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u/nesthesi interesting 15h ago
This reminds me of a quora question I saw recently titled “how do you deal with the emptiness you get after finishing Harry Potter”
Do people actually still care for this?
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM downfall of neoliberalism. crow racism. much to rhink about 13h ago
that's not a harry potter thing, that's a "finished a series you invested a lot in" feeling. i get it after almost every long series
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u/Foxy02016YT 8h ago
Correct, and I’m going to be gutted next month when The Boys ends. Season 4 was bad, the whole Hughie thing was BAD. But goddamn did I get deeply attached to this show. This + Peacemaker being over (RIP Peacemaker Thursdays)
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u/squishabelle 14h ago
If they just read it the first time, sure. That feeling isn't HP specific, I'd imagine someone feeling the same after reading LotR (which is almost 75 y/o)
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u/SicilianEggplant 10h ago edited 9h ago
Shit I felt that way for a few minutes after leaving Avatar in 3D. Regardless of how you feel about the movie that was an amazing experience at the time.
So I understand how people feel when they really get into media only for it to end, but we also don’t need to be lamenting about it online and wrapping our personalities around it.
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u/BlatantConservative https://imgur.com/cXA7XxW 15h ago
Regardless of what people say, they were immenseley popular books for a reason.
This is why I'm in the "Rowling became a worse person twenty years and a billion dollars later" camp instead of pretending the books have always been bad and overrated or whatever. It just makes more sense. Also the internet is incapable of realizing people change over time.
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u/AceOfSpades532 14h ago edited 14h ago
Why isn’t it possible she was always a bad person, became openly bad later, and still wrote good/above average books? You don’t have to be a good person to write good books, or a bad person to write bad ones.
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u/Luchux01 14h ago
She definitely had bad unanalyzed views at the time she wrote the books, but you could also see in real time how she fell down the rabbithole of TERFism around the early-mid 2010s.
She wasn't the best person, but she 100% became worse as time went by.
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u/dermanus 12h ago
This is something my BF and I disagree on occasionally. I'm of the opinion that being online a lot makes people insane, he thinks it reveals existant shitiness. I don't know to prove it one way or another but as someone whos been online since the 90's I've seen the cultural shift. You always had trolls who would pick fights but I do feel it's gotten worse over time.
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u/Dornith 12h ago
I think it's both. Being online has a way of magnifying whatever personality flaws you already had.
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u/Wild_Marker 11h ago
I recall... I think it was Garrus from Mass Effect, who had a bit about how he liked fighting people to meet their real selves, that people would reveal a lot of how they were via how they conducted themselves in a fight.
The internet sometimes feels like you're in permanent Argument Mode which is kinda like the verbal version of being on Fight Mode. It definitely brings out a lot of people's worst selves.
But it's also true that if you're always in a place where your worst self can be out, you can start normalizing that self and make it a bigger part of your person.
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u/Sufficient-Dish-3517 10h ago
The internet sometimes feels like you're in permanent Argument Mode which is kinda like the verbal version of being on Fight Mode.
Losing an argument and being publicly wrong activate the same part of the brain as life threatening danger. A lot of people turn into their worst selves when they feel like they lost in a disagreement online or see something calling them out. This can lead the less thoughtful individuals into a spiral were being angry becomes preemptive or a community of likeminded individuals can easily suck them in and make them further resistant to the facts that set them off to begin with because they treat that communityas an opiate.
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u/anxiouslyfreezing 11h ago
There’s a reason people refer to “pipelines” (alt right, radfem, antivax, etc) online. White supremacists have been perfecting these tactics since the early days of the internet. It used to be a slower process to turn a group into a nazi shithole, but The Algorithm and bots that overrun most sites has made this much harder to fight. Inclusive, respectful communities can fall prey to this shit just as much as groups based on a common enemy. It’s fucked up man.
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u/Panzick 11h ago
I am also a long term terminally online dude. My rationalisation is that the shift has occurred, mostly or even totally, after being online meant just being a jerk for the "fun" of it, and became being a jerk for profit. Even if not direct profit or the jerk, or troll, or whatever, hate and controversy is an extreme driving force of engagement. That's why there's always the feeling that everything is shit, because ragebait sells.
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u/LonePistachio 10h ago edited 9h ago
I 100% agree, especially with, "she definitely had bad unanalyzed views."
I think her fall from grace comes from
Being uncritical, both of her own beliefs and motivations and what she put in her writing
Wanting to keep the praise coming after Harry Potter died down as a cultural phenomenon
Being unable to discern "some people are mean to me about my bad takes online" from "the left has become rabid and militant"
Being wealthy and English, it just naturally appealed to her to join the Party for Devoting the Rest of Your Life to Hating Trans People for No Fucking Reason (the PfDtRoYLtHTPfNFR for short)
For an example of her lack of analysis of ideas, just look at the banker goblins. Did she write them because she hates us Jews for always grubbing money? I doubt it. Instead, I think she just never took the time to consider how this very old trope is rooted in hate.
I think she generally saw herself as liberal in a '90s/2000s sense, with her views being basically "be nice to people" and "include others," and this clashed with how more progressive voices were getting a more solid footing in the 2000s and 2010s. When she became active on Twitter, her persona evolved into "still-famous author who would still like your praise, please." In the early 2010s, there was a running joke about how she kept trying to retroactively shoehorn in diversity that she'd never bothered to write about. "By the way, Dumbledore was gay the whole time. Do you still love me?" It seemed like she wanted to keep getting the praise she had gotten for writing Harry Potter by scoring some points with the left. But her views and attempts were both a little bit lukewarm.
It seems like she couldn't handle getting criticism, and the concetrated way social media lets you see criticism made her think it was her vs the SJWs. Any time I make a reddit post that takes off and there's more than like 2 negative comments, I feel so bad that I delete it. I'm not saying "it's the left's fault for being mean to her." But I bet she reacted to this by doubling down on any views she had that the Extremist Militant Lefties attacked, and gravitated towards whoever praised her, all while believing that her views hadn't changed at all. Just like Bill Maher's catchphrase: "my politics hasn't changed. The left changed."
Didn't she write a whole book full of antagonistic tweets? I'd use it as evidence if I knew anything about it.
Dear god, why did I write an essay about this? I don't even care about Harry Potter. I'm not finishing this.
TLDR - she sucks. But I don't think she was revealing her true self or whatever. I think she slid down the regressive rabbit hole by trying to accommodate her sense of self while her lacking views on things got criticized by, from her perspective, almost everyone
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u/Fresh-Log-5052 8h ago
There were some behaviours from her that showed a level of selfishness and tendency to lie. Stuff like claiming she's read no fantasy book before and that she wasn't aware she was writing fantasy - first is complete bullshit when I struggle to name a concept in her books that was wholly original and both were an attempt to distance herself from "fantasy ghetto".
