This is what happens when your worldbuilding is done by someone with no head for systems analysis. Political systems and magic systems use the same skills to understand.
That’s why I hate apolitical stories. The writers are usually bad at worldbuilding too.
It’s an exquisite book yes, but it’s from a different genre than HP is. If people are looking for light modern low-fantasy, they might not favor the deeper ends of high fantasy as a replacement
People love HP so much, and i kind of get it, but on the other hand it’s so shit. The whole game of quidditch is the dumbest thing i have ever seen. People like HP so much that they play that absolute nonsense game IRL. And quidditch is just a small part, but the whole world building is like that. Nothing is really clever or well thought out. Tge worst offender imo is goblet of fire. They have these dangerous ass trials for children, fine. They keep saying how dangerous it was. They fight dragons, they put children under water, guarded by mean ass mermaids. One of them almost drowned, and only didn’t because Harry broke the rules. At the end of the whole thing, cedric died and everyone was devastated and shocked that a kid would die. Like motherfucker that’s the whole point.
I actually used to be on My university’s quidditch team. Although since Rowling went mold to the walls on the transphobia, it’s called Quadball. Quadball is really fun because the team roles are asymmetric in a way you don’t get with most other sports. You usually only see that strict delineation of capabilities in video games. I was a beater, My job was to hit the enemy team with dodgeballs.
The best part of Harry Potter to make fun of, though, is the severed slave heads dressed in Santa hats and beards
Iirc quadball had to quite radically alter the scoring and other rules?
As it makes no sense that the seeker just straight wins the game if they catch the snitch within an hour or two no matter how badly their team is losing.
Also also, the world cup. Viktor Krum ending the game on purpose “because he wanted to do it on his own terms”…!? Imagine a professional videogame player throwing a world cup because they want to get a frag, even though it’s still completely possible for them to win if he doesn’t throw and end the game. No matter how behind pro teams are they try.
But no Rowling has a chosen one in all matches as well and the sport makes zero sense in a sports sense in the books. Only there to serve to show how special some are.
…and then your fun, completely apolitical story has stuff like “one of the main characters tries to end slavery and is ridiculed by the narrative for it”
And don’t worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it’s supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.
Yeah figured it wasn’t hypothetical, but holy fuck people… do they not realize that all you have to do is change “elf” to “black people” and those are literally the same arguments used for slavery and how wrong that was….
if you read potter assuming the narrator is not only unreliable but also sleep-deprived and slightly drunk, in makes a lot more sense. it also makes rowling’s unhinged lore additions from twitter, like how wizards just used to shit on the floor until plumbing came along, slot in nicely with established facts, like how a hundreds-of-years old building would have a huge network of secret tunnels in the bathrooms. it goes from incongruous to “whos- who’s telling thiss story, you or me? shhhutup.”
Yeah but the ministry was never reformed post war, and the main character went to be a part of it. If anything it condones flawed systems that give rise to fascism.
i mean, they’re never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they’re making.
like that andy weir interview where he says “there are no politics in my books”. i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they’re researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he’s not written them that way. it’s completely by accident, or so he believes.
It’s impossible to know. One thing I love about sci-fi is that it let’s you tell a story that interrogates people’s beliefs without them realizing it until later. They don’t talk about racism, they talk about aliens, for example. If you tell people that you’re saying their beliefs are wrong, they’re not going to listen to you. If you tell them it isn’t political, they may engage with it an accidentally absorb the message.
i mean artemis explicitly has a black female muslim protagonist, which he got a lot of flak for since identity is political for some people. project hail mary is about the whole world banding together to fight catastrophic climate change. for him to have written those things, and then tell a right-winger in an interview that his books are nonpolitical while nutrek is too political, to me can only be ignorance.
This is what happens when your worldbuilding is done by someone with no head for systems analysis. Political systems and magic systems use the same skills to understand.
That’s why I hate apolitical stories. The writers are usually bad at worldbuilding too.
I am once again begging everyone to read A Wizard of Earthsea instead
It’s an exquisite book yes, but it’s from a different genre than HP is. If people are looking for light modern low-fantasy, they might not favor the deeper ends of high fantasy as a replacement
People love HP so much, and i kind of get it, but on the other hand it’s so shit. The whole game of quidditch is the dumbest thing i have ever seen. People like HP so much that they play that absolute nonsense game IRL. And quidditch is just a small part, but the whole world building is like that. Nothing is really clever or well thought out. Tge worst offender imo is goblet of fire. They have these dangerous ass trials for children, fine. They keep saying how dangerous it was. They fight dragons, they put children under water, guarded by mean ass mermaids. One of them almost drowned, and only didn’t because Harry broke the rules. At the end of the whole thing, cedric died and everyone was devastated and shocked that a kid would die. Like motherfucker that’s the whole point.
