Anyone else hate British cuteness?

[weker]

Muggles is a word that forces me to accept the fact that I'm reading a book written for an 8 year

and there lies your issue ITS A KIDS BOOK nothing else to say really. If you called them as-gal-dee-ens then kids would have issues reading the word, furthermore their not going to change the word half way through the series.
your general problem is you don't like the fact that the KIDS books are made for KIDS, but go on to generalize it to more British culture.

 

[Yosato]

British cuteness? Fuck, have you SEEN some of the people who live over here? You can't just take a single element from one series and apply it to the whole of British fantasy. If you could provide a few more examples then that would clear things up, but as of now I'm just going to use the very un-cute British phrase of:

"Yer chattin' shit lad."

 

[Robert Ewing]

Brits have an unhealthy obsession with pets. Maybe that's where it comes from? In every street in this awesome and majestic country there is a woman with 10,000 cats. (I kid you not.)

And I guess because places like Glasgow, Some areas of London, Birmingham, Manchester are so backward and terrifying places to be- maybe we need some form of release in the form of cute and cuddly?

 

[thelonewolf266]

Britain? Cute? You obviously haven't been to Glasgow on a dark Saturday night.

Psst... you're not meant to tell them that before they get here, how am I meant to mug him for all his worldly possessions if you scare him off like that.

Yeah in Britain cynicism and self depreciating humour are the word of the day.

 

[Swny Nerdgasm]

Again, it might just be the fact that I'm American. I'm used to mystical things sounding sort of Asian or Middle Eastern and putting apostrophes in random places. An ancient secret society should be called Kal'sur and the mystical weapon should be Dor'salim. So if non-magic using people in the HP universe were called Cara'sin instead of Muggles, maybe I wouldn't be posting this on the net, but as it is, Muggles is a word that forces me to accept the fact that I'm reading a book written for an 8 year old even though the later novels grow with the audience.

Hell I'm an American as well and I vastly prefer the word Muggle over the stupidly pretentious Cara'sin. The fact that most fantasy authors need to invent words is one of the major problems with modern fantasy to me, it worked for Tolkien cause he didn't just throw some random syllables together he crafted entire languages. I'm not an author but I have successfully ran a few D&D campaigns that lasted for multiple years, want to know what what I called the Faery like creatures that inhabited the woodlands of my homebrew setting? FAERIES, when in doubt with creating any type of setting go for simplicity.

 

[MonocleClaire]

I'm British and this topic makes no fucking sense.

 

[Coop83]

I can't get into Harry Potter, though I'm sure it's brilliantly written, just because non-magic users are referred to as Muggles. To compare, the Final Fantasy series has creatures called Moogles, but FF doesn't force us to take them seriously.

You do realise that Harry Potter was aimed at kids, right? It's not stereotypically British for us to make things "cute", just an unfortunate name in a story about a pre-teen kid at the stage where you encounter "muggles" for the first time.

I'm not a fan of Harry Potter, though I suspect that I will have to be subjected to these books and films at some stage, before I decide it's high time my children experience things like Watchmen and other proper films - I'm just responding to the generalisation.

 

[inFAMOUSCowZ]

Well um sure I too am an American, and I have no idea what you're talking about.

 

[Agent Larkin]

The British don't make things cute. They just happen to be the second most sarcastic people in the world.

Second?

Who, pray tell, is the first?

Definitely not the Irish.

 

[drummond13]

Congratulations, you've succeeded in being annoyed at something almost nobody else in the world is annoyed at. That takes drive.

 

[KingofallCosmos]

I generally don't care about pretentiousness - it just looks cool.

I mean, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh Wgah'nagl fhtan?

How is that not awesome?

Because it looks like you're in a bad tv show trying to fend off hackers

...though I admit when read out loud it does sound out of this world. It just doesn't fit in a magic world colliding with british school life.

Edit: Anybody read some of Walter Moers' work? Also for children and adults. There the innocent/childlike approach only provides more imaginative storytelling. Children's novels hold little boundaries, whereas fantasy novels tend to reuse the same elements over and over.

 

[demonsbanenathan]

So... you realize "Mug" was originally a UK slang term for "Face", and then became generally a derogatory term ("you ugly mug") and therefore "muggle" sounds fairly rude to an English person.

Lots of rude phrases and words probably sound adorable to Americans, but they are born with an innate ability to patronise English people, so it's understandable.

 

[similar.squirrel]

Wait, what? You refer to Final Fantasy, so I assume you're fairly comfortable with Japanese pop-culture.
Aren't you also infuriated by the squeaky-voiced,cat-eared and borderline paedophilic visions of cuteness that pervade so much of anime?

 

[vectorspyke]

Original Post

Yes I despise British cuteness.

