The Ultimate Harry Potter Thread

I agree. It bothers me that Rowling has a black and white view of killing. All killing is murder and is irredeemably bad. Unless...you know it's Mrs. Weasley rage killing Bellatrix Lestrange for one of her lesser crimes.

Also, Harry Potter himself became rather cavalier about using the Imperious Curse and even Cruciatious Curse and no one batted an eye.

Everything is black and white. This is completely unforgiveable, until Rowling flips a switch. As a writer if I create a rule in universe, I will try to abide by the rule in universe and not arbitrarily shut it off when I feel like. It's stuff like this that makes me think Rowling half-assed writing book 7 compared to the other six

It's not my idea. Lots of people have said that taming the beast is a common literary archetype for female protagonists.

I would also argue that yes it does work in real life. Kind of.

There is a limit to how much a "bad boy" can be saved or redeemed, but in a sense after World War II, a lot of soldiers got "tamed" by their wives during the Baby Boom as their aggression was redirected from war to the new peacetime economy. Beauty and the Beast stories just take real conflicts and exaggerate them.

Much like the archetypal story of "Kill the dragon, save the maiden, win the maiden." That's not literal, but if a man accomplishes difficult virtuous things, his odds of finding a mate increase.

I agree with the sentiment behind your statement but I disagree with the way you worded.

I believe strongly in evolutionary psychology. It's not a moral failing or a sign of weakness to be affected by evolutionary psychology.

The gist of evolutionary psychology is that if human beings are driven to do something that doesn't make sense, ask yourself if this behavior would have made sense 100,000 years ago.

Evolution is very slow. Human beings have had agriculture for less than 10,000 years and we have had industrialization less than 200 years. Our minds and bodies are still hardwired for a hunter gatherer lifestyle.

Exercise is good for you but it is hard to do. In the 21st century, I want to sit on the couch binge watching Hulu and eat sugar all day but this behavior will shorten my lifespan.

100,000 years ago, even my ancestors by dumb luck found a high calorie delicious food source such as a large unguarded honey comb, their best course for survival is to rest and camp out near the food source until it's gone. In their case not eating the sugar and being active would lower their chances of survival, not raise it.

Due to evolutionary psychology, almost all women have a subconscious attraction to dangerous men even though in the 21st this is not a good idea. 100,000 years ago, it was a good idea. It's not a crime to indulge in this fantasy in the relatively harmless arena of literature.

I agree.

I agree with your sentiment.

But that is not what Rowling wrote.

Effectively Rowling created a governing system where killing someone with the Avada Kadavra curse is (legally speaking) worse than killing someone any other way which in my opinion is fairly nonsensical.


I brought up soldiers a lot. Let me bring up my least favorite scene in all of Deathly Hallows. I do not recall if this made it to the movie, but here goes.

As we all know, Harry, Ron, and Hermione were charged by Dumbledore to go find and destroy Voldomort's horcruxes. The other good guys were vaguely aware that these three young adults were on a mission from Dumbledore, but they didn't know any details.

Early in Book 7, Remus Lupin offered to join them.

For meta reasons, Rowling wanted to write a story about Harry, Ron and Hermione. That's what here fans wanted too. I understand that Rowling did not want Lupin to make their trio into a quartet.

But Harry really chewed out Lupin for wanting to join them and essentially told him that he was morally in the wrong for offering to join them because his place was with his pregneant wife.

This felt very autobiographical to me. JK Rowling was a struggling single mother and had some resentment towards her baby daddy.

I understand.

But Remus Lupin was not planning to run away from wife because he was afraid of responsibility. He wanted to save the wizarding world. Heck, he was protecting his unborn son too since it was clear that Voldomort and his minions were not above killing "mongrel" babies.

By outright stating that Lupin was an amoral fool for doing this, Rowling created a slap in the face for every man (or woman) who chose to temporarily leave their family in order to go to war for a just cause knowing that they might die in the process.

 

I don't have a problem with Dumbledore being gay but I have a problem with how JK Rowling chose to reveal it.

I was planning to reread all seven books in a row anyway, that's what I did. When book 5 came out, I read it immediately. Then I read 1-5 in order. When book 6 came out, I read it immediately, then I read 1-6 in order. A few weeks after Book 7 came out, Rowling announced that Albus Dumbledore was gay.

I paid attention to every seen with Dumbledore. There was tiny iota of hint to his sexuality in seven books.

If Rowling was trying to advance LGBT representation, she was being cowardly waiting till after all the books were out to do it.

I believe that after the last book in the series was published she was missing the constant media attention she was receiving up and brought up this minor controversy to get more attention.

He did dance with Madame Maxime but there was no romantic vibe in it like there was with Maxime and Hagrid.

There is only one tiny hint that Albus Dumbledore is that he is unmarried. But you never meet the spouse of any Hogwartz teacher. You never meet a son or daughter of any Hogwartz teacher. Flitwick, Snape, McGonagal, Hagrid, Trewlany and all the temporary Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers stay in Hogwartz Castle during Christmas vacation though the C-list Hogwartz teachers like Professor Vector seem to leave then.

The only Hogwartz teacher that is confirmed to be married is Lupin and he got married three years after he quit teaching and his friends had to twist his arm to pursue a romantic relationship.

I just kind of assumed that Hogwartz teachers are married to the job. I don't know about the traditions of British boarding schools, but in the United States before the 20th century, it was traditional that school marms quit teaching when they married. A small number chose to never marry and their kids were their students.

It was never stated out right in the books, but JK Rowling said that witches and wizards age a little bit slower than Muggles. McGonigal was in early seventies in book 1 and late seventies and book 7 but still spry. Dumbledore was about 150. 160 was about the maximum wizards tended to survive barring Nicholas Flemmel.

