First #lesson of #2019. Concentrating on #footwork and #flow, the #fencers cover at wide measure, until one pauses; the other #attacks, dealing with a single disengage or parry from their #opponent. It is important that the #students concentrate on #smooth #movement.
if you say the phrase “you can’t be mad at me i have the right to free speech” three times in a mirror justin mcelroy appears and vaporizes you instantly
I think the context is important here
The tweets above were in reference to the backlash he got for these:
JK Rowling’s wizards are the most useful, lazy, incapable dumbfucks in the history of fiction. The average Muggle? You take away their technology and they would be able to complete the basic task of feeding and clothing themselves without shitting on the floor.
If a wizard ever lost their magic in Harry Potter they would die. They’d be dead in three days. They’re fucking garbage and I hate that I’ve come to hate this series as an author inexplicably hailed for her worldbuilding skills is daily revealed to be appallingly bad at it.
I realize this is a really dumb thing to be this angry about but I’ve been told for years what a great worldbuilder JK Rowling is, and that didn’t even work as an argument back when the books were coming out. The Time Turner breaks all of Harry Potter forever, not because it offers easy time travel you can hold in your hand (although it does do that), not because you’ll be asking ‘why don’t they just use the time turner’ with every scenario forever (although you do), but because its a big flaring warning light that the series was not going to make the transition from Fairy Tale Logic to Serious Fiction logic and still hold up.
I still think HP &The Philosopher’s Stone is a pretty perfect book, a distillation of decades of boardings school genre fiction with magic, friendship, and wonder; its a book that owes as much to Enid Blyton and L.M. Boston as it does to C.S. Lewis or T.H. White or other authors with two first initials. Its sense of place is magisterial, from the frumpy, soul-crushing suburban sadness of Privet Drive to the ephemeral curio-shop wonderland of Diagon Alley to Hogwarts itself, a bastion of astonishment, homeliness, and delight.
What it isn’t is the sort of framework on which you can support the horror that is the torture and murder of Charity Burbage in front of her colleague Severus Snape, who could not rescue her for to do so would break his deep cover.
Long-running series can experience changes of tone and complexity. This is neither something laudable nor worth reviling - its a neutral phenominon. Sometimes series do it well - Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, both series that by-and-large end with books focused on far more complex issues than their earlier entries. TV series do this too - contrast the early episodes of Steven Universe or Adventure Time with episodes seasons later (with AT, for example, trying jumping from the pilot to Remember You and see how hard you get tonal whiplash). Lois McMaster Bujold sublime space opera The Vorkosigan Saga doesn’t just tone so much as genre - space adventure, murder mystery, political thriller, goofy regency romance, comedy of errors heist movie, schizoid identity crisis - on and on. The latest entry in the series has almost no plot to speak of, but is instead a musing on age, gender roles, grieving the loss of a lover, and the hope of new life.
Some series, however, manage the transition poorly, largely because the initial tone cannot be harmonized with the later tone. (Mass Effect jumps immediately to mind). But Harry Potter has more than just a darker tone problem - its trying to have darker events fit in the same world in which people can walk around with names like ‘Mundungus’ and the Hogwarts school song can be a nonsense poem and the Philosopher’s stone was defended with a series of video game puzzles. In a world in which the villian openly tortures somebody to death, the Philosopher’s stone doesn’t have any whimisical bullshit in it - it has trip mines in the floor and an enchanted statue with a gun, because Voldermort isn’t a guy you confound with drinking potions and flying keys - you just kill him. The charming fairy world wonder of the Philosopher’s Stone has room for a love potion - the later world, in which Voldemort is essentially born from rape, has no place for Ron Weasley to hand out a book to Harry called Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches without seeming like a creep.
The cradle that is The Philosopher’s Stone can’t hold a beastly baby like Deathly Hallows, any more than Grindlewald pontification about the superiority of wizards can sit comfortably in a universe in which wizards took until the 18th century to accept even a fucking outhouse! (Not that fascist ravings are inherently logical; its that even non-fascists in the story never really demonstrate that wizards are anything other than 100% better than muggles always. If the series ever called out the wizarding world’s frighteningly stagnant society, the book would be acknowledging that the two worlds are different, neither better, just different. Instead - well, as Ron once bitched, magic makes coffee perfect every time so how do muggles stand being alive?) Don’t talk to me about irony, because this has nothing to do with irony 9″oh Grindewald takes a big game but wizards didn’t use toilets so Rowling is just being ironic about his sense of superiority) - this is about a world that is silly being asked to host a genocidal dictator and his crimes. Its like those tedious ‘grimdark’ AUs that always show up in fanfiction: what if the Sesame Street gang had to deal with ICE, what if Po started haemoraging while hanging-out with Laa-Laa, what if Peppa Pig learned that she was adopted and her real parents were brutally murdered as part of gang war because they were heroin dealers - and so on and so forth. (The best skewering of this edgelord comedy is still probably either Andrew Hussie’s Muppet Babies/Saw comic or any encounters the Shortpacked staff ever had with the Transformers: Buckets of Blood guy.)
