"Dumbledore is Gay" sez Rowling

why couldn't they magick their excretions directly out of their bladders/intestines?

― mookieproof, Thursday, October 1, 2020 11:07 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ahem:

This is the YA fantasy version of Badger's Star Trek: TOS treatment.

― Quiet Storm Thorgerson (PBKR), Wednesday, September 30, 2020 7:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

the books clearly begin from a "fun bedtime stories" mode, heavily loaded up with Roald Dahl and a grab-bag of silly fantasy elements. you don't really expect "world-building" there --- but when the books morphed into an epic YA fantasy series, they were still stuck with this fairly goofy, punny, kitchen-sink universe that makes no goddamn sense. each attempt to expand the wizarding world's geography and institutions beyond Hogwarts and Diagon Alley just made things less believable.

This is OTM. Rowling definitely a victim of her own success creatively, if the books had sold more modestly she likely either would have scaled back her misguided ambitions for the latter half of the series, or an editor would've done it for her. It would take a far defter writer to pull off the gradual tonal shift she was presumably going for.

imo the main point of arthur chu's thread is not that jkr makes mistakes. it's that she is now in a position where anything even slightly lazy or incorrect gets amplified. and while it's more amusing that anything when it comes to spell and name origin, there is quite a bit more at stake when you get something wrong about a whole group of people - and instead of understanding your responsibility, you insist on amplifying incorrect info - while knowing full well that your amplification will be used as a weapon against these people.

and jkr getting called out on these things (which have been well documented before) is exactly because she now presents herself as the "voice of reason" on transgender issues. so what was seen as a mere inconsistency or lazy research will be now similarly magnified. deservingly so.

speaking of inconsistencies in HP.. "The vagueness made the Potterverse a great sandbox in which the fandom could play." - it also allowed the fandom to call out things that are handwaved in the novels. http://www.hpmor.com/ even with its own failings is a great example of a fanfic that calls out all the ridiculous rules / spell names etc etc and tries to at least retrofit the magic system with some more consistent logic (often to hilarious and better results).

if i were to pick the most ridiculous thing though, it's the polyjuice potion. apparently, it's entirely possible - not just possible, but totally ok - to change your gender if you use magic. don't remember if this was just in the movie, but when a bunch of them takes the potion in the beginning of deathly hollows, fleur says (as she changes into harry): "bill, don't look at me, i'm hideous". a throwaway cheap comic relief line, sure, but now combined with everything else it's amplified to something nastier.

But could also be read in the "death of the author" spirit as a depiction of the visceral pain felt by people forced to present as a gender they're not (since Fleur actually IS a girl and would suffer that pain when appearing as Harry.)

HPMOR is one of the worst fucking things on the Internet, almost bad enough to make me feel sorry for JKR for getting famous enough for her work to inspire fic. It’s like, none of the things people like about the series written and delivered condescendingly and full of massive Do You Sees & it’s almost, almost enough to make me take back what I said about JKR being a lazy writer wrt the magic.

This reviewer otm, basically:

This story reminds me of reading Ayn Rand, where a fictional story is merely a vehicle for bludgeoning the reader with a "superior" worldview; characters espousing said worldview win out over those who don't in equal parts wish fulfillment on the part of the author and morality play for the reader. Rather than organic dialogue, the reader receives mini-lectures delivered using different characters as mouthpieces and/or sounding boards. In this chapter, it was the Sorting Hat waxing on thoughts of self-awareness in the Harry Potter analogue of machine consciousness, the author's professional bailiwick.

I'm sure you've all read the Ayn Rand's Harry Potter series from The Toast?

https://the-toast.net/2014/06/18/ayn-rands-harry-potter-prisoners-collectivism/

"HPMOR is one of the worst fucking things on the Internet" granted, still the way it exposes the various inconsistencies and plot holes is hilarious.

(this is not from HPMOR) like, why the hell wouldn't harry just talk to dumbledore's portrait to get at least some intel?

omg i had never heard of HPMOR

660,000 words???

like, why the hell wouldn't harry just talk to dumbledore's portrait to get at least some intel?

this bugged the hell out of me. all the old headmasters.... in picture frames... harry desperately needs to know information that only dumbledore has... but it’s just never brought up. she could have at least said something like “But Harry knew that Albus would need to spend the Year Of Trial before appearing in any of the frames around his old beloved school” etc. — or maybe he’s imprisoned in a particular frame and must be liberated by a thrilling rescue.. nope

you assume at some point during the writing of book five Rowling was like "shit, what am I going to do about the existence of time-turners once major characters start dropping like flies? I know! write a chase scene where the stockroom they're all kept in gets destroyed! sorted."

xp i vaguely recall something about dumbledore's frame being conveniently empty but without any particular reason. and it's not like all the previous headmaster portraits weren't present for various conversations albus had in his office with snape / the order etc.

