"Dumbledore is Gay" sez Rowling

Poptimism does fine with books, sci-fi/fantasy/other genres aren’t ghettos nearly as much as they used to be.

YA is a whole other thing - even poptimists would look askance at an adult who only listens to Disney Channel compilations.

he can't even use the same verb twice

he already knows "belched", now you can teach him "eructed".

I know it predates HP, but it seems to be pushed now in a way it very much wasn't when I was in school here in the 80s, it's like she has shown this is a good model and everyone has got trapped in her slipstream. on the plus side seems like they have shit up about split infinitives.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Saturday, December 28, 2019 7:23 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

just a wild guess but there might be more influential changes in the writing curriculum since the 1980s than harry potter

the split infinitive 'rule' is easily the worst pile of dogshit among all the trumped up grammatical 'rules' foisted on helpless youngsters. it's nonsense.

oh, it gets worse, he can't even use the same verb twice, burped is good once, then it becomes this ridiculous game of searching for new verbs, they have not thought it through at all.

As a college comp teacher, I spend so much time correcting the damage done by idiots like these. So many obedient students writing unreadable crap because they've been told "said" and "asked" are bad words.

The book Three Lives to Live, by Anne Lindbergh, has a great chapter about this - since the premise of the book is that the narrator is writing it as an assignment for her middle school English class, we get this amazing scene where the class workshops a chapter we've already read and then the teacher makes her rewrite it with new verbs.

Camaraderie, I would absolutely encourage your son to subvert the exercise in creative ways, like making all the characters act like birds, so they sing, tweet, squawk, twitter, or chirp. Or have all of them gargling, gurgling, burbling, snorting and wheezing. At least that will make it less tedious for him. Hand him a thesaurus, let him go wild, then tell him to throw the thesaurus away as soon as he loses that teacher.

So it's over...i forgot this is the movie where Ron is obsessed with butts and Myrtle keeps trying to see Harry's weiner

gah all those ghosts.. having established that ghosts exist and are essentially comic she proceeds to do.. nothing with them

and speaking of speaking with the dead, how come harry never just asks dumbledore’s picture frame all those burning questions about horcruxes, the sword of gryffindor etc?

You know, I don't really think whoever wrote this bit was purposefully aiming at Rowling, but I think they hit her pretty well with it:

https://entertainment.theonion.com/frozen-2-creators-confirm-that-elsa-gay-but-also-tran-1839981134

Hey, I deprogram eighty students a semester from the twaddle enforced by high school teachers, for example forbidden from starting sentences with conjunctions; it's how we get horrifying constructions like "due to the fact that."

I'm not super happy with the response of "she was a shit writer anyway". I know why it happens. A lot of people, particularly here where a lot of us are writers, have always hated her writing and her saying some fucking awful things is a free pass to dunk on her.

I know a lot of young trans people who did grow up on her writing, who do like her stories, and a lot of this thread is just out and out dunking on those people. Fuck anybody who was ever stupid enough to _like_ Harry Potter, right? What do they know? They should have been reading Le Guin!

criticizing any artist is dunking on people who like them if you look at it that way, but it seems an extreme position or one that's not really meaningful

generally opinions about why a piece of art is bad are trite, misdirected, function as a critique of the critic, are just more words

but at the same time saying why you think something is bad is a way of expressing personal and political thoughts, sometimes indirectly

of course nobody has to engage with any piece of art or criticism

the kind of meta "climb above the validity of critique" which we are all wont to play sometimes is only another layer of "i like this thing v i don't like this thing"

JK's politics are fair game for bagging on especially since she constantly obtrudes them into her fandom and the broader world

any cultural product is fair game for dissection/critique

leave Britney alone

one can be an adequate or better artist in all sorts of ways, e.g. technique, but have flaws that negate your positives so much they make you bad

the artist isn't the main arbiter of the value of the work

people can like stuff and get something from stuff that's terrible and that's more than ok

yes, all of that.

but also, conversations move on, we were not discussing the transphobia at that point, don't think anyone on here feels extra emboldened to criticise jkr because she's done this, she was already fair game as much as any other writer.