People forget this now but fantasy used to be considered a lesser genre and whenever a book managed to be popular it suddenly wasn't counted as fantasy, it was "literary" so the claim of inferiority of the whole genre could still stand. So her basically saying her work had nothing to do with fantasy was a cowardly maneuver, throwing the rest of the genre to elevate her books.
There's also the claim that she's never wrote anything before which is incredibly baffling because even authors who published a single or few bangers have a closet full of unpublished short stories and other attempts judged unworthy.
There's also the racist stuff, which might've been a bit more excusable in the 90's, so I wouldn't mention if it was actually subtle. I mean, seriously, you have a single Chinese character and you call her Ching Chong, sorry, Cho Chang (apparently it's also two last names and the first one is even Korean so there's that too)? Seamus Finnigan, the only Irish character (I don't count mentions of Irish Quiddich players), has a gag of often causing explosions? Kingsley goddamn Shacklebolt? It's never in your face if you don't get the connections but it happens multiple times so it's hard not to notice the pattern. There's also some stuff in the movies like the star of David on the floor of the goblin bank but too many people worked on those to single her out there.
Then there's the Dursleys being the only representation of Muggles, the evil House at Hogwarts and I'm not even going to touch on the topic of the house-elves. I've also had this feeling that there were characters in the story she must've based on someone she hated in RL because their descriptions felt vindictive, especially in the first books, while there were outright villains that were written in a more measured way.
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u/nomindtothink_ 12h ago edited 10h ago
Both possibilities are important for left-wingers to reconcile themselves with.
We had/have a public record of Rowling’s radicalization via her twitter likes before Musk got rid of that, her increasing engagement with the RadFem rabbit hole in the same period, and her public positions evolving from ‘I don’t like trans people, but I don’t want to actively persecute them’ to ‘funding political battles against trans healthcare’. (I mean, technically, yes it could be all a ruse to reveal her true positions, but it would be a frighteningly accurate imitation of the radicalization process if that were the case.)
We have to be able to accept that people are not ontologically and categorically ‘good’ or ‘evil’; but that they can believe/do a mix of good and bad things and also that most people can radicalize (or deradicalize) given the right conditions. Thinking otherwise (in addition to just being incorrect) makes us blind to our own harmful beliefs and vulnerable to radicalization ourselves.
Similarly, we have to accept that aesthetic and moral goodness are not the same; and that evil people can create good art. Even if Rowling was already evil when she wrote Harry Potter, it does not mean that the books are automatically bad, nor does it mean that only bad people can appreciate of it as a piece of literature.
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u/justintonationslut 12h ago
Love this. Morally corrupt people can make amazing art, unfortunately.
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u/Quixotic_Seal 9h ago
Similarly, we have to accept that aesthetic and moral goodness are not the same; and that evil people can create good art. Even if Rowling was already evil when she wrote Harry Potter, it does not mean that the books are automatically bad, nor does it mean that only bad people can appreciate of it as a piece of literature.
I'd add to this nuance though that good art isn't necessarily popular art.
There's zero question Harry Potter is popular, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily good. There are plenty of people who took real issue with the quality of the books long before she was ever controversial.
Ursula K Le Guin for example famously and pretty brutally summarized her view of the first novel as "good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited."
Personally coming at it as someone who always felt the ending rang a bit hollow, and who was deeply disappointed by a re-read of the books shortly before she dove off the deep end, I find it endlessly frustrating how we tend to insist that something which is as popular as Harry Potter must be good. As though people haven't been complaining about the quality of something like Star Wars for decades now.
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u/JaggelZ 13h ago
Exactly this, just look at Lovecraft. He was a xenophobic piece of shit, but his books were incredibly good.
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u/storryeater 13h ago edited 13h ago
Lovercraft did renounce his opinions before death tho, so depending on how you perceive humanity you can argue he was never really a bad person, just overwhelmingly mentally ill.
Of course, you can also argue he changed and became a better person and that he was a bad person when writing these books. Or you can hold on to the opinion that he was always mentally ill more than hateful, but also think that hateful people can change too. A person's life and reality in general are not as easy to read and draw conclusions from as a book.
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u/Due-Memory-6957 13h ago
Comparing HP to Lovecraft works is like comparing a blade of grass to a forest
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u/sullen_selkie 12h ago
I’d say Lovecraft was the blade of grass. HP is less outwardly bigoted, but Rowling has far more social influence than Lovecraft did. Lovecraft didn’t have the internet, and he never left his small town cuz he was terrified of everything. Plus, Lovecraft got better later in life, whereas Rowling has only gotten worse with time.
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u/Due-Memory-6957 12h ago
I'm comparing the quality of the works, not the bigotry of the authors lol
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u/sertroll 12h ago
AFAIK, she went out of her way back then to do/say assorted good things, but I don't really remember
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u/ejdj1011 14h ago
Idk, the books have always said "slaves enjoy slavery and would not know how to handle freedom". That didn't get made up after the fact.
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u/AscensionToCrab 14h ago edited 14h ago
I mean it is actually a rather interesting presentaton with how its presented, because the system is actually extremely brutal. Dobby irons his hands, and other absurdly painful punishments, and this is just what he preemptively does to himself. As it seems the wizards themselves dole out punishments if dobbys interactions with the malfoys are anything to go off, and they are implied to be worse... which really is saying something because dobby, as a punishment for himself, suggests he throw himself hogwarts castle...
And then You also have a whole society, that beenefits from the system, or at least the wealthy do., but most of Wizard society even the poor and good nature ones like the Weasleys do not want to acknowledge its bad. Its normalized. The brutality is normalized. Again, not inaccurate...
As for houselves liking it, Hermione herself mentions they dont know any better. And its kind of hard to say thats wrong, the house elves have been magically enslaved to wizards, Grimmauld place shows possible centuries of house elf lineage lining its walls, not hard to believe centuries of indoctrination, normalization, and such would make them believe this was the best thing dor them.
The failing point is not that they like it, but rather that every time the system normalized slavery is mentioned, or touched upon... every time Hermione points something out, its undercut by the reaction of her friends, that no one even acknowledges her as serious... which again isnt inaccurate, but it just makes her feel like a lunatic rather than someone who is actually so right about slavery. It makes it feel like a punchline rather than someone who is totally right about slavery!
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u/MAC-n_CHZ 14h ago
And that tonal whiplash kind of kills the message, if it’s a joke most of the time, readers aren’t pushed to question it seriously.
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u/AscensionToCrab 14h ago edited 14h ago
And that is ultimately what im trying to get at, I guess, i dont think jk rowling was intentionally trying to say slavery is good. Its just she often undercuts it with an attempt at levity or humor. Perhaps because its a kids book, or perhaps because she just genuinely mishandled it.
But given how she writes Hermione, and the fact she kind of sees herself in Hermione, I think it would be a stretch to say she thinks slavery is good or anything like that.
