Bait or not, I unfortunately had the "pleasure" of reading Yudd's autobiography (dude wrote one when he was 18 IIRC) before reading HPMoR and Harezier's self-insert sticks out like a sore thumb.
I want to point out that for a "jenius", Harry (or rather Yudkowsky) still hasn't learned that you do not go out of your way to show people how stupid they are, because you're going out of your way to make enemies for no payoff other than massaging your ego. Also, Yudkowsky doesn't know what "rationality" means (hint: it doesn't mean "unbiased").
Personally, I think world building as a literary merit is vastly overrated, and the modern obsession with it is has produced a culture that excuses poor writing if the setting is interesting enough for a fandom to be built around it. It’s the province of many hacks, Tolkien included. At least Lewis was a true writer.
Was he? Lewis Carroll had already done this? Jonathan Swift? Francis Bacon? Thomas More? The entirety of the Matter of Britain? And that’s only in English literature. You could argue that even Plato accomplished this with his concept of the Republic and Atlantis. Tolkien isn’t really that special. The only reason he’s perceived as special is because of the cult of pop culture that surrounds him.
2. The series also took a majority of it's time in one location and only occasionally left the school to show how weird and fantastic the world was, though in hindsight these sites made practically no sense.
The first three books were standard british children literature. Everything is goofy, bizarre, cheerful and sometimes vaguely creepy. This is a common british trope for stories of the sort (See P.L. Travers, Roahl Dahl or P.G. Woodehouse)
However, the concept of Voldemort was a tad darker than this sort of story usually requires, as she was directly drawing from Tolkien and real life.
1. J.K. used magic haphazardly and made a world with almost no laws were any problem would be circumvented by a spell our heroes could learn, use, and never use again. Because of that the world itself had very few rules it had to follow and made it difficult to explain how it worked.
This was really not that much of an issue in the earlier books, but it compounded as books went on and abandoned the episodic nature, not unlike Star Wars.
3. The series was written for children and went by the rule tell don't show, so a lot of the world was told to us and never really shown. I.E. muggle discrimination, weasleys being poor, the students learning the limits to magic, practical application of the abilities taught. The few times it did try to flesh out the world it made little to no sense like the O.W.L.s, cause lord knows a standardized test will be able to test your magical capabilities.
A lot of Harry Potter's worldbuilding makes way more sense if you're british, as it is oftentimes intended to satirize aspects of British culture and society.
> Be british
> Catch the joke
> Do not care about whether if it makes sense
Hogwarts is a big tongue-in-cheek parody of the UK's Public School system, that started as somewhat affectionate but at times was a bit more scathing about it since Rowling, as a leftie, isn't allowed to look favourably on Public Schools.
This was retconned. The first book implied that Hogwarts was not the only wizarding school in Britain, but an elite Wizarding school in Britain. There are four scenarios that can be inferred from the first book:
- Hogwarts is a Public School for people with magic abilities, and there is only one - Every british person that shows these abilities is invited to study there. This is supported by the general treatment with which the school is introduced but it also kind of murks the whole pureblood thing, as it seems to imply magic manifests randomly on people rather than being inherited.
This was always very jarring and Dumbledore shows he's aware repeatedly, which makes him kind of an asshole. The abused special kid is another british trope the early books played straight and, when Rowling tried to go down a more serious tone this is one of several things that suddenly raise eyebrows.
Well, it is established that Dumbledore can pretty much do whatever the fuck he wants because he's just that good. Fucking Minister of Magic regularly calls him to ask him what to do.
Dumbledore being the Supreme Chief Justice of the world (don’t remember the name), the international ambassador for wizarding Great Britain, and a school headmaster - functions that should, in any normal society, be incompatible
The Wizarding World isn't, by any means, a normal society and it is, in fact, close to an actual dystopia even without Death Eaters. The Ministry of Magic ranges between atrociously incompetent and petty authoritarian.
One would thing that if there was a house that was systematically producing white wizard supremacists one would either investigate what's going on there (Is Snape still a death eater?) or ask the Sorting Hat if he's specifically sorting bad guys there and if he can instead suggest these bad guys are expelled.
It is implied that the Sorting Hat can see into people's souls and that the school treats Slytherin as a containment house for the bad guys. On the other hand Slytherins tend to be very rich offsprings of influential white pureblood wizards and for a while he seemed to consider putting Harry there.
