwald defeated. "Oopsie 5 movies in and we've only got to 1937, guess you'll have to greenlight um 3 more movies tee hee"?
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Apr 24, 2022 17:49
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Liquid Communism posted:"Here's a list of school supplies to buy, starving waif who owns a single set of clothes and has never worn shoes! Remember not to lose them over the summer when you get sent back to your starving parents as another mouth to feed!" The Adventures of Arry Pohher, Workhouse Wizard Hogwarts letter flies in window APWW: what's that? I can't loving read (No-one comes to fetch him because he didn't have important wizarding parents) APWW: dies of malnutrition age 11 1/2 JKR: the system works as intended!
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Apr 25, 2022 06:46
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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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Asterite34 posted:The real death knell was Mortdecai Such a pity, the novels are terrific evil grumpy sleazy fun. If they'd cast Matt Berry or similar it could have been great, but Depp? Really?
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Apr 29, 2022 14:26
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HIJK posted:She has read the Narniabseries but I dont remember her name dropping anything else She contributed a foreword to a reprint of Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse, saying it was one of her fave childhood books IIRC. Not sure if she was one of the people whining on about how it was Political Correctness Gorn Mad that the villainous Black Men got a tactful name change to the Dark Men. (Not quite as horrifying as that sounds; it's a very colour-themed book with characters called Heliotrope, Scarlet etc, the Black Men have black hair and a hereditary grudge against the heroine's family for what even people in the book think are very good reasons. And at the end it's all sorted out and everyone's friends. But I absolutely sympathise with modern editors getting an attack of the cringe.)
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May 26, 2022 12:38
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Skwirl posted:Yeah, serialized books for kids and young adults absolutely existed before Harry Potter. Yeah - Harry Potter's a fantasy version of the old boarding-school-story genre. There's always been a subset of those which follow a set of kids year by year through their time at school; Malory Towers, St Clare's etc. HP was just the first to merge that with the wizard/witch/magic school trope - there'd been plenty of wizard/witch school stories before then, but none that did the year-by-year as the protagonists mature thing.
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Jun 6, 2022 13:00
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Doctor Spaceman posted:The Worst Witch had already done that too, though without a "one year per book" rate. Point. I knew I'd miss something. I'm glad I grew up with the Borribles and Green Knowe instead of Harry Potter though. Chaos, confusion, sticking with your mates, fighting the Wombles and the police and being polite to ghosts and any gorillas who hole up in your shrubbery. A much better message than growing up to be the police.
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Jun 7, 2022 16:46
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Sydin posted:Can't wait for the movie about Dumbledor's fascist summer fling with Hitler. Summer lovin' had me a blast Summer lovin' fashed me so fast I met a boy crazy for me Met a boy cute as can be Summer days dreamin' away Of uh, oh those gen-ocides Oh well oh well oh well oh huh
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Jun 8, 2022 18:40
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halokiller posted:Child abuse is required for Dumbledore's plan to take down Voldemort. He meant Harry to be an Obscurial all along, then had to switch plans when that didn't happen.
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Jun 17, 2022 14:39
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Violet_Sky posted:Thats how I feel about Crimes of Grindlewald. Two babies die for no reason other than Villain Bad How else are you going to tell Which Side's The Baddies in these movies, though?
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Jun 25, 2022 16:43
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Rotten Red Rod posted:The sad part about the Fantastic Beasts movies is that there IS a fun movie there, and the fixes aren't hard. Excise everything having to do with Dumbledore and Grindlewald, and just make it an adventure buddy comedy about Newt and Jacob as they work together to save magic animals - basically what half of the first movie was until it was suddenly about Credence. Having a muggle's perspective on the magical world is a fun new angle for the series, and Dan Fogler is CLEARLY the standout actor of the cast, so he really should be the key to the entire series instead of there basically out of obligation in 2/3. The lore thing isn't necessarily a problem; just dump or ignore anything they don't want. The whole series is made up of asspulls anyway; wing it in the name of fun and a half-decent creative team means no-one except ultranerds'll give a drat that whatever was contradicted in a line in some Pottermore article from 2007. The thing is that JKR's decided that she's a Deep and Serious Writer who can tackle the Rise of Wizard Fascism And That's What These Films Are Going To Be About Dammit, while in fact she has the moral/ethical/political/historical understanding and knowledge of your everyday unmagical liquorice allsort. And by god it shows.