There’s a bank, a prison, a series of schools with terribly important exams but.. what are these wizards actually expected to do with these powers?

this is true in real life too fwiw

lol good point. but we do have an entire body of world literature dedicated at least in part to investigating these questions and jkr seems uninterested in them. she did manage to stick a set piece in gringott’s for the last book but gaining access was absurdly easy, and we learned nothing new about it

it just feels like she only has the vaguest idea how anything in her world works

it me.jpg yes yes - but i want something more from my detailed fantasy worlds than the quotidian enfugment i already know - i want a glimpse of the mechanism, a flash of the green field of play. is the wizarding world really just a kind of shit edwardian echo of our own with the added ability to set the table more quickly??

dunk on rowling all you like, i'm old and didn't grow up with her and don't particularly care about her mythos or her writing one way or the other; i haven't read any of her books. dunking on the people who grew up with those stories as kids for continuing to like those stories, however, strikes me as being somewhat mean-spirited and unfair.

omg yr such a hufflepuff

which is the house with the trans people in it

oh wait

i'm just tired of spending every weekend trying to persuade various friends of mine that not _everybody_ in the world hates them and no, they don't need to hurt themselves, and the stupid shit j.k. rowling says makes it harder, and i know that's not as _relevant_ to some of y'all's lives as her apparently dodgy writing style, but i'm probably not going to shut up about the things that matter to me. and if that makes me a "hufflepuff", sure, fine, whatever, feel free to fp me if you're sick of reading my posts and go back to spending your time talking about what a ridiculous name "neville longbottom" is.

I hope that when my novel, X-59 and the Mechanical Boop-Boops of Bleeple Blorp Sector, is finally published that a bunch of internet wisenheimers don't come along two decades after the fact to point out that it was all built on a foundation of every lazy robot cliche ever.

lol sorry that was joeks rush

i did quite carefully explain what i like about her writing! i think there are good reasons why she’s popular.

xpost

I will say that the overriding feeling I have with her is of disappointment, her world has potential but she is too lazy and conservative a thinker to flesh it out. This fundamental timid english conservatism explains both her defense of privilege and her transphobia. Her "feminism" if she ever had any was always of the sheltered cis/het/white upper-middle class lady type, and her imagination for societal change was simply non-existent.

This is probably another of those instances where, because a ubiquitous cultural object is relatively marginal to my own life, I fail to understand why anyone feels a need to strongly critique or defend a thing which seems more deserving of casual acknowledgement or dismissal.

xxp the two are intertwined although not necessarily related

I’ve never really liked or rated her writing as much as some people have. My opinion doesn’t affect her or her billions in any way. However, her appalling political opinions take it from “read another book ffs” to “I’m so glad this bigot has a massive platform and loads of fans to defend their every fucking utterance”. Like I’m not forgetting she’s a horrible person when I make fun of her writing!

Rowling is a shit writer —> everyone hates ppl who grew up reading these books is a huge enough leap that it’s v v weird to put the latter onto some messageboard posters expressing the former, there have been like 2 posts this revive that are maaaaybe dismissive of fans which seems ok to me — again, unless simply stating the opinion that some books are bad amounts to a personal attack, in which case we’re all fucked

i will cop to enjoying the books, even while getting bothered by some of the internal flaws of the universe the further I went.

the only fans I have any gripe with are the nutbars who talk about nothing but POtter, which is admittedly a very, very, very tiny minority of people, and yet I happen to know at least five of them. probably cos of proximity to Potter world at Universal STudios.

One thing that repulsed me about the novels: who on earth thought drinking fermented butter was a good way to spend Saturday night?

I do also know a lot of LGBTQ+ fans struggling with the TERF news and I truly do sympathize with them as these books were very important to them growing up and now they feel betrayed.

xpost lol Alfred

i couldn't stop giggling last night because I had this asshole co-worker who kept reminding me ofs omeone and I couldn't think of who and then Voldemort showed up and it was very clear. he looks like him in a way Rick Scott never could. it's uncanny.