J.K. Rowling doesn't know shit about East Asia, or Asia for that matter, since she is a boomer british white woman. She did this thing to cater to the portion of her fans that were japanese and/or weaboos.
I am pretty certain that this trope in anime was started off by Naruto. However, you just know Ken Akamatsu read Harry Potter. He got really obsessed with Star Wars midway the run of Love Hina, it would not be strange for him that Mahou Sensei Negima comes from a Harry Potter obsession.
But a lot of stuff is foreshadowed right in the first book:
When Harry goes to buy his wand at Ollivander's, Ollivander tells him about his parent's wands, mentioning that his father's wand was good for Transfiguration. In Book 3, we find out that James managed to secretly become an Animagus, which would require very good skills in transfiguration.
Midway through Book 1 and also early in Book 2, Harry has a horrible feeling that Snape can read minds. In Book 5, Snape is revealed to be a skilled Legilimens, which happens to be the sort of mind-reading Harry mentioned all the way back in these books. However, when he explains this to Harry, he calls it "the ability to extract feelings and memories from another person's mind" and takes exception to Harry's characterization of this ability as "mind-reading".
Bane gets angry about his fellow centaur Firenze saving Harry from Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest because it supposedly interferes "with what the planets say is going to happen." From this, Harry morbidly assumes his own doom is inevitable, saying the planets "must show that Voldemort's coming back... Bane thinks Firenze should have let Voldemort kill me... I suppose that's written in the stars as well." While these grave events are prevented from happening in Book 1, the planets are ultimately revealed to have been quite right: Voldemort does come back (in Book 4) and does kill Harry (in Book 7) — in the Forbidden Forest, no less.
One of the lingering questions remaining at the end of the first book is why Voldemort ever wanted to kill Harry in the first place. This becomes a major plot point in the fifth book.
Again, british comedy. Quidditch is Cricket, Rugby and Football all at once. That is, two posh sports and one very big sport that the lower and middle classes enjoy loudly and the upper classes enjoy quietly.
getting more and more serious about the personal drama and history of the wizard wars and shit, and it clashes horribly with all the silly, whimsical stuff, resulting in a setting with a schizophrenic tone where the nobody's actions make sense
I think she had to continue writing the books, Book 4 was published in 2000. The nineties were over, the generation she was writing for was getting older and the themes she was introducing were increasingly too darker for the sort of story she started writing in the early 90s.
She was risking becoming a one-trick pony with a mistery book every two years or so and an overall plot that it's arguable to which degree she ever knew who she would resolve.
The movies made her richer than the bloody queen but also added some pressure on her, otherwise she'd be GRRM'ed.
That said, WB was kinder to her than HBO was to Martin.
you have the 4th book with a whole summer arc, than the weird tournament, some ball, and the villian returning. as well as the first death with more plot and world building than the whole 3 other books put together
Book 4 was painful to read at the time. The amount of inconsequential shit is astounding, I hated the fucking tournament. The start of the book made a promise and established a book that only happened at the very end. The Quidditch and Tournament shit and all the stuff that went on was, for the most part, quite boring.
At this point clearly Rowling was still on the one-shot mindset of a self-contained story, the starting and final chapters feel like a later addition to drift away from that.
like its much easier to understand how the wesleys are poor when they're from a long line of substance abusers and despite having magic/welfare they still can't get their shit together and properly take care of their 7 kids
They are literally a standard white british working class, except that Arthur Weasley is not a deadbeat drunk football hooligan and Molly Weasley is not a vapid, dumb, obese bitch who is absurdly negligent. The Weasleys read as a 60s standard working class.
The "Too many children" is a common thing tories used to say to disparage the white british working class, and so do regularly the Malfoys.
The whole deal with Cho Chang was always ridiculous to me. Just google a bit: both Cho and Chang are last names, but Cho as a name exists and seems to be, for what I've read, more common in Taiwan.
That one guy in Hufflepuff from book 4 who Voldemort kills at the end when he gets his body back. He defied stereotypes by being Chad Thundercock and cucking Harry. This was all part of a heavy-handed effort to make his death more tragic.
