"Dumbledore is Gay" sez Rowling

spare a thought for me, i (almost literally) work at hogwarts

Some of these dorks are dressed up.

Ugh

Another complaint is that my nearly-9-y/o son's teacher has told the class that they aren't allowed to use the word 'said' in their creative writing, and must cram in as many adjectives and adverbs as they can. I understand that this is an attempt to broaden vocabulary use, but it's still the imposition of an ugly style, and it seems like the HP books are the model for it.

Elementary school teachers never give correct or even good writing advice. Be fearful of their rules.

yikes I really made a mistake taking Fred off of killfile, fixing that now

and thanks for that great Tove Jansson quote, JoeStork!

I remember a creative writing teacher telling us we could set our film scripts anywhere except the USA and could use any topic except organised crime, that was a good example of restriction, but was at university, actually that was the only good writing teacher I've ever had, he was called Seamus Finnegan, which is also the name of a character in the HP books, he would not be impressed by this run-on sentence.

So glad I grew up in a time when children's books weren't subject to such analysis; no-one gave a shit about Jennings and Darybishire, afaik.

Yeah CaAL my daughter used to get told to use "wow words" and it was painful explaining decent prose style to her

I count among many of my students and colleagues in the university English department where I work and study a large number of people who got into reading via the HP books and then moved on to various other literary fields. These books are basically Star Wars, in that some people are going to use these touchstones as a jumping-off point towards the wider, richer world of film/literature, while others are going to remain willfully trapped in their fanboy bubble.

Star Wars is also bad though

Personally I think it's OK to chat shit about the terrible politics of children's authors who publicly flaunt their terrible politics but I guess there's more important stuff we could be doing

my nearly-9-y/o son's teacher has told the class that they aren't allowed to use the word 'said' in their creative writing

tell him that whenever he might use "said", he should just substitute "burped". that should appeal to a 9-y/o boy.

I guess there's more important stuff we could be doing

potter

fanboys?

what a poor selection of a word

Fanbutts

I had an English teacher in the early '80s who forbade the use of "get/got" or "nice". He also taught us the correct plural of "gin and tonic" is "gins and tonic". Stood me in good stead, that.

tell him that whenever he might use "said", he should just substitute "burped". that should appeal to a 9-y/o boy.

I have virtually no Harry Potter exposure (read maybe a couple chapters of the first one as a kid and bounced off hard; watched a few of the movies when friends did but had no real opinion) but some people seem a lot more outraged about the existence/imagined reading habits of harry potter fans than anything the author has said

xp also the "said"/"got"/etc thing extremely predates HP

this is a very lazy google books search but should illustrate well enough that it's been around https://www.google.com/search?q=%22dialogue+tags%22+%22said%22&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS838US838&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1900,cd_max:1999&source=lnms&tbm=bks

(yikes, sorry)

Sometimes it seems like the poptimism ethos does not include books!

Poptimists can’t keep a straight face when it’s books

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.

We were barred from using said and also in elementary school writing.

only a poptimist knows how to accurately complain about pop culture

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