Hogwarts Legacy - Whimsical Wizardry

[Dwarvenhobble]

Not until Cursed Child, which sucks.

Kind of part of the point of the larger story with Snape though and expectations about the house and people from it though.

Harry etc are told by Hagrid that Slytherin is evil.
Hagrid who was expelled by being framed by a Slytherin prefect who happens to be the main villain of the series.
Harry etc believe it's bad because that's what they've been told and taught initially and don't know better.

I've got no reason to expect that went better than the first time around.

The first time around it was more of a Proxy war than a full on take over though supposedly.
Like some of the Ministry was controlled but it wasn't fully taken over. There's a whole thing about no-one knowing who to trust etc.
Also like it or not chances are some of the people in the ministry thought they were just doing their jobs. To use the Nazi Allegory, plenty of people in the Nazi war machine believed the propaganda etc.

Would've been easy to portray the canning job as a decent job that Jacob personally hates instead of a soul sucking, terrible job for everybody. But this is the series where the wizards know the Holocaust is about to happen and don't do shit about it too, so this isn't surprising.
Game of Thrones is not over yet. Can we apply 21st century morality to media set in the fucking 21st century?

What if Wizards did act to try and stop the Holocaust while others fought for the Nazis against them?

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Not a refutation of the point. Also, again, Slughorn, Lestrange, Merlin, etc.

Not protagonists, mostly bastards

So the fact that by Cursed Child there's hardly any Death Eaters left and no signs of blood supremacy in Slytherin doesn't give you a hint?

Dunno man, story's not about that

First, that's generally how governments work - system remains the same, better people come in.

How very liberal

Second, I've already cited time and time again as to how and why things improved post-Hallows, all you keep saying is "nuh huh!"

Yes, you've described tweets showing very little improvement

How many people knew what Grindlewald was doing?

Irrelevent. The bureau was fine with this guy ordering executions without trial. Does it make it fine if only the "good guys" have and use that power?

I can't believe I have to explain basic storytelling to you, but okay:

1: The canning job sucks.

2: Jacob leaves the canning job and gets his dream job.

3: Because the canning job sucks, that the bakery job is much better leads to more fulfillment for the audience and for the character. If you're telling a rags to riches story, you don't start out with the character having a cushy job and then getting the dream job. I mean, you can, but you're limiting the amount of emotional impact.

A job can suck for one person without having to suck for everybody. He could've just sucked at canning instead of describing the place as a human rights violation that everybody else has to live with.

1: How many wizards knew the Holocaust was going to happen? A small bunch in one city from one man who many aren't going to see as an objective source of information, especially considering he's at odds with every wizarding government.

Or in other words, every wizard who survived that meeting, including sactioned governmental agents looking into Grindlewald. You don't need to defend terrible movies like this

2: Even if wizards knew the Holocaust was going to happen, they should care...why, exactly? From a birdseye view I can give you an answer, from an in-universe view, considering that wizards have good reason to fear Muggles given the history between them, they should risk themselves for Muggles based on...what? Yes, individual wizards sure, but if the Muggles are off killing each other, the wizards have little reason to care.

A) what good reason do wizards have to fear muggles for, given they basically have the run of the planet and the Salem witch trials were a joke? B) I'm well aware of the wizard's supremacy problem, it's the catalyst for the dark wizards finding allies in the other non human races. C) A huge number of wizards have muggle families

3: Considering that the wizard world was already fighting its own, parallel war during WWII (you think it's coincidence that Grindlewald was defeated in 1945?), you're asking the wizarding world to effectively fight two wars simultaniously.

It's the same war, on the same planet, over the same territory, with the same ideology. Even ignoring that like JK does, it's still *really* bad form to have a major plotline be "we have to stop wizard Hitler from enslaving the muggles and stopping the holocaust."

The TV show, you nitwit.

Oh, the universally hated TV ending that caused Game of Thrones to go from decade old cultural phenomenon to the discount aisle overnight

Game of Thrones is not set in the 21st century. It's not even set on our planet. You...you understand this, right?

Harry Potter very much is, and that's what we're talking about. Y'all brought up Game of Thrones as a deflection

The orcs are whatever GX thinks they are. Then when people point out stuff that contradicts his view, he can just go "nuh uh!"

According to Critical, he was talking about D&D orcs, who were decpicted pretty racistly back in the day and was one of the sillier ways Wizards pissed off the weird nerds when they declared they were going to stop describing sentient, sapient races with free will as Inherently Evil in their sourcebooks

I still don't think it becomes a necessity to address them in the central storyline. These things can be evoked as background and surrounding context without needing to be solved.