But to be fair I also despise American Modesty, German sloppy workmanship, French military prowess, Italian food, Japan's bizarre hatred of tentacles, Swiss partisanship, Vatican Cities atheism, Australia's high quality of acting talent, Norwegian hatred of fish and the Netherlands repressive drugs laws.

I think you just won the thread.

 

[Jason Fayers]

Okay so you think 'muggle' is a cute word, an you give me another example of this so-called 'British cuteness'?

 

[sumanoskae]

"Cara'sin" sounds stupid. It's incredibly awkward to say(which means you'll have to break the flow of reading just so you can figure out how the fuck to sound it out), lacks any impact or rhythm, and is entirely meaningless, it's only defining feature being how little sense it makes as a word. It's just weirdness for the sake of weirdness, the kind of thing someone would say if they were trying to make something sound foreign or mystical, but had no knowledge of foreign or mystic cultures.

"Muggle" roles comfortably off the tongue and is distinctive enough to remember, but structured in a familiar, so it isn't awkward to read. It also gives the impression of something that's low and petty.

If you ask me, I prefer if my fantasy words have some relation to reality, so that they can have some kind of symbolic meaning and be easy to understand and recognize. There's nothing that matches the special flavor of annoyance when half the words on a page are meaningless, awkwardly worded bullshit that all sound the same and I have to struggle to remember. It doesn't make me think about how "Mystical" and "Otherworldly" the story is, only how fucking stoned the people who approved their dictionary must have been.

 

[Sovvolf]

I'd love for you to come over to Britain and tell a Brit that his culture is too cute because of the whole muggle thing... I imagine he'd either give you a rather dull sneer or knock you on your arse and steal your wallet.

Got news for you mate, aside from being good looking chaps the only thing cute about our culture is our accents and that goes out the window if you enter Liverpool. We're pretty much notorious for being rather dull, cynical and blunt.

Or for added affect tell a fellow that his local football team is shite and see how cute us Brits can be. Its a no go area even if a good amount of us dislike football... its actually built into our blood to lay out anyone who makes fun of our team.

 

[Agent Larkin]

Original Post

Yes I despise British cuteness.

But to be fair I also despise American Modesty, German sloppy workmanship, French military prowess, Italian food, Japan's bizarre hatred of tentacles, Swiss partisanship, Vatican Cities atheism, Australia's high quality of acting talent, Norwegian hatred of fish and the Netherlands repressive drugs laws.

Well yep that wins the thread.

 

[ikabodjohn]

Muggle isn't to far removed from Zerg/Zergling(SC) and Nurgle(WH40K), would you call these things cute.

I'm English and there is a distinct lack of cuteness round these parts.

 

[MightyRabbit]

I can't get into Harry Potter, though I'm sure it's brilliantly written, just because non-magic users are referred to as Muggles. To compare, the Final Fantasy series has creatures called Moogles, but FF doesn't force us to take them seriously.

Again, it might just be the fact that I'm American. I'm used to mystical things sounding sort of Asian or Middle Eastern and putting apostrophes in random places. An ancient secret society should be called Kal'sur and the mystical weapon should be Dor'salim. So if non-magic using people in the HP universe were called Cara'sin instead of Muggles, maybe I wouldn't be posting this on the net, but as it is, Muggles is a word that forces me to accept the fact that I'm reading a book written for an 8 year old even though the later novels grow with the audience.

As it is, I hate British naming of Fantasy things. Posters should feel free to add their own grievances.

Muggle is cute? I believe Rowling took the name from the British slang term 'mug', meaning gullible person. Sure it's similar to Moogle, but 'harken' is similar to 'sparkle' and harken isn't cute.

And much of Britsh fantasy and science fiction names are derived from European languages. 'Excalibur' (not cute) comes from 'Caliburn' (not cute) etc.

Hell, Tolkien created half a dozen languages on the the bones of atrophied European languages. Sindarin is based on Finnish, Quenya on Welsh, Rohirric on Old English etc.

And look at Dr Who, names like Skaro, Gallifrey, Jagrafess et al, they're not cute.

On the other hand, a lot of American authors don't have the same grounding (conscious or subconscious) in old languages to make fantasy names with the same etymological veracity. So a lot of fantasy fans all over the world dislike the system you described, because it's associated with the pulp fantasy genre.

And if she had called them Cara'sim, she'd be breaking the rules of her own narrative. The wizarding world of Harry Potter was built very much on old British folklore, design, etymology and attitudes. To most of the world (and I think most of America is included there) Muggle is a perfectly acceptable fantasy term. Though I can't deny some names were designed to be endearingly eccentric.

Though seriously, who doesn't wanna hug a Dalek? Those cute little genocidal pepper pots of hate, xenophobia and burny laser death ^.^