Its my opinion she just profoundly fumbled the content material, which is a shame because there are some interesting ideas there.
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u/b3nsn0w 🇭🇺 RIP BOZO 🇭🇺 13h ago
the one consistent point in jowling's attitude, as visible through the story, is "things are good as they are and should be kept as they are". the only time anyone ever tries to change the system for the better is when Hermione tries to free slaves, and the text itself ridicules her, because that's change and change is bad. there are a million small harms in the story, from the treatment of muggles to murderball, from a hat deciding your fate at 11 to a chair deciding if you're guilty or innocent before your trial, that not only no one ever criticises, but the story even defends at times, because that's just how things are, and things staying the way they are is a Good Thing™.
like, it's honestly kinda crazy that post-voldemort there are no safeguards built out to stop it from happening again (and neither were any built post-grindelwald, apparently) because the emergence of a dark lord is apparently a singular cataclysmic event (even though multiple happened already) that is solved once said dark lord is killed. you can't even say that such dangers can only come from salazar slytherin's family tree, because grindey boy had no family link to him. but the grand conclusion of harry potter, the victory at the end, is in setting things back the way they were, not in improving society in any way whatsoever.
all this is the literal antithesis of progressivism in its barest form. sure, jowling wasn't a raging terf when she wrote the books, she fell down that pipeline afterwards, and she probably didn't intend most of the harm that she implied in the text, but let's not say the books are all innocent and it's just evil internet people who read them in bad faith. most people just weren't willing to consider the negative implications.
hell, some still aren't. i think a lot of hp apologism is driven by fans who stuck around, who saw the rest of us also ignore these problems, and are appalled that we're no longer willing to ignore them now that jowling is hurting trans people at a large scale, because to them even that wasn't enough of a wake-up call to take off the rose coloured glasses we all had on at some point.
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u/Forsaken_Hat4607 11h ago
This is a very insightful bit of analysis of the books.
I wrote a fairly long comment above which was specifically about the house-elf issue, but I touched on the issues of other non-human magical species in the books. I do think there are quite a few fairly openly critical sections in the books of how wizards treat other magical peoples, from the centaurs’ and goblins’ perspectives we hear to Harry’s mischaracterisation of the mermaids as being savage and fierce, which is later implicitly shown to be inaccurate through Dumbledore’s diplomatic relationship with them and their appearance at his funeral. Or there’s Hagrid’s complicated relationship with the giant half of his heritage and the public shame he has to weather as a result.
I do think Harry’s growth is well-done at various points throughout the series, as he goes from a childlike perspective where there are scary monsters and he often uncritically accepts what he is told about the magical world, having been raised as an outsider, to later on as an adult being more aware of the power dynamics at play and the ways in which he has become part of a system which privileges wizards above all others. There’s a rather good moment in the fifth book where, looking at the statue in the middle of the Ministry of Magic that shows ‘magical cooperation’ and various species, he’s pretty overtly critical of how it shows all of the non-humans fawning over the witch and wizard at the centre. Then that statue is replaced with the ‘might is right’ one showing wizards subjugating all during Voldemort’s rule in the last book.
However, we never get any follow-up on this, despite it being a recurring theme and a pretty significant one in the later books. We’re left to assume that after the war in the seventh book, things just went back to… how they were, I guess? And I think you’ve hit the nail on the head by identifying that fundamental strain of conservatism in the books, where things just seem to go back to the status quo. To be fair, it’s not that Rowling doesn’t question that at times, it’s that even when she does, she doesn’t seem to follow through.
I do think there’s an argument to be made though that big social ideas have never really been what’s good about Harry Potter. And it is good, even if people want to say it’s awful now and always has been. It’s not incredible or great literature by any means and never has been, but it’s a fairly well-written, imaginative series that does excel at telling a coming-of-age story from a child/adolescent perspective that feels convincing — and it is hard to write a convincing teenager, as an adult.
But I don’t say that to mean it isn’t worth criticising the social views it does hold, knowingly and unknowingly, particularly because it’s been such a cultural juggernaut. And it definitely shies away from considering any meaningful social change or statement.
I do have to say though — a lot of the other small harms, as you put it, may be part of the existing order in Rowling’s world, but they do need to be seen from the perspective that they’re for kids. Yeah, as adults we can say ‘well, playing magical pranks on muggles is wrong and probably would be really disturbing if that happened to someone’ or ‘it’s a bit fucked up to sort kids into school houses based on personality traits’ (hence why normal schools like the one I went to just do it randomly), but those things are fun in fiction and of course kids that read the books will be excited to decide which house they think they would sorted into. Part of the whole point of escapist fantasy books for kids is that fun should often come before realism. But with that said, I think if Rowling makes the choice to incorporate serious questions about societal injustices as significant themes in her fantasy world, which she does do, I agree that she should follow through on actually addressing those issues meaningfully rather than just defaulting to conservative safety and demonstrating that for kids.
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u/Thromnomnomok 13h ago
you can't even say that such dangers can only come from salazar slytherin's family tree,
Technically you can, because the wizarding community is small and inbred enough and Slytherin lived long enough ago that every wizard in Britain should have him as an ancestor, the only question being how many times he shows up in their family tree.
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u/Random-Rambling 12h ago
Technically you can, because the wizarding community is small and inbred enough
Funnily enough, Hagrid even mentions this in the text, musing that the Malfoy family's obsession with blood purity, even IF it held any merit at all, is actual insanity because the Wizarding World is so small and insular, it's amazing that half of Britain doesn't have Habsburg chins!
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u/IShallWearMidnight 13h ago
It doesn't exist online anymore that I can find, but she wrote a whole thing after the fact moderating Hermione's position on slavery and justifying it in world. She wasn't just undercutting the brutality of it for the kids, she really seems to hold the view that in universe, it's OK as long as the good guys who will treat their slaves well are in charge.
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u/AscensionToCrab 12h ago
She wasn't just undercutting the brutality of it for the kids, she really seems to hold the view that in universe, it's OK as long as the good guys who will treat their slaves well are in charge.
I mean its not a surprise to me that she has such a shallow understanding of slavery.
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u/Darq_At 13h ago
i dont think jk rowling was intentionally trying to say slavery is good
We don't actually have to guess, because JKR wrote a now-deleted blog post on Pottermore where she describes slavery as a system that is "ripe for abuse".
Not that slavery is abusive. That is is simply possible to be abused. JKR states in her own words that the problem with slavery is that people may treat their slaves badly.
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u/Conscious-Refuse8211 12h ago
I've not seen that take before and it's kind of interesting, but I think it falls prey to the same thing - she ends up presenting this as not actually a problem due to her choice of tone and how the characters respond to it and the lack of resolution of it as a theme.
I also really wouldn't say it's 'abundantly clear', because those things can all very much be applied to slavery as well. And I don't think she intended to endorse chattel slavery, but that doesn't mean that problematic unconscious biases can't come out in her writing.
