Remake Harry Potter- OK OK OK before you murder me just hear me out. HEAR. ME. OUT!
Remake Harry Potter and make it super queer. Think about it, The Harry Potter universe is about a magic society so make it so that the wizarding world doesn’t give a fuck about sex and/or gender because they can change it so easily with magic that worrying about what’s in peoples pants or how they present themselves became trivial to them centuries ago. Make Harry trans. Do it.
Now, because in this version of Harry Potter wizard society isn’t awful, magic has pretty much freed everyone from scarcity and forced labor
That’s right, I’m going to turn Harry Potter into fully automated luxury gay wizard communism
This, of course, requires a full rewrite of the story. Instead of being some boring chosen one story its just going to be shit like “Harry creates a golem with magic and has to deal with the philosophical and ethical implications of bringing life into the world” and stuff like that.
Yeah so basically Star Trek TNG but Fantasy instead of SciFi
Yes, yes, I’m a genius. I just de-libbed your wizardslop. Thank you! You don’t all have to clap at once
If we leave the author aside and just stick to the text, the main problems with Harry Potter are:
that it is derivative (which would not be a problem if it was good)
that it is stylistically lackluster (which could be fixed if it would not be written by a hack fraud - see the Harry Potter movies which are already better than the books because they were made by people who actually understood their craft)
that it is crawling with Blairite chauvinist brainworms (which are well-documented and which a queering of the text could easily remove) and finally
that it is horribly contrived, which results from the previous point - it’s the neoliberal rot that leads to any problem being solved by a ruleslawyering gotcha and a return to the status quo. If it would be an actual queer text, that is, one in which the transgression of gender as an exploitative class structure makes the queer a revolutionary subject fundamentally at odds with the chauvinist status quo, the premise of Harry Potter makes us automatically arrive at a less contrived main plotline, which is the narratively productive, dramaturgically convenient condition of armed revolutionary struggle. JKR does not understand insurrectionary warfare, she makes the mistake of tackling that subject with a kind of shitty courtroom drama that takes place in the wrong setting and under a specifically made up set of bullshit laws.
The latter point would also require that focus shifts away from the MC and towards the insurrectionist masses, as we see in all kinds of media dealing with such a subject matter, from Eisenstein to Andor. This also has the potential to make the text itself better, as it broadens the focus and makes it easy to explore a wide array of different characters instead of centering a bland self-insert Chosen One going through the played out motions of The Hero’s Journey.
This also reflects a deeper problem with how magic works in Harry Potter: by reducing it to rules you can learn, spells you can recite, and potions anyone can make if they just follow the instructions well enough, it ceases to be magical. It’s just another technology, albeit one you need a certain gene to able to fully use.
To be appropriately magical, magic should have large elements of the unknown (maybe even the unknowable!), and use should come with risks and uncertainties. You’re peeking behind the veil, you’re tapping powers you don’t fully understand. Make it too legible and it not only loses its luster, but invites the audience to endlessly ask “why didn’t they just _______?”
you can systematically study any repeatable phenomena, and such studying is one of the few things i’m willing to claim is human nature. A story where magic only works sometimes, not under the control of the users, would just be god from the machine over and over and we’d find it rather boring.
But we don’t fully understand the natural world either. Magic should have multiple competing schools of thought just like how science has multiple competing schools of thought. Like, there should be 4-elementists engaged in a bitter struggle with 5-elementists with a 5-elementism schism between true 5-elementism and 4+1-elementism.
If magic is totally random or up to the whims of some obscure power, I’m with you. I’m envisioning something more like taming a wild animal. You can be more or less skilled at it, but there’s always some level of uncertainty and danger. There are parts of the interaction you don’t (and probably never will) fully understand. Results are never routine or guaranteed.
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