Look at the Witcher, as an example. The violent anti-nonhuman discrimination is a major piece of context, and affects the political plotlines that affect Geralt and Ciri and Yennefer-- massively so from Thanedd onwards. But in the story he's telling, these things don't get solved. That's not a weakness of the story that is getting told. It would almost be a bit reductionist to expect it to be resolved.

Does the witcher end with a societal, ideological conflict and "all is well" without changing any of that?

Spoiler

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

What if Wizards did act to try and stop the Holocaust while others fought for the Nazis against them?

Maybe we'll find out in Fantastic Beasts 4: The Return of Ezra Miller

Using What If? to make a bad story palatable is fanfiction.

 

[CriticalGaming]

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

That dude should be glad. If it weren't for first world problems he wouldn't have an income

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Maybe we'll find out in Fantastic Beasts 4: The Return of Ezra Miller

Using What If? to make a bad story palatable is fanfiction.

Well it would keep the whole timeline intact to the present without running into the idea of inaction in the wizarding world.

WWII had plenty of myths to work with from the beast of the trenches to the claims of a Witch covern casting a spell to cause the seas to be too rough when an invasion was very likely to even the stuff about Aleister Crowley and his involvement in the war.

Given the whole Hitler and the Nazis being super into the occult it would be easy to write in some Bad Wizards helping him and have the whole idea of racial supremacy have been influence by his glimpses at the wizarding world.

I mean remember some-one managed to figure out how come the minion didn't side with Hitler. Pretty sure J.K Rowling could write at least some half decent Wizards at war story

 

[immortalfrieza]

What I really hoped would be clear at this point is that I don't really care about the developer's intent. If they're not malicious, they're incompetent, and there is a point where incompetence stops being funny or cute and just becomes disrespectful.

I don't think Rowling is anti-semitic in the sense that she hates Jewish people (although, again, she seems to be increasingly comfortable with people who hate all kinds of people) but when you reference the idea that there is a group of people out there who are secretly working together to control financial systems out of some collective loyalty and grievance against everyone else, you are referencing the real history of anti-semitism, because that's literally where that idea comes from. As a writer, this kind of entails a responsibility that, if you're going to do something like that, you have to be making a point.

And at the end of the day, the Harry Potter books don't have some overt Nazi agenda. They're far too boring for that. The awful truth is they're not really smart enough to say anything at all.

Rowling will present goblins as these absolutely single-minded little bastards whose only character trait is being greedy and conniving and resentful, then a few pages later she'll flirt with the idea that maybe goblins are like that because they're a discriminated underclass and maybe wizards shouldn't just assume goblins are their inferiors, and then she'll just drop it and it will never be resolved. Rowling clearly knows that better writers sometimes use social commentary, but to her this comes down to vaguely implying that multiple sides of an issue might exist and then proceeding to ignore the issue entirely and never mention it again.

If Rowling wanted to come down on the side that goblins are completely irredeemable monsters, she could have done so. That would actually have solved much of the issue, because if goblins are just evil monsters then they can't really serve as a stand-in for any group of people. They're generic fantasy monsters who have no capacity for redemption because they don't have souls. Basically, the way Rowling writes fat people. It's still wouldn't be wholly unproblematic, but it would certainly be more understandable.

Conversely, if Rowling wanted to come down on the side that goblins are people and that treating them unequally is unfair and similar to discrimination against Jewish people, you'd expect that to pay off. Like, maybe at the end of the series the Minister of Magic signs a law which makes goblins equal and that one goblin character whose only role is to betray everyone and steal the sword of Gryffindor comes up to Harry and they hug it out and start making out passionately while Ginny watches. That's how you do a satisfying narrative arc. Something was wrong, but in the end it gets made right.

But both of these options require the writer to have the basic cultural and political awareness to know that if you're going to reference something serious, like anti-semitism, you need to actually have something to say about it, even if it's just "this thing that I'm writing about isn't anti-semitism". You probably shouldn't say, in your narrative story where the resolution is entirely within your control, that the world is unfair and then that the world being unfair is actually fine.

Like how Rowling has an entire species who is living in slavery and whose introduction involves one of said slaves wanting badly to get free and does... only for the books afterward to flip from condemning slavery of these people to supporting it by having the one character who is trying to get them all free treated like garbage not just by the people who are enslaving said species but by said species themselves. The message being that said species is happy being slaves and she shouldn't interfere... despite it being clear that every last member of said species is magically brainwashed and mind controlled to the point that they'll unwillingly hurt themselves if their masters order them to and thus can't be trusted to actually know what's best for them.

