For the benefit of the many non-Brits complaining about how unrealistic it is: the Leaving School Grounds Unsupervised form is (when I grew up at least) a huge social divider and Big Deal in a lot of British schools. There was a whole micro industry at mine where the ~70% of kids who were allowed out would provide delivery services for sweets and pop for the 30% who weren’t.
JKR didn’t just pull this whole thing out her ass, it was something that most British kids will have instantly related to. (She’s still an awful human mind)
I mean, in the US we have permission slips from parents to go on field trips. Not sure why people would find it unrealistic.
Also…of all the things from a book about witches and wizards and magic. They’re complaining about permission slips? lolwut
Yeah, kind of my point was that y’all are viewing it as a “field trip”, which is typically a specific event that’s infrequent, carefully organized and supervised, which is a whole different beast to the generic standing instructions of “we’re not going to supervise your kids if they wander off school grounds” slip.
For the former case it’s pretty much understood that everyone in class should be able to join a field trip, but for the latter it’s not unusual for parents to decline and therefore teachers would absolutely be expected to enforce the rules.
In all seriousness, this is what happens when you write novels without doing any world-building and just put down whatever seems “fun”. The are sooooo many things in that series that make no sense once they are superceded by later plot devices. Rowling didn’t think any of it through ahead of time and gave almost no thought to internal consistency with previous content when she wrote new things.
It’s honestly a terrible series in most regards and it’s kind of disappointing how popular it became.
Also she a trans-hating bigot. Fuck J.K. Rowling. Can’t forget that part whenever discussing her or her work.
Rule of cool supersedes making sense. Yeah there’s a ton of nonsense, but you called it yourself, it’s fun. That’s all that matters.
More than fun. It’s whimsical.
She’s a terrible person. I read the books to my kids but they are puarated so she doesn’t get a penny. Same for the movies.
What happens when your kids want to buy merchandise from a store? When they get older and decide to spend their own money on DVDs? What about the racism and misogyny these books teach to children?
When they are old enough to make their own decisions they can. I’m able to seperate the art from the artist, without introducing them to hateful commentary that they aren’t able to properly process yet.
Not showing them Harry Potter does not mean they won’t be exposed to the media or the merchandise through friends and shops.
I’m also able to separate the art from the artist, which is why my house is filled with original Hitlers. I find his perspective interesting.
Hitler, again, was an even more awful person. That doesn’t make the autobahns that his government started a bad idea. However, we as a world society decided that the data from the nazi experimentation on twins, on people with disabilities and others would be destroyed.
Hitler was an artist, but not a great one from my understanding. It’s trivia, rather than who he was. He was a monster that killed millions. It’s very different.
JK is an author. It’s what she’s known for. Her work has not changed based on her views which were not known then. In fact, I think some fans were upset when she retconned some characters to be more woke, prior to becoming transphobia personified.
Her work may not have “changed”, but many elements in retrospect have obvious bigoted undertones, whether she intended them or not. We simply weren’t looking for them as children, and didn’t notice or understand.
If you’re interested in what some of these things are, Youtuber Shaun has an excellent video going over some of them.
Also, the Hitler point was merely a reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate that “separating the art from the artist” is pure luxury.
This is what I tend to say to people about Harry Potter as a series. It was the first series like it to become popular, and that’s its only merit. Overall it’s very tame and bland, but it got lucky and became popular. I didn’t like it because it was too same-y. After book 3 or so, I don’t care about Harry Potter anymore. Explore someone else that’s more ordinary. It makes a much better setting for derivative works, which to me as someone who writes textbooks of lore for RPGs is more important than just making a series sell well.
bad writing from an uncompassionate TERF dip shit loser. thats why.
“the wizards used to shit on the floor and magic it away before they discovered toilets”
fuckin’ drunk.
I think the castle is really neat and cool and fun to explore in the video games
Crappy writing <3
To be fair (while much of the writing is definitely shitty) they wanted to keep him in the school non-stop at this point because the people out to get him were becoming more prevalent and his enemies more powerful. So the intention to keep him safe.
But she probably could have directly said that. Most of the problems in the book could have been solved or entirely avoided if Harry would have listened to what he was told by Dumbledore and others
IIRC McGonagall does say something similar in the book. The movie just leaves it out. Harry asks if she could sign it, and she says something along the lines that she can’t, because she’s not his guardian, and she also wouldn’t anyway because she doesn’t think he should leave the grounds.
Honestly, it goes with the poor writing that she says it too. She really hammers in the point that he’s supposed to be scared of Black, because she doesn’t trust the reader to remember it for the twist I guess.
If Harry wasn’t a self entitled prick there would be no books.
Lmao truly though. I read these books again when I was much older and was just consistently pissed off at him lol. I know he was a kid but holy hell lol. He got a lot of people unnecessarily killed even
He’s 13 and all of his friends were going on a fun field trip. Wanting to find a way to go sounds pretty normal
That’s not what all the books are about.