Harry quite had had enough with Cho rejecting his advances. Did that bitch not know that he was The Boy Who Lived? The Chosen One? Harry knew that few in the insular wizarding world knew anything outside of their wands and magic. He knew there were things in the muggle world that even the most powerful wizards could not contend with. He put the strap of his AR-15 around his shoulder, chuckling as he stepped over Dudley's body while thinking of how powerless even The Ministry of Magic truly was. No Chinese slut was going to make a fool out of the boy prophecized to destroy He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Now, it was time to salvage the honor of He-Who-Did-Not-Get-Laid. He rubbed the double-lightning bolt scar on his forehead, chuckled to himself, and walked out the door.
Harry is much less of an overt narcissist as he is much more of a humble bragger. He is noticeably uncomfortable with his fame in early books, which gets him on a weird plot with Gilderoy Lockhart and Colin Creevey.
He gets brattier later but it's much more like tard rage than the sort of entitled cunt he often gets flanderised as, and it's implied to come from being part Voldemort
- Being a werewolf is treated like an easily treatable disease earlier. It's magical AIDS later.
- Mrs Figg is a crazy cat woman in the first book. It was all part of the plan.
- The Leaky Cauldron was retconned to be located in Charing Cross Rd from an undisclosed location
- Sirius Black might or might not have been retconned, but he certainly wasn't in Azkaban
- A lot of the artifacts from Book 7 might or might not have been retconned artifacts from earlier books
A lot of things can be argued to be either retcons or foreshadowing, depending on whom you ask.
Now Pottermore was a shitfest where JKR just went full retard, and the WIzarding World movies, which had a lot of her input, were even more of a shitfest.
Third book was too mind-screwy for this sort of story, and it added to the compounded problems of the franchise.
If I were harsher to JKR, I'd go as far so as to say that she didn't know how to end the book so she did this whole turn back the clock shit. The fact that it creates duplicates is so problematic...
It was a frankly underwhelming book with a lot of anticlimactic moments and a frankly schizo plot that jumped from here to there spreading itself too thin.
My favourite part is that she introduces several schools but fails to actually point out how different they are. 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? She later says that there are just several schools in the whole world, so wizard kids that are born in a country without a school just... don't learn?)
Beauxbatons (Which I think is a dirty joke?) was retconned as a wizarding school for Western European students (She said Spanish, Portuguese, French, Belgian and Dutch students attended Beauxbatons. There was absolutely no indication of this in the books where everything about it screamed French Hogwarts.
Similarly, Durmstrang seems to be Slytherin but Russian and a whole school. JKR said everyone in Eastern Europe went there.
Way to call @AgendaPoster and co fascist niggers, Joanne.
Speaking of fascism, where do German and Italian wizards go?
JKR was just too lazy to create lore for every country in Europe.
To bring it back to JK, she set out to write a children's series at the start. She wrote 3 good to very good children's books. Then she transitioned to YA, and the things that get a pass in children's books don't in YA. It took her a book and a half to work those things out, and by the time she wrote a good YA book she only had one book to finish her series which is why the 7th is a mess.
She's a victim of her own success really. Almost tragic.
Harry Potter has the mindset of a white british boomer labour and as such:
Voldemort had been terrorizing Britain for eleven years, just like the amount of years Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister when she started writing the books. Oddly enough, the timeline she later established would have Voldemort defeated in 1981 (The year Ms Thatcher became PM) and would have Voldemort's reign start in 1970 (That is, Ted Heath's tenure from the Conservative Party until 1974 and then two Prime Ministers from Labour Party, Harold Wislon and James Callaghan. More on this below): Unlikely Voldermort was based on old Ted as no one in Britain remembers him and he was fairly ineffectual and overshadowed by Thatcher.
Draco's introduction has him make rather unsubtle remarks about how muggles are not "our kind" and how "their culture" is not compatible with that of the Wizarding World, echoing Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech (Who was right, btw)
The Malfoys simultaneously represent the stereotypical upper class people who represented the Tory party before Thatcher -And that many lefties still think rule that party) down with the thinly veiled nazi sympathies a lot of them showed right before the war and never truly recanted (They just repurposed them but I digress) AND the white british population in regards to immigrants, specifically of the poo-shaded skintone variety.
Conversely, the Dursleys represent the sort of white british middle class JKR despised: Holidays in Spain, overweight, "aspirational" as in "social climbers", Daily Mail readers, suburb dwellers and averse to anything too odd. The Dursleys over-the-top fear and loathing of magic is highly reminiscent of classic Queer/BIPOC drama tropes (My Daughter is dating a BLACK MAN! My son is GAY!), especially on Petunia's side.