Those who have seen Harry Potter know what species I'm talking about.

Oh, and spoiler alert: Hogwarts Legacy is a prequel. There's really only one way it can end

Which is why I hate Prequels. A new story or even a Sequel can have the story go nearly anywhere it wants and resolve any way it wants. A Prequel is inherently and significantly limited by the fact that the story cannot do anything that would prevent the events that are supposed to occur after from happening. Someone who appears in the Sequel is going to have to survive the Prequel no matter how much contrivance it takes to do it. Someone who appears in the Prequel but not the Sequel is going to have to either die or vanish entirely so they don't effect anything that happens in the Sequel. Any efforts anyone makes to fix any problem systemic or otherwise that Prequels have that is still there in the Sequel is doomed to fail. Etc.

Unless a Prequel is so divorced from the events of what comes after it that they won't effect it one way or the other to begin with, in which case they might as well not be a Prequel at all, everything just gets really really predictable to anyone who knows anything about what happens afterward. In other words, nearly everybody who would have any interest in seeing said Prequel to begin with.

Do they bust up Slytherin and try to integrate it's students with normal people to get them to touch grass? Do they bring in therapists or anything to try and deradicalize the students? Or is it business as usual until the dark wizards show up to do a school shooting and the Slytherins either flee or join in?

Plenty of Harry Potter fans have pointed out that the Slytherin House is so incredibly lopsided towards evil that it's insane the house even exists. It's no surprise they would come to that conclusion, since not counting random background characters the number of people we see who are even not outright evil in that house can be counted on one hand and still have fingers left over, and even those tend to be jerks.

Which is the end result of just Rowling designating Slytherin the "evil house" and Gryffindor the "good house" by lumping all the good guys into Gryffindor and the bad guys into Slytherin rather than spreading both groups out among all the houses so each house could have actual development.

If one really looks at Harry Potter there is a TON of terrible story writing going on. It's particularly noticable after the first 2 or 3 books when both Harry and thus the reader get used to the Wizarding World and thus don't have a bunch of spectacle to distract from how little the whole world really makes sense. This also coincides with the books becoming more serious subject matter and thus drawing even more attention to how much the world is like a house of cards with a really bad foundation.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I get that, the systemic stuff isn't solved, but that's par for the course in most fantasy stories and isn't a particularly bad thing. I don't think there's anything wrong with writing stories in flawed settings that don't aim to right all the societal wrongs of that world.

That's true. In fact, I think needing to resolve every problem in a book in order to resolve the narrative is ultimately the childish option. It's the one you would typically use if you were writing a story for younger children who need a clear and unambiguous moral resolution.

But there is a subtle yet very important difference between "this world is unfair but you have to find a way to live in it anyway" and "this world is unfair and that's fine". Even if your characters can't solve every problem in the world (and why should they, we can't) we should probably know how they feel about that. Rowling cannot tell us how her characters feel because she appears to have very few consistent opinions on anything, and her characters reflect this. Harry's opinion on any given issue is almost always entirely dependent on how he feels about the people involved and whether their actions benefit him.

And I could forgive this. Children's fantasies are often very selfish, so having selfish characters be excused of their selfish behaviour because they're the "good guys" is probably going to appeal to children. However, if you feel the need to comment on issues such as slavery, racial discrimination, poverty, mental illness, torture and so forth, we've kind of crossed a line where that's not going to cut it any more.

Like, oh my god, the dementors are totally a metaphor for depression. Wow, isn't that deep and profound, and isn't it cool that Rowling channeled her own experience of depression into her work. Wow, these books really go hard. I am feeling all the feels. But hang on, what person who has suffered from clinical depression sits there and says "yeah, that would be a cool way for the good wizards to torture people in their wizard torture prison" and then just leaves that one there and never touches it. Is depression good actually? Are there people who deserve to suffer it? Am I meant to be happy that Harry and his friends survived a whimsical hogwarts adventure knowing that the existence of a depression-torture-prison is totally fine for them (because they're not in it, and they only care about themselves). That's not fun, wish-fulfilment childlike selfishness any more..

The reality is, referencing depression is an easy way of making it look like you're saying something important because mental illness is a stigmatized topic. Talking about it is cathartic and people mistake that catharsis for having said something profound. It's a cheap trick. You were never meant to think about it, because Rowling didn't either.

