The A Very Potter Musical trilogy's song, "Harry Freakin' Potter", is great because it both celebrates and mocks this by just laying it out unabashedly "YOU'RE HARRY FREAKIN POTTER"
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Anyway nowadays the actual light novel genre that actually is called "isekai" has taken "isekai tropes" up to the point of obvious self-parody and it's become a whole self-aware meme that the wish fulfillment fantasy of an isekai is immature and fucked up
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Which means maybe we can talk a bit more openly about the "guilt" side of Harry Potter being a "guilty pleasure"
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(Quidditch seriously almost is to the point of self-parody already though I mean she couldn't just make Harry really good at scoring goals in a game where you win by scoring goals It's set up so Harry does ONE HUGE DRAMATIC THING every match, which ALWAYS ENDS THE GAME)
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Feels weird defending JKR right now, but I feel like a lot of criticisms of the series come from the misguided placing of HP in the YA genre, and not recognising its context as British Children's literature that gradually formed a newer YA genre as the characters grew.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
And so people read them expecting a sort of proto-Twilight but the lineage for the first few books is much more a sort of mix between Tom Brown's Schooldays and Captain Underpants.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
Which is not to say "they're for kids, they're not supposed to be good" but that they're for younger kids, and based on younger kids books, than most people think.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
Yeah! I mean, the clear precedent here would be Roald Dahl, who shares a sense of whimsy and also some of the same problematic backgrounds.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect
Right, HP is like if you took a Roald Dahl magical world, and then bonded it to a Mallory Towers school romp, so you get the absurdism and the grounding. This is why the criticisms that the magical world has no rules sort of misunderstand the idea, I think.
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Which is that the magic is mad, and silly, and dreamlike, and absurd, but before you benefit from it, you have to actually go earn it at a boarding school.
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Right, if the magic were actually explained, or had known consistent rules -- if we actually got to see the content of the lessons and the textbook -- it would probably in fact have ruined it The initial appeal was that to the reader magic seems like it can just do anything
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
You get the fantasy of transitioning from the real world and its limitations to this childlike fantasy of being able to wave a wand and do whatever you want, that feels more real because there's a process of being educated and initiated into it (but not one you can actually show)
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Replying to @arthur_affect
And it's STILL the world of a child or young adolescent. The stakes change and the subjects are wild, but it's still middle school. And really recognizably middle school.
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