The other thing is that Harry Potter is obsolete. Its a thirty year old series that hasn’t seen a major installment in nearly two decades and its not good enough to survive the extended test of time on its own merit. More importantly, is that the growth it spurned in the YA novel industry led it to produce works that outclass Harry Potter in every way.
So can we please let Harry Potter die so that people stop asking me what my fucking Hogwarts house is?
Yeah, this comes from a weird place that like all franchises just deserve to live on forever or something. How many people are still talking about MASH, one of the most watched television shows of its time? Or more recently Twilight, which at one time redefined an entire literary genre and had the biggest films in the world, much like Harry Potter? Obviously, I don’t discount at all Rowling’s everything she’s done to harm her brand thing here, but why is the baseline assumption that Harry Potter should live on forever? Media franchises come and go all the time.
It’s the millennials, or at least the ones that get into the position of writing op-eds for the NY Crimes, having an existential crisis over the fact that the defining media franchise of their youth doesn’t have what it takes to become one of the timeless classics. It gives them the feeling that their cultural moment will fade.
Doing the “kids these days don’t know how telegraph works” but with JK Transphobe’s mediocre fiction novels
The bourgeoisie of any generation always seem to do this, try to hold onto cultural relevance for as long as possible. Weirdly enough it should still be “millennial’s day” in a normal world now with them leading the charge.
Like part of maturity should be accepting not everything in your day was a winner.
Weirdly enough it should still be “millennial’s day” in a normal world now with them leading the charge.
Yeah the oldest millennials are in their mid forties, forget middle management there’s some of them in upper management now. Yet there’s still this attitude in most organizations of “Millennials are the kids in the room, they don’t get to run stuff yet.” So the Millennials are stuck in this spot where Gen X and Boomers treat them like kids and Zoomers see them as old and out of touch.
At some point the word “millennial” for boomers and gen X just became a generic synonym for “young person,” I’ve seen the word applied to kids born in 2010.
I call 'em like I see 'em
Harry Potter: loser
Dragon Ball Z: Winner
Someday Dragon Ball Super apologists are going to become normal, like Star Wars prequel apologists
At least we can safely say GT apologists will never surface, right?
Right?
MASH
It’s because we’re in the modern era of the mega franchise where they stay relevant far past their prime. Everybody wants to be like Marvel in the 2010’s, so now any series that’s had a history of great popularity is getting reboots, remakes, tv spin-offs, etc.
Harry Potter’s growth is largely attributed to the media urge to get their own mega franchise after seeing just how popular Pokémon had become worldwide, as well as Scholastic losing their golden goose of Goosebumps because of legal issues with R.L. Stine.
There were attempts to do to Harry Potter what they’ve been doing with other franchises but only mixed results have come. The Fantastic Beasts series failed, the broadway spin-off play failed, and the tv show looks like it won’t be received well.
Only the movies and the Universal theme park have had success. Hogwarts Legacy was very popular but it didn’t last much longer after its release date.
Something that’s left out is Harry Potter still being very popular in the global south. A lot of young kids read it when they start to learn English and if anything it’s made a bit of a comeback, at least from what I’ve seen in my area.
On the other hand, I’m pretty happy that Percy Jackson seems to be doing well again despite the original movies being God awful. People told me they were “fad books” but I got more out of them than I did with Harry Potter.
“Something that’s left out is Harry Potter still being very popular in the global south. A lot of young kids read it when they start to learn English and if anything it’s made a bit of a comeback, at least from what I’ve seen in my area.”
That is very interesting and makes a lot of sense. I’m talking mad shit about HP but its engaging to first-time readers and the reading level ramps up as the series progresses, which is useful for teaching first and second languages.
Something that’s left out is Harry Potter still being very popular in the global south. A lot of young kids read it when they start to learn English and if anything it’s made a bit of a comeback, at least from what I’ve seen in my area.
Same in South America tbh, but, I have noticed that there was a major decline in HP stuff since the 2010s. Manga and Comics are still very popular, mostly because they are translated and localized to Spanish and Portuguese very well since at least the 1970s.
I definitely talk about MASH. But most of the time I first have to explain what MASH was.
BTW all of MASH is on archive.org
still talking about MASH
Sidney Freedman emote when
Sidney Freedman emote when
Beyond starring in MAS*H, Alda eventually wrote and directed some of its most acclaimed episodes. One of his favorites was “Dear Sigmund,” where psychiatrist Sidney Freedman fights depression by writing an imaginary letter to Freud. “It confirmed for me that if you ask an actor to play somebody depressed, their first tendency is to get morose and slow. But I thought I could show a guy who’s fighting his depression and on the surface seems cheerful.” Allan Arbus’ performance brought it to life, and Alda cherished the chance to write for him. “I was so convinced that he really was a psychiatrist, that I used to sit and talk with him between scenes as if he was one.”
