submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
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[–] 167 points 5 months ago (52 children)

This is what happens when your worldbuilding is done by someone with no head for systems analysis. Political systems and magic systems use the same skills to understand.

That's why I hate apolitical stories. The writers are usually bad at worldbuilding too.

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  • [–] 147 points 5 months ago (11 children)

    …and then your fun, completely apolitical story has stuff like "one of the main characters tries to end slavery and is ridiculed by the narrative for it"

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  • [–] 56 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    And don't worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it's supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    I feel like that isn’t a hypothetical…?

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  • [–] 46 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    This isn't a hypothetical thread. Rowling's Pottermore blog had this post https://web.archive.org/web/20170929062836/https://www.pottermore.com/features/to-spew-or-not-to-spew-hermione-granger-and-the-pitfalls-of-activism (which has since been removed, but only after it had been up for years) full of slavery apologia and with the premise that whether or not slavery is bad, Hermione's actions to try and stop it (which amounted to asking people to stop having slaves) were worse.

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah figured it wasn’t hypothetical, but holy fuck people… do they not realize that all you have to do is change “elf” to “black people” and those are literally the same arguments used for slavery and how wrong that was….

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago*

    The most heinous crime conceivable to a conservative like JKR is an attempt to change the status quo.

    An obvious example: Sure we're burning the world to the ground. But did you ever consider what if renewable energy is somehow even worse, and its advocates are terrorists?

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  • [–] 39 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    if you read potter assuming the narrator is not only unreliable but also sleep-deprived and slightly drunk, in makes a lot more sense. it also makes rowling's unhinged lore additions from twitter, like how wizards just used to shit on the floor until plumbing came along, slot in nicely with established facts, like how a hundreds-of-years old building would have a huge network of secret tunnels in the bathrooms. it goes from incongruous to "whos- who's telling thiss story, you or me? shhhutup."

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  • [–] 83 points 5 months ago (20 children)

    People love HP so much, and i kind of get it, but on the other hand it's so shit. The whole game of quidditch is the dumbest thing i have ever seen. People like HP so much that they play that absolute nonsense game IRL. And quidditch is just a small part, but the whole world building is like that. Nothing is really clever or well thought out. Tge worst offender imo is goblet of fire. They have these dangerous ass trials for children, fine. They keep saying how dangerous it was. They fight dragons, they put children under water, guarded by mean ass mermaids. One of them almost drowned, and only didn't because Harry broke the rules. At the end of the whole thing, cedric died and everyone was devastated and shocked that a kid would die. Like motherfucker that's the whole point.

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago (18 children)

    I actually used to be on My university's quidditch team. Although since Rowling went mold to the walls on the transphobia, it's called Quadball. Quadball is really fun because the team roles are asymmetric in a way you don't get with most other sports. You usually only see that strict delineation of capabilities in video games. I was a beater, My job was to hit the enemy team with dodgeballs.

    The best part of Harry Potter to make fun of, though, is the severed slave heads dressed in Santa hats and beards

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  • [–] 23 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Iirc quadball had to quite radically alter the scoring and other rules?

    As it makes no sense that the seeker just straight wins the game if they catch the snitch within an hour or two no matter how badly their team is losing.

    Also also, the world cup. Viktor Krum ending the game on purpose "because he wanted to do it on his own terms"...!? Imagine a professional videogame player throwing a world cup because they want to get a frag, even though it's still completely possible for them to win if he doesn't throw and end the game. No matter how behind pro teams are they try.

    But no Rowling has a chosen one in all matches as well and the sport makes zero sense in a sports sense in the books. Only there to serve to show how special some are.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    I mean, they are children playing on their school team. Not really professionals

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Viktor Krum might still be in school, but I'm talking about the Quidditch world cup that the Weasleys take Harry to.

    In a school match at Hogwarts it might make sense for someone to not take it that seriously. Just like you get people surrendering in games like league and dota and whatnot. But can you ever imagine having professionals play for the world championship and just be like "nah I'm just gonna take this 1v5 because I can dive a kill there to improve my stats, ofc we'll lose but the game is already lost so why even try"

    Most of the people in Krums team were proper adult professional sports wizards and witches I think. Krum was just so good he made pro even while at still school. Similarly as how Harry just gets to be the actionhero I mean "seeker" for the Gryffindors literally the first minute he flies a broom.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Ngl, i never really looked much into irl quiddich. Making up a new game from scratch is really fucking hard, and she obviously couldn't do it. There is a fantasy trilogy called kingkiller chronicles, and tgey made up a chess like game named tak. You can play it irl and it's really interesting imo. If you know anything about humans and how they behave un sports or video games for example, you'd know that people would just stand around and waut for the magical winning ball. There ia no reason no one dropps everything they are doing to get the game winning ball. But they just keep playing. Thinking about it, is there a real reason the snitch exists? It could just be the game as it is and harry potter is pretty good at it. Is it so he can literally win games by himself? I have to stop thinking about that crap.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (5 children)

    Isn't American football as asymmetric? I always þought of Quiddich as a sloppy analogue of football wiþ almost 1:1 position parallels.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Yes it is. It's why it's so popular in highschool. There is a role for most body types.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    It's why it's so popular in highschool.

    Citation needed.

    I'm not arguing it doesn't affect popularity, just that i don't think it's the main reason for the love, or really even in the top three.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    I actually have a citation for it 😄. But it's going to take me awhile to find it. It's from a thesis/book about the development of gridiron football from rugby. The highschool bit is a minor part of the overall thesis that the specialization mirrors the evolution of the assembly line and specialization of work positions from the generic tradesperson who is multi skilled.

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  • [–] 39 points 5 months ago (10 children)

    i mean, they're never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they're making.

    like that andy weir interview where he says "there are no politics in my books". i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they're researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he's not written them that way. it's completely by accident, or so he believes.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    I heard that and assumed he was lying so as to try to not alienate people on the other side.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    that would require him to realize that he was indeed speaking to "the other side". i don't think he did.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    It's impossible to know. One thing I love about sci-fi is that it let's you tell a story that interrogates people's beliefs without them realizing it until later. They don't talk about racism, they talk about aliens, for example. If you tell people that you're saying their beliefs are wrong, they're not going to listen to you. If you tell them it isn't political, they may engage with it an accidentally absorb the message.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    i mean artemis explicitly has a black female muslim protagonist, which he got a lot of flak for since identity is political for some people. project hail mary is about the whole world banding together to fight catastrophic climate change. for him to have written those things, and then tell a right-winger in an interview that his books are nonpolitical while nutrek is too political, to me can only be ignorance.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Artemis also has the premise that stripping away all the safety regulation that a rich country would add to its space program would make a poorer country able to rapidly develop a superior space program and become a rich country with nothing at all going wrong except the one time

    spoilerthe protagonist accidentally chloroforms everyone
    when it all works out fine in the end anyway because of ignoring the few rules that they did have. It's not a stretch to say that it promotes elements of Objectivism, although it's a lot more pro-state than Ayn Rand was.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    yeah that's another thing i got from that interview, he writes his own philosophy and doesn't really understand that fundamentally different worldviews exist. in his imagined perfect world, a pure meritocracy, all rules are legacy and can be disregarded if required.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    tell a story that interrogates people’s beliefs without them realizing it until later.

    The term for this, at least as it pertains to science fiction, is "cognitive estrangement".

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I am once again begging everyone to read A Wizard of Earthsea instead

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