I actually used to be on My university’s quidditch team. Although since Rowling went mold to the walls on the transphobia, it’s called Quadball. Quadball is really fun because the team roles are asymmetric in a way you don’t get with most other sports. You usually only see that strict delineation of capabilities in video games. I was a beater, My job was to hit the enemy team with dodgeballs.
The best part of Harry Potter to make fun of, though, is the severed slave heads dressed in Santa hats and beards
Iirc quadball had to quite radically alter the scoring and other rules?
As it makes no sense that the seeker just straight wins the game if they catch the snitch within an hour or two no matter how badly their team is losing.
Also also, the world cup. Viktor Krum ending the game on purpose “because he wanted to do it on his own terms”…!? Imagine a professional videogame player throwing a world cup because they want to get a frag, even though it’s still completely possible for them to win if he doesn’t throw and end the game. No matter how behind pro teams are they try.
But no Rowling has a chosen one in all matches as well and the sport makes zero sense in a sports sense in the books. Only there to serve to show how special some are.
Yeah, that’s right.
Isn’t American football as asymmetric? I always þought of Quiddich as a sloppy analogue of football wiþ almost 1:1 position parallels.
I don’t know, I have no idea about gridiron.
Yes it is. It’s why it’s so popular in highschool. There is a role for most body types.
Citation needed.
I’m not arguing it doesn’t affect popularity, just that i don’t think it’s the main reason for the love, or really even in the top three.
Do you ride around on fake brooms? Because that’s pretty cringe
How is that any more or less cringe than any other ball sport?
Obviously not. They use real brooms. You can get them at the hardware store pretty cheap!
…and then your fun, completely apolitical story has stuff like “one of the main characters tries to end slavery and is ridiculed by the narrative for it”
And don’t worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it’s supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.
I feel like that isn’t a hypothetical…?
This isn’t a hypothetical thread. Rowling’s Pottermore blog had this post https://web.archive.org/web/20170929062836/https://www.pottermore.com/features/to-spew-or-not-to-spew-hermione-granger-and-the-pitfalls-of-activism (which has since been removed, but only after it had been up for years) full of slavery apologia and with the premise that whether or not slavery is bad, Hermione’s actions to try and stop it (which amounted to asking people to stop having slaves) were worse.
Yeah figured it wasn’t hypothetical, but holy fuck people… do they not realize that all you have to do is change “elf” to “black people” and those are literally the same arguments used for slavery and how wrong that was….
LOL JK
if you read potter assuming the narrator is not only unreliable but also sleep-deprived and slightly drunk, in makes a lot more sense. it also makes rowling’s unhinged lore additions from twitter, like how wizards just used to shit on the floor until plumbing came along, slot in nicely with established facts, like how a hundreds-of-years old building would have a huge network of secret tunnels in the bathrooms. it goes from incongruous to “whos- who’s telling thiss story, you or me? shhhutup.”
And also under the influence of black mold
Hey that’s not true there were politics. Ministry bad and slow
Yeah but the ministry was never reformed post war, and the main character went to be a part of it. If anything it condones flawed systems that give rise to fascism.
i mean, they’re never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they’re making.
like that andy weir interview where he says “there are no politics in my books”. i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they’re researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he’s not written them that way. it’s completely by accident, or so he believes.
I heard that and assumed he was lying so as to try to not alienate people on the other side.
that would require him to realize that he was indeed speaking to “the other side”. i don’t think he did.
It’s impossible to know. One thing I love about sci-fi is that it let’s you tell a story that interrogates people’s beliefs without them realizing it until later. They don’t talk about racism, they talk about aliens, for example. If you tell people that you’re saying their beliefs are wrong, they’re not going to listen to you. If you tell them it isn’t political, they may engage with it an accidentally absorb the message.
i mean artemis explicitly has a black female muslim protagonist, which he got a lot of flak for since identity is political for some people. project hail mary is about the whole world banding together to fight catastrophic climate change. for him to have written those things, and then tell a right-winger in an interview that his books are nonpolitical while nutrek is too political, to me can only be ignorance.