Like how Rowling has an entire species who is living in slavery and whose introduction involves one of said slaves wanting badly to get free and does... only for the books afterward to flip from condemning slavery of these people to supporting it by having the one character who is trying to get them all free treated like garbage not just by the people who are enslaving said species but by said species themselves. The message being that said species is happy being slaves and she shouldn't interfere... despite it being clear that every last member of said species is magically brainwashed and mind controlled to the point that they'll unwillingly hurt themselves if their masters order them to and thus can't be trusted to actually know what's best for them.

Those who have seen Harry Potter know what species I'm talking about.

Oh yeah, don't even get me started on those little fuckers.

 

[Gordon_4]

Like how Rowling has an entire species who is living in slavery and whose introduction involves one of said slaves wanting badly to get free and does... only for the books afterward to flip from condemning slavery of these people to supporting it by having the one character who is trying to get them all free treated like garbage not just by the people who are enslaving said species but by said species themselves. The message being that said species is happy being slaves and she shouldn't interfere... despite it being clear that every last member of said species is magically brainwashed and mind controlled to the point that they'll unwillingly hurt themselves if their masters order them to and thus can't be trusted to actually know what's best for them.

Those who have seen Harry Potter know what species I'm talking about.



Which is why I hate Prequels. A new story or even a Sequel can have the story go nearly anywhere it wants and resolve any way it wants. A Prequel is inherently and significantly limited by the fact that the story cannot do anything that would prevent the events that are supposed to occur after from happening. Someone who appears in the Sequel is going to have to survive the Prequel no matter how much contrivance it takes to do it. Someone who appears in the Prequel but not the Sequel is going to have to either die or vanish entirely so they don't effect anything that happens in the Sequel. Any efforts anyone makes to fix any problem systemic or otherwise that Prequels have that is still there in the Sequel is doomed to fail. Etc.

Unless a Prequel is so divorced from the events of what comes after it that they won't effect it one way or the other to begin with, in which case they might as well not be a Prequel at all, everything just gets really really predictable to anyone who knows anything about what happens afterward. In other words, nearly everybody who would have any interest in seeing said Prequel to begin with.


Plenty of Harry Potter fans have pointed out that the Slytherin House is so incredibly lopsided towards evil that it's insane the house even exists. It's no surprise they would come to that conclusion, since not counting random background characters the number of people we see who are even not outright evil in that house can be counted on one hand and still have fingers left over, and even those tend to be jerks.

Which is the end result of just Rowling designating Slytherin the "evil house" and Gryffindor the "good house" by lumping all the good guys into Gryffindor and the bad guys into Slytherin rather than spreading both groups out among all the houses so each house could have actual development.

If one really looks at Harry Potter there is a TON of terrible story writing going on. It's particularly noticable after the first 2 or 3 books when both Harry and thus the reader get used to the Wizarding World and thus don't have a bunch of spectacle to distract from how little the whole world really makes sense. This also coincides with the books becoming more serious subject matter and thus drawing even more attention to how much the world is like a house of cards with a really bad foundation.

There is nearly two centuries between Legacy and Philosopher’s Stone. The cast of the books aren’t even born yet.

 

[Hawki]

Not protagonists, mostly bastards

FIrst, you're still evading. Albus and Scorpius are protagonists by definition.

Definition of PROTAGONIST

the principal character in a literary work (such as a drama or story); the leading actor or principal character in a television show, movie, book, etc.; an active participant in an event… See the full definition

www.merriam-webster.com

You could certainly call Scorpius a deuteragonist, but how is Albus not the protagonist?

Second, how are the above characters I listed bastards?

Dunno man, story's not about that

And your point is?

How very liberal

Um, yes, liberal democracies allow elections to be held as opposed to authoratarian regimes which are one-party states.

How terrible.

Yes, you've described tweets showing very little improvement

By what measure? I've cited sources (which weren't tweets), you haven't provided any counter-sources.

Irrelevent. The bureau was fine with this guy ordering executions without trial. Does it make it fine if only the "good guys" have and use that power?

No, that very much is relevant. If someone infiltrates an organization and does something heinous, that carries the default assumption that what they're doing isn't how the organization itself is operating. At most, you can infer that MUSA carries out capital punishment.

It's well established that MUSA isn't a paragon of virtue (e.g. it banning marriage between wizards and muggles), but that's beside the point in the case of the film. Grindlewald is stopped, Joseph and Queenie can't be together, cue tragedy (tragedy the second film undercuts, but the sins of the sequel don't translate to the sins of the predecessor).