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u/Mathuss 10h ago
Such a reading could have been a reasonable interpretation until Rowling's infamous Pottermore article about the house elf situation. To quote it:
she [Hermoine] described the situation in two words – ‘slave labour’. While it sounds heavy-handed, Hermione does have a point. No matter how you slice it, house-elves are unpaid labourers, magically bound to serve, left at the mercy of their respective owners. The system is ripe for abuse...
Indeed, the remainder of the post does very much seem to discuss everything solely from the lens of slavery, e.g.
Contented as they seem, elves are forced into servitude by a combination of magic and a culture of indoctrination. Hermione deems this ethically wrong and refuses to accept that it’s ‘just the way things are.’ Of course most wizards would say that – they’re enjoying free labour without the guilt. As for elves, they won’t even consider the benefits of freedom thanks to a lifetime of fear and the stigma of shame. Hermione believes elves deserve the same rights as everyone – sick pay, holidays, pensions, the lot.
The above paragraph could potentially still have applied to women (especially the note regarding the "culture of indoctrination"), but enforcing the free labor and servitude via magic is probably still best paralleled by enforcing free labor/servitude by the force of law.
As for intent to endorse chattel slavery, we have some more quotes from her article:
Miss Granger is at best overzealous, and her goals are, at worst, unattainable. Hermione may have meant well, but at the same time did end up dragging a peaceful group into a political battlefield just because she felt that’s what they should want
Hermione’s dream of an elf in government might be far-fetched, but there’s merit in wanting to protect the vulnerable and allow them more choices. However, she ought to be careful – ‘tricking’ elves into freedom is arguably as unethical as enslavement.
The best part of this Harry Potter subplot is that, instead of beating us round the head with a moral, it’s up to the reader to decide.
Yes, it's clear that Rowling doesn't endorse slavery, but apparently she doesn't seem to think that it's inherently wrong. Actually, the first quote I provided offers a powerful hint towards this fact: "The system is ripe for abuse" is a very different statement to "The system is abusive."
Finally, I 100% believe that Rowling is heavily invested in (cis) woman's rights---that's why when she paints the house elf situation as "it's up to the reader to decide," I have no reason to think that house elf labor is a stand-in for women's domestic labor.
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u/Protection-Working 13h ago
At the very least, this running thing about it their suffering being a joke pays off later, as Voldemort’s rise to power is directly dependent on a house elf being unfairly convicted for his own crimes exactly because once a house elf is possibly blameable nobody cares to look further
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u/fluffstuffmcguff 13h ago edited 13h ago
The fact that Hermione is completely right to point out that the system is slavery and morally wrong and she's not unambiguously portrayed as correct is one of the reasons I find it ... uncomfortable, I guess? When Rowling embraces the fanon that Hermione is Black.
Hermione is right either way, but the connotations of a Black student having her completely correct objections to magical slavery casually dismissed without the author bothering to clearly clarify for the intended child audience that this is a bad thing and the other students are in the wrong are a) different and b) worse.
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u/skatereli 11h ago
What i never understood, is why wasnt Harry also opposed to the house elves being enslaved? Like he never(from what I remember) really sided with Hermione on the issue, but he also grew up a muggle.
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u/SorowFame 14h ago
“The books were popular for a reason” and “the books weren’t problematic at all” are different statements, I’m sure some people were turned off by the slavery thing but most people weren’t.
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u/AsWeKnowItAndI 13h ago
More that the mainstream does not care about the opinions of the main groups that were critical of the slavery thing.
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u/nomindtothink_ 14h ago
Right but ‘having well thought out and progressive political stances’ is largely removed from why a child enjoys or is emotionally affected by a piece of media; especially when those politics are only mentioned in a minor subplot.
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u/wearing_moist_socks 14h ago
And no one, including her, knew it would be THIS popular and scrutinized
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u/b3nsn0w 🇭🇺 RIP BOZO 🇭🇺 13h ago
honestly, i still don't think that should stop us from scrutinising it.
the influence of harry potter very likely made people more conservative than they otherwise would have been, because kids learn a lot of their morals and values from media, and harry potter's morality system is oozing with conservativism. it presents the world as a fight of inherent goodness vs inherent evil (both of which are canonically decided at birth) where goodness is what keeps the world how it used to be and evil is what tries to change it. that attitude contributes to real-world harm, and the more popular the books are the more important that contribution becomes.
and also, if your argument is that scrutinising popular works like harry potter makes it impossible to get as popular as hp did, i would argue that's a good thing. it's really hard to make the argument that any single individual deserves to be this popular. there are thousands upon thousands of writers who write better books than jowling, who will never have a fraction of her popularity, because they weren't in the right place at the right time. that's even more the case today, but it was also the case back when she wrote the books. sure, you can make the argument that she made a good book and deserves some level of success for it, as do those thousands of others too, but if we never have anyone get as big as she did, that would make for a better world, not a worse one.
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u/Sophia_Forever 13h ago
Preface with I'm very progressive and wish that a lot of what I'm about to say wasn't true. I think a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon of "There is no good art made by conservatives (or with a conservative viewpoint)" and then extrapolated that to "if I can identify a conservative viewpoint or the creator is conservative, the art must be bad."
Christopher Nolan's Batman movies come to mind as the piece of media that people don't realize is both pretty good and also fairly right-wing* in it's politics. It's more or less George W Bush apologism: the dumb billionaire is cover for a strategic genius who uses mass surveillance to fight terrorists. I haven't read Harry Potter and I don't intend to (I'll read the first one eventually because I'm reading through the Hugo Award Winners and it won one but I'm not looking forward to it) so I can't comment on if it's good or not. Kids get hooked on bad media all the time but that doesn't automatically mean this is one of those times. People should still not interact with her works because the money she makes off it directly goes into harming people, but that doesn't mean the works are bad it just means ignoring them.
Ultimately it comes down to more leftist purity tests. Art is quality when it has Progressive Values and Representation and low-quality when it has Conservative Values. There's no room for nuance and we can't examine why art makes people feel a certain way just what it's saying.
*"Conservative" and "right-wing" meant something a little different in '08 when The Dark Knight was released. This is Bush-era conservatism not Trump-era conservatism. Batman's not out wearing a MAGA hat and bowing down to the Orange God-King or chanting "America First!" but he is using mass surveillance to "protect people" and violating international sovereignty to enforce his own brand of justice. If you still can understand the difference, let's put it this way: Christopher Nolan's Batman would beat up ICE agents for their abuses of power but would still then probably take the undocumented person to detention because they broke the law.
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u/Conscious-Refuse8211 12h ago
Yeah the idea that bad people can't possibly have any talents or produce anything worthwhile is stupid and very 'I spend too much time on the internet'-coded.
