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
Oh, I contextualize it in British children's literature. The whole opening section of Philosopher's Stone is a Roald Dahl novel with capering cartoon grotesques of baddies as 2D 'fatties.' And then she tries to turn that into a c19th bidungsroman
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Replying to @TabitaSurge @arthur_affect
The Durselys are VERY Dahl-esque. Not quite The Twits but clearly of that mould.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
Crazy so. The awkwardness when she tries to give them character depth and development later in the series: ooof
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Replying to @TabitaSurge @arthur_affect
Yes, and it's a strange, stilted, attempt because, if I remember rightly, they lurch back and forth between flat villains and complex humans. Petunia, I remember particularly, gets a more nuanced, humanising moment, and then reverts to flatness asap.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
I use the example of Voldemort as what not to do with KS3 and 4 writers. The bad guys think they're the good guys; the bad guys are not cartoon baddies. They think they're the heroes
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Replying to @TabitaSurge @arthur_affect
For me the issue with Voldemort is his two sides. As the looming shadow, he's quite interesting. We don't learn anything about his motivation until Phoenix probably, aside from hints that he's a bigot. But the more he becomes defined as "wizard racist" the less clear he is.
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Like, I've seen Harry Potter fans go to town explaining how the book is a great anti-racist allegory, but I don't actually think it comes through that strongly myself. Yes, Voldemort doesn't like muggles / mixed bloods, but his goal is explicitly immortality.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
Hard to do an anti-racist allegory when abolitionist positions are presented as nonsense - SPEW ffs - spouted by white female SJWs and all the main characters, including Harry, laugh at it
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Replying to @TabitaSurge
Yeah I say that Harry Potter was a victim of the capitalist forces driving it to cultural dominance and everything here But at the same time there are also a lot of hints that, despite the hope many fans had for the series, JK Rowling was just shitty all along SPEW, Gringotts
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All the endless dunking on villains for being ugly Even if you try to excuse the other stuff as one-off mistakes, that was a consistent and very harsh pattern Which she had in common with Roald Dahl, who, well, turned out to be openly horrible
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Replying to @arthur_affect @TabitaSurge
(It's the kind of thing that we have a tendency to excuse in children's fiction -- it's just a kid's story, kids love it when a character you're meant to hate is hateable for all the superficial obvious reasons But she *never stopped doing it*)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @TabitaSurge
(Her adult detective novels are WORSE about this The fact that it's a hardboiled private eye series and therefore it's "supposed" to be cynical and un-PC seems to give her constant pleasure at being able to hold up people she hates and mock the way they look)
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