• @aleshasmiles@lemmygrad.ml
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    291 year ago

    When I was a kid and had no understanding of the world, I was a huge fan of Harry Potter. It was my first dive into fantasy and has a lot of positive nostalgia for me. But as soon as I started looking deeper into the subtext I noticed it was full of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. and the basic premise was a rich celebrity jock growing up to be a magic cop. My point is, if even I can let go of my favorite childhood series, anyone can. And it’s not just because of I am a trans person and Rowling is a transphobe, it’s just a horrible series on its own merit. Only literal children have an excuse to enjoy it.

    • @hegginses@lemmygrad.ml
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      161 year ago

      I used to be really into Harry Potter when I was a kid. I loved the books and the video games. Order of the Phoenix is what ruined it for me. I was so hyped for the new book, pre-ordered it and everything but when I actually read it I was met with some of the most boring storytelling I had ever sat through. It was just mindlessly dragging out the length of the story purely so the book could follow the trend of being bigger than the previous ones but the end result is that you get halfway through it and still nothing substantial had happened with the plot. So much of the story is just the characters going through daily life and wondering where the fuck Hagrid is and after 200 pages of that, I completely lost interest in the entire franchise, I never engaged with the series ever again after that aside from pirating the movies just to get the gist of the plot.

      This is the kind of writing tactics I used to use in my English exams in high school to pad out my stories and hit the word count.

      On a side note I also fucking loathe Lemony Snicket books for using word salad to pad out shitty uninteresting stories. I remember reading A Series of Unfortunate Events, I got about 20 pages in and realised this whole book was going to be using repetition of character speech and what should frankly be an illegal amount of adjectives just to make it look like an actual story is there.

      • ButtigiegMineralMap
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        81 year ago

        the Harry Potter games were ok sometimes, but the Order of The Phoenix video game on Ps2 was one of the worst games I’ve EVER played. You play as Potter(obv) and you go around doing mini-missions for classmates so they join your secret group. Then halfway through the game, your group gets caught by the professors or some shit and then you have to do missions for ALL OF THOSE CHARACTERS AGAIN!! The missions aren’t fun, they’re busywork. That game alone made me distance myself from Harry Potter before I even knew how sexist and racist the series was subtly. Ok maybe not so subtle but to an 8 year old it was pretty damn subtle.

      • Water Bowl Slime
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        61 year ago

        Attacking Harry Potter is one thing, but going after a Series of Unfortunate Events is another! Those books have a great story individually and collectively, you should have finished reading. The narrator is pretty pompous though and I never bothered with any of the spinoff books because his interjections made me hate him too.

        • ButtigiegMineralMap
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          61 year ago

          My brothers used to read those w my Dad. They finished the last book w my dad and they hated it lol. Spoiler

          spoiler

          Apparently they were mad about some sorta mystery involving a sugar bowl or something, they didn’t let it go and said the author was lazy for not following through with some of the clues, I didn’t read it tho, what do you think about said Sugar Bowl?

          • Water Bowl Slime
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            51 year ago
            spoiler

            I thought of it as a plot device first and a mystery second so it didn’t bother me that its contents were never explicitly confirmed. Though the last book implies that it contains a cure for the fungus disease and that’s what the Netflix adaptation went with so there’s that.

  • QueerCommieOP
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    1 year ago

    As we are on the subject, I would like to go on a Harry Potter rant. My little brother is having the Harry Potter series read to him, so something I keep noticing is the population. Rowling keeps mentioning that the wizard population is relatively small. She says the pureblood families going extinct and the muggle population is much larger than that of wizards, but how could this be? Wizards seem to reproduce at a similar rate to humans, and they have the advantage of muggle families often bearing magic children. Does this mean they die at a faster rate? It couldn’t be. Many wizards are noted to live far beyond 100. Humans can kill by poisoning, machine gun, bombing, Illness or many other things. Wizards on the other hand can stop poisoning very easily, don’t have either high tech weapons (but could protect from them easily), and have many magical cures for illness not barred by copyright or hospital bills. The way they do kill is poisoning, which is less likely to kill, by knife, which is easily reversed, or by a spell which is far less efficient than a human projectile. How is it then, that the biggest wizard school has only 28 athletes? My other problem is: aren’t wizards supposed to have some great culture? They live like it’s the Middle Ages, without accepting much modern tech. Yet, they are shallow enough to adopt the human Christian holiday of Christmas, and they make terrible parodies of contemporary Christmas songs, (Sirius sings “merry hippogryphs” or something of the sort). That concludes my Harry Potter problems that I haven’t seen someone like Shaun cover.

    • lemmygrabber
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      161 year ago

      They live like it’s the Middle Ages, without accepting much modern tech.

      The world of Harry Potter ignores means of production and and their ownership in shaping the world so you get this broken depiction because of that. As far as I could understand Malfoy’s family was wealthy because of his father was a government bureaucrat in cahoots with badguy but there is no explanation of where wealth comes from in general (at least in the movies, I haven’t read theory).

      Harry Potter was meant to be a children’s book but because children are disillusioned and disappointed in the world they are brought in, the franchise grew bigger than it should have. The worldbuilding is riddled with holes for this reason.

      Apart from this it seems like Rowling is just an asshole in general. There is a video by YouTuber, “Shaun”, who points out that there is a lot of meanness in the stories that are casually passed off as normal. Combining this the anti-semetic trope of large-nosed Goblin bankers and how Rowling is a raging bigot IRL, it is not surprising that the fascist-rhetoric of pure bloodlines and declining population features the way it does.