It's hardly surprising that the Harry Potter fandom became a hotspot for early woke as the books themselves were proto-woke as outlined above. Even TVTropes wrote:
LGBT Fanbase: Formerly. Pre-2020, Harry Potter was a massive hit among queer people, due to its emphasis on love being "the most powerful force", Harry being forced to grow up in a literal closet by his abusive relatives and eventually finding a loving adoptive family that cares for him and the overall fight for equality and fairness. Due to JK Rowling's increasingly outspoken hostility towards the transgender community, however, the LGBT Fanbase for Harry Potter has been rapidly declining, and most queer people nowadays discourage people from engaging with the series in any way (including ways that are non-monetary), as its continued influence as a franchise grants more power for Rowling to cause harm.
However, the actual truth is that the franchise wasn't specially targeted at girls, if at all. JKR writes stories and characters that appeal more to boys than girls one of the reasons being she can't write romance to save her life. I don't care if this sounds sexist but the reality is that boys want to read adventure and girls want to read romance, and even in woke current year this remains true.
What attracted THAT sort of millenial girl towards Harry Potter though was, at first, that this precise lack of skill on the part of JKR and the general tone of the story was fucking fertile ground to shipping shit. Harry Potter arguably was the first IP to launch a thousand ships and it was known for the most deranged shippings and fanfiction that there was even in the pre-tumblr years. In the DeviantArt and fanfiction.net fucking years. So this is only natural that this would attract a woke crowd, which in turn would attract more millenial white girls and queers.
Also, JKR did everything she could to nurture such a fanbase.
Another thing that is noticeable, and woketards are using now against her, is how patronizing her views are on minorities if we take the books as a source. More on this below.
I'd dare say most anime of this sort had Harry Potter as an inspiration, a mix of Harry Potter and Naruto. I'd say MHA is half Harry Potter, Half Naruto.
She has more imagination than the average female writer, if we take Ms Meyer, Ms James and Ms Collins as references. Their world building is much, much worse.
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
I admit this annoyed me some, but less than actually reading the book (After Order of Phoenix, which was a good one) and feeling like Rowling had been hyping me through a doorstopper and then, by the closing on the book pretty much outright saying "Dear reader, I know you were here for really exciting shit that didn't quite come, I promise all the sort of stuff you were expecting will be in the next book. It will be AMAZING!"
It wasn't, it was more anticlimactic shit
Years later, GRRM would fucking do the same to me with A Feast for Crows and with an even more cheeky epilogue.
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
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
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.
I have little interest and sympathy for Rowling after humiliating herself and trashing her work in a desperate attempt to appease the social justice mob and now getting unpersoned despite that pathetic groveling.
She was incredibly comfortable with that to the point of retconning Hermione as black.
The kiwis on the Rowling Derangement Syndrome seem to be under the impression that Rowling was red pilled from dealing with her insane fanbase. She wasn't, she loved it up until they caught her in wrong-think.
She wasn't even vocal about being a terf, she just liked the wrong tweet.
Like the champagne socialist she is, she only draws the line when she is personally threatened. Overall, she is still very much for the woke agenda damned be all.
I don't think she is able to write for adults. Her novels for adult have received a lukewarm reception and they're getting bought and read most likely for cultural war reasons these days.
At some point, the series was also retconned to take place in the late 1980s/early 1990s (which doesn't make sense as Dudley is stated to have gotten a PlayStation and threw it out the window), and an inability to mesh the "wizard world" with the "real world" led to all sorts of bullshit like "squibs" and a whole world of really stupid wizard subculture.
For most of the books stated timelines John Major was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with Tony Blair taking over during the events of Book 7. But she mentioned that his predecessor, "he" tried to throw Cornelius Fudge out of a window. Except that John Major took over Margaret Thatchow who, needless to say, was a woman.
Potterheads used to hand-wave this saying that JKR was taking a jab at Thatcher by having Fudge mistaking her for a man, which wouldn't be out of character for her and it would be funny to think that's the case considering her views on trans stuff and gender essentialism, but it is a much more likely answer that when she wrote these novels Tony Blair was the Prime Minister (Cornelius Fudge is supposed to be an expy of Blair, allegedly) and therefore who she had in mind when she wrote that scene later retconned to have happened way earlier.