Truly an incredible guy.
I will never stop talking about MASH
And like, even the houses are terrible and an even worse way of categorizing personality than like zodiac or Miggs Bryers.
The houses are literally main characters, losers, evil people, and smart people (except the smartest person is in the main character house).
The houses are the sort of thing where I’m not sure how much of it is bad world building and how much of it is just British.
Definitely both. I never want to read the words “head boy” again in my entire life.
Such a missed opportunity to position the houses as related to aptitude in a particular type of magic. That would give them an actual character.
Then Rowling woulda needed to think about her magic system a little more then not at all. She just made up whatever spell would suit the situation and then she mostly forgets about them. The fucking candy is more clearly defined then the spells.
The spells start off as ‘here’s a quirky spell to make your enemy’s snot turn into bats’ and end up as ‘here’s the fiftieth version of ‘gun spell’’
I just realized the houses never specilized in anything other then the personality type you need to join depsite being fucking wizards.
What an awful writer lol.
For real so much slop is just infinitely better. Dresden files is pulp slop but actually good. The Sanderson-verse is also way better slop.
Why can’t we get live action cowboy wizard Harry Dresden and some wild anime take on the Cosmere dammit.
For real for real. Im forever bitter that the release of HP overshadowed His Dark Materials since HDM subverted the genre before YA even got established. Though I suppose “A coming of age story thats meant to be Narnia but militantly atheist; containing child death, concentration camps, feminist subtext that extends beyond ‘girl power’ and talking polar bears brutally murdering eachother for sport” is a hard sell to a general audience.
Infinite admiration for the love Dresden Files people give to the Dresden Files. Do you have a recommendation for someone who may be interested but doesn’t know where to start?
As a member of the general audience, I am interested in the polar bear fights
Just a warning that the Dresden Files writing (not the story, just like the pure writing) is kind of cheesy and subpar, especially in the beginning, but IMHO the author gets better as he goes on.
It keeps the boomer lib energy throughout though
For Dresden just start with book one Storm Front. It keeps escalating in satisfying ways and I can’t really recommend starting anywhere but the beginning. Also the central romance plot pays off very well in a way that reminds a bit of Mulder and Scully in X files.
Dresden Files release order is chronological except for some of the short stories. Book 1 is the unfortunately named Storm Front.
I never got into Dresden files, but I enjoyed that authors take on roman Pokemons vs Zerg. Those were cool books.
You might like Rivers of London for an urban fantasy crime series set in the UK. It’s less horny, but more cop.
Twenty Palaces was pretty good as well, more of a grim tone than Dresden, though it sadly only got three or four books.
Edit: Oh, neat, the author was able to crowdfund doing another pair of books.
Wonderful I will have to check those out.
There was a brief live action Dresden files on the Sci Fi channel iirc
Neat. I bet it was terrible, I may just look it up.
Would make a great adaptation if it got the right treatment now and there’s like 18 books so it could have legs.
Reject Hogwarts; embrace Strixhaven.
You’re forgetting they did the fantastic beasts stuff unless you don’t consider that major or a harry Potter thing
I’m not counting Uninspired Animals as major. It got a movie and tv show and all that but it’s not to the same caliber as the rest of the series IMO.
I think it was a mistake to not just do more Harry Potter (like as a brand thing) however that would manifest but maybe even J.K realized that by the end of the series he’s a sauceless loser and not a character people would keep reading about
It’s so frustrating how true this is… with Rowling as the writer. You could make a Wizard-Cop Nazi Hunter story that is absolutely amazing, but obviously Rowling can’t lmao
Should’ve just done more Hogwarts. Had the recipe for an easy cashgrab with “magical school” and you can even dream of continuing it a la Doctor Who by rotating the cast every 7 years. People love magical misfits and “magic school” is such an easy genre to write if you’ve got a captive audience of millenials that will watch any half-decent potterslop.
Honestly the big issue is Rowling. Both as a writer (she won’t really let go of the property and involves herself with every project, making it worse) and as a person (she sucks and people hate her. Her not only making money but being involved with a project makes it toxic to a lot)
Wait, there was a fantastic beasts TV show? Damn that’s an impressive level of failure if I didn’t hear of it despite being the target demographic.
lord of the rings keeps not dying, and people always hope to recreate that sort of thing. it aint working, folks.
