One of the perks of being a communist is that you’re often right
One of the downsides is that the people around you loudly insist that you’re wrong until you’re proven right, at which point they scratch their heads and pontificate about how nobody could have seen this coming
No, we are always left.
left is right, but right is never right
God this hurt me.
Anyone who doesn’t change their name to Cassandra is a lib
It’s a tale as old as time. Not exclusive to communists either, but applies to basically everyone who believes in some sort of post-capitalist leftist idiology.
Something something it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
It’s a tale as old as time. Not exclusive to communists either, but applies to basically everyone who believes in some sort of post-capitalist leftist idiology.
I would say it applies to basically everyone who learns to recognize and reject idealism in favor of a genuinely materialist lens when trying to understand the world and how reality works.
Diamat really is the core of Marxism.
that day was always here, you just had to let yourself see it
they called me an asshole the other day, now i know there’s a bias
“sEpArAtE tHe ArT fRoM tH-” yeah nah shut up
‘The art’ you mean a pretty bad children’s book series that had chattel slavery painted as a good thing, insanely racist tropes baked into the material by the author, libshittery, harmful analogies for trans people…?
“But its a book series about the chosen one who has weird interpersonal conflict and he must face the great evil-” wow so just like 9,000 other fucking young adult series that AREN’T ludicrously racist wow
Fucking move on already jesus christ
A book about slave-owning Wizard Jesus Christ beating Wizard Hitler through the power of being born superior, then promptly becoming a cop and supporting the corrupt system that tried its very best to prevent him from beating Wizard Hitler
the eternal greentext
i read it as a kid because i was a kid and it was fucking everywhere, it was fine, again because i was a kid, then my tastes got better and now i do other shit besides caring about the 30 year old kid book written by a terf mold golem, you can do this too!
What I really hate about “separate the art from the artist” is that we legally can’t do that.
I’m not allowed to publish my own story set in that world and make money off of it, that would violate the artist’s copyright. The artist has a death-grip on the art and will for the rest of her life (and even for a time after her death through her estate) and she is squeezing it for every bit of value she can. We are not allowed to get in the way unless we pay her for the privilege.
What I really hate about “separate the art from the artist” is that we legally can’t do that.
Also like, you just can’t seperate art from the artist. The artist made the art, unless it’s souless corpo slop, a fundamental part of the artist was poured into the art.
Yeah it’s actually commodity fetishism.
To separate the art from the artist, we must act as if stories grow on the pages of books instead of being created by labor.
I never thought of connecting commodity fetishism to that particular phrase (separate the art from the artist). That’s insightful.
Also like, you just can’t seperate art from the artist. The artist made the art, unless it’s souless corpo slop, a fundamental part of the artist was poured into the art.
idk some of the stuff i make is pretty half-ass and i’m just seeing if it’s possible, not trying to do a magnum opus. soul pouring is the enemy of done
a fundamental part of the artist was poured into the art
What will happen, if we drop it into a volcano?
I think if there was a fundamental way of completely deleting artist’s work from existence (all drafts, copies etc) not a lot of artists would cope very well, as mini test run - people got very annoyed when their only drafts burn down in fire (unless they are doing it themselves) before computers
I’m okay with separating the art from the artist when theyre no longer profiting from it. And when the art isnt stupid and awful.
exactly. you cant claim “death of the author” when the author is fucking alive and using the money to fund her trans genocide crusade
Two more Pantera members to go before I can listen to “Walk” again
hmm, i might still have a napster or kazaa mp3 on an old disk
i declare death of the author
Stealing Harry Potter books from the library and replacing them with Discworld books is praxis.
wow so just like 9,000 other fucking young adult series that AREN’T ludicrously racist wow
There’s also quite a few that have decent TV adaptations. I can think of The Magicians and that recent TV run of Percy Jackson, and magical schools are definitely not my genre.
The Magicians show was so shitty and so cozy. It wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t shitty. Really hit that early 2000s CW teen drama slop vibe.
It’s like when people talk about how the live action Gundam movie, G-Savior, looks like a shitty late 90s/early 00s scifi channel show/movie. Yeah, it does and it’s sick af.