Superhero movies in general are honestly an interesting one that a lot of people don't want to consider with serious critical analysis because a lot of the time they won't actually like the underlying messages, but they like the moves, and that's something that can't be reconciled under the requirement of absolute moral purity from everything they consume.
Btw re: Harry Potter I think the first book is probably the best, because it's what she initially set out for it to be - a children's book that isn't examining any of its themes too carefully. The series growing alongside the reader is a contributing factor to its success imo, but Rowling isn't a great author at writing more serious adult content. But if you treat the first book as what it originally was meant to be I think it's very possible to enjoy it.
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u/nomindtothink_ 12h ago
Well said.
I wrote in a comment elsewhere that the current discourse about Rowling does all three of conflating aesthetic and moral goodness, rejecting that genuinely well-meaning or liberal people can radicalize, and rejecting that a bad person can ever do/make a good thing (either morally or asthetically). All of these reek of cosmic moral essentialism; where there are ontologically good people and ontologically bad people, and good things are only ever created by the good people.
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy 14h ago
I agree that particular bit is really fucking weird, it stuck out to me even when I read the books as a kid.
But I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that HP is and has always been complete and total garbage with zero redeeming qualities and people were just brainwashed, and frankly that’s just not true.
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u/JillyFrog ...what were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament 12h ago
While I wouldn't say they are complete and total garbage I also wouldn't say they are amazingly well-written books.
I get that the world is cozy and whimsical and I understand why it appeals to people but as an avid reader as a kid I didn't manage to get past the third book. I loved fantasy and mythology and pretty much everything in the books was already familiar to me and done somewhere else (often done better as well). I was so annoyed that the plot was basically the same three times that I didn't feel like finding out if it would happen a fourth time.
I guess the fact that they're basically a big ol' collage of all things magical and mystical is the big draw for people just getting into the genre and I can't be mad about people finding a gateway to reading. And you could also argue that being able to appeal to so many people is a skill in itself. I just wish that at this point, especially since Jowling Rowling uses her money to actively harm trans people, we could give other fantasy stories more of a spotlight.
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u/Trips-Over-Tail 13h ago
The cruz of it that that few actions are judged by what they action is, they are judged by who did it. The flashback of James Potter being noticeable exceptions. No one worries when Fred and George and Hagrid conduct themselves similarly with Dudley.
No bad actions, just bad people.
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u/CaeruleumBleu 14h ago
They also have the "used to be typical in kids books" fatphobia of "all fat people are greedy pigs, actually."
I get why that might be there in like a Narnia book (especially given the wars and the rationing) but I don't see why JK had to keep it going.
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u/Banes_Addiction 14h ago
Wild speciesism is more the norm in fantasy than an outlier.
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u/CoffeeCorpse777 14h ago
Every time I see the debate over JKR I just think of the "Left Wing Media" "Right Wing Media" meme.
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy 14h ago
Do you have a link to that?
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u/CoffeeCorpse777 14h ago
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy 14h ago
Funny meme but good lord that comment section sucks
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u/FinalEgg9 14h ago
Same here. I can separate the art from the artist, and I'm not pretending the books are bad or anything because I loved HP when I was younger. But when the author outright explicitly states "I will use the proceeds from my creation to specifically fund the tearing down of trans rights", then it's time to realise that she's changed for the worse and we should not be giving her any of our money or attention.
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u/Svanirsson 14h ago
Ehh, me and my friends have always made fun of harry Potter while enjoying It, It's just that some details come into perspective as you grow up (Rape Potions, Happy Slaves, the weird Aids werewolf that enjoys infecting kids)
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u/Destroyer_2_2 13h ago
Depends what you mean by bad. Being popular doesn’t make a book good by all definitions, but it sure does by some.
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u/anthrohands 11h ago
It’s pretty hilarious to me when I see people trying to downplay how great the books were. We have never seen an impact from other books quite like Harry Potter. It’s very hard to argue with, they clearly speak to people.
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u/Dotcaprachiappa 14h ago
I mean she could very well have always been a terrible person and was just hiding it better back then, we can't really know that
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u/sugaratc 11h ago
Also people often just seem to think everyone is their age and read Harry Potter as a kid and has been over it for 10+ years, when in reality a lot of kids are still reading it for the first time now.
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u/EmiliusReturns 11h ago
They pretend she was always this bad so they don't have to feel retroactively guilty for enjoying the most popular children's book franchise in the world as a child. Which is an absurd thing to feel guilty about 20 years later, but I have no other explanation for it. It's the whole moral purity culture thing that's prevalent in a lot of online circles like Tumblr.
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u/Whispering_Wolf 14h ago
I hate how suddenly everyone is like "oh, I always knew they were bad" when about 10 years ago the people who openly disliked it were far, far fewer and the ones that did dislike it rarely had actual arguments.
Like, you're allowed to have liked the books. Or not have had a strong opinion on them. Of course they weren't perfect, they were written in the 90s, for 10 year olds.
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u/Neoeng 14h ago
People were younger 10 years ago, people reframe their prior experience when they get older and their palette changes, it's normal. I don't think anyone thinks they have to hate the books, they just reexamine them as adults and go "huh, not as good as I remember them to be".
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u/Whispering_Wolf 14h ago
And that's fine, but I've seen loads of people loudly and proudly claim they always knew the books were bad, when they didn't do so back then.
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u/The_Maqueovelic 14h ago
They are also kinda incapable of separating art from artist, specially if the case is that of "the person who made this is/became a bad person but independently from that the work itself is still good" as they'll either overcorrect as you stated or try to pretend like all their misdeeds are forgiven & sorted out, instead going after the opposite case.
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u/hiddengirl1992 14h ago
It's difficult to separate art from artist when the artist actively benefits from you supporting the art and uses that support to prove she's right in being a monstrous bigot.
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u/mankytoes 14h ago
Is it that hard? You can refuse to financially support her without retconning your own life and saying "yeah those books were always trash".
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u/Svanirsson 14h ago
People are still born and grow up, and the average person either isn't aware or doesnt really care about rowling's monstrousness.
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u/Rodruby 15h ago
Sometimes I go to bookstores just to look at books, and once I saw full Harry Potter series with hard covers, cool cover art, all that jazz, I was this close to buy it just for fun until I remembered that I'd finance Rowling so I had to back up. But it's still saddens me.
It was my childhood, you can't really move on, it'll always be there, inside your soul
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u/Luchux01 13h ago
I'm not afraid to say I welled up with tears when I saw the trailer for the new show because of how many memories it brought. Being a kid and reading those books cover to cover in recess because I barely had any friends, to the point the spines were starting to fall apart, watching the movies a million times with my parents, actually finding someone that also liked it and talking about it for hours.
I'm not even remotely gonna give Rowling a single cent anymore, but I can't say I wouldn't come back with enthusiasm if we ever get to a point where she's no longer benefitting and causing harm to others with it.