In Harry Potter, Rowling built a wonderful little fantasy world that ran happily on the logic of fairy tales and fairy stories, and then decided she was never going to be taken seriously as an author unless she introduced Hitler to the equation. And it never works. But its not like it couldn’t have worked. The Lord of the Rings is famously a very different bookfrom The Hobbit. It did, in fact, introduce Hitler into a little fantasy world. Tolkien makes it work by abandoning huge portions of the Hobbit’s tone, style, and even structure - he writes a completely different book. What that means is that Frodo isn’t scarfing down Bertie Bott’s Every Flavoured Beans on the slopes of god-damn Mount Doom.
The moment, say, Cedric Diggory lay dead in Harry’s arms, we needed to never meet Mundungus Fletcher ever again, or Weasley’s Gooftacular Prank Nonsense, or Ron getting harry a book about love spells. All that needs to go away - at least until the very end. There’s a great bit in the Lord of Rings after the Shire has been scoured of Sauraman where the Hobbits essentially open up their larders and allow people to have fun again; there’s also a nice bit slightly earlier where Great King Aragorn puts on his old dirty clothes just so he can be Strider - the quieter, gentler, lighter world isn’t gone forever, but it does have to go away for a while - which mean Mundungus Fletcher doesn’t suddenly show up having sold all of Harry’s shit like an asshole.PEOPLE WITH THE SILLY NAMES HAVE TO GO AWAY FOR A WHILE. (Like Slughorn! Freaking Slughorn, who slips in in book six like the second coming of the vain and silly Lockhart, even though that’s the book where Dumbledore dies.)
Rowling keeps trying to make this old world fit in the new - so even though the latest Potter-related movie literally involves referencing the holocaust, we still get this fun trivia of wizards shitting on the floor like animals.
God. Damn. It.
It needs to be said that a primary reason these things ‘don’t work’ is that the logic of a fairy tale is different than the logic of a mundane story. The logic of a fairy story tends to be self contained - it doesn’t have a smart ass running around asking questions like ‘why’ because there is no why; a thing is the way it is because it is the way it is. Fairies steal babies on the third Sunday of every month, and nobody ever asks ‘well what about in countries that use different calendars, and what about the shift from Julian to the Gregorian calendar that skipped eleven days.’ It’s not that one cannot critique or bring critical thinking to fairy stories; its that in a fairy story you don’t ask how the sewer system works because its not peritnent to what the story is trying to convey.
Harry Potter, however, ultimately does not belong to to the world of fairy stories, but to the legacy of Tolkienesque fantasy - the world of
In The Hobbit nobody would ever ask if Hobbiton had sewers - its not important, and if you ask those kind of questions as an adult you’re being a pedantic shite. Lord of the Rings, though? Not only is it a valid question, but Tolkien probably wrote a paper explaining the etymology of the Westron word for ‘sewer’ and how sewers were first invented up Shítlívær the Noldor as a way of helping the Blessed Isles cope with all the shit that tumbled out of Fëanor’s mouth.
The world of The Hobbit is one in which you could run away to and have adventures. The world of The Lord of The Rings is one you could walk about and study - in short, it wants you to be invested in its existence in a different way than The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings is more grounded than The Hobbit is, but not so grounded that it doesn’t lead room for mystery or questions that refute Wittgenstein’s assertion that all questions must be answerable. The Lord of the Rings leaves room for The Undiscovered Country.
Harry Potter wants too… but can’t.
Firstly, Rowling obviously understands the need for what we might call poetic mystery - like the gateway in the Department of Mysteries - but she also wants you to know how wizards pooped three hundred years ago. You get the feeling she knows exactly how and why that gate works, and what it is, but she withheld the knowledge because she likes mystery’s aesthetic.
Secondly - and far more of an issue - is that Harry Potter becomes a world that invites you to pick up each part of its structure and think about it, because the author has - with loving care- built an entire world like a god.
Except JK Rowling is a lazy thinker who never, ever considers the consequences of anything she says. Nagini is actually an Asian woman, wizards used to magically disappear their shit off of wherever they just stood and shat it out, HErmione Granger can have a time travel device to attended a bunch of classes but Harry can’t grab one off a nearby shelf and go back fifteen minutes and save his godfather )and the minister’s protection detail apparently doesn’t keep them on hand to go back half an hour and tell their past selves ‘Hey Voldermort is about to walk in here and kill y’all).
No author can work out ever aspect of every element in their works - that’s impossible, and why ARGs are solved by the internet hivemind in half a day even though they took a far smaller group of minds months to devise. But Rowling is intellectually lazy - she adds the holocaust without sparing a single moment to think that idea through, and then gets defensive when confronted on the subject. ‘Hey your American wizard houses seem a bit racist also America doesn’t really use the house system’ - and her response was to lash out. On and on and on.
Rowling tried to move Potter from a fairy logic world with its own rules into our world with our rules and our history but she doesn’t know our history or even our rules, so she tells us wizards shat on the floor until the 18th century while the rest of us sit around going ‘but humans have never done that as social groups - even in horrible slums and facility-free prison cells humans a designated place for taking a shit even if its just ‘that corner over there’ - we don’t just drop pants and go whenever!”
Hey guess what its morning and I’m still super mad about this.
i want to be but i cant stop laughing at “Tolkien probably wrote a paper explaining the etymology of the Westron word for ‘sewer’ and how sewers were first invented up Shítlívær the Noldor as a way of helping the Blessed Isles cope with all the shit that tumbled out of Fëanor’s mouth.”
Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.
I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.
Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”
