Hogwarts Legacy - Whimsical Wizardry

[Drathnoxis]

Don't mind me, just snagging that #1000.

Low content post. Ban this man!

 

[Gordon_4]

If you start taking out stupid things that make no sense, well...

Quidditch has a reputation for looking more complex than it actually is and I think on some level people expected like Wizard soccer or Wizard cricket.

However to me it brings to mind Wizard ice hockey. Compare the function of a quidditch team to like, the Mighty Ducks. You’ve got Goldberg, the goalie. Your beaters are just enforcers Fulton and Portman with the added advantage of having special pucks only they can hit, expressly to clobber other players with. The rest of the team is Charlie, Adam, Jesse and Averman as (I think) the forwards who try and score goals.

 

[Absent]

It is as shallow as many other things.

But I don't think it's an issue, or poor writing. I think it's a prequisite of fantasy : it's just not sustainable without some shallowness. The fact that fantasy stuff do not exist in the real world is generally linked to the fact they would not function when articulated to all aspects of reality. Fantasy is all about the "let's assume that thing which does not make sense". Magic, trolls living under bridges (or black knights living on them) staunch on never letting people through, ghosts (or spirits or creatures) of pure evil, animals too big to fly or to be sustained by their legs. Pure postulates, pure what if, pure fairy tale stuff, which "explanations" are solely, exclusively, "once upon a time". And we roll with it. It's bound to contradict other elements, if we thing about it too much. Fantasy universe have implicit rules about where to speculate and where not to (where get aaall the way off their back, so that the story can happen - it's comical but not illegitimate). We do it for the physics, psychology, sociology, astronomy, sociology and everything of that universe.

There's a startrekky geeky trend, on the public side, to try to explore and analyse every detail and implication of a fictional world, often with sweaty efforts to, paradoxically, salvage and justify it. But it's necessarily limited, because it eventually hits a wall and shatters. Yet now, there's also the effort of some authors' side, and I think it's (loosely?) related to why I don't like the potter world very much.

There's a whole genre (does it even have a name?) about treating folklore as if it was an object of "natural philosophy" - that is, not cultural anthropology but hard science, biology, etc. With typology, taxonomy, ethology, all the tools of modern positivism. It's not limited to fiction, as there was a time where mythological entities were indeed studied that way (serious treaties on plinian races and demonology, spiritualism ,etc - we could stretch it to modern pseudosciences, like ufology, tk studies, ancient astronauts pseudo-archeology and various conspiracy theories). But there's also the fun of "what if" all these folklore elements were real enough to be studied and classified as true parts of the world. This kind of, let's say, "literalism" gives a cool, refreshing, fun or unnerving "effect of reality" to fiction. It merges two worlds, modernity and traditional beliefs, and it produces ghostbusters firing proton beams at ghosts. Their ghosts are rationalized as causally affected by tech, yet they remain nonsensical (what/why is a ghost?). We have a bunch of horror fictions where omg the folkloric thingy is actually very real and very material (Dracula, Krampus, Trollhunter - even the original Doom game and its medieval red devils). It's amusing, but fragile : you can only rationalize so far what only exists as abstraction, as pure ideas, and what makes only sense in the dreamworld of cultural categories. Such as household guardian spirits.

Being a story about the academic study of magic, the potter thingy condemns itself to rationality double standards, and condemns its public to contradiction (priming it for this scientist, positivist, approach to folklore). It makes the magic mundane and possible to master, it naturalizes it, wheras magic is defined by unnatural transgression. So it un-magics magic. That's what I dislike with its setting. It's not about magic, it's about electricity. It domesticates a thing which charm comes from its wildness. It's, on the artistic level, the equivalent of pseudoscientists who revel in the re-enchanting of the world (dreaming impossible stuff like telepathy, telekinesy, prescience, etc) using hijacked scientific mumbo-jumbo, hardly realising they're trying (fortunately in vain) to kill the very thing that thrills them : the extraordinary.

Anyway, in that context of treating magical things as if they were natural objects, readers are encouraged to expect from them more sense, more coherence, more explanations and causalities than they can provide. It's both the nature of nerdism (internet! forum! geeks!) and the nature of this hybrid genre (magic! science!). It doubly exposes itself to overthinking. But this overthinking slides very easily outside the frame of relevance, like an in-universe tex avery character skidding out of the reel. It is bordered by necessary shallowness which, I think, should be respected as the author's own boundaries of inner logic. Else, absolutely every fictional universe can be accused of implied horrors - which, in practice, happens only depending on the author's real world public opinions.