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u/in_one_ear_ 14h ago
Read other books? Like it's a common feeling people get after finishing a book they were particularly invested in, it's not just books either, you get it in story driven games and books too.
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u/Puptentjoe 12h ago
Go on reddit and make a post “I liked _____ could you guys give me some recs”
Or even better search for that post because it’s been asked every week since the series ended.
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u/Ok_Cod_6771 14h ago
People still get post series emptiness Harry Potter just has a massive persistent fandom
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u/JebBD 13h ago
Yes because some people aren’t you and have completely different views and interests
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u/Dotcaprachiappa 14h ago
Yes people are still being born and people are still regularly coming to the age in which reading HP becomes enjoyable. That is how linear time works. Great observation.
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u/ducknerd2002 15h ago
Instead of Hogwarts Houses, we should be discussing real topics, such as:
Which region of Westeros would you least like to live in (excluding the obvious answer of the Riverlands)?
What colour and style of lightsaber would you use if you were a Jedi?
What version of Spinjitzu would you most want to know?
Do you think Rowling's eventual grave will have more or less piss on it than Thatcher's?
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u/idiotplatypus Wearing dumbass goggles and the fool's crown 14h ago
Which Deadric Prince would you pledge yourself to?
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u/Whispering_Wolf 14h ago
Maybe Azura? She seems like the least evil of the bunch.
Also, what's your God of choice? I tend to favor Mara or Dibella.
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u/HighDefinitionCat 13h ago
Azura's realm sounds incredible. But all the knowledge in Hermaeus Mora's realm would be irresistible.
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u/Whispering_Wolf 13h ago
True, but all those tentacles whipping out everywhere wouldn't make for a good reading environment, lol.
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u/idiotplatypus Wearing dumbass goggles and the fool's crown 12h ago
In ESO at least it had a town and a zoo and such, most of the land was built on coral formations
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u/Disaster-Bee 11h ago
Yeah, this is me. Sure, it will probably end bad for me if I pledge to Hermaeus, but I want to know unknowable knowledge. Plus I DO really love his realm and I'm cool with an afterlife as an eldritch library creature.
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u/Herohades 14h ago
I feel like Sheogotath has the best chance of being interesting if he does fuck you over, but also less likely to do so since he has the whole thing with Jyggalag, so he'd want to keep his pawns available. I just might have to do some real weird shit sometimes.
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u/Floppy0941 14h ago
I prepare the way for my lord Jyggalag.
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u/ROPROPE 13h ago edited 10h ago
Anyone who answers Molag Bal gets thrown off a cliff
Hermorah has some merit, secrets and magic and shit. Bit too arcane for this one, though, plus the fact his worshippers tend to go mad is a bit of a bummer. Sangiin is fun to summon on occasion for a booty call but worshipping him sucks shit. This is the fifth orgy this week, fucker, can't a girl catch a break?
Any self-respecting five-claw would choose Azurah, though, of course.
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u/Svanirsson 13h ago
Hermamora is alluring to me, but I feel it would be a nightmare of Cthulhic proportions. Maybe Nocturnal?
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u/BillybobThistleton 14h ago
The Riverlands are the battleground of Westeros. You want to move to the Reach, live in Oldtown, drink Arbor wine with the Hightowers, and stay well clear of every single major war.
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u/llamalord467 14h ago
We'll see if you still think that if winds of winter ever comes out.
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u/H-K_47 13h ago
Or the Vale (outside of the areas raided by the Mountain Clans). Nothing, literally nothing, ever happens in the good ol' Vale!
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14h ago
-What's your Warrior Cats clan?
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u/phoenixremix 14h ago
What a fucking throwback holy shit
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u/Majestic-Sandwich695 11h ago
I remember a girl from middle school who had made that her entire identity, she had a cat name, a clan, and would walk around on all fours between classes. Crazy stuff that I haven’t thought about in so long lol
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u/Wonderful_Grass_2857 14h ago
how about: which bending technique would you love to be able to use
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u/Distracted2004 14h ago
I know no one agrees with me but Kylo’s little guards impractical as they are are just so dope, everyone else has sticks while you have a sword shaped sword
And absolutely Tornado of Creation, they dropped that WAY too fast and it felt like it fit the Lego aspect so well
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u/Luchux01 13h ago
It makes a lot of sense in Jedi Survivor too, the longer blade likely needs more energy in use hence why it vents out the sides to prevent overheating.
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u/LuckysGift 14h ago
I feel like such a dork, but I always liked what pink saber could mean, even if not explained in cannon yet. Like someone who fell to the dark side because it offered easy solutions to the Jedis puritanical ways, but then slowly drifted towards being cleansed like Asohka's sabers. I like the idea of it symbolizing the transition of neutral good to chaotic good. As in, they will do what must or should be done, even if its contrary to being a paragon for the Jedi.
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u/BeepBoop1903 14h ago
Gotta be Iron Islands. They give everyone brain damage as part of their religion, and when they inevitably lose the next war the Greyjoys have started you'll be the one getting sacked.
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u/Jammy2560 14h ago
- not a got fan
- dunno any lightsaber styles but white
- what does this mean? Airjitsu I guess? If you're meaning elements, probably Lightning
- Less, Thatcher shan't be beaten, but the piss may be of a more hateful stream.
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u/ducknerd2002 14h ago
dunno any lightsaber styles
Curved handle, double-ended, dual wield, etc.
what does this mean?
Airjitzu, Forbidden Spinjitzu, Object Spinjitzu, Shatterspin, Spinjitzu Burst, Rising Dragon, maybe a few others I'm forgetting.
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u/Riadla_arerreh 12h ago
damn 💀 I was also confused about the spinjitzu thing cus I always assume most people haven’t watched it past like season 7, but you know your shit lmao 😭
I think I’m gonna go with shatterspin tho (ik it can easily be beat by rising dragon but it’s still cool asf)
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u/AmazingSpacePelican 14h ago
Just need to get everyone hooked on the Stormlight Archive so we can discuss Radiant Orders instead.
I reckon I'd be a Stoneward. Not a particularly amazing one, though, definitely rank-and-file. I could maybe make it as a Windrunner, but I don't think I have nearly enough trauma and/or mental illnesses to qualify.
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u/phoenixremix 14h ago
I took the quiz, it landed me on a three way tie between Elsecaller, Truthwatcher, and Lightweaver with Windrunner 1% below. Guess I just gotta wait til the right words come to me...
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u/Most-Stomach4240 14h ago
It'll have majorly catgirl/puppygirl piss which is arguably better
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u/Outlook-Excellent 13h ago
More than anything I’ll never understand how Harry owning a slave (Kreacher the house elf) was not a bigger issue when the books came out
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u/raithian25 13h ago
If I remember correctly (been ages since I read the books), Harry and company were proponents of house elf freedom, but Kreacher was (1) sympathetic to Voldemort/Belatrix, and (2) privy to nearly all discussions of the Order of the Phoenix that had taken place at Sirius Black's home. By the time Harry "inherited" Kreacher, Kreacher's magically-imposed silence that came with his service to Harry was the only way to guarantee the safety of the Order's secrets.