Seperate the art from the artist means you should take their art off of them when they misbehave until they prove they’re sorry and have improved
I understand getting swept up in Harry Potter in its hey day. In hind sight there was an obvious push for it by the ruling class. I remember all this stuff about how Harry Potter saved reading and all that. Don’t even get me started on life as a rural person with no library and how marketed it was in that way. A lot of us were children ffs.
But that was then and this is now. Hell I remember reading it and finding shit like the slavery stuff weird as hell and I grew up as sheltered as you can get.
There is better media out there. The Owl House is right there ffs!
The marketing push was by Scholastic after they were no longer able to have Goosebumps be their golden goose
I think it was more then that. Like pretty early on there were people creating a background for her and her image.
I belive that the ruling class pick various artists to boost and even help them with said art for the circus part in bread and circus. I believe JK was one of those because there was a rise in Sci Fi and Magic and a lot of those like Earth Sea existed to talk about power. JK and her boot sucking was perfect for getting people away from those things and its worked spectacularly.
Hell she is kind of the reason YA novels are the way they are right now.
her being a woman was and is useful for them as one of the release valves for revolutionary sentiment, “look she is a woman and a successful author, and if you work hard and make the right connections you can be too”
I don’t think it was like, someone from the black lodge chooses to promote books that suppress the masses. More that the culture industry through price sensors, press agents, and class gatekeeping spews total drivel into the popular consciousness.
politics is not downstream from culture. Harry Potter liberals exist because they are comfortable to where politics might as well be lord vodemore vs arry pottuh because the expectation was that everything is basically sorted out (inside the gates of the suburban community)
Superstructure is probably like a hundredth as powerful on the world as the world is on it. Yes it’s great or fucking sucks, really says a lot doesn’t it, but for instance a moralist social democrat like Upton Sinclair writing a novel about animal cruelty and immigration in the American project was no match against ranchers. Same thing there is happening today.
That’s assuming the executives at Scholastic had that kind of insight or even cared. Goosebumps was lost after legal issues with R.L. Stine that cut them off from their most profitable source of money. Scholastic was panicking for anything to help them from such a huge loss and then they heard stories about a popular children’s series in the UK that was pulling very impressive numbers.
The image and story about her success came with the success of the books and a way to mythologize the author. Prestigious book reviewers wouldn’t even touch Harry Potter at first and only gave them a look after the overwhelming book sale numbers came through.
Add that to the recent Pokemon phenomenon and you had what looked like another mega franchise that Scholastic and Warner Bros took full advantage of. If anything, Harry Potter is a great example of the post-Cold War hyper capitalist approach to entertainment and how any franchise with a level of success would turn into a media frenzy.
I don’t think it was some coordinated effort out of a fear for 20 year old books. If that were the case they would have taken action in the 70’s or 80’s. The “boot sucking” wasn’t even evident in the books until the Goblet of Fire. I still stand by that this is where all the issues people have started and where the series took a nosedive. Before that, Harry Potter was a good middle grade fiction book. Then Goblet comes out and completely shifts it in an increasingly worse direction.
Also if you really need that modern fantasy with a more adult edge fucking Dresden Files.
It’s actually good and a novel take on urban fantasy.
Even if you need modern fantasy without the adult edge there’s plenty of better stuff. Diana Wynne Jones and Rick Riordan do basically the same thing but much, much better.
definitely seconding both of those (though imo dyanna wynne jones was probably the better writer of the two) but also Mortal Engines and especially Edge Chronicles were personal favourite series set in fantastical worlds as a kid.
Jesus Christ apparently I’m still fucking traumatised by the edge chronicles because just the name caused the gloamglozer to come to mind unbidden
fr, i feel like that book series genuinely changed how i viewed the world so much as a little kid.
there is also october daye and alex verus, similarly long, but with less women characterization weirdness (but slightly less interesting worlds and less pulpy, although prose is still not great)
Given who the author is I think we can give Butcher a pass. Compared to other white boomer men writing pulp fantasy noir he’s downright a paragon of wokeness.
Also Dresden himself is supposed to be kind of a sleazy piece of shit and the entire series is from his perspective so I think it works.