The Unfortunate Implications of sentient droids in star wars are treated like a joke, an outrage about them would be blatant overthinking and pendantry (even if other aspects of star wars have been treated as real world analogies - it's not an all or nothing thing). Teleportation, even in Star Trek, is a terrifying concept, if taken scientifically seriously instead of magically (which, for all its technical geekery, is what is done). And, again, for all its cartoon aesops, the horrors of pokemons is never brought up as seriously indicative of authors politics.

So again, the flac lady potter book gets for transphobic inanities is probably justified (haven't followed it closely and I suspect the polarizing violence of the internet didn't help her much, but that's another matter), but getting all riled up about some philosophical implications in a half-rationalized (never fully rationalizable) fantasy world is a matter of misplaced expectations. Elves, wizards, magic wands, dragons and griffons ? Selective shallowness is a required ingredient (which doesn't prevent depth - like in any fairy tale, mythology, etc). Too many elements simply cannot have "explanations" other than once-upon-a-time premises, that's the genre. Neither Romero's living-dead nor Hitchcock's birds uprising can have valid causes. Their interest as plot devices is elsewhere.

 

[SilentPony]

I feel so bad for pikamee, is now being used for ammo for homophobes even though this had nothing to do with the Wizard game.

Poor Pikamee. She was honestly sweet and fun, she didn't mean to harm anyone and didn't deserve the hate. Going after V-tubers and voice actors isn't how you stop JKR.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Lol, wut? She's just quitting her job

Which is kind of super weird because she's quitting her job as one of the most successful Vtubers on the planet at present and a very lucrative job I'd imagine just because she's graduating?

Like stopping to look at that it makes 0 sense at present.

She's graduating so needs a job of some kind really to keep on and she has a lucrative one at present and why would she need to find another job really when she has such a lucrative one already that she was enjoying?

Second the Graduation thing, why invest in merch and other stuff for a star whose leaving for a graduation event. You'd make farewell merch of some kind or celebration of their career merch or something. The graduation merch seems more like a life event merch thing that unfortunately has happened to now have become a point for them to quit because they are no longer having fun having people call her an awful monster etc.........Something understandable if you just want to make something people enjoy.

 

[Baffle]

You people should really play the Geneforge series. If you haven't, they will blow your minds. They're essentially house elves moral conundrums simulations.

I have 1-5 but have never played them. Is any one of them better than the others? Moral conundrums are my specialty.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

So now they're doxing. People are cheering this on even though I highly doubt 4chan (a site that is completely sympathetic to trans people/s) have listed only harassers

People wanted this fight.
People were warned this would happen.

For fucking years a certain ideological group have been working to try and dox people or happily spreading the dox of people who they opposed. People said to knock it off and fight with ideas not trying to create potential implicit threats. It was ignored by people claiming they were "On the right side of history" and how they would "Win the fight vs you evil people" well people wanted this fight to happen. A certain ideology has chosen mutually assured destruction.

I want people to remember, I and many others stood against this when it was put out originally and in years since have faced people saying this position was right and I and others were the monsters either protecting awful people or actually are awful people.


We didn't choose the rules, others did, how does that phrase go, "Live by the sword die by the sword".

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

"Few" is the key word in that sentence.



Who? Certainly not the Hogwarts house elves. Certainly not Winky. Certainly not Hooky. Kreacher and Dobby, sure, but again, the exceptions.

The thing with the house elves isn't that they're being forced against their will, it's that by their nature, they're in a position where that good will can be abused.

The thing with Kreacher is he did want to serve but he wanted to serve his mistress (the painting on the wall of a long dead woman). Kreacher was literally some-one from generations of House Elves in a family all serving a family who had certain views about the Wizarding world and so Kreacher picked them up too and so years on he's suddenly faced with massive changes (first with Sirius and now with Harry whose not even technically part of the Black family) and hence his position towards them for a while

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Because people who can't recognize their own interests, people who can't take responsibility for their own actions, people who lack the mental capacity to understand what appropriate or respectful treatment looks like exist in our world too, and it's not legal to use them as slave labour. Exploiting someone who doesn't know that exploitation is bad doesn't absolve you of responsibility for exploiting them.

