My mom taught high school English for decades and she used to tell her students that JK Rowling is a great storyteller, but a terrible author. She dreamed up a really cool world that really resonated with people, but her execution in that world is awful. The biggest place you see this is to lift the curtain on anything, and it crumbles instantly. Time Turners? Unnecessary plot device with massive implications. American wand? Kills Voldemort immediately. Sex ed at Hogwarts? No sex, only snog?
JK Rowling hasn’t helped herself with this either, by continuously editorializing. Hermione was always black. Dumbledore is gay for wizard Hitler. Wizards didn’t need bathrooms and would just magic away their shit, except wizard bathrooms are a central plot point for the second book. When she was starting out, she didn’t have the money for a real editor. When she made it big, it was by the strength of her own bootstraps, so she didn’t need one. It shows. She shat gold once, and in her eyes, it’s now gold every time.
Avada Kedavra is dumb. Wizard duels essentially have to follow the be first, best, or cheat rule. The definite death spell makes being best pointless and cheating too slow. You have to go nuclear first and fastest. Also, the defining characteristic is the green flash and no marks on the dead body. In the world of Harry Potter, if nobody sees the flash, and nobody finds the murder wand, every heart attach and brain aneurysm is indistinguishable from the universes ultimate crime.
But, I think things like this are a reason why people love Harry Potter. It’s why I did. When you’re presented with a world so incredible with an execution that’s lukewarm at best, it allows your imagination to take over. I love reading cheap, bad, free-on-Kindle sci-fi and fantasy, because oftentimes the central idea can be really unique, cool, and interesting. The execution can be awful, or sometimes not, but the core idea is usually a diamond. I get to be an archeologist, uncover it, and re-imagine it as I see fit. That’s why so many Harry Potter fans get defensive. It resonated so strongly because people had to invest their own imaginations so deeply to make sense of a story that fundamentally doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Not only that, but Rowling didn’t even dream up the world by all accounts. Just a bunch of plagiarized shit and racist stereotypes that happened to be the one which got extra popular.
I tend to stay away from the plagiarism argument, just because you can make a strong case that real human originality is exceptionally rare and most art is minimal transformation of a wide array of source material. Everything from the Illiad to Star Wars is derivative.
That said, her treatment of minotiries in Harry Potter is straight plagiarism of Confederate and Nazi ideology on slaves and untermensch. It surprised me that people were shocked at her “some people can’t be women” stance when she continuously played the “some people aren’t people” angle for laughs.
and the “but they want to be slaves. they are happier” bullshit. at least it was house elves and she didn’t have it be the castle brownies or something like that. her editor (read: dog) probably talked her out of that one
There is that, but her plagiarism was kinda close to Vanilla Ice saying that he didn’t sample Under Pressure. A little aggressive, especially for her inflated ego and billions of dollars.
Absolutely agree about the other part though. She didn’t need the money to make her a shitty person, that was all original.
When she was starting out, she didn’t have the money for a real editor. When she made it big, it was by the strength of her own bootstraps, so she didn’t need one.
I got the strong impression that by around Book 4, she’d more or less offloaded the writing to ghost writers. The length of the material combined with a real drift in writing style to the formulaic made the latter books worse and worse with each release.
By book 7, it felt like they were cramming a whole second story inside the first, for no reason other than to up the page count.
When you’re presented with a world so incredible with an execution that’s lukewarm at best, it allows your imagination to take over.
The whole early '00s Young Adult novel explosion was full of variations on Wizard High School. Lots of them were bad. Plenty of them were still beloved, for some seed of an idea or particularly compelling character that drove the next iteration of authors and screenwriters.
I like to think The Magicians is a good example of a second-order HP book (that I honestly didn’t love, but appreciated more after I got hooked on the TV show) playing with the root ideas and extending them in fun directions.
That’s why so many Harry Potter fans get defensive.
It’s just tiresome to see people call you a TERF because you enjoy a kid’s book.
A bit like screaming at someone wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt for being a fascist, because Walt Disney… was a fascist.
People take issue with giving more money to a person who has spent a good amount of her considerable wealth openly and maliciously harming trans people.
You’re not a TERF for being a HP fan, but you are directly funding TERFs if you buy HP merch or legally watch her stuff.
she tweeted the wizard shitter comment. She explained it that the bathrooms were a later addition to hogwarts after too many muggle born wizards were shocked at the lack of them. the ability to swiftly and cleanly vanish your shit from whatever corner of the castle you decided to drop it was meant to be some amazing revelation to her fans i guess. No thought went into what it meant for wizard kids up to 13 years old needing to have a parent or elder sibling clean up their turds for them since they weren’t allowed to perform magic.
Did she forget that the only entrance to the Chamber of Secrets was in a girl’s bathroom? The secret chamber built by one of the founding members during the initial construction has its only entrance in a room that was a later addition. Not even internally consistent with her own story.
IIRC, it wasn’t muggle shock, it’s just what wizards did up until plumbing was common. It does kind make one question why they would invest so much into fixing what they seemingly considered a solved issue though.
Yeah i’ve always felt that the castle is basically stuck on pre industrial revolution technology (the plumbing might be an exception). The rest of the wizard world seems to be stuck in late medieval period stylistically, or otherwise 1810’s. Clearly wizards are always a century or so behind on Muggle tech - fantastic beasts movies kind of ruined this but i did think that american wizards being into muggle tech and machinery was a nice touch and thematically congruent both with our own world and the HP world.
My mom taught high school English for decades and she used to tell her students that JK Rowling is a great storyteller, but a terrible author. She dreamed up a really cool world that really resonated with people, but her execution in that world is awful. The biggest place you see this is to lift the curtain on anything, and it crumbles instantly. Time Turners? Unnecessary plot device with massive implications. American wand? Kills Voldemort immediately. Sex ed at Hogwarts? No sex, only snog?
