This is what happens when your worldbuilding is done by someone with no head for systems analysis. Political systems and magic systems use the same skills to understand.
That’s why I hate apolitical stories. The writers are usually bad at worldbuilding too.
…and then your fun, completely apolitical story has stuff like “one of the main characters tries to end slavery and is ridiculed by the narrative for it”
And don’t worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it’s supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.
The most heinous crime conceivable to a conservative like JKR is an attempt to change the status quo.
An obvious example: Sure we’re burning the world to the ground. But did you ever consider what if renewable energy is somehow even worse, and its advocates are terrorists?
Yeah figured it wasn’t hypothetical, but holy fuck people… do they not realize that all you have to do is change “elf” to “black people” and those are literally the same arguments used for slavery and how wrong that was….
if you read potter assuming the narrator is not only unreliable but also sleep-deprived and slightly drunk, in makes a lot more sense. it also makes rowling’s unhinged lore additions from twitter, like how wizards just used to shit on the floor until plumbing came along, slot in nicely with established facts, like how a hundreds-of-years old building would have a huge network of secret tunnels in the bathrooms. it goes from incongruous to “whos- who’s telling thiss story, you or me? shhhutup.”
People love HP so much, and i kind of get it, but on the other hand it’s so shit. The whole game of quidditch is the dumbest thing i have ever seen. People like HP so much that they play that absolute nonsense game IRL. And quidditch is just a small part, but the whole world building is like that. Nothing is really clever or well thought out. Tge worst offender imo is goblet of fire. They have these dangerous ass trials for children, fine. They keep saying how dangerous it was. They fight dragons, they put children under water, guarded by mean ass mermaids. One of them almost drowned, and only didn’t because Harry broke the rules. At the end of the whole thing, cedric died and everyone was devastated and shocked that a kid would die. Like motherfucker that’s the whole point.
I actually used to be on My university’s quidditch team. Although since Rowling went mold to the walls on the transphobia, it’s called Quadball. Quadball is really fun because the team roles are asymmetric in a way you don’t get with most other sports. You usually only see that strict delineation of capabilities in video games. I was a beater, My job was to hit the enemy team with dodgeballs.
The best part of Harry Potter to make fun of, though, is the severed slave heads dressed in Santa hats and beards
Iirc quadball had to quite radically alter the scoring and other rules?
As it makes no sense that the seeker just straight wins the game if they catch the snitch within an hour or two no matter how badly their team is losing.
Also also, the world cup. Viktor Krum ending the game on purpose “because he wanted to do it on his own terms”…!? Imagine a professional videogame player throwing a world cup because they want to get a frag, even though it’s still completely possible for them to win if he doesn’t throw and end the game. No matter how behind pro teams are they try.
But no Rowling has a chosen one in all matches as well and the sport makes zero sense in a sports sense in the books. Only there to serve to show how special some are.
Viktor Krum might still be in school, but I’m talking about the Quidditch world cup that the Weasleys take Harry to.
In a school match at Hogwarts it might make sense for someone to not take it that seriously. Just like you get people surrendering in games like league and dota and whatnot. But can you ever imagine having professionals play for the world championship and just be like “nah I’m just gonna take this 1v5 because I can dive a kill there to improve my stats, ofc we’ll lose but the game is already lost so why even try”
Most of the people in Krums team were proper adult professional sports wizards and witches I think. Krum was just so good he made pro even while at still school. Similarly as how Harry just gets to be the actionhero I mean “seeker” for the Gryffindors literally the first minute he flies a broom.
Soccer is more uniform, yes? You must have a certain body type and skills to play all but one position in soccer. Same wiþ basketball. Baseball has more variability; look at Babe Ruth.
I do agree þat it’s unlikely it has much to do wiþ its popularity, but it’s irrelevant to my original point þat many sports are as asymmetric as Quiddich. Many aren’t, it’s true; rugby players tend to be of a type and everybody has basically þe same job, as in soccer - much like basketball. But asymmetry in team sports is not uncommon.
