I hate how libs ALWAYS try to compare real politics to popular media.

Maybe it says something about their ability to comprehend complex situations without needing to compare it to something made to be easily understandable. Or maybe it’s a testament to their belief that there are somehow objective good and evil sides in the world, or think real politics should play out like a movie.

    • KommandoGZD
      12·
      2 years ago

      Voldemort wasn’t your standard liberal “but the bad guy is really relatable and not a bad guy”

      Nah he’s definitely not relatable and definitely evil incarnate. There’s nothing redeeming about him. That said, he gets some background beyond that, iirc they discuss whether or not he was born the devil or if the world made him that way. He’s absolute pure evil, but he’s also just a human (wizard). Doesn’t mean he’s relatable.

      slavery in the Harry Potter universe is hand waved away by “house elves like to serve people, it’s in their very makeup”

      The most frustrating part about it to me isn’t even that in and of itself, but that she sets up an explanation and iirc even explicitly discusses the validity of this “they like to serve” issue, yet doesn’t ever follow up on the set up. They are magically enslaved, right? What does that mean? How exactly? Why the fuck don’t you use that set up? Idk, make that magical enslavement the reason for them “liking the enslavement”, some kind of insidious magic by their slavers to twist their thoughts into not resisting the enslavement. It’s right fucking there, she didn’t even have to come up with anything new. Hell, make it some superficial metaphor for propaganda, internalized racism/propaganda etc pp. No, just nothing on that, gets introduced, set up and forgotten.

      Imo that’s the most glaring issue with these books and idk if it’s just her laziness as a writer or her liberalism really showing itself or a combination of both, but she does this shit constantly and it’s infuriating as fuck to read as an adult. No idea if, being a liberal, she believes recognizing issues is “an activism” or improvement in and of itself, but that’s what it comes across. She constantly establishes structural and systemic issues within the world and society in these books over hundreds of pages, discusses them explicitly, makes them somewhat large plot points but never resolves them. The slave thing, the racial supremacy of the society, the corruption, the institutional rot, the controlled press, etc pp. All of this is discussed at length, yet never resolved in any way. Big bad dead and that’s it. Which would be lazy/bad writing but fine, if the author wasn’t such a self important piece of shit, if she wasn’t hell bent on retconning decades after the books release and the franchise wasn’t elevated to political theory by shitlibs around the world.

      • Kirbywithwhip1987
        7·
        2 years ago

        Voldemort isn’t even a good villain, even in pure evil kind of way, that place goes to The Senate of course.

        • KommandoGZD
          6·
          2 years ago

          Fuck yeah, some appreciation for the prequels. Not the best films, but the world they built and the story they told were amazing and a hell of a lot more interesting than the OT imo.

          Thing is HP could’ve had a villain story like the prequels, it had the set up for it. The politics, the government and the problems/corruption within it certainly was set up to play a similar role. Voldemort even gets to power via a coup d’etat after infiltrating and undermining the political system for years. But then she just never capitalizes on that, doesn’t mention it in the resolution AT ALL (the Harry being a cop thing etc only came out after the story concluded). It was clearly set up in a way to have Voldemort as a product of that society, as its final conclusion, etc but in the end he’s, as you said, just a boring ass, fairly inept Lord Evil kinda guy and because he dies due to a wand technicality love won or some shit.

          Man I wish he was more like Palpatine.

          • Kirbywithwhip1987
            4·
            2 years ago

            Every Star Wars movie 1-6 is good, and it’s even better when you realize what was the inspiration for Lucas. I agree, I don’t get why so much people hate the prequels? No Star Wars movie deserves the hate, prequels or OT, Disney on the other hand… And Rowling is just adding bullshit to the story that no one asked for.

        • loathesome dongeaterMA
          7·
          2 years ago

          It’s like how Dumbledore was gay but thoroughout the whole series he doesn’t do one thing that’s gay. Tbf he also doesn’t do anything that is straight. But I still feel confident that he wasn’t gay in the author’s head until much later after the last book was published.

        • KommandoGZD
          5·
          2 years ago

          Cheers comrade <3 I watched Shauns video some weeks ago and remember him addressing that book, but I haven’t read it. I’ve tried my best to not engage with JKRs shit and anything she puts out/says ever since the 7th book came out, because I always saw her ruining the books with her retconning and retroactively inserting her current vibes into those books.

          These books have enough faults and inconsistencies as is, but her trying to force this stuff in after the fact in the most clumsy way possible (see the example you gave), just causes more and more damage and combined with her apparently horrible personal politics it just makes the issues worse, has people rightfully interpreting them the worst possible way and overanalyzing every damn thing in these novels.

    • AgreeableLandscape☭OPM
      9·
      2 years ago

      Yeah people recently have been saying that Rowling “became” a TERF, or a bigot, or whatever.

      Hell no, she always was one, and it showed through in her writing.

        • PolandIsAStateOfMind
          91·
          2 years ago

          “the intricate detail and study of Latin she did to name spells and world build” which is crap because she very much subscribes to the stick two words together to make a new word school of world building

          Wait what? Rowling has the worst naming sense in entire known to me literature bar none. I literally stopped in the half of first book because everything was named so absolutely cringy and immersion breaking.

          Compare to Glen Cook “Black Company” where most people are also named weirdly but it somehow fits totally, so it can be done, but she just completely botched it.

        • AgreeableLandscape☭OPM
          7·
          2 years ago

          the intricate detail and study of Latin

          Why do I suspect that involved Google Translate at some point lol

            • AgreeableLandscape☭OPM
              7·
              2 years ago

              Also, being Chinese, I very often find myself saying this whenever an English speaker uses the native name of an East Asian person: “you know the last name goes in front right?”

                • AgreeableLandscape☭OPM
                  7·
                  2 years ago

                  I’ve heard “well I’m speaking English aren’t I? And English puts the last name behind the first!”

                  Also, as much as I generally like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, this always irked me as an Asian: there’s an alien character called Kira Nerys, whose name format is the same as the East Asian one, so her last name is Kira and first name is Nerys. Which, I’ve always wondered: She’s an alien, so they did they pick that as a quirk to show just how “out of this world” her culture is? Bruh there are well over a billion people on Earth whose names are formatted like that!

                  • PolandIsAStateOfMind
                    51·
                    2 years ago

                    Bruh there are well over a billion people on Earth whose names are formatted like that!

                    Lol even in Europe Hungarians have this convention, and Slavs also did in the past, which is often still used in formal situations. It’s kinda funny here in Poland, because when someone corrects that usage, you can be 100% sure it’s either mindless grammar nazi or a real active anticommunist.

            • AgreeableLandscape☭OPM
              6·
              2 years ago

              Seriously? We’re still worked up about the portrayal of “magic” in media?

              Brings me back to when Evangelical Christians in the US were screeching about the name “Sorcerer’s Stone” for the first HP book, beause sorcerer is unholy and demonic ooOOOOOOooooo👻! But the official name was actually Philosopher’s Stone, they changed it for the US for some reason.

              Or when Christians were saying Pokemon Go let you catch literal demons which could possess you. Because there were Pokemon based on ghosts and Japanese Yokai. Oh, and don’t forget the fact that they evolve! We can’t let children hear that word!

        • Rafael_Luisi
          5·
          2 years ago

          Every non bri’ish thing in the universe is some fucking stereotype. The magic school on brasil is on the fucking amazon florest, because thats literally the only thing that anglos know about south america. Its so superficial and obvious that someone asked her on twitter and she made that up in like one minute because she could not give a fuck into actual world building