"hey albus, do you want us to communicate anything to harry in case something happens to you?"
"nah, he'll figure it out exactly at the right moment as a consequence of a bunch of other random things also happening at the right moment"
"but how do you make sure all those things happen?"
"magic!"

i mean if we're talking bad plotting, then nothing tops love-starved, desperate-for-family-contact Harry Potter just plain ol' forgetting to open that mysterious birthday present from Sirius until after the latter died, at which point Harry remembers, opens it, and discovers that - of all the rotten luck! - it was a magic mirror that would have let him contact Sirius at any time!!! if only he'd had that before, everyone could have avoided the confusing and deadly mess at the Department of Mysteries! the most artificial and unconvincing ginning-up of bathos in any of the books imo.

You guys have all read every word of these bullshit books, huh?

Sorry, that was snarkier than I meant to sound, it's just--if you're reading this shit and you notice it's shit, why keep reading it?

short answer = because it's yr defining worldview and you and all your friends translate life thru it?

Or perhaps because you were a child/teenager when they came out and they were always knocking around the house? Not that deep.

You guys have all read every word of these bullshit books, huh?

well when we discuss the subject in the Proust thread people get confused so

tbh i didn't even read JM's post before i jst assumed it was lazy and pointless

soz

xp or perhaps because there was enough payoff to ignore the cringey parts, we are just more inclined to talk about the cringey parts now.

the real lol is that if instead of doing 3 turns of the time turner ("that should do it, ms granger" says albus) they did, i donno, 5, instead of just saving sirius's life they could've captured pettigrew while he was still a rat, thus allowing sirius's name to be cleared completely - which would mean harry would be able to communicate with him freely and pettigrew wouldn't be able to help voldemort.

really, the more you think about it, the more it feels like a lot of the world building depended on a reader's good will, so once you remove it, poking holes is both easy and fun.

like, why didn't albus just use a time turner to go back in time to warn potters?

I can buy that a time turner might have a functional limit to how far back it can take you... like a week or two max, but as a plot device it's like a nuclear bomb, you can use it once and then everyone has to agree it can't be used again or the world is over

except they used in the cursed child again, and to bypass the previous plot driven limitations they had to make it "a prototype of a more powerful version of the Time-Turner"

Cursed Child so surgically excised everything I liked about Harry Potter and replaced it tedious middle-aged existential crisis I have nixed it from my personal HP canon

replaced it with

not having read these (or seen 'frozen') is killing my crossword game

the time-turner is another thing that makes way, way more sense for a series of charming little mystery/adventures - the wizardly equivalent of like, the Boxcar Children sequels. it's a cool gimmick that once revealed, explains all these odd things from earlier in the book, and lets them do a fun time travel thing to repeat the climax of the book but get the good ending this time, so long as they tie up all the loose ends and land where they're supposed to. great, cool, fun. just doesn't wash at all once the stakes are elevated to super intense epic, which tbf is already starting to happen or be hinted at with that book.

but yeah even then it's like, this seems WAY too powerful to be something that teachers loan out to overachieving kids

Prisoner of Azkaban was probably the high point of the HP novels, before Rowling got too powerful to be reined in by an editor and everything got bogged down in mytharc stuff

I agree. I was never a fan of the series, and I really lost patience with it when the books started getting bloated with mytharc, but I remember thinking Prisoner of Azkaban was much better than the first two. I think she'd gotten a little better at the nuts and bolts of writing by then, and having Sirius to focus the story on helped as well. I generally find her adults more interesting than her child characters, and troubled-hero-escapes-from-prison is always fun.

Fuck you, Noodle Vague.

As to what the rest of you are saying, fair point. I forget how long ago these things started coming out--they still have such a weird presence in the forefront of popular culture for something that ostensibly ended 13 years ago.

yeah the last book was released in 2007 but that was the beginning, not the end. movies went through 2011, then the Cursed Child in 2016, the Fantastic Beasts movie trilogy (2016, 2018, and... next year maybe?), and a couple dozen video games and then there's the toys and merch. Harry Potter is basically Agatha Christie x Star Wars, it is never, ever going away (despite Rowling's best efforts to be a stain on humanity)

tbf though most of those later items have failed to really arouse anything like the same public enthusiasm as the source material. the fantastic beasts movies in particular seem to suggest that rowling's name and "from the wizarding world of Harry Potter" isn't going to make an event out of just any old weird unappealing wizard movie. the masses got invested in the setting of Hogwarts, the familiarity of a cast of charming characters they'd come to know, and the melodrama of Harry, Snape, etc. it's not like Star Wars where you can get a lot of people actively and sustainedly amped, most of the time, so long as it's got stormtroopers and lightsabers and some plucky heroes.