A job can suck for one person without having to suck for everybody. He could've just sucked at canning instead of describing the place as a human rights violation that everybody else has to live with.

I don't know what your point is. I've already explained how and why Newt can give Joseph a lucky break, changing the entire canning industry is beyond his purview for the reasons given.

Or in other words, every wizard who survived that meeting, including sactioned governmental agents looking into Grindlewald. You don't need to defend terrible movies like this

I agree the second film is bad (if not terrible) but nothing you've said refutes the point. Again:

1: No-one has any good reason to believe Grindlewald is a reliable source of information

2: The general public is only going to hear rumour about what he said/showed.

3: If the Muggles are killing each other, that's a problem for wizards...how, exactly? War isn't exactly an unknown phenomenon in this world or the IP.

A) what good reason do wizards have to fear muggles for, given they basically have the run of the planet and the Salem witch trials were a joke? B) I'm well aware of the wizard's supremacy problem, it's the catalyst for the dark wizards finding allies in the other non human races. C) A huge number of wizards have muggle families
It's the same war, on the same planet, over the same territory, with the same ideology. Even ignoring that like JK does, it's still *really* bad form to have a major plotline be "we have to stop wizard Hitler from enslaving the muggles and stopping the holocaust."

a) Wizards DON'T have the run of the planet, I've no idea where you're getting that from. It's true that the movies have generally buffed them, but it's clear that the wizards are in hiding. Could they take over the world? Potentially, though that's getting into SpaceBattles-type discussion. Also, the Salem Witch Trials?

Salem Witch Trials

The Salem Witch Trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft that occurred in No-Maj (Muggle) colonial Massachusetts in the years 1692 and 1693.[1][2] The Salem Witch Trials occurred in the settlement of Salem in colonial Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693,[1][2]...

harrypotter.fandom.com

b) Yes, and? Wizards generally distrust Muggles, for reasons that are sometimes understandable, sometimes repulsive. Congratulations, you've stated the obvious.

c) This is the one point that has a grain of truth to it, but I don't see it as a big issue. The more 'magic' you are, the closer you are to power in the setting, and wizards advocating on behalf of muggles aren't going to get far. And while the geographical stuff is technically true, the wizarding world is so isolated it's only by virtue of overlap. Also, it isn't the "same ideology," not in-universe.

d) I don't know where you're getting this major plotline idea. Even leaving aside all the questions as to the wizards' inclination to help, you realize they were fighting a war at the same time, right?

Global Wizarding War

The Global Wizarding War[2] was a large-scale wizarding conflict, which was mainly fought in continental Europe but also took place in other parts of the globe such as the United States of America, coinciding with the Muggle Second World War, and finally ending in 1945. This war was initiated by...

harrypotter.fandom.com

Again, this isn't in dispute, this is canon.

Oh, the universally hated TV ending that caused Game of Thrones to go from decade old cultural phenomenon to the discount aisle overnight

Nice evasion, but however one feels about the ending, I've never seen anyone cite a reason for dislike as being Westeros retaining a monarchy.

Harry Potter very much is, and that's what we're talking about. Y'all brought up Game of Thrones as a deflection

Says the person who brought up Star Wars as a deflection, who's deflected time and time again.

I've brought up other fantasy settings because the stuff you're criticizing HP for is stuff you could criticize countless settings for.

According to Critical, he was talking about D&D orcs, who were decpicted pretty racistly back in the day

Yeah, sure.

and was one of the sillier ways Wizards pissed off the weird nerds when they declared they were going to stop describing sentient, sapient races with free will as Inherently Evil in their sourcebooks

Gee, imagine that, people invested in a setting getting miffed when lore aspects of the setting are arbitrarily changed.

 

[Thaluikhain]

2: I hardly doubt the whole house, but almost certainly yes, considering that Slytherin still exists by the epilogue of Deathly Hallows and Cursed Child, the latter of which has Slytherin protagonists whose bullying comes from outside the house.

Er, surely that's a bit of a leap. Again, unless this is addressed in Cursed Child, we don't know anything at the end of the 7 book series, beyond Slytherin exists. They could have gone back to the status quo just like they seemed to be between Voldemort being around and Voldemort coming back later.

Can you apply that same morality to a fictional world at all? That's what people have been trying to so the past 3-4 years (maybe because Covid made them REALLY fucking bored who knows).

I mean saying Orc's in DnD are a fantasy representation of black people? Or saying Goblin's are Jewish and anti goblin propaganda in the fantasy is the same as nazism.

