meditation teachers be like “i wish to spread the dharma for the benefit of all beings” yet none have ever attempted to make a movie, TV show, or even the most powerful known vessel of culture, a YA fantasy novel. curious 🤔
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yud at least had the sense to write harry potter fanfic. that shit worked. kids read it and everything
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c.s. lewis obviously had the right idea with the narnia series. that’s how you get em young. surprising how few people have really seriouslu tried to follow in his footsteps
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meanwhile the power vacuum in teaching the dharma to children of my generation was filled by… j.k. rowling. and we know how that turned out
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millennials criticizing the harry potter universe for liking cops too much or w/e is its own whole genre by now but it really is very frustrating that harry potter looms so large in the millennial psyche despite being ultimately so morally and spiritually shallow
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rowling was just some woman before she accidentally became a kind of mother to an entire generation. it was a burden she did not sign up for, was not vetted for, and ultimately was unprepared to bear
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at least the popularity of the harry potter series taught us that many, many kids wished school was more meaningful, more filled with adventure, more suffused with magic; wished that they were being taught how to actually do cool stuff by teachers they could respect
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there’s just so little to learn from harry’s arc tho. he starts out surviving voldemort because of his mother’s love (did the other mothers who lost children to voldemort love their children any less?) and ends up beating voldemort on a technicality involving the elder wand
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what is there to admire or emulate here? i’ve never heard a single person say out loud that they want to be like harry potter. there’s nothing to be like. harry wins because he’s Special, not because of any exceptional qualities he’s managed to cultivate
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Harry has the minimum hero trait: not giving up when it matters, even when failure seems almost certain.
That's not enough for him to quite *deserve* to win in some sense, but it's really, really not nothing.
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Ultimately a Royalty story not a Horatio Alger story
Tho what about Luke Skywalker then
The Be/Do dichotomy at work
(Yes, the twist: renunciation of Have)
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He has Voldemort's brother wand (killing curse dodge #2) and horcrux (dodge #3), and the hat considers putting him in Slytherin. And like... yeah, he is kind of an asshole. He uses dark magic a few times. And then... what, resists temptation to be even worse? It was weird
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Big disagree. The entire moral of HP is that love for others is paramount.
* Harry was saved because his mother loved him
* Snape was redeemed because he loved Harry's mother so much that he risked his life for her son
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* Harry survived his own sacrifice because he saved Draco whose mother loved him
* Voldemort was doomed because he didn't love anyone and could not conceive of ppl (Snape, Draco's mother) loving others so much they would betray him
* ~~big power of friendship energy throughout~~
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that’s the message, you don’t have to cultivate any exceptional qualities to be good, you can be good at any moment, because there is goodness in everyone, you just have to not choose evil
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I kinda felt like that was the point
Harry’s notoriety is a result of some cosmic fluke, he’s not thoroughly effortlessly exceptional, he’s not obv Good, he doesn’t do much alone & imo the big theme is watching kids grow into the complexity of the adult world & become part of it
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it’s not super special and it looms in psyches largely bc it doesn’t have some big new bold spiritual/moral message (easily digested by basically everyone) but I’ve never understood what the point of all the critiques were - isn’t it a little cynical?
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