Yeah though it drops its original style and premise pretty fast. Loved the first book, couldn’t get into the rest.
Never thought I’d see the day when hexbear users would make a ton more sense than anyone else on a given topic. But here we are.
we’re literally right 90% of the time lmao
Many such cases
90% is just one Hexbear user and when they leave, it’s chaos. Who is that user?
cowbee
No lmao
Yes. You saying no is part of your 10% error rate
Of all the shit to go full
over, the HBO Discovery TV reboot of Harry Potter.You’d think it’d be something reasonable like bread or LED light bulbs, but no it’s fucking Mrs. Transphobe.
How LemmyTreatlers look at you when you tell them they shouldnt watch their treats because they hurt trans people
the “left-lib who joins dbzero thinking they are leftists only to get moderated by their ancom admins” is a very fun genre of lemmy user that keeps happening
Never thought I’d see the day when hexbear users would make a ton more sense than anyone else on a given topic. But here we are.
Ladies, gentlemen and nobleenbies, we got 'em
Read another book, dipshits. As someone who reads a lot of fantasy it’s fucking absurd to me that people need to give any support, in any form at all, to this transphobic pos. It’s a fucking crummy children’s book. I’m an older millennial who literally grew out of these books before they even finished, they aren’t that good. I don’t judge people that hard for liking them in the first place, but holy shit you aren’t missing out on anything by skipping more media from the queen of transphobia!
“You can’t tell me what to do”, no I can’t fuck face, but I can tell you you’re a piece of shit with poor taste, and you can’t convince me otherwise!
Quick reminder that “seperating the art from the artist” was never intended to be “how dare you look at me funny when i name Hitler as my favorite painter”, it was about doing close readings of literary texts that mostly required just the work itself when many of the university libraries in Europe were largely destroyed after WW2 and it was difficult to source claims about biographic and historic details.
And if we do that kind of reading, if we ignore that Harry Potter is written by the best-connected transphobe in the world who single-handedly has bankrolled a successful legal campaign to strip trans people in the UK of their legal protections, who did not only use the wealth from the HP franchise to officially unperson my British sisters but also constantly cites her books’ popularity as evidence for the popularity of her believe that trans women are predators and leverages her fame to meet up with Labour’s party leadership and the royal family to discuss how the UK can be more cruel to trans folks, even if we ignore that she is literally a key figure in genociding my people as we speak and just look at the text itself, having just the tiniest bit of reading competence inevitably leads us to conclude the following:
THAT TEXT ITSELF IS STILL PUREST GARBAGE. Cumbersome and stilted writing, contrived plotlines that exist entirely as a flimsy pretense for an endless series of smug legalist gotcha plot twists, an unimaginative lore that was plundered wholesale from the works of better authors and of course an endless stream of slavery apologia, internalized misogyny, class shaming, colonial chauvinism, orientalist racism, homophobic stereotypes, more slavery apologia, body shaming, pro-cop bootlicking and Blairite status quo worship. I remember how i got talked into reading this tripe and feeling almost physical pain when i got to the first of way too many Quidditch matches because it’s so obvious the entire rules set of that bullshit sport exists exclusively to have a setup for the protagonist saving the day. How can you have your characters play rugby on witch brooms and end up making that shit? How incompetent do you have to be to present us with this arcane clusterfuck of special scoring rules and different types of quirked up balls and still make it immediately obvious that this is all just about your super special birthday boy pressing the super special i win button in a climactic moment? Just go and call it Harryball instead of Quidditch. And the entire series is exactly like this. It’s all just an endless glazing of the Wizard Cop Jesus Boy, from “you’re actually a really cool person because you were sitting on a pile of inherited wealth all along” to the dying wizard nazi spending his final moments happily sexualizing his underage pupil because he looks like his mother that dumped the wizard nazi after wizard hatecriming her. You can’t set the bar for generic urban fantasy lower than this vomit stain on the genre and somehow this talentless hack fraud has never again been able to even clear that bar.
It does not matter if you seperate this art from this artist. It’s all an endless sea of manure. People only polish this magical turd because of childhood nostalgia and because the movies mostly had people working on them that, completely unlike J. KKK Rowling, understood their craft, which fooled an entire generation into never seeing through this obvious ruse. Reddit ass shit novels by a reddit ass shit author. “Ooooh let’s be unaccountable liberal hypocrites and seperate le art from le artist!” Seperate my piss from my poop you fucking philistines.