Same thing applies if you're watching the Star Wars movie series for the first time, -you must start with Episode 4 - It sets up everything you need to know about the Jedi and how the Force works and it keeps the central mystery of Luke's parentage a secret until it's dramatically revealed to him (and the audience) in Episode 5
Beauxbatons (Which I think is a dirty joke?) was retconned as a wizarding school for Western European students (She said Spanish, Portuguese, French, Belgian and Dutch students attended Beauxbatons. There was absolutely no indication of this in the books where everything about it screamed French Hogwarts.
Similarly, Durmstrang seems to be Slytherin but Russian and a whole school. JKR said everyone in Eastern Europe went there.
Way to call @AgendaPoster and co fascist niggers, Joanne.
Speaking of fascism, where do German and Italian wizards go?
JKR was just too lazy to create lore for every country in Europe.
Well, it is established that Dumbledore can pretty much do whatever the fuck he wants because he's just that good. Fucking Minister of Magic regularly calls him to ask him what to do.
It's implied he's some sort of high-level magical politician or bureaucrat or otherwise obtained a sort of honorary title. Maybe it's supposed to like the Ministry of Magic's equivalent of the House of Lords or some shit. I don't know, it's never explained, and yeah, you're supposed to think Dumbledore really is just that good.
Rowlings worldbuilding only makes sense if the magical world is literally ran by their version of the NKVD, or KGB, or Gestapo. Because she's said that up until like 600ish years ago, the world knew full well about wizards, and they were integrated into society. Not in a 'oh there might be some somewhere' way, but that the Malfoys were good court friends of William the Conqueror. To go from that, to modernity, would require mass social engineering and control that would make IngSoc go "Lol, calm down faggot."
Also apparently magic is genetic, which doesn't make sense. The benefits offered by trait that can be summed up as 'lol I can warp reality' is unbeatable. There would be no normals left, only wizards.
It never stops being magical AIDS and it's not "treatable". Remus is the first werewolf we see and the book makes obvious that he's not healthy, looking worse some days than others. What the werewolf potions does is to keep his mind sane so he wouldn't hurt himself and others during the transformation, but he's still physically affected by it. We see that despite he's taking the potion through the whole school year.
Remus, specifically, can't find a job to pay for the potion because there is also a registration so people know he's a werewolf (or I guess certain wizards suspect it). That's the reason why he looks worse than others. I suppose that, when he was part of the order, Dumbledore made sure he could get some potion so he can work without problems.
They aren't retconned. Jo said she had planned the end from the beginning, that's why many places, characters, and objects that we meet in book 1 play important roles in book 7. The problem is that she didn't developed them well from book 2 to 6, so it feels like she just remembered they existed.
Rowlings worldbuilding only makes sense if the magical world is literally ran by their version of the NKVD, or KGB, or Gestapo. Because she's said that up until like 600ish years ago, the world knew full well about wizards, and they were integrated into society. Not in a 'oh there might be some somewhere' way, but that the Malfoys were good court friends of William the Conqueror. To go from that, to modernity, would require mass social engineering and control that would make IngSoc go "Lol, calm down faggot."
Also apparently magic is genetic, which doesn't make sense. The benefits offered by trait that can be summed up as 'lol I can warp reality' is unbeatable. There would be no normals left, only wizards.
It's funny, these stories are often cherished by the woke but the "power" in these YA fantasies always has the main character inherit being "the chosen one" because they need a (M/G)ary Sue stand-in for themselves or some aspect of themselves that's special in a way that nobody else can easily obtain. Which usually is due to heritage or bloodline, which starts to sound very familiar somehow...
This is supported by the general treatment with which the school is introduced but it also kind of murks the whole pureblood thing, as it seems to imply magic manifests randomly on people rather than being inherited.
The headcount of the magical population of Britain and whether one school is enough to contain them all is not reflective of the fact whether magic is random or inherited.
Magic is definitely heritable. Non-magical children are rare, but they're raised in the magical community. If magic were random, wizards would have to either steal gifted children from normies or fuck until replacement rate is achieved, at which point nonmagical washoff would quickly overwhelm the mundane world.
Draco's introduction has him make rather unsubtle remarks about how muggles are not "our kind" and how "their culture" is not compatible with that of the Wizarding World, echoing Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech (Who was right, btw)
Draco is wrong though. There's no invasion of muggles to worry about, and magical Britain seems to be extremely effective at assimilating and absorbing the few magical children of muggle parents. Harry is not a good example because he's aboooosed, but Hermione, the child of two muggles, dives headfirst into wizard culture and is in no way shaped by the modern world. (Partially it happens because Rowling might not have wanted to date the books, or to distract from her story, or to denigrate other children's stories as fiction, but in-universe it's just a fact that children of muggles assimilate really well and won't be raping underage pixies on Diagon Alley.)
