this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
779 points (100.0% liked)
Greentext
6554 readers
260 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Probably an unpopular opinion, but the stories don't hold up under scrutiny, and that's apparent even from the first book. Then again, that's not how one enjoys children's books.
Not really. Even big potter fans acknowledge that the books have giant plotholes
Huge potter fan here (that won't consume any potter media because JKR is a self-owning ass clown that deserves to watch her empire crumble), and yeah, even well before the Twitter nonsense she started spouting, it wasn't like a secret or anything that the books weren't perfect. I still stood on like at midnight for prisoner of Azkaban as a kid, though. But I remember thinking the Voldemort/death eaters thing was a pretty clear WWII/Hitler/Nazi analogy and googling it only to find an interview with her stating it absolutely was not, and people who thought it was were "reading politics" into a children's story. She's always been a dumbass, and she's wrong about her own work. Also, the whole house elf thing was... Really, really rough to read as a kid. I could never understand why no one was on Hermione's side, and how no one could see that elves didn't want to be free because their condition would be that of an outcast, and in a world where only wizard's were allowed wands, nonhuman humanoids were veru clearly subjugated to the point of delusionality.
Which is to say, yeah, the books got problems, even if you love em. I love those books, because the world felt real, even when it was shitty, it felt real. But there are major problems in them, both in the plothole sense, and in the politics (or lack thereof) of the author shining through the cracks
Nobody is on the side of the house elves because Hermione is the pet leftist. Ever watch Downton Abbey? Pretty good show tbh, but if you have, then Tom Felton is the Downton Abbey Hermione. Why is Downton Abbey, of all things, relevant? Because it's conservative apologia for the way things were, just as HP is conservative apologia; these types of media will often include a zany leftist that they can soften and win over to show how their conservative agenda is good actually. Think about it, HP isn't left vs right, it's old conservatism (Dumbledore and his muggle-loving ways) vs batshit insane ultra conservatism (the Death Eaters). If you swap wizarding blood for noble blood, being a wizard for being a noble, etc. it works almost perfectly. Hermione is new nobility that the old nobility doesn't respect; Harry is from a good pedigree, but was raised by his peasant aunt and uncle and doesn't know how to act the part, etc etc. The left (Hermione) wasn't supposed to win (and didn't), that W was meant for the old conservatives all along.
HP and Rowling have always been conservative, it was just that we misread the struggle being portrayed there.
She's a classic neolib. Pretending to be progressive while actually pushing regressive, conservative bullshit.
I got sort of an inverse impression of Downton Abbey. For me, it was about inevitable change, since practically every single truth held by the most conservative characters is at some point bent or entirely overturned, often by themselves. Literally all of the gentry are huge hypocrites.
It also spends a good amount of time creating parallels in the lives of the different classes that, for me, underscored how there was nothing fundamentally special about the aristocracy besides their wealth. Wealth that they never earned and only held onto because a peasant Irish driver who banged their daughter forcibly removed their heads from their assess.
It just doesn't seek to accomplish all this by making the upper class into Disney villains, since that's rarely how people actually are. But I never got the impression the show was trying to say this is how things should have or had to have been.
This is a great counterpoint, thanks for taking the time to write this thoughtful response. Imo, Downton paints a rosy picture of the gentry, one of kind, intelligent people who are willing to change with the times if only they understood the need; one where there's a healthy mutualism between the gentry and those under them (house servants, tenants, etc). Maybe that really is how it was, idk, I'm American and all of our gentry equivalent seem to feel little responsibility to those upon whom they depend.
That's fair. The rosiness I always attributed to the fact it's basically a fancy soap opera with a huge budget.
The Crowleys are definitely depicted as kind lords, though the show contrasts them several times with other less humane counterparts. I don't have the education to rate its historical accuracy, however.
Death Eaters are revolutionary wizard supremacists.
I searched for her denying the Nazi analogy and only found the opposite
Source: http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/10/20/j-k-rowling-at-carnegie-hall-reveals-dumbledore-is-gay-neville-marries-hannah-abbott-and-scores-more/
Will check the link a little later (just woke up to pee. Lol). But this was years ago, like around the time PoA came out, or maybe halfbood prince? Either way, it was ab article, not s video. I'll try to find it later today
It's a transcript from a Q&A session she did in 2007, around the time of the last book and the OotP film, so a few years after PoA (book and film).
Edit: And here's an interview with a dutch newspaper from 2007 where she says Voldemort is kind of a Hitler https://archive.is/Pi45t (warning, it's in Dutch)
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I promise I didn't just make that up! I can't find the article I saw when I was young, but it was, like, openly hostile to the idea of it. Maybe it was someone else and I attributed it to her or something. :/
I'm not saying that she didn't say it, she said a lot of stuff over the years. I assume she changed her mind, given you said it was around the time of PoA. If I'm not mistaken she had quite some influence on the films and in the last two films you literally see people running around in what look like Nazi uniforms.
It’s not even a plot hole here (though there are a million plot holes in the books). They literally use the truth serum on Barty Crouch Jr and he fesses up.
Yup, and in the same book too.
Yeah, plus iirc after this pretty much everyone except his friends and senior Hogwarts staff is deeply suspicious of Harry and no one wants to believe Voldemort is back. Don't get me wrong, there's lots wrong with the series, but I can't say this is one of them.
She can tell a decent story. But she's awful at world building beyond the "what would be cool to have" step and the moment she has to consider the ramifications of things she introduced coming up again. Like she can tell a story just fine, but the moment she needs to care about continuity it all goes out the window.