Harry Potter: Classic Or Dud?

it's voldemort afaict

some kind of vampire thing

it's voldemort afaict

sure, sure, blame voldemort. that's Rowling's answer to everything innit?

Not exactly - after all one quarter of the school is given over to training asshole wizards!

i never quite understood why they didn't just abolish that house

For me the worst inconsistency is that Quidditch sounds like a really shitty sport - apart from the pointlessness of all of the scoring and various balls when only the snitch matters, it's all about having the best broom - like if the player with the most expensive boots was always the centre-forward. And what kind of sport cancels a match because one player has a sore arm but not when there's a goddam hurricane blowing and a bunch of evil ghosts invading the pitch?

iirc when I read it the thing that made no sense at all was the magic system. You concentrate and say some quasi-Latin words and spells happen. And every so often someone invents a new spell and now if you say those quasi-Latin words you can cast it. There's no idea of harnessing supernatural forces just a cosmic rulebook that some authority (who is never mentioned in any capacity) keeps updated.

spoilers: a hall of fame moment, and by moment i mean 800-page book, is when, iirc, voldemort replaces one of harry's confidants and mentors, with whom he is often alone and vulnerable, with an evil voldemort-loyal doppelgänger totally indistinguishable from the real person; then decides against having this guy hit harry over the head, lock him in the trunk of a car, and take him up to the manor at Evilshire in favor of rigging an enormous media-drenched international sporting event from beginning to end so that harry potter, who at plan's inception is not actually qualified to compete, may not only battle but defeat the world's most promising wizarding students in a series of matches of wits and magical power, whereupon he will be presented with a trophy that has been replaced with an identical-looking trophy that is actually a teleportation gate up the road to Evilshire. goldfinger was more chillingly pragmatic.

yeah but because ancient magical laws

Quidditch is the worst thing about HP yeah

good god what is this blatantly racist house elf allegory bullshit

house elf slave allegory

I meant to say

I mean I am embarrassed to read things like "ah sir, meaning no disrespect, sir, but I is not sure you did Dobby a favor, sir, when you is setting him free" to my daughter, Mark Twain she is not

J. K. Rowling that is

I am aware that my daughter is not Mark Twain

yeah it's weird & not good

marginally less awkward if you read it with the kind of olde backwarde Englishe accents they used in the movies but ffs Hogwarts is the whitest school in the world what would you expectorate?

good fucking god the number of adults I know who do nothing but talk about harry potter is irritating

white adults in their 20s sure love harry potter

Eh, the original Harry Potter readers are just reaching the point that the original (and next several generations of Star Wars fans reached years ago: this is the shit they grew up on, and they don't feel like letting it go.

(I'm all for powerful connections to the things you loved as children, by the way--and how many of us who hang out here aren't like that with a lot of our favourite music. But when one thing forms the sole parameters around one's engagement with art, well, I don't know if that's a *problem* necessarily, but it sure is annoying.)

the best part of harry potter is the half-assed, under-edited quality of books 4-7.

culminating in harry's resurrection

the series is like the drunk history retelling of itself

The ponderous hyper-complicated nonsense in this series is extremely tiring. Everything is resolved w the most convoluted deus ex machina shit imaginable.

yeah because all the books are first drafts

But see there was this magic thingamajigger but voldemort put a curse on it when he was doublecrossed by his henchman who's actually a werewolf that Dumbledore saved from giants when he was a pup so first harry has to figure out how to cast a charm w his magical phallus to win a raffle where the prize is the key to a secret chamber that no one had ever been able to get into where the thingamajigger is supposedly kept but once he gets there its actually just some shit his parents left him which makes harry sad and also voldemort gets away

Pad w dialogue and quidditch matches for extra 500 pages

Which seems preferable to you other ilxors:

...continuing forever to enjoy the stories and other entertainments that gave you delight when your mind and experience of life were that of a twelve year old, because you effectively did not develop much beyond the capacities of your twelve year old self, or

...losing forever your sense of delight in those juvenile stories and entertainments, because you have since grown up, experienced more, thought more deeply, and matured in your knowledge of life, although none of the stories or entertainments you currently enjoy ever give you the same level of innocent delight you experienced back then?

I'll take my answers off the air.

every line of dialogue in harry potter books: "it's the blahblahblah, isn't it?" "it's the whatfuckywha, isn't it?" goddamnit

i like how they didn't abolish the "slytherin" house even after the monster that salazar slytherin hid in the school to kill muggle-born children got loose and nearly killed a bunch of people

there's a lot to love if you free your mind of preconceptions about books needing to have internal consistency or logic

yeah I think modern schools would banish the greek system for lesser issues

Every school has its Sigma Chi

I assume most of Hogwarts' endowment comes from Slytherin alums

One of the (perhaps unfortunte although I don't mind too much) its the after-life of this series on twitter. At points people just scream at others to "read other books".

Anyway, this thread post-Rowling/Depp thingy. It then makes the charge that this book is in line with world pol shifting rightwards, which is more rhethoric that I suspect cannot be mapped out.

This isn’t a liberal/left fantasy! This is a racist, sexist, homosphobic, classist, ableist, imperial, slavery apologia. It’s Etonand Oxbridge with magic!

— Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_n6) December 7, 2017

I assume most of Hogwarts' endowment comes from Slytherin alums

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, 26 April 2017 12:57 (seven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol

Moral cred proven by liberating a favourite elf? Check

Btw note that the rest are HAPPY being slaves, miserable when freed!

— Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_n6) December 7, 2017

didn't know DJ Martian got woke, let alone was into Harry Potter

the series is pretty reactionary/right wing tbf, Rowlings attempts to PC it up almost all take place in the media rather than in the books, Hogwarts is straight Enid Blyton

Yeah, given the day and those tweets they have made me mildly interested in right-wing brexity children's lit. I am just not reading however many vols of HP there are.

i read them all a couple of summers ago for complex psychosocial reasons and my main conclusions are that Hogwarts is the whitest school in the universe and whatever Rowlings imaginative gifts may or may not be she isn't much of a writer.

the whole thing just gets too much attention

It's a Harry potter series have some words lads

xp

well yeah, and it's grown so big that even suggesting it's a triumph of marketing above all else will get accused of challopry in some quarters but i'm pretty sure it's a triumph of marketing above its actual merits

i have no major problem with it but the milking of the brand for cash and the associated copycats in hollywood are p depressing.

Why

It was popular but pretty hacky there's nothing to get invested in here unless it's the opportunity cost of what kids would have read besides (imo nett kids probably read more overall after being swept up in the phenomenon) or what Hollywood would have made besides (just different shit)

The big crime here is Daniel Radcliffe obv

they're still churning out plays as well, and there'll be more movies. she should just end it, it's run its course and she's rich enough. it's crass.

i don't lie awake thinking about it.

Stalin should've stopped after year X an all but that's not our world is it

It's probably helping to keep me in a job at the minute tbh.

once again, i'll point out that if we were to limit ourselves to expressing opinions that changed things on ilx we wouldn't have a board