I actually have a citation for it 😄. But it’s going to take me awhile to find it. It’s from a thesis/book about the development of gridiron football from rugby. The highschool bit is a minor part of the overall thesis that the specialization mirrors the evolution of the assembly line and specialization of work positions from the generic tradesperson who is multi skilled.
Ngl, i never really looked much into irl quiddich. Making up a new game from scratch is really fucking hard, and she obviously couldn’t do it. There is a fantasy trilogy called kingkiller chronicles, and tgey made up a chess like game named tak. You can play it irl and it’s really interesting imo. If you know anything about humans and how they behave un sports or video games for example, you’d know that people would just stand around and waut for the magical winning ball. There ia no reason no one dropps everything they are doing to get the game winning ball. But they just keep playing. Thinking about it, is there a real reason the snitch exists? It could just be the game as it is and harry potter is pretty good at it. Is it so he can literally win games by himself? I have to stop thinking about that crap.
All it needs is for the snitch to just end the game after some amount of minimum points, maybe with +1 goal value. Then you can defend until your team is tied, or go for the win when you are ahead.
All it needs is for the snitch to just end the game after some amount of minimum points, maybe with +1 goal value. Then you can defend until your team is tied, or go for the win when you are ahead.
i mean, they’re never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they’re making.
like that andy weir interview where he says “there are no politics in my books”. i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they’re researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he’s not written them that way. it’s completely by accident, or so he believes.
Fascism is pretty well-defined. People just don’t like it because we like to pretend it’s a specter of the past far removed from modern sensibilities, and the definition exposes how not at all far it is from mainstream conservatism.
The mainstream definition of “woke” is “whatever MAGA was told to hate today”.
It’s an exquisite book yes, but it’s from a different genre than HP is. If people are looking for light modern low-fantasy, they might not favor the deeper ends of high fantasy as a replacement
I liked The Magicians trilogy. Very deep and a great set of writing and plots and emotion and it makes a mockery of the fantasy worlds created by the likes of JK Rowling.
Yeah but the ministry was never reformed post war, and the main character went to be a part of it. If anything it condones flawed systems that give rise to fascism.
Hope you guys have all read the book JK lifted from most heavily: Groosham Grange.
Groosham Grange is basically a short story with a surprisingly captivating worldbuilding, but suffering from being very unserious. It is also mocking of conservatives and christians in a way. I can therefore see why she would be like “i need to make a full series of books like this, but taking themselves seriously” but i wish she’d planned out the magic system a bit beforehand.
This is what happens when your worldbuilding is done by someone with no head for systems analysis. Political systems and magic systems use the same skills to understand.
That’s why I hate apolitical stories. The writers are usually bad at worldbuilding too.
…and then your fun, completely apolitical story has stuff like “one of the main characters tries to end slavery and is ridiculed by the narrative for it”
And don’t worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it’s supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.
I feel like that isn’t a hypothetical…?
This isn’t a hypothetical thread. Rowling’s Pottermore blog had this post https://web.archive.org/web/20170929062836/https://www.pottermore.com/features/to-spew-or-not-to-spew-hermione-granger-and-the-pitfalls-of-activism (which has since been removed, but only after it had been up for years) full of slavery apologia and with the premise that whether or not slavery is bad, Hermione’s actions to try and stop it (which amounted to asking people to stop having slaves) were worse.
The most heinous crime conceivable to a conservative like JKR is an attempt to change the status quo.
An obvious example: Sure we’re burning the world to the ground. But did you ever consider what if renewable energy is somehow even worse, and its advocates are terrorists?
Yeah figured it wasn’t hypothetical, but holy fuck people… do they not realize that all you have to do is change “elf” to “black people” and those are literally the same arguments used for slavery and how wrong that was….
And it gets worse when combined with Rowling’s later comments that she’d always imagined Hermione was black.