Really? Here in Russia, Harry Potter is vastly more popular among girls (meaning appropriately-aged female children -- the adult fanbase is of course overwhelmingly female but I'm not counting them). Boys switch to fantasy with adult protagonists (e.g. Vlad Taltos) really fast. IIRC Harry Potter is 9 when he enters Hogwarts and upthread it's said there are 3 "children's" books of Harry Potter -- at 11, Russian boys will have grown out of it.
I thought it might be related to an observation (there was a study n sheeet) that boys want to be the characters and girls want the characters to be them, thus a story set in school is more relatable to girls, while boys are content pretending to brood over accidentally destroying universes. This also conveniently explains the proliferation of "coffee shop aus" and other islamic content.
But it appears it doesn't hold true worldwide. Huh.
I don't care if this sounds sexist but the reality is that boys want to read adventure and girls want to read romance, and even in woke current year this remains true.
yes but! The classic boys' adventures have exactly the % of romantic content modern girls love in their books (which they then proceed to write gross fanfics about). Boys and girls consoom books differently but there's no reason why they can't read the same books.
He's also wrong. Children won't notice all the discrepancies (e.g. about Batman's day job) but about what they notice, they ask all the fucking time. Especially small children who can't distinguish between fantasy and reality well, they're EXTREMELY demanding because they won't just stop at INTERNAL consistency, they have to reconcile a book with reality and with all other books they remember.
The premise of Half-Blood Prince was really cool, it was the one time the books felt acutely magical rather than like walking through a theme park as an adult. Some almost cultist shit. I want a story about that. A novel series, even. Bright shining path to greatness. I didn't like any of the later books, the characters were too embarrassing to be sympathetic. I don't even remember what Order of the Phoenix, which you say was a good one, was about. Umbridge is the only part I remember, and I had to count on my fingers to realize she was in that one. (I don't remember her getting raped by centaurs though.)
The latter two, maybe in fandom. In the books, both were irrelevant. The poor bastard from book 4 wasn't retarded, and there weren't any true nerds and nerdery in the books, because the world is (understandably) not deep enough to allow it. Hermione was studious and she was in Gryffindor.
She didn't retcon Hermione as black, she said "lalala nothing in the books says she isn't a nigger" (which is wrong, but also not the same as "actually she's a nigger now, end of discussion"), and it was in relation to retarded fans triggered by theater casting. A better example of a woke curtsey is Gay Dumbledore -- I think he was written as such in book 7 for woke reasons and probably inspired by British boarding school faggotry since book 1.
Because she's said that up until like 600ish years ago, the world knew full well about wizards, and they were integrated into society. Not in a 'oh there might be some somewhere' way, but that the Malfoys were good court friends of William the Conqueror.
Nicolas Flamel was a wizard in the books. Elizabeth I had court wizards IRL. William the Conqueror is earlier than that. No reason (aside from being ahistorical) why the Malfoys couldn't be his friends. There are "historical" accounts of epic adventures and magic, and the reason you think they shouldn't be trusted is you've been told magic does not exist and therefore they must be fiction or superstition. What if, instead, wizards did a little separatism, and if some irrefutable historical evidence pops up (like an artifact than can be activated by a normie), wizard MI13 shows up and erases your memory.
Also apparently magic is genetic, which doesn't make sense. The benefits offered by trait that can be summed up as 'lol I can warp reality' is unbeatable. There would be no normals left, only wizards.
It makes perfect sense. Magic is a technology that needs a civilization to put it to use. Mages don't just fart lightning and win. Look at the IRL, whites and some azns are clearly better adapted to computer sorcery than negroes who are largely unable to understand conditionals, but negroes did survive through the millennia when there was no computer sorcery, and they're outbreeding computer sorcerers so far.
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Since this is a general Harry Potter thread now, imma post I was just today thinking (I read all 7 books but only once, years apart, and out of order -- 4, 5, 2, 1, 3, 6, 7?)