I can tell you from spending time with my sister's kids that they are actively and sustainedly amped about Harry Potter, and they weren't even born in 2007

if we survive the 2020 election, I confidently predict a Harry Potter TV series by 2025 that retells the original story of the books and it'll be on par with any of the recent Stars Wars nonsense in hype terms

o no

xp i've been thinking for a while that a big TV series revive will happen but probably not that soon if rowling keeps trying to make herself the face of the anti-trans movement. that would have to die down, the beasts movies would have to finish and become completely forgotten, it'd really have to play on millennial nostalgia. from what i gather from The Youths on social media, your sister's kids aren't the norm, 30-something dorks are still driving this IP train. and their kids might not latch onto it like they always dreamt they would.

it'll be Hogwarts: The New Class

if you're reading this shit and you notice it's shit, why keep reading it?

my kids demanded it. tbf even they started quailing by the last book. it took us about two months to finish it.

as i think i've said before here, she is actually really good at writing for 'easy reading' - the sentences flow really well, the dialogue works, it's always easy to keep to track of who's saying what, and every character is given just enough of a characterisation that someone reading aloud knows what sort of voice to put on. it's impressive. it was more fun to read to my kids than a wizard of earthsea, though of course earthsea is in every way a better book.

it'll be Hogwarts: The New Class

Saved by the Spell

✓

The book series's timing was absolutely perfect for my nephews (born 1993ish?). They got all the excitement of new books coming out, not knowing what was going to happen, having Quidditch-themed birthday parties, etc.

By the time my daughter (born 2007) was reading age, the books and movies had all already happened. By then it was a global industry, complete with amusement parks with themed rides. She read the books perfunctorily because everyone in her demographic had, but it never quite approached the quasi-religious state that I saw in the early oughts.

On some level, asking it to have continuity and make sense is beside the point - like, you are okay with wizards and witches and magic and reincarnation and immortality and time travel, but you're displeased with how the series handles... toilets? Or if somehow there was a slipup between west Africa and Madagascar (while talking about a minor detail of a fiction that is, at root, a voluntary leisure activity? Ok nerd.

At the same time, sure, Rowling either was lazy or became lazy. No argument there. And her utterly shit opinions now don't make anything better. At first, people understandably loved her rags-to-riches story, but she has used up that goodwill.

And, as has been pointed out upthread, she could just disappear onto a private island and go count money, letting people be happy with the pleasurable aspects of what they've already been given.

But some perverse impulse of massively famous and influential persons is to never quite be done, and to eternally wish to kick the beehive. I dunno.

like, you are okay with wizards and witches and magic and reincarnation and immortality and time travel, but you're displeased with how the series handles... toilets? Or if somehow there was a slipup between west Africa and Madagascar (while talking about a minor detail of a fiction that is, at root, a voluntary leisure activity? Ok nerd.

I really loathe this kind of argument - there's such pleasure to be had from a really well crafted, consistent and unique secondary world, whether fantasy or SF. When you read a lot of authors who put so much time and care into creating theirs, it can be fairly enraging to read one (a highly feted one at that) who can't really be arsed to do so. Sorry if that makes me a nerd.

Having said that, I did read and mostly enjoy all the Potter books for the first time as an adult, and they definitely have plenty of redeeming qualities, particularly the third one, as pointed out upthread. But she's not a serious fantasy author by any means.

Sorry, that was snarkier than I meant to sound, it's just--if you're reading this shit and you notice it's shit, why keep reading it?

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Thursday, October 1, 2020 7:38 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Well, her world building may be shit, but JKR's prose is so elegant that it doesn't really matter.

This is a very good piece on fandom, the writer, and the last few years.

Rowling had never been a particularly controversial figure. Her books sold hundreds of millions of copies, they inspired films that brought in billions of dollars, and she used the money she made to save children from orphanages. In 2012, she gave enough to charity and paid enough in taxes to knock herself off the Forbes billionaires list. In 2020, she was tweeting links to a store that sold pins that said F*CK YOUR PRONOUNS.

i will read that gyac, but my eye keeps getting magnetically drawn to the line from PBKR in the post above that says

but JKR's prose is so elegant that it doesn't really matter.

no wish to inflame tempers or anything, but genuinely is that a joke?

(i don’t mind people’s love of HP, and frankly who cares if i did, people have got real enjoyment out of the books, but my god the writing is like telephone hold music)

I hadn’t seen that either before I came back to post but I agree entirely, I have to assume so? I will read literally any old shit but I have never thought this of her prose even at its most enjoyable.

yeah my comment was unnecessarily troll-y but i was genuinely interested if someone did find her prose elegant what it was they saw in it.

i don't find it elegant but as i've said before here it is exceptionally easy to read out loud, and you never really lose your way in all the proper nouns and potions and corridors and whatsits - which i reckon is not very easy to do on a technical level. as for characterisation.. plot.. the sense of the world.. it's risible - so my view is that the easiness with which her prose goes down is what makes it 'work' to the extent that it does

you never really lose your way in all the proper nouns

brb gonna make some “F*CK YOUR NOUNS” pins

Sorry, yes, it was a joke (part of which is it's a statement that not even HP-defenders usually make).