“Imagined” yet after all the book art and movie she never bothered to correct anyone? I smell some retconning BS there.
LOL JK
if you read potter assuming the narrator is not only unreliable but also sleep-deprived and slightly drunk, in makes a lot more sense. it also makes rowling’s unhinged lore additions from twitter, like how wizards just used to shit on the floor until plumbing came along, slot in nicely with established facts, like how a hundreds-of-years old building would have a huge network of secret tunnels in the bathrooms. it goes from incongruous to “whos- who’s telling thiss story, you or me? shhhutup.”
And also under the influence of black mold
One of my favourite things is the running gag on Clickhole about her hacky ‘revelations’.
The Saga Continues: JK Rowling Just Revealed That Voldemort Came Back To Life, Used A Spell To Lift Will Smith’s 10-Year Oscar Ban, And Then Died Again
The Saga Continues! J.K. Rowling Has Revealed That The Man SEAL Team Six Thought Was Osama Bin Laden Was Actually Professor McGonagall Using A Polyjuice Potion And The Real Osama Bin Laden Teaches Sex Ed At Hogwarts Now
Overstepping Her Bounds: J.K. Rowling Has Announced That Daenerys From ‘Game Of Thrones’ Has Crohn’s Disease
Major Bombshell: J.K. Rowling Has Revealed Daniel Radcliffe Is Chinese
Whoa! J.K. Rowling Just Revealed That Philip Seymour Hoffman Is Also Dead In The ‘Harry Potter’ Universe
People love HP so much, and i kind of get it, but on the other hand it’s so shit. The whole game of quidditch is the dumbest thing i have ever seen. People like HP so much that they play that absolute nonsense game IRL. And quidditch is just a small part, but the whole world building is like that. Nothing is really clever or well thought out. Tge worst offender imo is goblet of fire. They have these dangerous ass trials for children, fine. They keep saying how dangerous it was. They fight dragons, they put children under water, guarded by mean ass mermaids. One of them almost drowned, and only didn’t because Harry broke the rules. At the end of the whole thing, cedric died and everyone was devastated and shocked that a kid would die. Like motherfucker that’s the whole point.
I actually used to be on My university’s quidditch team. Although since Rowling went mold to the walls on the transphobia, it’s called Quadball. Quadball is really fun because the team roles are asymmetric in a way you don’t get with most other sports. You usually only see that strict delineation of capabilities in video games. I was a beater, My job was to hit the enemy team with dodgeballs.
The best part of Harry Potter to make fun of, though, is the severed slave heads dressed in Santa hats and beards
Iirc quadball had to quite radically alter the scoring and other rules?
As it makes no sense that the seeker just straight wins the game if they catch the snitch within an hour or two no matter how badly their team is losing.
Also also, the world cup. Viktor Krum ending the game on purpose “because he wanted to do it on his own terms”…!? Imagine a professional videogame player throwing a world cup because they want to get a frag, even though it’s still completely possible for them to win if he doesn’t throw and end the game. No matter how behind pro teams are they try.
But no Rowling has a chosen one in all matches as well and the sport makes zero sense in a sports sense in the books. Only there to serve to show how special some are.
I mean, they are children playing on their school team. Not really professionals
Viktor Krum might still be in school, but I’m talking about the Quidditch world cup that the Weasleys take Harry to.
In a school match at Hogwarts it might make sense for someone to not take it that seriously. Just like you get people surrendering in games like league and dota and whatnot. But can you ever imagine having professionals play for the world championship and just be like “nah I’m just gonna take this 1v5 because I can dive a kill there to improve my stats, ofc we’ll lose but the game is already lost so why even try”
Most of the people in Krums team were proper adult professional sports wizards and witches I think. Krum was just so good he made pro even while at still school. Similarly as how Harry just gets to be the
actionheroI mean “seeker” for the Gryffindors literally the first minute he flies a broom.Yeah, that’s right.