Violence, greed, dishonestly, these are just traits and blanketing them only a fantasy race does not correlate to racism in the real world. It's negative traits that have to be applied in the fantasy environment so that there is potential for conflict with the fantasy.

It's very easy to imply racism or antisemitism to anything you want in a fictional environment but that doesn't mean there is a hidden message of author intent. This is especially true in private world building rule systems like the DnD example, in which DM's are free to use the lore and ruleset however they want as it's merely a guideline to the fantasy not true facts.

In one of the DnD novels, the orcs are being hunted by a hate group called the CCC, who, IIRC, burns things on their lawns. That's pretty blatant. DnD has had problems with how they've dealt with orcs, mostly because they started in the 70s. GW orks also started off racist, but they started off racist against people from the next town over in England and that was too niche for most people to notice and it went away.

As for the goblin bankers thing, that's more likely to be a genuine oversight on Rowling's part. The goblins are caricatures of evil banker tropes, but those tropes exist because they are tropes about Jews being evil and they are stereotypically bankers.

It's perfectly possible to look at the evil banker tropes and not realise they are evil Jews tropes. I've seen this happen on FB, where someone likes a cartoon about evil bankers oppressing the working class, and people ask them why they hate Jews, because they didn't realise the re supposed to be specifically Jewish evil bankers.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Um, yes, liberal democracies allow elections to be held as opposed to authoratarian regimes which are one-party states.

How terrible.

True. Hermione has brilliantly led the charge and ensured that Wizarding world's slave race is treated sligthly better and promised to look into providing the werewolves with basic medicine at some future point. How progressive, I'm with her.

No, that very much is relevant. If someone infiltrates an organization and does something heinous, that carries the default assumption that what they're doing isn't how the organization itself is operating. At most, you can infer that MUSA carries out capital punishment.

And is willing to execute their coworkers at the drop of a hat with a smile on their face through entirely legal means.

I dunno man, would you want to work there?

I don't know what your point is. I've already explained how and why Newt can give Joseph a lucky break, changing the entire canning industry is beyond his purview for the reasons given.

You're coming at this like the story is an unchangeable retelling of history, I'm coming at this as a badly structured story that makes it look like the good guy wizards are almost entirely indifferent to human suffering.

I agree the second film is bad (if not terrible) but nothing you've said refutes the point. Again:

1: No-one has any good reason to believe Grindlewald is a reliable source of information

Except for Newt Scamander and co, who know Queenie Goldstein can read his mind and has no reason to lie about what she saw.

2: The general public is only going to hear rumour about what he said/showed.

And? They voted for the fucker in the third movie

3: If the Muggles are killing each other, that's a problem for wizards...how, exactly? War isn't exactly an unknown phenomenon in this world or the IP.

Hopefully platform 9 3/4 doesn't get hit in the blitz, I guess

a) Wizards DON'T have the run of the planet, I've no idea where you're getting that from. It's true that the movies have generally buffed them, but it's clear that the wizards are in hiding. Could they take over the world? Potentially, though that's getting into SpaceBattles-type discussion. Also, the Salem Witch Trials?

Salem Witch Trials

The Salem Witch Trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft that occurred in No-Maj (Muggle) colonial Massachusetts in the years 1692 and 1693.[1][2] The Salem Witch Trials occurred in the settlement of Salem in colonial Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693,[1][2]...

harrypotter.fandom.com

That's been retconned since I heard it last, and since mentioned in the books.

Nice evasion, but however one feels about the ending, I've never seen anyone cite a reason for dislike as being Westeros retaining a monarchy.

Your experiences aren't universal, though that's probably not somebody's personal *singular* dislike

Says the person who brought up Star Wars as a deflection, who's deflected time and time again.

I brought up a funny Star Wars tweet to point out the absurdity of using stuff like that as post hoc canon to paper over bad storytelling. Like, you're throwing pottermore articles and events from the Pokémon Go clone as canon events to justify dogshit storytelling

I've brought up other fantasy settings because the stuff you're criticizing HP for is stuff you could criticize countless settings for.

Neat. This is a Harry Potter thread about the Harry Potter game, of course I'm gonna be talking about Harry Potter. Other media being bad or having superficially similar flaws isn't an excuse, it's a deflection.

Yeah, sure.

Gee, imagine that, people invested in a setting getting miffed when lore aspects of the setting are arbitrarily changed.

A) How is it possible for a sapient, sentient creature with human level intellect and free will to *inherently and always* have any particular alignment?
B) What is the explicit setting of the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Monster Manual?

