Harry Potter and why its world building is so boring? - Avada Kedavra vs M16

[XYZpdq]

Then there's that one bad film that made the Wheelers. I read them in comic book form and they're still terrifying

Oz was always weird as all fuck, it's just that everybody's used to the Garland movie so things from that aren't as noticeable, like how people accept a flying saucer with some tubes randomly glued to it as a spaceship because Star Trek is so ubiquitous, but really the 1701 is a strange looking craft when you think about it.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

The first books maybe were relatable for a kid the same age as Harry who was just entering middle school and wanted to feel like there was something special ahead for them and they were going to be part of something bigger rather than just another dummy living the mundane life of a school kid (while an owl tells them they are basically wizard Jesus Christ). I don't know what was the hook after maybe the third book, i don't even know what the real stakes were, why wizard world even matters or why even root for Harry or his friends, it was standard YA stuff at that point were bland as hell kids fight the meanie adults.

 

[Windows XP Home Edition]

I could never get into Harry Potter and I've never liked it. I think it's just because I'm not really into fantasy too much and the amount of over the top hype it receives. I only really read the first three books and I wasn't exactly blown away by them. I find the characters particularly unlikable and the writing tedious. Why do 20-30 year old manchildren still read and watch the movies when there are better, more mature literature and movies out there? It doesn't help that I find the author to be an extremely annoying person in general.

 

[Ira the Weatherman]

Harry Potter is just The Worst Witch but featuring a boy and some edge.

She also contradicts her statements constantly (Hogwarts is for British kids only, but Draco wanted/could go to Durmstrang. Why? Is Durmstrang so open or is Hogwart xenophobic?

'Durmstrang'? So... like 'Sturmdrang'?

BRAVO J.K.

 

[Jan Ciągwa]

No offense but Rowling's worldbuilding is so boring because she's a woman and women have no imagination whatsoever.

To be fair, I'd rather read Rowling's womanly tripe than the supernova of autism that is Yudkovsky's manly fanfic.

So, drinking unicorn blood makes you immortal? Why didn't you enslave those sentient, sapient unicorns and harvest their blood for all eternity? Stupid, STUPID, STUPID!~!!1212 I'm surrounded by idiots!11

 

[Calandrino]

King James Bible: 783,137 words
Harry Potter books 1-7: 1,084,170 words

You guys complaining about plot twists in the later Harry Potter books have got to be closet fans or something. How do you read the first couple of hundreds of thousands of pages and go, "well this sucks so far but I just have to know if Professor Snoozlewoozle defeats the Rumbley-bumblies"

 

[Troonologist PhD]

No offense but Rowling's worldbuilding is so boring because she's a woman and women have no imagination whatsoever.

To be fair, I'd rather read Rowling's womanly tripe than the supernova of autism that is Yudkovsky's manly fanfic.

So, drinking unicorn blood makes you immortal? Why didn't you enslave those sentient, sapient unicorns and harvest their blood for all eternity? Stupid, STUPID, STUPID!~!!1212 I'm surrounded by idiots!11

Yudkowsky’s shit doesn’t get enough attention on the Farms. Anyone sperging on about how rational they are is probably a massive tard.

 

[XYZpdq]

King James Bible: 783,137 words
Harry Potter books 1-7: 1,084,170 words

You guys complaining about plot twists in the later Harry Potter books have got to be closet fans or something. How do you read the first couple of hundreds of thousands of pages and go, "well this sucks so far but I just have to know if Professor Snoozlewoozle defeats the Rumbley-bumblies"

there was also some elements of the thrill of the chase in the day, pirating the newest one, putting "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE" in your back window and driving down the highway to ruin things for everbody else the day it came out, reading a book from photos taken from what was clearly the floor of a Barnes and Nobles, stuff like that

 

[DJ Grelle]

Yudkovsky

I have nothing but utter contempt for this fucking kike.
He's all "oh rationality *fellates scientism like the redditor he is* but there is this post he made on his facebook that was essentially a fat fuck coping with his fat. It was all whiny about "CICO doesn't work!" and "exercise is hard" and "surgery is the only option" and it made me hate him even more than I hate jews and that is not an easy task to accomplish.

 

[Jan Ciągwa]

I have nothing but utter contempt for this fucking kike.
He's all "oh rationality *fellates scientism like the redditor he is* but there is this post he made on his facebook that was essentially a fat fuck coping with his fat. It was all whiny about "CICO doesn't work!" and "exercise is hard" and "surgery is the only option" and it made me hate him even more than I hate jews and that is not an easy task to accomplish.

I'd be fun to read how biased and irrational belly fat is so please post source or at least a screenshot.

 

[DJ Grelle]

I'd be fun to read how biased and irrational belly fat is so please post source or at least a screenshot.

This was it. I first saw it in a /fit/ thread and it makes me irrationally angry.
"Metabolically disprivileged" damn how rational
"I will delete comments suggesting diet or exercise" jfc I'm mad now

 

[Jan Ciągwa]

Jesus fucking Christ, learn some brevity Yudd.

I recommend stocking up on Ritalin and cleaning your sinuses often - if you're too important to walk you fat fuck.