Sounds a lot like PETA on about working animals and even pets.........

 

[Majestic_Manatee]

Sounds a lot like PETA on about working animals and even pets.........

Sounds a lot like only viewing people with learning disabilities as animals or pets...

 

[Absent]

I have 1-5 but have never played them. Is any one of them better than the others? Moral conundrums are my specialty.

I can't really really say. Better ask Thaluikhain, who seems to have played more of them than me. I played a couple of them, was highly impressed but also under the impression that they were too similar in story... So maybe not to play back to back.

The one that hooked me was Geneforge 4. So I can vouch for that one. But wait for a second opinion.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Your argument would land if that was actually my point. My point was not whether the stereotype was invoked at all, but rather in what context, why, what thematic purpose it serves, whether that thematic context is well-founded, what message does that invocation convey, and whether that invocation was therefore justified.

Historically, Jews were excluded from any gainful profession and guild, and forced into moneylending and tax collection specifically because Catholic dogma forbade it. Which in turn made them easy targets for further dehumanization and demonization, and even easier to steal from, expel, and murder when it came time for (predominantly Christian and noble) debtors to actually pay up.

And when Jews actually did what you would expect any reasonable person to do under those circumstances -- resist and revolt -- it "proved" they were really "nothing but" greedy usurers loyal to no one but their own. Thereby turning justified acts of resistance against oppression against the oppressed, to rationalize further oppression. And in the post-industrial world, that centuries-long externally-enforced stereotype -- and its ramifications -- were weaponized against them to justify further antisemitism, up to and including the Holocaust itself.

You know, kind of like how goblins are portrayed in the damn books. But naw, just the mere invocation of the trope means Wizard Book Bad, Wizard Book Lady Bad, regardless of any actual context that might make us consider how some of these stereotypes came to be, and what it says about us as a people.


Case in fucking point about this whole "analysis" being superficial, reductive, and denialist towards any deeper context.

Or are you going to argue HDC's don't face educational and social disadvantage, that plays an integral role perpetrating generational poverty and downward social mobility?


Can't help but notice those folks only come up now, once you need a shield against criticism. As opposed to other groups who tend to suck all the oxygen out of the room, and pull attention away from people who actually need help.


Sounds like you got that one on lockdown already and don't really need my input on the matter.


So, let me see if I get this straight. Wizard Book Lady invokes stereotypes that are harmful against people in the real world, perpetuate bigotry, all that good stuff, but now -- only once someone suggests n actual, critical, thematic analysis -- and only now is it just a book that doesn't really have anything to say? Yeah, that absolutely doesn't punctuate my point all this is a reductionist smoke screen to keep people from thinking too hard about it on threat of being labeled a bigot.

This is about as far from an "oompa-loompa" situation as it gets, given what I already mentioned about how internalized oppression destroyed Winky's life, and how Dobby and Kreacher resisted servitude and poor treatment in their own ways. And I really have to wonder about those who treat the two identically.


Or, the systemic change she's after is to stop getting wizards to conceptualize their relationship to house elves as slavery. You know, attacking the root cause -- the underlying psychology on the part of wizards that strips house elves of individuality, agency, dignity, and thereby enables the abuses against which she takes issue.

Kind of like how in the real, post-industrial, world there will be no progressive movement towards equitable treatment of underclasses (in the west, defined by work in the service industry) until the citizenry stops conceptualizing them as a servant class.


You mean, calling the situation for what it actually is?

Would you care to posit a reason there were blacklists of streamers, content creators, and social media personalities being shared online other than to invoke a chilling effect on game coverage, perchance?

A lot of this feels like this video would be relevant to bring up again about the idea of the origin of certain tropes


Yeh I get to use a Moviebob video about racism to explain why J.K. Rowling is not antisemetic. Some-where Mr Chipman just clenched his fists in anger and doesn't know why yet I'm sure lol.

Would be a fantastic point if the books or game *did* anything with that. But they didn't, so...

Do they need to is the question?
Because there's a hell of a lot of pieces of media out there that are now bad by that logic because they innocently used tropes that came from lets say old attitudes towards things even if they were use innocently.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I can't really really say. Better ask Thaluikhain, who seems to have played more of them than me. I played a couple of them, was highly impressed but also under the impression that they were too similar in story... So maybe not to play back to back.