Isn’t American football as asymmetric? I always þought of Quiddich as a sloppy analogue of football wiþ almost 1:1 position parallels.
Yes it is. It’s why it’s so popular in highschool. There is a role for most body types.
Citation needed.
I’m not arguing it doesn’t affect popularity, just that i don’t think it’s the main reason for the love, or really even in the top three.
Soccer is more uniform, yes? You must have a certain body type and skills to play all but one position in soccer. Same wiþ basketball. Baseball has more variability; look at Babe Ruth.
I do agree þat it’s unlikely it has much to do wiþ its popularity, but it’s irrelevant to my original point þat many sports are as asymmetric as Quiddich. Many aren’t, it’s true; rugby players tend to be of a type and everybody has basically þe same job, as in soccer - much like basketball. But asymmetry in team sports is not uncommon.
I actually have a citation for it 😄. But it’s going to take me awhile to find it. It’s from a thesis/book about the development of gridiron football from rugby. The highschool bit is a minor part of the overall thesis that the specialization mirrors the evolution of the assembly line and specialization of work positions from the generic tradesperson who is multi skilled.
I don’t know, I have no idea about gridiron.
Do you ride around on fake brooms? Because that’s pretty cringe
Edit: Lol at people being butthurt about this. Try reading a book that isn’t written for children, I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
Obviously not. They use real brooms. You can get them at the hardware store pretty cheap!
Ngl, i never really looked much into irl quiddich. Making up a new game from scratch is really fucking hard, and she obviously couldn’t do it. There is a fantasy trilogy called kingkiller chronicles, and tgey made up a chess like game named tak. You can play it irl and it’s really interesting imo. If you know anything about humans and how they behave un sports or video games for example, you’d know that people would just stand around and waut for the magical winning ball. There ia no reason no one dropps everything they are doing to get the game winning ball. But they just keep playing. Thinking about it, is there a real reason the snitch exists? It could just be the game as it is and harry potter is pretty good at it. Is it so he can literally win games by himself? I have to stop thinking about that crap.
All it needs is for the snitch to just end the game after some amount of minimum points, maybe with +1 goal value. Then you can defend until your team is tied, or go for the win when you are ahead.
All it needs is for the snitch to just end the game after some amount of minimum points, maybe with +1 goal value. Then you can defend until your team is tied, or go for the win when you are ahead.
i mean, they’re never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they’re making.
like that andy weir interview where he says “there are no politics in my books”. i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they’re researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he’s not written them that way. it’s completely by accident, or so he believes.
I heard that and assumed he was lying so as to try to not alienate people on the other side.
that would require him to realize that he was indeed speaking to “the other side”. i don’t think he did.
deleted by creator
Fascism is pretty well-defined. People just don’t like it because we like to pretend it’s a specter of the past far removed from modern sensibilities, and the definition exposes how not at all far it is from mainstream conservatism.
The mainstream definition of “woke” is “whatever MAGA was told to hate today”.
i think he’s more likely in the centrist position of “politics is when parties or banners or protests”
I am once again begging everyone to read A Wizard of Earthsea instead
It’s an exquisite book yes, but it’s from a different genre than HP is. If people are looking for light modern low-fantasy, they might not favor the deeper ends of high fantasy as a replacement
I liked The Magicians trilogy. Very deep and a great set of writing and plots and emotion and it makes a mockery of the fantasy worlds created by the likes of JK Rowling.
The show was very different but also excellent
Hey that’s not true there were politics. Ministry bad and slow
Yeah but the ministry was never reformed post war, and the main character went to be a part of it. If anything it condones flawed systems that give rise to fascism.
Hope you guys have all read the book JK lifted from most heavily: Groosham Grange.
Groosham Grange is basically a short story with a surprisingly captivating worldbuilding, but suffering from being very unserious. It is also mocking of conservatives and christians in a way. I can therefore see why she would be like “i need to make a full series of books like this, but taking themselves seriously” but i wish she’d planned out the magic system a bit beforehand.