Separate the art from the artist so I can hate a motherfucker twice
You can’t separate the fart from the fartist.
Eve is still trying tho.
Tagline material
Looks like mods have cleaned up a lot of it so I’ll just say the absolute tantrums being thrown in that thread were maddening. Half a dozen users literally arguing “don’t tell me what to do and if you do I’m gonna do it out of spite”. Toddler shit.
i saw you there fighting the good fight before it was cleaned up. thank you for your service
i really don’t get the HP thing, especially how much of a bullseye the “read another book” critique is. why can’t they read a different book or consume a different media?
i have a work pal (younger than me) and they admitted to being a big fan when young and that every few years they re-read the entire series. i kept a non-judgmental face because i like 'em, but i have judgment for that lmao.
they’re like a full blown adult now. why this series? also, i’m embarrassed by the shit i read as a kid/young adult mostly. it was schlocky hackey pulp. i was entertained at the time, and i occasionally reflect on the themes or maybe look up a passage, but i’d never revisit it entirely. there’s simply too many other things i want/need to read.
why is this such a thing these people can’t move on from?
I think Harry Potter is probably the best example of a 100% merchandise driven concept
Like everything it contains has been turned into something you can buy
Wands, robes, jelly beans, all made and sold so that you never have to think about anything else
Become the brave and heroic wizards of Griffyndor, the sagacious erudites of Ravenclaw, the clever and devious Slytherin or the bumbling badgers of mediocrity that are Hufflepuff
It’s like Pokémon, but with 19th century British pomp and calumny baked right in!
That was by design too. It came around the same time as the Pokemon craze and every company wanted a version of that. There was even a Harry Potter card game that was popular for a month.
I could have sworn it was “ethereal bisexuals of Ravenclaw” and “long-legged communists of Hufflepuff”
why is this such a thing these people can’t move on from?
i don’t think it’s all that unique in that regard, we just hear about it a lot more
like a lot of people re-read the narnia books but no one really gives a shit because cs lewis is long dead and isn’t funding hate crimes
As a dying person, they probably can’t read another book because they just don’t have enough time. It’s too big a risk to experience something new that could be bad. So little time…
Since I got the diagnosis from parents about how much time I have left I’ve just been playing the same Pokemon game with various mods because anything else is too much opportunity cost.
I’m sorry to hear that.
I’m sorry.
So they’ll keep experiencing something old that’s bad?
Harry Potter tries to offer escape from capitalist realism. The premise is a boy being extracted from an alienated existence in bourgeois society, and thrust into a post-scarcity world where he is empowered to direct his own future. Everyone just gets an education and can self-actualize in a way that they could not in their “muggle” life. The magic is not per se that important; what matters is what it means for someone’s life. I think the escapism of HP made it popular. For better or for worse.
A smaller point is that the Houses and the Sorting Hat are astrology for libs.
I remember part of the marketing was that lots of Christian parents were forbidding their children from reading the books due to “witchcraft” which made it all the more enticing for kids to read.
missed it but good job to every comrade who gave these tasteless transphobic treatlers what for
lol, lmao. ”You can’t tell me what to do!” child ass belief system. Even if you’re still that hung up on this franchise, this is just a cash grab remake.
How telling is it that after writing those books 30 years ago, JKR has never managed to make anything remotely on that level of popularity and they have to resort to remaking them to keep the franchise alive? Just those shitty detective novels she wrote under the name of the guy who invented conversion therapy and Fantastic Beasts, which fizzled out quickly.
They can go watch J K Rowling melting down doing transphobia on Twitter in real time if they doubt whether the money is going to a bad cause. They can’t deny it, she’s doing Goebbels shit there all the time. She’s infamous for it. It’s the only thing she is known for besides HP at this point.
Like Graham Lineham only being known for Father Ted and having a brain melt from Twitter.
20 years ago i didnt make it past book 5 cause i just didnt give a fuck anymore. it’s like i could see the future.