 

[Hawki]

Er, surely that's a bit of a leap. Again, unless this is addressed in Cursed Child, we don't know anything at the end of the 7 book series, beyond Slytherin exists. They could have gone back to the status quo just like they seemed to be between Voldemort being around and Voldemort coming back later.

No, it's never outright stated, but consider that:

-Slytherin is steadily given more shades of grey as time goes on.

-In the context of Cursed Child, it's established early on that there's hardly any Death Eaters left, nor is any support for them expressed, ever (bar Delphi, arguably)

-Considering that the protagonists are Slytherin, are bullied for being Slytherins, and that the bullying as such comes from outside their house (or is at least implied to be), Slytherin isn't a specific villain in the play, bar the alternate timeline that Albus/Severus create.

In one of the DnD novels, the orcs are being hunted by a hate group called the CCC, who, IIRC, burns things on their lawns. That's pretty blatant.

Isn't that a case against orcs being racist though?

DnD has had problems with how they've dealt with orcs, mostly because they started in the 70s.

Such as?

GW orks also started off racist, but they started off racist against people from the next town over in England and that was too niche for most people to notice and it went away.

I'm vaguely aware of the soccer hooligans inspiration that supposedly exists. Not seeing the problem. I mean, should I be offended because of Gorkamorka?

As for the goblin bankers thing, that's more likely to be a genuine oversight on Rowling's part. The goblins are caricatures of evil banker tropes, but those tropes exist because they are tropes about Jews being evil and they are stereotypically bankers.

It's perfectly possible to look at the evil banker tropes and not realise they are evil Jews tropes. I've seen this happen on FB, where someone likes a cartoon about evil bankers oppressing the working class, and people ask them why they hate Jews, because they didn't realise the re supposed to be specifically Jewish evil bankers.

The goblin banker thing is such a stretch.

Goblins already have a defined appearance in folklore that the books/films represent, plus a love of gold/skill in metalurgy in numerous settings. Putting them in a bank isn't a big leap from goblin tropes that already exist.

Furthermore, the Jewish equivalent in the setting is Muggle-borns, especially in the context of book 7. So for this to work, you'd have to accept that there's two Jewish stand-ins within the same IP, which isn't totally impossible, but unlikely.

 

[Hawki]

And is willing to execute their coworkers at the drop of a hat with a smile on their face through entirely legal means.

Yes, capital punishment is probably legal (it's certainly legal by the 90s in Britain/Ireland), no, it probably has more due process than the infiltrator which I mentioned would give.

You're coming at this like the story is an unchangeable retelling of history, I'm coming at this as a badly structured story that makes it look like the good guy wizards are almost entirely indifferent to human suffering.

Then we're at a crossroads. I've explained why wizards might be/would be indifferent to muggle suffering, your gripe is that indifference to human suffering is wrong (which it is), regardless of the context it takes place in.

Your approach to story/lore seems to be that it isn't what you want it to be, my approach is to evaluate the setting as it is. Also, most of the gripes you've mentioned (e.g. capital punishment) are plot/worldbuilding elements, not storytelling elements.

Except for Newt Scamander and co, who know Queenie Goldstein can read his mind and has no reason to lie about what she saw.

Not exactly a reliable source.

And? They voted for the fucker in the third movie

I haven't seen the third movie, how much information did he impart, and in what matter?

Hopefully platform 9 3/4 doesn't get hit in the blitz, I guess

Yes, that's technically a risk.

That's been retconned since I heard it last, and since mentioned in the books.

Where? The article cites the books themselves as sources.

Your experiences aren't universal, though that's probably not somebody's personal *singular* dislike

And your experiences aren't universal either.

I brought up a funny Star Wars tweet to point out the absurdity of using stuff like that as post hoc canon to paper over bad storytelling. Like, you're throwing pottermore articles and events from the Pokémon Go clone as canon events to justify dogshit storytelling

First, the Star Wars tweet doesn't make sense in that context because it's imparting information that's given in the film itself.

Second, I actually agree that HP has ad hoc storytelling issues, but we're way beyond that. You've simultaniously discussed stuff from Fantastic Beasts and Hogwarts Legacy, while in this very post, discounted Pottermore and Wizards United. You don't get to pick which sources are and aren't canon, especially since there's nothing to suggest that these aren't canon.

Neat. This is a Harry Potter thread about the Harry Potter game, of course I'm gonna be talking about Harry Potter.

And yet you're fine with talking about the content of some games while writing off others.

A) How is it possible for a sapient, sentient creature with human level intellect and free will to *inherently and always* have any particular alignment?