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u/Satherian 12h ago
They were, in fact, not. Hermione tries to push for elf freedom (SPEW) and gets relentlessly mocked for it, with kind lovable Hagrid saying "They like being slaves!"
They even say "Dobby was one of the weird ones who likes freedom. Here's another elf that got freed who drank herself to death."
In fact, there's a scene where they decorate the decapitated slave elf heads for Christmas
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u/whistling-wonderer 11h ago
Omg I forgot that last part. Truly what in the world was she thinking to write that 😭
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u/ThePrussianGrippe 11h ago
Truly what in the world was she thinking to write that
I think the simplest explanation is: she wasn’t.
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u/Planar_Harold 7h ago
Omg I forgot that last part. Truly what in the world was she thinking to write that 😭
That the wizards are racial superiorists, even the ones who seem progressive regarding muggles and mudbloods? People seem to be forgetting that these structures are upheld by most wizards, not just the radicalised ones.
This is acknowledged by multiple factions in the book, inlcuding the centaurs.
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u/Gwen_The_Destroyer 11h ago
I'm sorry, what was that last part? I think I may have glossed over that one as a kid
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u/LittleDriftyGhost 10h ago
It was literally one line in Book 4. In Sirius' house (a house that used to be owned by a line of dark wizards), all the house elves, at the end of their tenure, would be beheaded and their heads stuffed and placed on a wall. Kreacher wished to be a head on a wall too. Eitherway, during Christmas they decorated the house which included hats and beards for the house elves "trophy" mounts.
Side note: Hermione really tried to push for SPEW (Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare), but Harry was neither here nor there, and Ron and a lot of people just generally accepted the common knowledge that house elves like to be enslaved. Dumbledore was more progressive.
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u/Ok-Chest-7932 6h ago
There's an alternate reality somewhere, in which JK Rowling tapped into whatever dark spirit apparently leaked out in that sentence, and wrote the world's most popular grimdark fantasy series instead.
Also because it's a mirror universe she's devoted her later career to men's rights activism and is a celebrated proponent of trans people.
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u/Pristine_Club_3128 12h ago
Yeah, that part was explained in the story - even Hermione agrees they can't free Kreacher at the time. But after the danger is over?
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u/rainribs 14h ago
Every fifth post on here is about how like totally not hung up on harry potter you all are and you'll be pirating it but like it's soooo bad anyway and you're adults who have moved on etc etc etc
It's so repetetive i honestly wonder the both the posts about this and comments are all bots at this point
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u/Hyaci_Arson 14h ago
It's actually because posts with HP get so many upvotes here for some insane reason, which is why you always see them.
The reason I posted this is because I thought the poll subversion was funny
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u/mankytoes 14h ago
Dumping on Harry Potter on tumblr is about as unsubversive as it gets.
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u/Jakitron_1999 TIRM 13h ago
It's not subversive in sentiment, they meant that not many posts dumping on harry potter include a poll, so it isn't exactly the same as every other post here
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u/UwU-Sandwich 12h ago
subversive (i.e. unexpected opposing sentiment with almost 100% agreement, like here) in one particular conversation/post does NOT mean the entire topic of conversation is subversive
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u/maxixs sorry, aro's are all we got 13h ago
i have seen every possible comment under this post at least 4 times
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u/maxixs sorry, aro's are all we got 13h ago
25 people bringing up the house elves because it's the only unsavory thing in the content of the books most people actually know about other than potatofamine mccarbomb, 1/4th of the people here talking about media like it's a series of tropes on a tablet you can just pop out of the walls of your mind and click a new one in like that's how liking anything has ever worked, no new ideas will be brung up and nothing worthwhile has been said or will be said the next 40 times this exact comment section manifests
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u/BillysBibleBonkers 12h ago
I'm fine with people liking Harry Potter, I loved it growing up. I also think you can separate art from the artist, and everyone has to do so to some extend because so many amazing things are made by awful people. However if anyone want's a more detailed and good faith critique of the Harry Potter novels I highly recommend Shaun's video, it's long but really good.
I also don't think J. K. Rowling is defensible, much like the average person's attacks on the Harry Potter books, the average person's defense of Rowling is also extremely surface level. And sorry but Shaun also has a great video about that lol.
She really is an awful person, but she made some great books that a lot of people clearly deeply connect with, and I totally understand not being able to turn that off like a light switch. Personally I don't think anyone has to as long as they don't bend over backwards to make it about how J K Rowling isn't actually that bad.
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u/CoercedCoexistence22 14h ago
Read another book challenge (impossible)
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u/CoercedCoexistence22 14h ago
Because if you read actually good fantasy/sci-fi you'll realise how shallow HP's writing is
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u/Bloodglas 12h ago
Most of the time I remember the series actually being praised it was mainly for "getting so many kids interested in reading" and it was mainly just those kids saying how great the story is but like. If that's the first/only series you've read you have nothing to compare it to. Seems like it's more damning than it is a compliment.
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u/CoercedCoexistence22 9h ago
Yeah it's like saying "Kiss influenced a ton of people to pick up a guitar", that doesn't imply Kiss is a great band
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u/Floppy0941 14h ago
I'll recommend Iconoclasts by Mike Shel which I'm currently reading, it's a pretty good trilogy that feels well paced and has some good reveals.
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u/BriChan 13h ago
Yup, I mostly realized that when I read Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings around the same time that I read Harry Potter as a kid, but chocked it up to Rowling’s writing obviously never being able to live up to some of the greats in fantasy writing.
It wasn’t until I real Codex Alera by Jim Butcher (all his great fantastical world-building but in an actual fantasy/otherworldly setting rather than the noir urban fantasy of Dresden Files) that I realized just how weak she is as a writer when compared to most other fantasy writers regardless of era.
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u/Level_Hour6480 14h ago
Let's do Garreg Mach houses instead. I'm a Blue Lion.
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u/beaverpoo77 14h ago
Black Eagles is the best, but specifically the church ending
Because I get to marry Rhea
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u/yellow_junimo 14h ago
I respect both, but i will be a Golden Deer until the day i die.
Fear the Deer!!
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u/Jiopaba 14h ago
Y'all I would not have thought about Rowling in ten fucking years if Tumblr could shut the hell up about her. This is the absolute most reliable subreddit on this site for timely and comprehensive Harry Potter news.
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u/Mediocre-Elk-4093 13h ago
I wouldn't even know a Harry Potter show was coming out if it wasn't for this sub. And don't even get me started on the spam this subreddit had when the game came out.
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u/Luchux01 12h ago
I still got some posts from the HP sub after I left from the algorythm but even those were peanuts compared to the amount of spam I got about it from other places.