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Jun 25, 2022 16:50
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BigglesSWE posted:I thought it was dumb to invoke Holocaust imagery in FB2 but boy howdy JK just had to double down and establish the German Ministry of Magic in this latest film, opening up a horrifying can of worms regarding that Ministry’s agenda and actions during the Hitler years. Even the first movie was insanely crass for evoking Jim Crow poo poo with muggle/wizard separatism, intermarriage being forbidden, etc. I'm actually kind of curious whether anyone in authority or with any kind of personal connection ever pointed any of this out to her and got blown off, or whether they've all been too polite to say anything to the Rich Genius Writer.
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Jun 25, 2022 21:36
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Alhazred posted:I hate to give credit to JKR, but that's what the villain of the movies wants us to believe. The good guys realize that the muggles aren't a threat. No, it's a general belief in wizard society. The opening of the first movie has a newspaper headline ANTI-WIZARD SENTIMENT ON THE RISE in with the ones about what a menace Grindelwald is and how he's trying to start a war with the muggles, and there's no hint that those are are particularly tabloid papers. (You'd expect at least one showing a bit of support for the big G since he's meant to be such an inspiring and dangerous demagogue but as ever...) Pththya-lyi posted:What is the point of the Second Salemers in the first movie, if not to show that Muggle bigotry is a legitimate threat to wizards like Creedence? The film treats Creedence's family situation as an allegory for a young queer/LGB* person growing up in a homophobic religious environment: the mother abuses all her children, but treats her magical child worst of all specifically because she can sense that he is magical. And the second movie establishes that Grindelwald gains followers by pointing out real problems in bad faith, so we have to accept that "Muggles are a threat to witches and wizards" is true in the world of the films. The movie tells us it is, but it makes zero sense. How can muggles be a threat? How can Credence's foster mother even know anything about them? They're supposed to loving obliviate anyone who finds out about them! Why hasn't Credence's abuser been obliviated as soon as a wizard hears her trying to tell muggle reporters that wizards exist? Tina's even in poo poo with the other Aurors for punching her out over her treatment of Credence and other kids, but not for not wiping her memory? Stupid movie can't even stay consistent to its own asspulled lore for 10 minutes.
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Jun 28, 2022 18:17
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muscles like this! posted:It all depends on how much WB wants to keep Rowling happy. The most recent one was a flop for a Harry Potter movie and had an extremely troubled production including paying millions of dollars to Depp after they fired him. So they probably aren't champing at the bit to make more. Do they have to worry about Ezra Miller's increasingly awful reputation too or did Credence definitively cark it in film 3?
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Jul 11, 2022 06:16
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Liquid Communism posted:Oh, no doubt, and chances are high IMHO James stopped him solely because it would screw up his chances with Evans if he knew her former best bud was going to get murdered by his friends and did nothing. Or he had enough sense to see that it'd royally gently caress over Lupin and quite possibly Dumbledore too; wizard society is paranoid enough about werewolves that if it came out that a werewolf student ate another student, even an unpopular half-blood nerd with no important relatives, there'd be a screaming shitstorm, a dead or locked-up-for-the-rest-of-his-days werewolf and a fired Headmaster. Wizards >= assholes.
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Jul 12, 2022 13:24
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No Soul Please, We're British
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Jul 17, 2022 12:50
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I don't think the famously worldly JK Rowling knows about Stonewall Jackson, and I'm not sure she knows about the Stonewall she'd care about either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots Stonewall is the biggest LBGTQ organisation/charity in the UK. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/
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Jul 22, 2022 06:30
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Liquid Communism posted:Yet it holds up when nobody realizes the ex-cop they hired to teach defense is actually a terrorist in disguise despite using spells that are a one-way ticket to hell prison on and in front of kids, and there being a huge number of ways to verify someone is who they say they are magically. Look, it was that way when I went to school and all this Muggle talk about "verifying references" and "child endangerment" is antithetical to the school experience I want my child to have!
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Jul 28, 2022 05:57
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YaketySass posted:Realistically students would mostly care about self-transfiguration but that doesn't really come up, for some reason. Except when Hermione cunningly gets her buck teeth fixed by saying "stop" a bit late. Wizards are for some reason really down on all forms of self-transfiguration in spite of it apparently being perfectly safe and permanent on the evidence of that.
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Jul 29, 2022 15:53
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