One thing that repulsed me about the novels: who on earth thought drinking fermented butter was a good way to spend Saturday night?

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

at a guess, scandinavians

There's an implicit air of superiority when your reaction to somebody being revealed as a shitty person is "I never liked them anyway" - like you can somehow divine someone's badness by disliking their art, and that anyone who liked their art is a foolish rube. I also deeply feel rushomancy's post because of my own friendship group, which includes a LOT of trans/queer people who grew up loving HP - they don't really need people rubbing it in, y'know? They're already having a shitty enough time. And I get the side of "but we're just discussing Rowling on a Rowling thread", but it still makes up part of this continual discourse of "ha ha you idiots, not only does the creator of this thing you love despise you and your very existence, but it's YOUR fault for being so stupid as to like it in the first place".

didn't this latest discussion start less from the TERF comments and more from Tracer's post about reading the last book with their kids?

I started reading from cryptosicko's post, so it certainly looked to me like it was about her transphobia, but I guess there was a bit of a gap?

Yeah it felt way more like normal conversational drift than a pile on to me. I get what you guys are saying but I don’t know what the alternative is, discussion boards gonna discuss

christ, i'm not calling for a fucking struggle session, just try to be kind and considerate of other people, ok?

xps to emil.y I’m looking at it from the perspective of someone who knows people who absolutely cannot look past their own love of the series, and don’t care about what she’s putting out into the universe.

I think what many are trying to understand is where the lack of consideration has been, as an overall trend? It's a long thread, so maybe I missed several posts.

I would get if this was a Facebook thread and someone had just posted that Rowling was a TERF, and the sub-comments were all dismissive "I never liked her terrible books, this is just icing!" responses....but it's a message board thread, and most of the discussion on the books themselves seemed to follow Tracer Hand's focus on they noticed while reading the books to their kids.

I get the overall point, but I don't see where the insensitivity is happening in this thread. If I missed it, then I apologize, but as far as pile-ons go, this seems rather benign by ILX standards.

nv otm

perhaps its because this is the thread where the conversation occurred and not a generalized Potter thread, but I can attest these same criticisms appeared in Potter threads many years ago almost verbatim. hence why most of the posts I read had an aire of familiarity to them, as I read similar criticisms here while I was actually making my way through the books.

There's an implicit air of superiority when your reaction to somebody being revealed as a shitty person is "I never liked them anyway" - like you can somehow divine someone's badness by disliking their art, and that anyone who liked their art is a foolish rube.

I get that, and I'm guilty of it. But with HP I think there's the added factor that for decades it's been impossible to voice even a mild criticism (like, "Hey, I like Snape but think her other characters are kinda flat) without Harry Potter fans coming after you like you just pissed on their sacred tree. When a work of art is so beloved people cannot tolerate any criticism of it, there's going to be a backlash, and I think a lot of the "I never liked them anyway" is coming from a place of "Hey, we're in a thread where it's okay to say something negative about these books? Sweet, I've got some thoughts I've been saving up."

Not much different from Star Wars and Donald Trump then

thr answer to who like to eat fermented butter = everyone

oh, it gets worse, he can't even use the same verb twice, burped is good once, then it becomes this ridiculous game of searching for new verbs, they have not thought it through at all.

As a college comp teacher, I spend so much time correcting the damage done by idiots like these. So many obedient students writing unreadable crap because they've been told "said" and "asked" are bad words.

― Lily Dale, Saturday, December 28, 2019 8:47 PM (yesterday)

As a middle-grades comp teacher, I also work to undo this damage. It's pre-existing, and I blame a series of terrible SAID IS DEAD posters/worksheets that were disseminated in the wake of the 2000s Writer's Workshop classes proliferated by Columbia Teachers' College.

http://mjgds.org/classrooms/2ndgrade/files/2014/04/Said-is-Dead.jpg

continually grateful i went to journalism school where you better have a good fuckin reason to use a word that isn’t “said”

lol otm

mouthfarted