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There's always been some pretty harsh criticisms of the writing and the way Rowling promoted her personal story that were dismissed as coming from haters and curmudgeons, it's the bad politics and uncurious, privileged perspective that have progressively become harder to ignore thanks to her antics.
YaketySass fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Sep 22, 2020 |
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Sep 22, 2020 15:25
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Is there meaning to the concept of tourism when your community on the whole British Isles is maybe a couple thousands people who can all teleport if they're of age? These guys all know each other.Edgar Allen Ho posted:Does no one in Hogsmeade gently caress?
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Sep 25, 2020 23:52
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Really, technology rarely if ever features in the stories except as a plot device and less and less as it goes on; by the point of Deathly Hallows it might as well be in a fantasy universe. Hogwarts may well be in Scotland and follow a "hidden world" conceit but the setting itself is so detached from real life that the series has more in common with isekai/portal fantasy stories where the protagonist's lost contact with the ordinary world.
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Apr 14, 2021 13:15
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TinTower posted:I still don’t get how she could think you could have 400 quadrennial tournaments in less than a thousand years, though. Especially as the first World Cup was on an odd year and the one in the books was on an even year. initially they had one every couple of months but they started running out of kids to kill
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Apr 14, 2021 21:14
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HPMoR got a tons of free publicity from fans presenting it as "Harry deconstructs Rowling's hacky worldbuilding with real science and teaches you about it!" nerd power fantasy when the fanfic can't even achieve that, he basically just uses the Time-Turner he's given right at the start and everything else he does is by exploiting rules Yudkowsky made up on his own. All the while lecturing people about the author's own crank beliefs. Lots of people have gotten mileage out of "HP's magic doesn't make sense!?" and done it better than that, such as this comic here . Predictably, the comments are all about recommanding HPMoR.
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Apr 16, 2021 19:14
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If anything the "good guys" have the opposite problem to Petunia's resentment, where they're too apathetic toward people not inside their special club. House Elves, Magical Beasts, Muggles, Squibs*, whenever it comes up that "hey, isn't it kind of hosed up that you have all this power and they don't", they just shrug and go "welp, that's just how the world works, let's not treat them as badly as the bad guys". Harry's very first introduction to that world begins with Hagrid telling him "we can't reveal ourselves to Muggles, they'd want us to help them and poo poo" and everybody is basically fine with horrifying stuff like erasing memories or everything Azkaban-related if it's to support the status quo, they just don't like it when it happens to the wrong person. *The part where Harry discovers Filch takes obviously scammy lessons to learn Magic 101 is the saddest part of the whole series IMHO.
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Apr 17, 2021 16:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:An entirely offscreen process of building a romantic relationship. like father like son
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Apr 17, 2021 18:16
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amigolupus posted:It's kind of sad that while there's people like Sirius and Remus who can tell Harry stories about his dad, there wasn't anyone who can really tell Harry what his mom was like. Snape doesn't count since it took until he was dying to do so. It just seems like a weird story oversight that people kept mentioning how Lily was super popular and friends with people from different houses but no adult ever stops by to introduce themselves to Harry as Lily's close friend. Slughorn has a lot of good things to say about her but that's obviously filtered by him seeing her in an academic setting and his own personality and prejudices.
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Apr 18, 2021 11:35
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TinTower posted:Remember the massive controversy over the Lexicon when Rowling wanted to make her own encyclopedia? lmao @ the song
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Apr 19, 2021 22:34
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Zore posted:Weirdly there is a death penalty for animals that involves a dude with a large axe and a very technical appeals process. It's not that weird considering the great diversity of beings Wizards consider to be animals. Zore posted:Wizarding North America is somehow more dystopian and hosed up than Wizarding Britain according to those movies which is a hell of an accomplishment. lol, America deserves it but this is also 100% Rowling's inner  shining through.
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May 3, 2021 10:54
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He's also the most competent villain in the series. The overall plan was stupid but he played his part perfectly, it was his boss who couldn't manage the final blow.