Because those aren't contradictory statements. You're conflating free will with inherent traits.

Demons, in general, can be said to have free will in most IPs, as while they're usually malignant, they're free to act how they please in pursuing their goals. Individuals that belong to a hivemind (tyranids, borg, zerg, etc.) don't have free will, as their every action is dictated by a hivemind.

B) What is the explicit setting of the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Monster Manual?

Don't know, not sure how that's relevant.

 

[Dreiko]

Man, this game has generated some interesting reactions, but I don't think any one compares to the wired's literal dildo reviewer giving it a 1/10 after stating the game is mid at best in the summary (meaning 4-5/10 based on simple logic) while also making the claim that the game is bad because all the queer people refused to work on it and they are the backbone of literally every, single, game.

At this point people have activated their lizard brains and are set in stone and arguing with em is a waste of time. Ah well, I'll go back to flying on my broom going weeee~

 

[Silvanus]

That's true. In fact, I think needing to resolve every problem in a book in order to resolve the narrative is ultimately the childish option. It's the one you would typically use if you were writing a story for younger children who need a clear and unambiguous moral resolution.

But there is a subtle yet very important difference between "this world is unfair but you have to find a way to live in it anyway" and "this world is unfair and that's fine". Even if your characters can't solve every problem in the world (and why should they, we can't) we should probably know how they feel about that. Rowling cannot tell us how her characters feel because she appears to have very few consistent opinions on anything, and her characters reflect this. Harry's opinion on any given issue is almost always entirely dependent on how he feels about the people involved and whether their actions benefit him.

And I could forgive this. Children's fantasies are often very selfish, so having selfish characters be excused of their selfish behaviour because they're the "good guys" is probably going to appeal to children. However, if you feel the need to comment on issues such as slavery, racial discrimination, poverty, mental illness, torture and so forth, we've kind of crossed a line where that's not going to cut it any more.

Like, oh my god, the dementors are totally a metaphor for depression. Wow, isn't that deep and profound, and isn't it cool that Rowling channeled her own experience of depression into her work. Wow, these books really go hard. I am feeling all the feels. But hang on, what person who has suffered from clinical depression sits there and says "yeah, that would be a cool way for the good wizards to torture people in their wizard torture prison" and then just leaves that one there and never touches it. Is depression good actually? Are there people who deserve to suffer it? Am I meant to be happy that Harry and his friends survived a whimsical hogwarts adventure knowing that the existence of a depression-torture-prison is totally fine for them (because they're not in it, and they only care about themselves). That's not fun, wish-fulfilment childlike selfishness any more..

The reality is, referencing depression is an easy way of making it look like you're saying something important because mental illness is a stigmatized topic. Talking about it is cathartic and people mistake that catharsis for having said something profound. It's a cheap trick. You were never meant to think about it, because Rowling didn't either.

That's a fair and true point, but (if I remember rightly) the use of Dementors at Azkaban is actually brought to an end after the books' plot.

 

[Silvanus]

Does the witcher end with a societal, ideological conflict and "all is well" without changing any of that?

At the end, arguably two of the three central conflicts are sort-of-resolved, one isn't, and It doesn't end with any sort of 'all is well' message. But then, I don't really think the ending of Harry Potter is supposed to be taken as 'all is well' either. It had to include an optimistic resolution because it's a book for kids and young adults.

My main point is that I don't believe it's incumbent on a story to resolve societal/systemic issues, even if they're woven into the story. They can exist as context and background alone. Much like how you could have a story set in our own world, that ends optimistically/happily, without the protagonists successfully ending war and inequality.

I think that a hell of a lot of what Rowling has come out with since HP is transphobic. No doubt. I also think that people are looking back at HP and sort of stretching things to make it fit a shittier image, in order to be in line with how we feel about her now.

 

[CriticalGaming]

No doubt. I also think that people are looking back at HP and sort of stretching things to make it fit a shittier image, in order to be in line with how we feel about her now.

Everything is racist, everything is homophobic, everything is sexist. You just have to twist your view of it a little.

 

[thebobmaster]

What I'm seeing in this thread so far: "This doesn't bother me, so you are wrong for being offended!" "How dare you tell me what to be upset by!" Misinformation on both sides. Stubbornness.

What I'm not seeing much of: Discussion about the game.

 

[BrawlMan]

What I'm not seeing much of: Discussion about the game.

I can be easy going, but that's why I enforce rules in the threads I make. If there's a controversy, sure, there can be discussion, but don't let it take over the entire thread.