I hate Ron Weasley the character, he's utterly fucking useless. (Not the "person", heaven forbid, I don't even remember what he was doing in-universe.) He's the protagonist's best friend but he's not good at anything except having opposable thumbs. Hermione should've been that generation's Weasley (even her first name is more wizard-y than normie), then Neville as #3, some on-and-off "bad boy" for the fangirls to swoon over, and an utterly unattainable hot chick for Harry to eventually marry.
No joke, we have one autistic friend who will mention this fanfic like it's the holy grail at every social gathering.
I've read a bit of it and couldn't stand it. The bizarre and obvious author self-insert constantly undermines himself by being a smug jackass to almost everyone.
Bait or not, I unfortunately had the "pleasure" of reading Yudd's autobiography (dude wrote one when he was 18 IIRC) before reading HPMoR and Harezier's self-insert sticks out like a sore thumb.
I want to point out that for a "jenius", Harry (or rather Yudkowsky) still hasn't learned that you do not go out of your way to show people how stupid they are, because you're going out of your way to make enemies for no payoff other than massaging your ego. Also, Yudkowsky doesn't know what "rationality" means (hint: it doesn't mean "unbiased").
The headcount of the magical population of Britain and whether one school is enough to contain them all is not reflective of the fact whether magic is random or inherited.
Magic is definitely heritable. Non-magical children are rare, but they're raised in the magical community. If magic were random, wizards would have to either steal gifted children from normies or fuck until replacement rate is achieved, at which point nonmagical washoff would quickly overwhelm the mundane world.
My point was precisely that the first book made a big deal about being 'accepted' into Hogwarts, I personally doubt that Rowling put much thought on this but the implication was that either there were more schools and this one was just the best, or you just either went or didn't have a magical education at all. It's strongly implied that magical education was compulsory, though.
A big deal is being made about being 'expelled' throughout several of the books, we see what being 'expelled' means through Hagrid, you are deprived from a magical education. Hagrid is only allowed to continue to be criminally retarded because of Dumbledore, and is one of the lotta shit Dumbledore allows that raises eyebrows.
Draco is wrong though. There's no invasion of muggles to worry about, and magical Britain seems to be extremely effective at assimilating and absorbing the few magical children of muggle parents. Harry is not a good example because he's aboooosed, but Hermione, the child of two muggles, dives headfirst into wizard culture and is in no way shaped by the modern world. (Partially it happens because Rowling might not have wanted to date the books, or to distract from her story, or to denigrate other children's stories as fiction, but in-universe it's just a fact that children of muggles assimilate really well and won't be raping underage pixies on Diagon Alley.)
The Ray Cism allegory is there but is faint and backfires several times.
On one hand, the magical community is severely inbreeded, classist, with an ineffectual, corrupt government and mudbloods are suggested to enrich it and actually prevent it from actually disappearing. The magical community elites are suggested to be rabidly, irrationally scared of muggles.
On the other hand, muggles are represented by Little Whinging, Surrey and the Dursleys, Rowling jab at the white british middle class: Vain, mean-spirited, hypocritical, insincere, shallow, judgemental and intolerant, and they're, of course, all bullies and racists towards muslims and niggers and faggots the magical community and get deranged at any instance of magic (see the former Prime Minister).
We see Wizards slur muggles all the fucking time, even the supportive, progressive Weasleys talk about the muggles in an incredibly condescending, paternalistic way, as if they were painfully stupid. Arthur Weasley fascination at things like engineering comes across as negging muggles all the time, and he is possibly the most friendly-to-muggles character there is.
Why wouldn't wizards feel like that? Every muggle we see is either an asshole or a Meg Griffin-tier ditz.
But Wizards are all fucking lolcows. There isn't even a single one that is not a retard. The books try to make the Lovegoods look eccentric when they're pretty much justified in their stuff by the wizarding culture. They pretty much cannot do anything without cheat codes, they don't really know how basic stuff works, let alone going in depth with stuff like physics, chemistry or engineering. A lot of them are literally too dumb to live. There is an awful lot of absolutely fucking insane and ridiculous preventable death in the Wizarding Community.
Let us not even talk about niggers house elves, AIDS faggots werewolves, and jews goblins.
Really? Here in Russia, Harry Potter is vastly more popular among girls (meaning appropriately-aged female children -- the adult fanbase is of course overwhelmingly female but I'm not counting them). Boys switch to fantasy with adult protagonists (e.g. Vlad Taltos) really fast. IIRC Harry Potter is 9 when he enters Hogwarts and upthread it's said there are 3 "children's" books of Harry Potter -- at 11, Russian boys will have grown out of it.
