I 100% know and understand why we hate Rowling, she deserves all the hate she gets, but why do we hate the work itself? I watched those movies when I was little when they were on TV, now couldn’t care less, and only interesting part to me are mythical creatures/monsters. But I still forgot why do we hate it so much??

Can someone remind me and explain me?

  • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmygrad.ml
    61·
    2 years ago

    By no means am I a Harry Potter fan. I have been a very weird person since childhood, that never took pleasure in reading these fantasy novels other classmates did, but preferred better and valuable stuff to read and research and learn more.

    But, is is simply not the case that Rowling made the whole story in an archaic castle setting with the flying broom fantasies? We can critique it in a realist way, pointing out the immoralities or the lack of revolution or all of those quirks, but these are stories that just exist as figments of imagination by these authors.

    My idea is that completely ignoring these stories is the best way to nullify their importance, because these stories have archaic roots, and you can do nothing about castle world fantasies.

        • Soviet Snake@lemmygrad.ml
          61·
          2 years ago

          I know you can critique it, but I mean, we could also critique Star Trek and everything in existence, if you understand that art is a product of its historical time we can understand why it contains certain unpleasant elements. A lot of what was produced from today into the beginning of time has something criticable, but as lomg as you have an attentive mind and can isolate that I do not see anything wrong with it. People like to think we already live in Utopia and this should not exist, but sadly we don’t and we will continue seeing this kind of stuff. Rowling is nothing more than a product of this, a deadbrain liberal who stands for, mostly, what is wrong. True, Tolkien is dead and we cannot read shitty tweets unlike J.K., though.

          • JucheBot1988@lemmygrad.ml
            4·
            2 years ago

            What’s interesting is that Tolkien himself might have agreed with some (not all) of the criticisms in the article. It seems he had, toward the end of his life, certain misgivings about The Lord of the Rings, particularly the concept of the orcs as a wholly evil race. For his planned sequel, or rather prequel, to The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, he experimented with several ideas: orcs are not real living beings but inanimate puppets, they are living beings whose minds and individual wills have been fully overridden by the Enemy, or they are demons taking on physical form in mockery of human nature. He never resolved the issue, or finished the book. It was published after his death (though in somewhat incomplete form, and with heavy editing) as The Silmarillion.

            The basic problem of Tolkien’s world has always been this. His stories began as a private hobby, and a way to cope with the stress of having been a combat veteran in the First World War. They were imitations of the ancient epics he had read as a student, and which he studied in his capacity as a professor of linguistics and comparative mythology; deliberately “primitive” in tone, they cribbed a lot of elements from Germanic, Irish, and even Slavic mythologies. Elves, for instance, are the Tuatha de Dana of Irish folklore; orcs are the Fir Bolg. Now one can accept certain things in an ancient mythological setting – we recognize them as relics of another time and place, a sort of pre-scientific explanation of the natural world – that in a novel do not come off nearly so well. And as Tolkien’s invented world slowly morphed into a series of three giant novels, the harshness of an iron-age (or simulated iron-age) mythology came more and more to the fore. He tried to soften it, and for the most part succeeded, but at the price of a lot of interior consistency. People have noted how a lot of the socially problematic aspects of LOTR are not so much explained away, but rather hidden, by a sort of virtuoso authorial sleight-of-hand.