• duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      17 days ago

      “Dobby doesn’t like money. Dobby doesn’t like freedom. Dobby wouldn’t know what to do with it! Dobby likes being a slave!”

      Harry Potter fans: “Wow this is exactly what my employees / tenants think to themselves 24/7 while earning money for me!” 🤩

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        17 days ago

        Dobby’s whole thing is that he wanted to be free despite being physiologically conditioned to be a slave due to what kind of fantasy creature he is. So it’s even worse than this.

        • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          17 days ago

          I haven’t read any of the books in almost 30 years and I gave up at a book 5 when I was a kid because it just got boring. But one of the issues I have with fantasy and science fiction, despite writing in these genres, is that there’s a lot of race reification in them. Alien species or magical beings are usually pretty distinct from humans, despite often being based on racial caricatures, and interbreeding among them is usually either impossible or really frowned upon, like in Lord of the Rings for instance.

          • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netM
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            17 days ago

            I haven’t read any of the books in almost 30 years and I gave up at a book 5 when I was a kid because it just got boring.

            Harry Potter is one of the most corporate garbage slop ever created. It’s basically British MCU. I really don’t get why Westerns (mostly Anglo-Speaking) love this so much when it’s pretty boring, even for a kids thing.

            • Lurkmore [none/use name, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              17 days ago

              Honestly I think it managed to hit at the right time in the right places. People like magic and want to believe life isn’t so mundane.

              Also she wasn’t really an outspoken right wing freak originally. Or at least they don’t tell kids that.

              • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netM
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                17 days ago

                Honestly I think it managed to hit at the right time in the right places. People like magic and want to believe life isn’t so mundane.

                But why HP? There were magic books and shows for YA and kids before it. With something like Anime in Latin America it makes a lot of sense why people like it, they would come home from school and watch the shows daily. Also every latino that I met that liked HP were either chuds, or libs with very chud opinions.

                Also she wasn’t really an outspoken right wing freak originally. Or at least they don’t tell kids that.

                I think she always were neoliberal, she just got worse with time because people started to notice her bullshit. She probably had a better PR team before too.

                • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                  17 days ago

                  I am Mexican, the people I met irl that like harry potter are the archetypical libs, not very socially gifted to put it elegantly, a bit nerdy but not very smart either. Very agreeable, and like following authority. They were told reading is what good kids do, but they didn’t form their own opinions so harry potter is what they ended up reading. You know, ñoños.

                  • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netM
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                    17 days ago

                    Yeah, I heard about that. She always seem to hold very homophobic and racist views even before the twitter thing but seem to have keep that hidden.

                • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  17 days ago

                  But why HP? There were magic books and shows for YA and kids before it.

                  Her first three books were in the right time at the first place. They were longer than stuff like Goosebumps and Animorphs but short enough that it wouldn’t be intimidating for young readers like stuff by Dickens. I remember her books came with some massive literacy drive to get young children. Once she became popular enough, she started expanding her books into massive tomes that completely went against the whole point of even reading her books in the first place, but the popularity of the series had already snowballed.

                  Perhaps that literacy drive was completely inorganic in retrospect, but this is why your average HP fans are 35+ year olds.

            • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              17 days ago

              It was bought by one of the big movie studios early on. I think the early books were being released either alongside the movies or with a very small lagg. And they shoved it down our throats using the movie propaganda machine.

              It’s one of those things that was entirely astro turfed.

              • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netM
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                17 days ago

                I was talking with some people about this some days ago, and it’s kinda funny how inorganic the entire fanbase and fame of JK and HP is. When you see something with a huge fanbase, like DBZ in Latin America, you have like people going into huge meetings in public to watch new episodes, I still think theres genuinely cool stuff in there. With HP as older I get the less I understand why people like it, maybe it’s cool if you’re a young kid living in the US, Canada or UK, and is sort of a power fantasy thing. The movies also got really boring after the second one.

                • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                  17 days ago

                  Someone else pointed out it is like British MCU. So I imagine there is this kid who for reasons had to read that, because it’s what was available due to it being pushed by Warner bros. And I guess there is some inertia to it.

          • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.net
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            17 days ago

            fantasy is great for when you want to be really racist but you don’t like being criticized for being racist so you just make up some races that can’t complain about your racism.

            • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.net
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              17 days ago

              George Lucas runs this grift a little differently, he’s a serial stereotyper. He’s made up 1000s of minority species just to give them heavily stereotyped caricatures in his movies. None of them can call him out because they don’t exist. There’s nobody to tell him that Malastarians hate being called d*gs, it’s all yes men and human supremacist fanboys.