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Harry Potter.
Before JK went mask off, I had dropped the books about half way though for being increasing annoyed with how they ended. Never any change to the status quo except Harry actually regressing in character development. I watched the first movie, but that was around when I dropped the books and never looked back.
I was able to just quietly keep my opinions to myself, but with with JK becoming increasing unhinged with both her tweets and books, I haven't felt the need to be polite with the "separate the art from the artists" types. Especially when they just assume that you're a fan if you don't correct them.
I haven't read the books, but liked the movies. This is more of a expression of what I liked than anything else... But while JK turned into a mess, the movies generally were good even though
The first two are okay but the third one in particular is a favorite of mine. It's less because of Harry Potter and more about just how well it stands as a well made movie. It is darker in the literal sense and movies a lot more away from the magic wonder feeling the former movies had. In particular by adding a horror like element that adds so much more tension then the older ones. When I was a kid it was terrifying how unsettling and discomforting things were made to be.
And despite it being the movie which used the never-seen-after completely world breaking time turners, it does an amazing job actually using them.There are all these things that go wrong, but just in the right way that the time loop works out without actually changing the first iteration we saw. The books probably do it the same way, but as a visual adaptation it's right on the mark, down to the sense of time running out when the time travel shenanigans happen.
Then again, I'm weak for "good feelings" making a difference and similar, so the protection spell that chases the Dementors away at the crucial moments sure makes me giddy. So it's a thematic bullseye for me, despite how much emotional discomfort the movie played with to get there.
I'm just gonna hop on to say that there is zero world building in Harry Potter. I know that's because it was written for a youngish audience, but like the only things that are ever built on are used directly for the story in that book, then mostly left alone.
No one comes back years later with a Time Turner and wrecks havoc, for instance.
The few comparisons to Tolkien I've heard of her works are so unbelievably unfounded and off base.
Not to mention she's a TERF
I'm just gonna leave Shaun's review here.
Harry Potter unintentionally made a whole subgenre of fiction that could be called "Harry Potter, but fixed". Little Witch Academia's workers union episode was great and Reign of the Seven Spellblades is a mid, but still fun anime that seemingly takes aim at opposing Harry Potter and JK(specifically, her anti-trans shit) at every turn. I haven't read it, but Shaun seems to think that The Hog Father is a direct reaction to the house elf shit in HP.
Hogfather as in the Discworld novel? I could have sworn that was older than Harry Potter.
Edit: it is, but surprisingly only one year older than the first Harry Potter book.
I'll have to relisten to the review.
Fuck I hate her bullshit inconsistency with this. Prior to that shitty play coming out I could have given you a simple explanation for this. First: the time turners were all made inoperable during book 5 when the team went to the Ministry. This was shown explicitly in the text (and is an example of Rowling’s delayed reaction to criticism that I think the Shaun video brings up). It could be bypassed pretty easily if you wanted, but it also works well enough to explain why nobody else uses one anymore, for a kid’s book.
But more crucially, the way time turners work in the original is pretty clear: it’s a one-way trip back in time. In book 3 they travel back a matter of hours, and then work back to the "present" in real time. You can’t use it to go back and kill Hitler or something like that, unless you want to be permanently stuck in the past. It’s never said, but it’s feasible that it could have been expanded on by placing a hard limit on how far back you can go at all. Then she went and wrote the play and (supposedly—I never read or watched it myself) completely broke all of that. I suppose you could be generous and say she was following Sanderson’s 3rd law, but IMO it wasn’t so much "expanding" on what she already had as it was "completely retconning the way it works in a way that also undermines previously-established plots".
And they were made inoperable in the laziest way possible. Like someone bumped a cabinet and ALL of them broke. Easy, no more time travel.
Fine enough for a kid's book, but it tried to take itself WAY more seriously than that, just to continue to pick up and drop plot points and ideas constantly. I wouldn't mind it if a fair few people didn't hail it as if it's a great work
Sanderson's third law of magic: Expand what you already have before you add something new.
Not sure why this was downvoted. It’s a very good point. Sanderson doesn’t like being openly critical of other authors but it’s pretty obvious that applying his laws to Rowling explains a fair amount of why her writing is bad.
How old were you when you started reading them?
JK Rowling holds a very common position amongst older feminists and really doesn't deserve the constant rape threats for funding women's refuges. I'm pushing back on the party line here, and no, I don't believe trans people deserve to be killed, or any bullshit like that. I promise to hide them in my non-existent attic if it comes to that.
Edit: the books did get progressively worse after the third or possibly fourth one, though, and the films aren't very good.
Her or her friends are running those charities. It's a way to hide money from tax collectors.
Looking back with adult eyes, her books push a very pro-Class based society. That's why nothing ever changes.
Edit: The books got progressively worse because JK wrangled more and more control away from her editor.
I'm not sure about the ownership of foundations, charitable funds and the like; some degree of corruption wouldn't surprise me unfortunately.
I will say that she won't have been deliberately pushing class-stratification given her socioeconomic background, however the whole setting is heavily influenced by Victorian-era children's novels about boarding school adventures which were absolutely saturated with classism.
They surely needed a team of editors towards the end.
JK was never poor. Her "homelessness" was couch surfing between friend's houses in Edinburgh.
If she didn't approve of the class system, then why was the sorting hat never wrong? Having kids switch houses between school years would have been an easy to to signal character development for a younger audience. Her class system is depicted as shitty, but something you just have to accept as true and deal with to become stronger. Look at how they treat the one character to oppose slavery. Even our MC, who's an outsider to the wizard world thinks it's weird to be opposed to slavery.
Well, you've clearly made your mind up.
Right back at you.
I just did a poo.
It being common does not make it ok. If she were just quietly anti-trans in her personal life that might be something we could overlook. But she is proudly and actively hateful towards trans people. She ignores the fact that trans women are even more likely than cis women to be victims of gender-based violence and pretends that trans women are actually predators. And she engages in bullshit "transvestigating", drumming up witch hunts against butch cis women. She is actively causing harm against women, including the cis women she claims to want to protect. She’s a terrorist using stochastic methods.