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May 9, 2021 18:59
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"Looking back it was obvious something was up but he had such a pristine reputation at the time that nobody really bothered to investigate or worry about what his circle of friends was starting to look like" doesn't seem like much of a contradiction. If anything, the description of the system's utter complacency toward creeping fascism is one of the series' strengths, and much of the reason why annoying fans picked up the analogy and started inserting it everywhere. YaketySass fucked around with this message at 11:19 on May 11, 2021 |
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May 11, 2021 11:16
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Ccs posted:Came across this. Assuming LeGuin only read the first book, I’m wondering what ethically mean spirited aspects she saw within the work from the beginning. Probably all the fat jokes, for a start.
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May 16, 2021 19:46
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Hermione ranting over how she doesn't know anyone who voted for Brexit while Harry doesn't even understand what's going on but instinctively knew the public would choose the worst option.
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May 21, 2021 11:29
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why even bother with interior plumbing when you've got water summoning spells and poo poo on the floor
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Jun 7, 2021 10:24
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School's a familiar setting that provides structure to the protagonists and is a natural fit if they're young. And if it's a special one (the flattering kind of special) where the people accepted there are legitimately more capable than the normies and adventure happens, you get a version of "being sucked into the magical other world" that still has a lot of recognizable beats from real life along with a generous helping of media tropes related to school: the cliques, the super important competition, etc... It's the part where it's specifically a stuffy British-inspired boarding school that's a bit weirder, but I suppose people attribute them some sort of gothic mystique, especially if the school is both elite and old. It's the closest you're going to get to "the protagonist gets to live in a castle but they're not a literal aristocrat or anything". It's what The Magicians' making fun of, and what the whole Tumblr Dark Academia aesthetic is about, though I guess that one at least tries to engage with so-called "high culture" and real life knowledge. The comparison to anime and how omnipresent high school is is interesting, but weirdly enough I've never heard of a series where the school is a traditional Japanese castle instead of something more Western-inspired.
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Jun 27, 2021 07:33
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A big part of the school's layout and curriculum is already designed to get the students used to the idea that every non-Wizard is not so far removed from an object. You can casually create life with Transfigurations by turning a random object into a frog and then back again, lots of regular objects are enchanted to behave as if they're alive, ghosts and paintings are explicitly described as not having full interiority, and of course the presence of House Elves is almost entirely occulted, with their labor being indifferentiated from any random spell.
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Jul 13, 2021 17:42
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Cranappleberry posted:please let neither of them be foolish enough to be in a Harry Potter movie. They'll all be together in a MCU crossover movie first.
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Jul 28, 2021 07:29
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DC crossover but it's because they decided to pilfer Alan Moore's work some more and eventually reached that one LXG comic where Harry is the Antichrist.
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Jul 30, 2021 17:38
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Cranappleberry posted:if Mads Mikkelson just does his take on Hannibal Lector, I might actually watch it if it ever shows up on a streaming network I already pay for. I would be surprised if he goes farther than Dr Strange's level of  .
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Aug 7, 2021 02:40
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There were a lot of people praising the original series for its transition from whimsical kid book to something superficially more serious and dramatic, and it really feels like FB was an attempt at rushing this dynamic. Guess that's the brand now.
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Aug 7, 2021 21:41
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There's also the issue that Wizard's isolationism already looks morally bankrupt at the best of times, so you probably shouldn't draw attention to what they were doing during WWII and the Holocaust, there's no way of handling that that doesn't make them look even more awful.
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Aug 8, 2021 11:56
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Lupin unleashing his inner power of being a scrawny Hulk
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Aug 15, 2021 10:48
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Cranappleberry posted:Dumbledore rubs his hands in delight that he has a quiverfull family to replace all of his lost soldiers. They're the largest Pureblood family in Britain, if anything it's weird the Slytherins aren't full of quiverfuls too.
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Aug 16, 2021 13:48
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Considering the entire reason the protagonist matters at all is that the bad guy got BTFO by "a mother's love", it seems weird to assume wizardhood is passed through the genes when it could just as well be handwaved as something more immaterial between parents and kids.