 

[Salt Water Taffy]

One of the key problems with Harry Potter's worldbuilding is that it's overly centered around Hogwarts and treats it like the center of the wizarding universe. Hogwarts, to its credit, is a very whimsical and intricate place - it's basically a massive playground to a little kid, who is less likely to care than an adult about the world surrounding it. The only super stupid thing I can think of within Hogwarts itself is the house system - yeah, you can say it's about bravery and loyalty and cunning and all that jazz, but in practice the houses morphed into The Good Guys, the Hitler Youth, the magnet school for the super-nerds, and the short-bus house. A lot of the most interesting pieces of Harry Potter lore are interesting on a micro scale but not on a macro scale. For instance, on a micro scale, the sport of Quidditch is very interesting - it'd be dull if Harry, et al just played soccer or tennis or something, and it makes sense that a sport would be a very important part of the Hogwarts community of students. But relative to the entire wizarding world, a dumb sport is window dressing at best. Most of the weakest parts of the worldbuilding relate to the world outside Hogwarts, like basically everything about the Ministry of Magic. The Hogwarts focus wouldn't have been as much of a problem if the series was content to be the boarding school mystery series it works best as. Once the Voldemort threat spread past Hogwarts' walls was when the series grew too big for its britches. I understand why the death of Dumbledore would be incredibly upsetting to the students at Hogwarts, but why is the entire wizarding world seeing the death of a school headmaster as a way-of-life changing disaster?

TL;DR, HP's world-building is like a pretty ship-in-a-bottle: it's pretty when you look at it on a shelf and it's got some very ornate detail work, but if you throw it into the real ocean it's not going to float, and the people who make good ships-in-bottles tend not to be good at making real ships.

It's also kinda telling that probably the single most well-received pieces of Potter media beyond the first seven books and movies are the theme parks. Theme parks are super immersive but very small scale - the exact scale that Potter works best on

 

[Still Anonymous For This]

I have a bit of a soft spot for the Harry Potter books. I was a little kid when they were first being released and would stay up all night to plow through them when my mom would bring one home. In retrospect, are they literary masterpieces? No. But for the time, they were an enthralling series for kids to introduce them to fantasy and reading.

I mean, if a Harry Potter book can lead a kid to Tolkien, I can't really fault it. JK has serious issues with world building and not thinking through how characters should interact with the world, but the Harry Potter books are literary masterpieces compared to some of the trite that comes out of Games Workshop's Black Library.

 

[Vyse Inglebard]

Yeah, the mysteries and the relationships between the main characters, it probally helps that the concept was novel to the average reader since magic adventures wasn't really in vogue for YA at the time despite similar books being written in the past.

I defy anyone to try and convince me that Goosebumps isn't a more quality book series than Harry Fucking Potter. Goosebumps was the shit when I was a kid and if I am ever cursed to have demonspawn of my own I sure as fuck would be more likely to give them a boxed set of Goosebumps than Harry Potter. Hands down.

Ursula K. LeGuin did the scar-faced magical prodigy attending a wizard school better, in my opinion, with A Wizard of Earthsea.

I see all of these literary recommendations and I raise y'all Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. In that series, wizards are champions of "The Powers That Be" and given the ability to rewrite the universe using the Speech — essentially reprogramming the universe and, thus, performing wizardry. Wizards can literally be anything (animals, robots, etc.) and can talk to anything. No, seriously, anything.

Nita and Kit are both more relatable protagonists, both having got into the gig because of being bullied and wanting to make their lives just a bit easier for themselves. Thing is, they discover that their main duty is to travel through time and space to battle the Lone Power, the evil Power who created Entropy and Death, usually involving them heroically sacrificing their lives. (In fact, halfway through the first novel it is explicitly stated that someone usually has to die this way in order to defeat the Lone Power — although it doesn't have to be a wizard.) Their power, thus, comes with a responsibility that the Potterheads never have. Also unlike the Potterheads, the Young Wizards actually take their jobs seriously, usually because there's high stakes involved (the destruction of the UNIVERSE ITSELF in the first book, the destruction of the entire Eastern U.S. in the second, etc.)

If you wanna talk about YA novels that do this concept more justice than Harry Potter ever could, you start with this series. Fucking fight me on this.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

I understand why the death of Dumbledore would be incredibly upsetting to the students at Hogwarts, but why is the entire wizarding world seeing the death of a school headmaster as a way-of-life changing disaster?

This is (somewhat) explained in the books, it's because he was part of the leadership in the resistance against Drumpf Voldemort, therefore his death means they lost a great hero they were counting on when Voldemort returned. I think it's suggested too that he's a quiet guy and would rather be a mere school headmaster than anything more grand even though he easily could be.

There's also the fact that as far as we know, almost all the British wizards were educated at Hogwarts meaning that one kindly headmaster they remember as a kid is now dead. Which brings us back to your point about the world of Harry Potter only working on a small scale.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Its a series that is essentially a product of its time unfortunately.

 

[UnKillFill]

Trump is Valdamart, everybody knows that. So what if JK Loling is a literal bigot now? At least he called out the modern day Hitler before he even came into power.

 

[Xerxes IX]

View attachment 1846819
This was it. I first saw it in a /fit/ thread and it makes me irrationally angry.
"Metabolically disprivileged" damn how rational
"I will delete comments suggesting diet or exercise" jfc I'm mad now

Are suggestions that he try meth okay then?

He sounds like the kind of pseud that'd call doing hard drugs biohacking.

 

[Naamaleipuri]

So.. Hogwarts Legacy, the game coming for PS & XBOX.
I'm mildly interested, mostly because I wonder if I can play as a pureblood supremacist character, shitting on them muggles and mudbloods. They have stated to have a morality system after all. It's probably going to be like paragon and renegade from Mass Effect ie; good guy and angry good guy.. But here's hoping.