Actually not, of Spiderweb games I've only played Exile 3 all the way through. Played the demos of the first few Geneforge games (and some of the Avernums and Nethergate), but I just liked the old E3 and BoE interface, and there's so much fan created BoE stuff out there I stuck to that.

 

[Satinavian]

Anyway, in that context of treating magical things as if they were natural objects, readers are encouraged to expect from them more sense, more coherence, more explanations and causalities than they can provide. It's both the nature of nerdism (internet! forum! geeks!) and the nature of this hybrid genre (magic! science!). It doubly exposes itself to overthinking. But this overthinking slides very easily outside the frame of relevance, like an in-universe tex avery character skidding out of the reel. It is bordered by necessary shallowness which, I think, should be respected as the author's own boundaries of inner logic. Else, absolutely every fictional universe can be accused of implied horrors - which, in practice, happens only depending on the author's real world public opinions.

I don't expect the impossible from fantasy fiction. Sure, there is some vagueness in places that is useful. But when i compare HP to e.G. "Ascendance of a bookworm", another many books spanning series which includes a magic school as important setting, then the quality of the worldbuilding of the latter is vastly superior. And that is actually very good for immersion. HP chases instead the sense of wonder alone, introducing new fantastical elements all the time but never exploring them or putting them together in a way that makes sense. There is a lot to see in the Potterverse but no matter where you actually look the smoke and the mirrors are obvious soon and you are reminded hat you are just reading a book.

As for the outrage only happening because of Rowlings real world view : True. Bookworm has slavery even less muddled that HP, has child labor, an extremely stratisfied society, collective punishment as a staple of the law, forced marriages and a couple of other nasty things. And there is hardly any attempt to get rid of those, they all still exist after what counts as happy ending. But the author has (to my knowledge) never pushed very questionable real world policy, so people don't care.

 

[Gordon_4]

I don't expect the impossible from fantasy fiction.

Really? That's usually my first expectation with fantasy fiction.

 

[Dreiko]

I did! There was a kid at my school we called Winky Bumsniffer because he had a persistent hard wink (which i now recognise was a twitch and was cruel of us) and was constantly ramming his hands in the back of his pants then sniffing them (that one wasn't our fault).

Edit: in my defence, and this isn't a particularly good defence, i had loads of twitches as a child, new one every week. Parents despairing.

HP has a lot of very weird nicknames for things, I like it for the sheer creativity. My favorite has to be the Moaning Myrtle. The jokes practically make themselves.

 

[Silvanus]

For fucking years a certain ideological group [...]A certain ideology has chosen mutually assured destruction.

It's genuinely hilarious that you want to pretend that "woke" lefties are singularly to blame for introducing doxxing and harassment to the discourse, as if we're blissfully unaware that those tactics have been the bread-and-butter of aggressive online right-wing communities for absolutely ages.

 

[Absent]

mutually assured destruction.

You say this as if it was a bad thing.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

It's genuinely hilarious that you want to pretend that "woke" lefties are singularly to blame for introducing doxxing and harassment to the discourse, as if we're blissfully unaware that those tactics have been the bread-and-butter of aggressive online right-wing communities for absolutely ages.

Oh you mean in response to physical attacks on innocent people who happened to be left wing?

How evil of the online right wing communities to want a person who beat an innocent person over the head with a bike lock to face some kind of repercussions.


Doxxing was reserved for situations when people had clearly crossed lines. Not masses of people sharing the info just because they disagreed with a person and oh say falsely reporting the person to child protective services and trying to get his recently born son taken away from him because he dared make video critical of Anita Sarkeesian..........

 

[Silvanus]

Oh you mean in response to physical attacks on innocent people who happened to be left wing?

How evil of the online right wing communities to want a person who beat an innocent person over the head with a bike lock to face some kind of repercussions.


Doxxing was reserved for situations when people had clearly crossed lines. Not masses of people sharing the info just because they disagreed with a person and oh say falsely reporting the person to child protective services and trying to get his recently born son taken away from him because he dared make video critical of Anita Sarkeesian..........

Blah blah blah, denial and deflection. Anyone paying the scantest bit of attention is well aware doxxing and harassment were widespread and commonplace in online right wing communities for an age, and you're not going to make people forget that by slinging mud now.