I thought it might be related to an observation (there was a study n sheeet) that boys want to be the characters and girls want the characters to be them, thus a story set in school is more relatable to girls, while boys are content pretending to brood over accidentally destroying universes. This also conveniently explains the proliferation of "coffee shop aus" and other islamic content.
But it appears it doesn't hold true worldwide. Huh.
I think Harry Potter is a classic masculine story, with a classic masculine protagonist and, in many ways, is reflective of Jo's, let's say, complicated relationship with men. Jo is an old school feminist, which means she's influenced by second wave feminism but she's not all that much into theory, which is probably why she isn't impressed by third-way post-structuralist feminism.
She is a practical feminist due to lived experience more than an academic feminist.
A lot of her behaviour, though, reeks of penis envy.
Harry Potter is meant to appeal to men and has the classic elements of such a story (In weaaboo terms, it's very clearly a shonen), however it is written by a woman and therefore it fails to capture the sensitivities of a man, more precisely a young boy.
That's why Harry Potter comes of as quite off (I wouldn't describe him as effeminate, though) as the series goes on. It's not so apparent with other male characters as they're written from the outside, so it's easier for Rowling, but the way Harry Potter thinks and feels is rather odd because it's written with a woman and her conflicted perception of men.
It sticks like a sore thumb many times when compared to Hermione (JKR's self-insert)
A better example of a woke curtsey is Gay Dumbledore -- I think he was written as such in book 7 for woke reasons and probably inspired by British boarding school faggotry since book 1.
He was gay from the beginning. He's fucking flamboyant in book 1. Old style british bugger, he was described short of speaking polari.
"Nothing like this man had ever been seen in Privet Drive. He was tall, thin and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard, which were both long enough to tuck into his belt. He was wearing long robes, a purple cloak which swept the ground and high-heeled, buckled boots. His blue eyes were light, bright and sparkling behind half-moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked, as though it had been broken at least twice. This man’s name was Albus Dumbledore"
"‘Fancy seeing you here, Professor McGonagall.’
He turned to smile at the tabby, but it had gone. Instead he was smiling at a rather severe-looking woman who was wearing square glasses exactly the shape of the markings the cat had had around its eyes. She, too, was wearing a cloak, an emerald one. Her black hair was drawn into a tight bun. She looked distinctly ruffled.
‘How did you know it was me?’ she asked. ‘
My dear Professor, I’ve never seen a cat sit so stiffly.’ ‘
You’d be stiff if you’d been sitting on a brick wall all day,’ said Professor McGonagall.
‘All day? When you could have been celebrating? I must have passed a dozen feasts and parties on my way here.’
Professor McGonagall sniffed angrily"
She couldn't have been more explicit about this due to british censorship at the time, but why should she? We should censor more so that some authors doen't indulge so much on irrelevant, TMI-riddled, trivia about their characters as they do nowadays, in no small measure influenced by Harry Potter and more precisely the fanfiction culture the franchise popularised.
The Weasleys are incredibly dysfunctional, I have more of a beef with Freorge and Gred, who I think are annoying delinquentes, and Arthur, whom I think Lucius Malfoy had a point about: He's incompetent at best and corrupt at worst.
He's pretty much comic relief, he also allows us an insight into the wizarding world that neither Harry nor Hermione have for purposes of worldbuilding but also occasionally plot-relevant.
Hermione should've been that generation's Weasley (even her first name is more wizard-y than normie), then Neville as #3, some on-and-off "bad boy" for the fangirls to swoon over, and an utterly unattainable hot chick for Harry to eventually marry.
I've read a bit of it and couldn't stand it. The bizarre and obvious author self-insert constantly undermines himself by being a smug jackass to almost everyone.
Wasn't LessWrong that Atheism+ community that instead of towards woke tilted towards race realism and therefore earned the eternal hatred of the likes of RationalWiki as a far right hate filled community?
A big deal is being made about being 'expelled' throughout several of the books, we see what being 'expelled' means through Hagrid, you are deprived from a magical education. Hagrid is only allowed to continue to be criminally retarded because of Dumbledore, and is one of the lotta shit Dumbledore allows that raises eyebrows
Kind of raises the question of just how dangerous an washout can be; of course, the newer series of movies actually answers this. But I'm half expecting the entire world to be put at an risk by some who's an bigger basket case than Voldermort