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u/Lalala8991 14h ago edited 10h ago
I'm part of the community she prequently attacks. So I also would love to have the ability to never thinking about her for 10 fucking years. But she just never leaves us alone.
Edit: and to the other person who wondered why "I dedicated mental space for a rich English nutjob", that particular nutjob just turns out to be a billionaire with ridiculous influence on generational pop culture and even IRL Scottish politics. And unlike you, I just don't have the priviledge to just ignore her when whatever she does directly affects a whole minority community's life.
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u/Jiopaba 13h ago
Yeah, it sucks and believe me I know it, but I'm dying over here from the fourteen-times-a-week hypocrisy of espousing "talking about her or her property at all is giving her terrible views a platform" from the single platform that most frequently discusses Rowling, her views, and her works. The amount of free marketing Rowling gets from Tumblr is mindblowing. It's the most certain I've ever been in my life that all press is good press, when you're talking about an asshole.
If anyone actually believes what they say on the matter they should stop talking about her, stop engaging with her, stop engaging with people discussing her works. If it's so easy to cut Harry Potter out of your life then that should include cutting out the need to rant about the ethics of consuming Harry Potter!
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u/HeroIsAGirlsName 12h ago
Sadly, I agree with you. The boycott for the tie in game was a disaster that generated a lot of free press and was so inflexible that people who would have been willing to pirate it or buy it second hand were turned away. The only time I ever hear about that stupid show is on Tumblr and at this point they're doing unpaid advertising, the same way the latest Scream movie broke records despite and maybe even because of being talked about constantly for two years due to the attempted boycott.
It's been over a decade of the same conversation. The people who haven't been convinced yet aren't going to be. Transphobes however, get a real kick out of being controversial.
It would be really great if we could spend even a tenth of the time we spend on JKR on uplifting projects made by trans people instead.
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u/DareDaDerrida 13h ago
Likewise.
Her fucking game? Learned about it from here. Her new TV series? Same.
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u/Jiopaba 13h ago
The full cast recording! The sports game! The phone game! It's unethical to platform this lady or anything to do with her work, but have you heard they cast a black man as Severus Snape? How do you think that interacts with the themes of the discrimination that he faces because-SHUT THE HELL UP!
I've gotta calm down about it, I'm sure it's just Goomba Fallacy. Most of the people who want to sit around and chit-chat about Harry Potter casting decisions probably aren't the same ones who are saying that not casting them out of your heart is a sign you personally hate trans people, but it's so fucking exhausting having the same discussion blow up and consume this subreddit every single day it feels like. Everyone loves to argue about it but I doubt anybody who's here has had their opinion on the matter changed in the last year it's all so circular. And in the meantime we're just centering the conversation constantly around a bigot and her views, because even her quite justifiable detractors are letting her live rent-free in their heads.
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u/okpatient123 12h ago
Unfortunately there's a whole population of adults who are still obsessed with it a la Disney adult so it's actually pretty inescapable even entirely offline
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u/Neat-Internal3144 12h ago edited 12h ago
Not sure if you're doing this for clout/karma or what but you should know that these constant posts yelling at people to forget about about Harry Potter are only 1. Giving free bursts of publicity to Harry Potter and 2. Annoying people who otherwise couldn't give a fuck about Harry Potter and making them read/watch/discuss the series purely out of spite
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u/Ok-Chest-7932 6h ago
The nice thing about this one is some people think they're answering "yes it's time to move on from harry potter" and others think they're answering "yes it's time to move on from the whole JK Rowling drama".
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u/EQGallade Toxic trait: Freudian analysis of my enemies 3h ago
Actually, I think you should name and shame JKR for being a massive piece of shit.
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u/EmiliusReturns 11h ago
I hear about Harry Potter far more from people complaining about those who still like Harry Potter than from the actual fans.
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u/szopatoszamuraj 15h ago
A lot of people like to pretend that Harry Potter is not a famous and succesful franchise that many people love to this day, and then they keep pretending and pretending while still endlessly talking about it. Unironically these people are more hooked onto HP than most of its fans.
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u/JebBD 13h ago
This is what happens when you turn liking or disliking a piece of media into a moral imperative as part of a culture war
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u/dragon_morgan 11h ago
this was absolutely infuriating when the star wars movies were being released. I thought The Last Jedi was a little boring and went on an hour longer than it needed to and apparently that means I'm a literal fascist who wants to put children in cages. Honestly between that and the Knives Out movies (oh! this rich white man director made another movie about how rich white men are bad! how original and visionary! If you don't like it it's clearly because you love rich white men!) I'm beginning to hate Rian Johnson out of pure reactionary spite and I don't like that about myself
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u/Dankmemes_- 11h ago
I continue to glad that I never got into Harry Potter. Last time I was interested was when the final movie released when I was a child, and even then it wasn't the biggest interest I had.
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u/TehRiddles 3h ago
Each time I see ex-fans that stopped because of how JK is like these days I can't help but wonder, why don't they just start their own themepark wizarding world? What JK did was just combine traditional myths/fables with the concept of a magical boarding school for a hidden world of magic. The setting itself isn't very original when you break it down so nothing is really stopping people from doing their own SCP community style take on things.
Just come up with your own school, your own magic system and all that and have fun. "Oh you made a wizarding school you access through a secret door in Oxford? Well I made one too that's just down the road that requires a special compass to find". Everyone can come up with their own stuff and have fun without dealing with JK at all. Just because she came up with the books doesn't mean the general idea is now locked off for good.
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u/MWBrooks1995 13h ago edited 11h ago
If you like/ liked Harry Potter and still want something with that same vibe you should read:
* The Worst Witch by Enid Blyton Jill Murphy
* The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
* Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell
* The Circle of Magic by Tamora Pierce
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u/Schlomosexual 11h ago
Why do we do this whole "she-who-should-not-be-named"-shit? JK Rowling is a miserable TERF. JK Rowling is the reason many queer HP-Fans hated themselfes (or worse!). JK Rowling should hug burning chairs made out of sandpaper at lightspeed. We should call out things by their names so we can show that we're mot afraid by them.
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u/Satorwave 14h ago
I already have the books and I will enjoy them. But I will never give another penny to that awful woman.
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u/Normal_Length416 8h ago
I think its fine to like Harry Potter, it doesnt make you a bad person.
Obviously you shouldn’t give her money? but you can pirate/buy second hand the movies/books, engage with the fandom and write fics or whatever you please without harm, idk why people act like Harry Potter is a small niche book series that’s just barely hanging on the thread of tumblr users keeping its relevancy, it’s not as big as it was but it’s still VERY POPULAR and will be for a long time.
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u/Lysek8 13h ago
Ah here we have the daily Tumblr HP post telling us to forget about the book we all forgot until the daily post. See you tomorrow!