JK Rowling hasn’t helped herself with this either, by continuously editorializing. Hermione was always black. Dumbledore is gay for wizard Hitler. Wizards didn’t need bathrooms and would just magic away their shit, except wizard bathrooms are a central plot point for the second book. When she was starting out, she didn’t have the money for a real editor. When she made it big, it was by the strength of her own bootstraps, so she didn’t need one. It shows. She shat gold once, and in her eyes, it’s now gold every time.
Avada Kedavra is dumb. Wizard duels essentially have to follow the be first, best, or cheat rule. The definite death spell makes being best pointless and cheating too slow. You have to go nuclear first and fastest. Also, the defining characteristic is the green flash and no marks on the dead body. In the world of Harry Potter, if nobody sees the flash, and nobody finds the murder wand, every heart attach and brain aneurysm is indistinguishable from the universes ultimate crime.
But, I think things like this are a reason why people love Harry Potter. It’s why I did. When you’re presented with a world so incredible with an execution that’s lukewarm at best, it allows your imagination to take over. I love reading cheap, bad, free-on-Kindle sci-fi and fantasy, because oftentimes the central idea can be really unique, cool, and interesting. The execution can be awful, or sometimes not, but the core idea is usually a diamond. I get to be an archeologist, uncover it, and re-imagine it as I see fit. That’s why so many Harry Potter fans get defensive. It resonated so strongly because people had to invest their own imaginations so deeply to make sense of a story that fundamentally doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
I love that it’s finally culturally acceptable to say “Actually no, the books weren’t better. They sucked” lol
What Alfonso Cuarón managed to achieve with Prisoner of Azkaban on screen however still gives me goosebumps… plotholes be damned lol
There’s a scene where lightning flashes and reveals (I think) Gary Oldman’s profile in the shadows of the clouds, and it was awesome.
The rest of the movie was confusing and boring as hell but the visuals were pretty good.
Not only that, but Rowling didn’t even dream up the world by all accounts. Just a bunch of plagiarized shit and racist stereotypes that happened to be the one which got extra popular.
I tend to stay away from the plagiarism argument, just because you can make a strong case that real human originality is exceptionally rare and most art is minimal transformation of a wide array of source material. Everything from the Illiad to Star Wars is derivative.
That said, her treatment of minotiries in Harry Potter is straight plagiarism of Confederate and Nazi ideology on slaves and untermensch. It surprised me that people were shocked at her “some people can’t be women” stance when she continuously played the “some people aren’t people” angle for laughs.
and the “but they want to be slaves. they are happier” bullshit. at least it was house elves and she didn’t have it be the castle brownies or something like that. her editor (read: dog) probably talked her out of that one
There is that, but her plagiarism was kinda close to Vanilla Ice saying that he didn’t sample Under Pressure. A little aggressive, especially for her inflated ego and billions of dollars.
Absolutely agree about the other part though. She didn’t need the money to make her a shitty person, that was all original.
I got the strong impression that by around Book 4, she’d more or less offloaded the writing to ghost writers. The length of the material combined with a real drift in writing style to the formulaic made the latter books worse and worse with each release.
By book 7, it felt like they were cramming a whole second story inside the first, for no reason other than to up the page count.
The whole early '00s Young Adult novel explosion was full of variations on Wizard High School. Lots of them were bad. Plenty of them were still beloved, for some seed of an idea or particularly compelling character that drove the next iteration of authors and screenwriters.
I like to think The Magicians is a good example of a second-order HP book (that I honestly didn’t love, but appreciated more after I got hooked on the TV show) playing with the root ideas and extending them in fun directions.
It’s just tiresome to see people call you a TERF because you enjoy a kid’s book.
A bit like screaming at someone wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt for being a fascist, because Walt Disney… was a fascist.
People take issue with giving more money to a person who has spent a good amount of her considerable wealth openly and maliciously harming trans people.
You’re not a TERF for being a HP fan, but you are directly funding TERFs if you buy HP merch or legally watch her stuff.
I still don’t get why the fuck she would put this 😭😭😭 she dabbled into Yaoi I guess.
I don’t remember this ever being a thing, magicking away your excrement. Bathrooms are a plot in the first book too.
she tweeted the wizard shitter comment. She explained it that the bathrooms were a later addition to hogwarts after too many muggle born wizards were shocked at the lack of them. the ability to swiftly and cleanly vanish your shit from whatever corner of the castle you decided to drop it was meant to be some amazing revelation to her fans i guess. No thought went into what it meant for wizard kids up to 13 years old needing to have a parent or elder sibling clean up their turds for them since they weren’t allowed to perform magic.
Did she forget that the only entrance to the Chamber of Secrets was in a girl’s bathroom? The secret chamber built by one of the founding members during the initial construction has its only entrance in a room that was a later addition. Not even internally consistent with her own story.
IIRC, it wasn’t muggle shock, it’s just what wizards did up until plumbing was common. It does kind make one question why they would invest so much into fixing what they seemingly considered a solved issue though.
Yeah i’ve always felt that the castle is basically stuck on pre industrial revolution technology (the plumbing might be an exception). The rest of the wizard world seems to be stuck in late medieval period stylistically, or otherwise 1810’s. Clearly wizards are always a century or so behind on Muggle tech - fantastic beasts movies kind of ruined this but i did think that american wizards being into muggle tech and machinery was a nice touch and thematically congruent both with our own world and the HP world.
Hell of a comment + explanations. Thanks for the insights!