The world view it espoused wasn’t even very liberal. There’s literally a race of superbeings that are superior to everyone else who segregated themselves off into their own secret apartheid ethnostate. The bankers are their own race, and are also forbidden by law to have the basic tools of magic or allowed to go to magic school. There’s literally a slave race too, and freeing them was mocked by the narrative. The vast majority of humanity regularly have their minds, memories, and free will violated as a matter of law.
A critical analysis of Harry Potter reveals a hellworld, and we’re supposed to cheer for them because the good apartheid ethnostate only turns its cruelty on other races instead of turning the cruelty inward. She accidentally wrote a critique of her own worldview
Yeah, it’s extremely Tory-coded despite ostensibly being anti-Tory (the Dudleys).
Don’t forget the Dudley’s being a vehicle for fatshaming (dudley, aunt marge) in fact the only time Dudley is treated in a positive light is when he gets swole and can see a dementor’s effects and he trusts harry (harry begrudgingly respects him) and his aunt is almost let off rhe hook when she has a moment where she recalls some arcane magical knowledge and harry is like oh maybe she’s not so unlike my mum. Like in the literal text they ‘rehabilitate’ the dudleys. Maybe not vernon though i don’t recall.
The bankers are their own race, and are also forbidden by law to have the basic tools of magic or allowed to go to magic school. There’s literally a slave race too, and freeing them was mocked by the narrative.
These points are brought up so often as being obviously problematic that it makes me wonder if the new HBO adaptation will attempt to “fix” them in some way.
Doubt it, liberals think it’s absurd to care about those things
Rowling tried to fix a lot of this stuff herself. Usually with a books delay.
We find out the slave race loves being slaves in book four I think. Time Turners are destroyed in book five. The play is about “what if the plot was sensible” (erm actually everything is worse then). I haven’t read these since the seventh book came out, but I’m sure there’s more.They’ll probably justify the caste system i.e. Goblins are ontologically greedy, Elves love being slaves, etc etc
Wow it might be the perfect white feminist book
Both can be true
A based 4 chan post? I’m speechless
IIRC that was from leftypol rather than 4chan but I have that saved on my PC because I deadass think that qualifies as theory.
Voldemort dying to an obscure legal technicality is a perfect quantum of the liberal worldview - I feel like there’s some kind of spiritual connection or a phantom here of the liberals trying to impeach Trump, except in that case nothing happened because in real life the rules don’t actually matter and you don’t win just cause some arcane trivia says that you should.
Edit: Oh, this is why you should finish reading the thing before you comment, they precisely called exactly this happening. The immortal science wins again!
This and the fanfic about Harry Potter shooting Death Eaters with a gun are my Hogwarts theory
I remember an old YouTube channel called How It Should Have Ended animating a skit about Snape using a time turner to go back in time to shoot Voldemort before he kills Harry’s mom. I assume they bang after, because this was late 00’s YouTube after all
Let’s see ol Voldemort wriggle his way out of this one!
Obligatory bell hooks takedown of HP from 2002
Whew
Harry Potter: depicts neoliberal hell, immensely popular among people who grew up in the 90s and 00s but fell off hard among people who don’t have nostalgia for that exact specific era of life in the anglosphere
Pokemon: depicts socialist utopia, immensely popular across multiple generations and cultures with no signs of slowing even though the games have kinda sucked for a while
They really could make so much money with a good modern game, if they ever made one
I think that’s what they’re trying to do with the Legends series, but they just aren’t in step with the fans and/or they just aren’t able to take the kind of risk they need to take. They need to farm the franchise out to AA devs like they did with the Colosseum games, keep game freak on the main franchise only but supplement that with a spin-off game with fresh ideas every couple of years.
Young people on both the right and left are also less wedded to political institutions. Those of us born in the 20th century had grown used to the idea that the right stands for tradition and the left for reform. In the liberal era, everyone was expected to hew quite closely to the status quo.
But what we see now is that both factions stand for revolution.
The conservative writer Rod Dreher recently asked a young man in Washington to outline the demands of his generation’s right-wing radicals. “They don’t have any,” he replied, “they just want to tear everything down.”
The Zoomer left is no less radical. In Harry Potter, the good guys do not deliberately kill, but instead stun or disarm their opponents. Here Ms. Rowling endorses a liberal commitment to nonviolence that appears to be falling out of favor, particularly on the left. In a recent YouGov poll, the respondents most likely to endorse the statement “political violence can sometimes be justified” skewed young and left wing. We saw a glimpse of this change in norms after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, when some young leftists responded with indifference bordering on glee.
we should ask charlie kirk what he thinks about this.