So Albus Dumbledore had a crush on a man during his early 20s. Then he beat him up his thirties and threw him jail. Then he was celibate for about 120 years. That's not gay. That's being an asexual.

But it doesn't really matter. In literature, if you don't write it, it didn't happen.

Like Shroedinger's cat who is neither dead nor alive, until you observe it. if you never bother covering the romantic proclivities of a characters they have no sexual orientation one way or the other.

One thing that bugged me is that in interviews Rowling talked about Fred and George Weasley as if they had distinct personalities. Later one loses an ear and the other dies. I don't remember which one.

Rowling talks about how difficult this was for because apparently the one that died was the gentler twin and the one lived was the more aggressive.

What?

In every book, in every movie, the twins are interchangeable. They finish each other's sentences. The only time they are seen apart is when took a girl to the ball and the other did not. Even when they were making out with Veela chicks at the wedding reception there were mentioned together.

They had the same classes, the same grades, as adults the same job. On the radio, they still finished each other's sentences and they picked aliases related to each other.

Twice in book 1, the twins took each other's name for fun.

When Molly Weasley saw a boggart turn into the corpses of all her loved ones, (presumably she saw Ginny dead before Harry got to her). Ron, Percy, Bill, and Arthur all got a seperate corpse seen but when the boggart mimicked the dead twins they were dead together. Even in the subconscious fears of their own mother, the twins are interchangeable. WTM?

I have a good friend who has very young twins. I cannot tell them apart but their parents can, and go into great detail on how their personalities are different even though they are just learning to talk. Actually I haven't seen them in a year plus because of Covid. They are four now and are much better talkers. Perhaps I will be able to tell them apart once I can visit them again.

A long the lines of not mentioning things in your writing. I got tired of orphan heroes so my protagonist Nilen the gnome has a huge family. Four siblings. He has six or seven aunts and uncles still alive and kicking. One of the aunts, Aunt Ariyas, I decided is a lesbian. I haven't figure out to work her into my first story, so I probably won't bring it up. Very few of Nilen's family is going to be in my novel but they will be mentioned in passing a fair lot because Nilen relies on the wisdom taught by his many family members, especially his Great Aunt Jomila who taught Nilen, his mother and aunt Ariyas about herbalism.

It's putting the cart before but if I come up with a sequel to A Cobbler's Journey, Nilen might meetup with his lesbian aunt. His lesbian aunt is a priestess of the god Korus (Korus' priests and priestesses are called Stewards). Nilen the cobbler has little reason to deal with the Stewards of Korus, but the Nilen the hero might end up working with them. After his first adventure Nilen is going to join the Tenders of Mera and the Tenders and Stewards are allies, so once Nilen gets involved in ecclesiastical politics, he might have reason to reach out to his aunt or visa versa.

I have no doubt Rowling had backstory in her own mind how the twins were different, but she never put pen to paper on this, so it didn't happen.

Again I have 300,000 words of backstory for my fantasy setting and less than a 1000 words of story. Lets say I do finish a nice 50,000 word novel. Technically anything on my World Anvil page that doesn't make it into the novel is not canon. Things don't exist in the minds of your readers if your readers cannot read them.

Likewise, readers can see things that the author never intended which are very real in their mind even if they are not canon but that is a discussion for another day.

Going back to LGBT characters. I like the LGBT characters that Rick Riordan includes. I know it's a different media but I like the LGB characters in Brooklyn 99. Pretty much everywhere else I don't like them. Perhaps it helps that Greek and Roman mythology is full of gods and heroes acting in a non-binary way.

The two traps LGBT characters fall into into either is A) their sexuality is practically their only noteworthy character trait or B) their sexuality is announced but it never affects the story in any way so it might as well not be mentioned.

 

And Norse too! Our cultural roots are deeply intertwined with non-binary characters.

 

I never heard of that until I read the Magnus Chase series, but yes one of the major characters is gender fluid. I wasn't sure how normal that was for the ancient Norse but I do know that Loki would transform into a woman sometimes and the gender fluid character is a daughter/son of Loki.

 

And not only women... if you think to how sleipnir was born.
Norse Gods had no big issues on weird sex.

 

Greek mythology has plenty of weird horseplay.

Efforts to actively make something fail don't usually work. The opposite of love is not hatred. The opposite of love is indifference.

While I was initially way that Netflix is censoring stuff in a very uneven way (and doubling down on Cuties) the main reason I'm not on Netflix is that the material on Netflix is just not quite worth the monthly fee in my opinion.

 

Maybe my grandparents were not the norm, but they did not even meet until after the war. Since I heard so many anecdotal stories like this I assumed it was the norm.

If it is weakness to allow instinct to overpower reasoning, then human beings a weak species indeed.

If 90% of the human race is below the baseline, the baseline is wrong and we need something more realistic.

Evolutionary psychology is not nice and it's not fair.

In a Stone Age situation, without police, without law. A woman is more likely to survive submitting to such a dangerous individual than trying to resist him because he can easily kill her without any repercussions. "He's a good provider" or "he's exciting" and all that other stuff is just window dressing and mental gymnastics to rationalize the behavior.

I agree. But such leaders are rare. There are not enough of them for every woman to marry such a good king.

I believe bad boy romance stories are reflections of society rather than drivers of change in society.

I'm going to try to do this with my fiction. My good guy characters are all going to have strong tightly knit families.

I'm just concerned that people will not want to watch "boring" happy families and good relationships.

 

I took this as inspiration for a little L-O tweak.