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Aug 19, 2021 09:56
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Arithmancy is just an extended lit major "lol math, amirite?" joke
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Aug 24, 2021 19:22
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Wizard genes aren't real, the Hogwarts letter is like the Red Pill
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Aug 26, 2021 10:28
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The best part is that his middle name is just John should have been Jones
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Aug 27, 2021 10:49
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I just assumed the GoF plot was Voldemort being a dramatic bitch again and wanting a full crowd to witness that their hero had died (probably with a sign that he himself was back), but the idea that it's the opposite and he was trying to make things look like an accident probably makes a bit more sense.
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Sep 2, 2021 22:24
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They dumped all of their skill points into fire magic and were really psyched for the occasion.
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Sep 4, 2021 20:53
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while you were making GBS threads on the floor i was laying pipe
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Sep 15, 2021 08:21
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I would choose that school in Dracula where the headmaster is the Devil.
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Sep 20, 2021 10:23
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TinTower posted:The way FB2 treated the subject, I'm gonna go for "his homosexuality". I think Rowling is inept enough to dodge the subject again, which would make the title especially hilarious.
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Sep 22, 2021 18:57
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The Fashion Crimes of Grindelwald
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Sep 22, 2021 19:59
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Rudeboy Detective posted:Mild derail but I can't sit on this thought for any longer. I wonder if any Ministry employees tasked with studying Muggles lock onto some insanely specific corner of pop culture. Like the wizard equivalent of a western otaku, but they're way too into like star trek or metal. I like the idea that most of their job is trying to guess which parts of our stupidly huge media production is fiction vs documentaries.
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Oct 12, 2021 06:49
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I'm down with the "Aurelius is a ressurected/surviving Ariana Dumbledore" theory just because there's no way its execution wouldn't be a trainwreck.
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Oct 18, 2021 11:25
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hosed up that Pettigrew has had more offsprings than the rest of his generation of students combined
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Nov 9, 2021 19:58
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lolSome Guy TT posted:https://twitter.com/marysdesk/status/1463536289286819848
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Nov 25, 2021 06:31
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Is Tonks technically a furry?
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Nov 29, 2021 06:07
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josh04 posted:Rita Skeeter is a piece of the general theme that emerges over the seven books, that Rowling's writing has nothing but contempt for the looks, character and occupation of every woman character who isn't unceasingly maternal. It's a trend (especially Harry's dead mom being the epitome of all that's pure and good) but I'm not sure it's completely true; McGonagall's a notable exception at least. Edgar Allen Ho posted:I really miss being able to be a dumb slytherin teen writing fanfics about how hot Draco and Alan Rickman are. gently caress, gimme the whole reboot where Slytherin is just Goth House and Hogwarts doesn't just put 1/4 kids into the Hitler Youth. It's always a bit funny the way massive fandoms just half-ignore the actual text and make up their own alternate consensus and lore. Slytherin being the preppy, fash-friendly Tory house that everyone makes excuses for makes perfect sense, but fanfic authors loved to make them out to be the House for misunderstood alternative kids. Within the context of the story and Rowling's extremely square sensibilities it's pretty clear that the closest thing to a group of misfits is supposed to be Harry's friends (there's the orphan, the poor guy, the nerd girl, and beyond those there's Neville, Luna, and Ginny). I'm not sure what contributed most to this: -The inevitable fandom contrarianism that leads to lionizing uncomplicated villains, -Special snowflake characters ("he's the One Good Slytherin, like Drizzt in D&D"), -Aesthetic confusion over dark magic = goth, -The houses becoming trendy as personality tests, leading to FYGM social climbing being defended as equally admirable as being brave, smart or nice, -Lust over specific characters (Snape and Draco) making certain tropes popular and endlessly copied, -People just not liking Harry/finding him boring (for understandable reasons) and rewriting him as the actual bully.
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Dec 8, 2021 16:12
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