Let’s not be too hard on Charlie Kirk, he hasn’t said a racist thing in over four months now!
But he also hasn’t spoken out about all the stuff with ICE
Idk about y’all I’m carrying the flame rn
Citing Rod Dreher as a source about how violent the youth are is hilarious.
Bordering on?
This writer will need to get the wall, because they are too hecking stupid to be reeducated.
well that is correct, actually
JKR/HP transphobia is intimately connected to her brain dead reactionary liberalism, which young people around the world are rejecting
We found that Harry Potter fans tend to be more accepting of those who are different, to be more politically tolerant, to be more supportive of equality, to be less authoritarian, to be more opposed to the use of violence and torture, to be less cynical, and to evince a higher level of political efficacy.
Jesus fucking christ
Edit:
Liberalism is not the human default. It is a style of doing politics that can be sustained only in a society that is peaceful, affluent and high-trust all at once — a rare combination in our species’ history. Under such conditions, we might well see a widespread tolerance of free speech, a rejection of political violence and a popular faith in democratic processes.
Imperialist piece of shit fucking conservative garbage
But look at her debate credentials:
On 13 September 2023, Perry participated in a debate with Anna Khachiyan against Grimes and Sarah Haider. The debate, referred to as “a clash of the female titans”, was held at The Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles and was moderated by Bari Weiss.
Just one meteor dropping that day could improve the world by approximately 10%
Comrade meteor has been leaving us hanging for a while at this point.
Ah, it’s that mask the deserter in Disco Elysium was talking about.
Another “why don’t kids today have exactly the same interests and tastes as I did 30 years ago?” article from a NYCrimes turbolib, what a shocker.
Literally doing the “no, it’s the kids who are wrong” meme.
I mean, I’m not going to read an nyt opinion piece on gen z killing the Harry Potter industry, but I think it’s increasingly evident that gen z likes liberalism less than prior generations, and it makes sense that many people who don’t like liberalism would find the wizard cop books revolting. Also they’re just not good books and the marketing gimmick of aging with the audience was a one time feature of their publication.
Book one, two and three are good, fine and decent in decreasing order. After that it turns into bloated shit. Book one crimps Roald Dahls style and its nice.
I do find it funny that all the actors that play the heroes: Radcliff, Watson etc are all like “fuck jk rowling” while all the villians are terfs who are on her side
It’s an example of pre-woke Hollywood accidentally getting representation right. They hired a real Sorting Hat for the role
All of the first years would havve gotten serious headlice from the sorting hat
IIRC Tom Felton, the guy who played Draco is chill with trans people.
Brief tangent, but damn was Draco’s forced redemption dumb as shit. Want to make him good at the end? Just make him the Harry Potter equivalent of Gary Oak. The rival who keeps Harry on his toes but isn’t a genuine threat.
“Surely this can’t be because JK Rowling is a balrog of a cunt”
A balrog of Mordor ?
Morgoth nor Mordor.
It has been a while since I watched they are taking the Hobbits to Isengard
What did you say?
Tell me where is gandalf for i much desire to speak with him
Balrog of Street Fighter 2?
So they admit that racism, antisemitism, and overt fascism is just Liberalism. Gotcha. Thanks for finally admitting it?
maybe its also because its a millenial thing and zoomers and alphas dont care about it
I think it’s less because the author is an asshole than because mediocre children’s literature doesn’t typically tend to endure. Sure, kids don’t have good taste. I read incredibly shitty fiction as a kid! But guess what? Most of that isn’t still in the popular imagination, either.
I’d like it to be because she’s a POS but I suspect most people aren’t particularly plugged into JK Rowling’s Nazi arc.
I agree with this. Harry Potter wss decided on being a timeless classic before it ever has to pass the test of time
I read incredibly shitty fiction as a kid!
Artemis Fowl was goated tho
Pretty sure I’m too old for Artemis fowl. Also why I bounced off HP - just a few years too old.
Beowulf more your alley? Or perhaps Canterbury tales?
god no, I’m old, not smart
I’m old,
Yeah I was being cheeky and implying that was more your time period
Slight aside, I never really appreciated Beowulf until I watched the Alan Wood documentary, “In search of Beowulf”.
If you’re interested in English history, his earlier documentaries are also worth a look - they are iirc all about the Anglo Saxon period, although they do unfortunately focus largely on kings and nobles.
he’s also not difficult to look at in the old ones