      • QueerCommieOP
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        151 year ago

        On your first point, why are the weazlys’ poor? They’ve got multiple people working similar jobs in the ministry. Why don’t they just build a new, larger house? With all that magic and land it should be easy. Maybe the mode of production is mercantilism or something? As, the only businesses or basically small. Businesses.

        • lemmygrabber
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          101 year ago

          I actually Googled this and read some answers on Quora and Reddit. They say that the Weasley father worked in a department related to investigating objects ruled by muggles which was looked down upon and he did not get along with Draco Malfoy’s father and one more Ministry figure whose name I can’t recall. He was the sole breadwinner and had many children because of which he was poor. No one knows why the mother despite being a decently talented witch does not work. So it just looks like they are poor for the plot. Same reason why Harry does not use his inherited wealth to help Ron and his family, depsite them taking care of him as he were a part of the family. They are poor because they were meant to be poor. It is not because of any injustice. Some people are rich and some people are poor and the poors should just accept it and embrace the cutesy quaint and rustic aeathetic that comes with being poor.

      • @Munrock@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        The world of Harry Potter ignores means of production and and their ownership in shaping the world so you get this broken depiction because of that.

        I think this, subconsciously, is part of its appeal. The Weasleys using hand-me-down gear and having a penny-pinching aesthetic is allowed to be ‘quaint’ and ‘charming,’ whereas when I’ve spent time with real friends who have to live like that it gets me angry thinking about why it’s like that. But for characters in Hogwarts, the positives are material and the negatives are harmless aesthetics, and there’s no ‘why’.

        All of the negative aspects are taken care of by magic (except and only where the narrative requires struggle), leaving just the positives (e.g. a tightly-knit, supportive family). So on the one hand you’ve got an extremely relatable world because of all the superficial similarities, and on the other hand you don’t even notice the absence of the bad parts because in Harry Potter’s unreality they weren’t removed or solved; rather they were never there to begin with.

        • @Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
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          101 year ago

          All of the negative aspects are taken care of by magic (except and only where the narrative requires struggle), leaving just the positives

          Arguably that’s not exclusive to HP, but is in fact a feature of many western entertainments

          • @Munrock@lemmygrad.ml
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            101 year ago

            Yeah, it’s just the way HP completely omits the world building.

            It’s like you got Tolkein world building where he builds the whole iceberg, Sanderson world building where he builds the tip of the iceberg but the huge bit below the surface is hollow, and Rowling world building where it’s literally just the tip but nobody looks down because they don’t want to know (until the author wades into politics and makes an ass of herself).

          • lemmygrabber
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            91 year ago

            It’s not exclusive to HP but in it not describing the epistemology leaves a hole noticeably larger than other franchises.

            In Witcher 3 for example there is magic but its much more limited in scope. There are kings and queens with armies so you can guess the class structure of the society.

            In HP the reaches of magic are like Calvinball where it doesn’t follow any rules and just does whatever the author felt like. A young girl has access to a handy widget that can turn back time with no side effects at all. HP is extremely poorly thought out.

      • @lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml
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        111 year ago

        Yeah overall HP’s world building is a Jenga tower, it makes me lol when people say that it is a coherent fantasy world. Actually it’s double stupid because obviously the fact that it doesn’t make sense is part of why it’s successful. On one hand because it gives it a fairytale vibe, and most importantly because it pushes every good buttons in white privileged people’s mind by portraying a society that is nowhere different, just with floating things and old stuff’s aesthetics

  • @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlM
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    141 year ago

    I think this game will be bad, anyway. Like 7 out of 10 tops, and with effort. I don’t base this on anything really, it just seems that way.

    • lemmygrabber
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      81 year ago

      I think it’s going to be reviewed better than that. I am thinking it will be 85 on Metacritic at least. The reason is that it is the first actually AAA looking game in the franchise as of late. With the way Sony is involved in it I expect it to be a decent single player game.

      • No but I can totally see that it’s gonna be a buggy mess that looks like a triple A game but doesn’t play like one because of minor stuff that in the end ruins the game, like your character’s momentum when walking or prompts to interact showing just a little bit late or you have to get in a weird position to get them to appear. It might also have suspiciously low res textures in some areas, namely all the areas that weren’t made to look super good for the screenshots or promotional material. Possibly there will be some weird design choices that devs stopped doing ten years ago, and this will automatically make the game look much more dated than it is. If you’ve played the Sherlock Holmes games from Bullfrog, this is exactly what I’m talking about.

        It will probably get a good score from the press because like you said, open world harry potter for the first time, and then they will revisit the game 5 years down the line and admit it wasn’t actually that good in hindsight like they did Bioshock Infinite. The players will be mostly divided in two camps: the reactionaries praising the game despite having barely played it before they dropped it because “that’ll show the wokes” (but the game isn’t that good so they didn’t play more than the prologue), and the liberals who will automatically 1-star the game due to Rowling. Then after that you’ll have the more radical leftists, like communists and anarchists, giving the game a proper review and admitting that it’s not that good after all, even if you judge the game on its own merits.

        Someone will inevitably say “I really wanted to like this game… but I can’t”, and not because of the controversy, but because it’s a passably meh game at best.

        Just a very strong hunch. We’ll see if I’m right or not. I am not basing this on much at all, it just calls to me.