Harry Potter and the Biased Misinterpretation of Fiction

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Personally, I interpreted that as Luke going through an extremely traumatic experience that he's unable to properly process in the moment. He's still in survival mode because of the danger surrounding him. It's not that he doesn't care, he cares a lot actually - that's why it's difficult to process. There's a lot going on emotionally and he isn't given the time to rest and properly mourn. I disagree with people thinking that he wasn't realistically depressed. He was clearly hurt by the event.

I have only seen 'A New Hope'. I watched it recently because a character from a different series is an avid fan of Star Wars and I wanted to understand some of the references he makes.

Much like with Star Wars, I think a lot of people who try to analyze Harry Potter seem to forget that it was intended as children's entertainment, and that a lot of themes and plots that don't seem to make sense are more likely due to that than any intent by the author.

To be fair, JK Rowling wrote The Philsopher's Stone with the intention of it being aimed at kids/teens. It was the later books/movies that became progressively darker to appeal to a growing adult audience.

I recall watching The Deathly Hallows I and II in the cinema and I swear the audience of hundreds were all 30-60 years old. Didn't see any kids.

Luke is clearly hurt by the event and then the movie moves on. The idea that he processes his grief sometime later, offscreen, is valid. The death of Obi-Wan has a bigger impact on the story, even though Luke spent more time in-universe with his aunt and uncle. It reminds me of Disney's animated "Jungle Book," where the wolves raise Mowgli for 10 years, but after they send him away, he never mentions them. The question is whether or not he'll stay in the jungle with Baloo, who he's known for a day and he spent most of that day kidnapped by the monkeys. It might not make "realistic" sense, but in the context of the movie, it works.

Likewise, the original "Star Wars" doesn't focus a ton on what makes the evil Empire so evil. The opening crawl tells us they're evil and they have a super-weapon, but the focus is mostly on how they're a threat to our main characters. Even blowing up Alderaan is more about how mean it is that they did it right in front of Leia than it's about the tragedy of this planet we never even went to.(I've seen a cut scene where Luke's buddy is talking to him about how the Empire is taking control of commerce, which ironically sounds more Right-leaning nowadays, but nothing of the sort made it into the movie.)

This type of movie is like a magic trick. They should be judged on whether or not they pull the trick off, not whether the trick makes practical sense in the real world.




Yes, exactly.



I think of "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter" as being "for the young and the young at heart."

Over a decade ago, I briefly had a YouTube review show covering animated movies, where my catch-phrase was, "What do you mean it's just an animated movie?" This was in response to the, at the time, widespread idea that entertainment was a disposable distraction and that the audience devoting any thought to it was insane. You consume it, you enjoy it no matter what it is and then you never talk about it. And you would read this kind of thing in groups devoted solely to discussing entertainment! Why did those people join those groups if they didn't think the topic was worth discussing?

However now, everything is so politicized and taken so seriously, I read comments that make me want to yell, "Come on guys, it's just a movie!" ("..book," etc.)

Interesting! I consider good cinema and TV a form of art

Of course, there were also lots of people who thought entertainment was worth discussing. But in every group, there was always someone trying to shut the discussion down (especially in response to any sort of criticism of the entertainment in question.)

I've been asking myself, why does it bother me what these strangers think about these stories? For one thing, I think my brain just needs something to "gnaw on," so to speak, during my long hours at my retail job and these internet arguments are something it can use for that, without taking too much concentration away from my work.

But here's another possible reason, that I'm quoting from a different thread in a different WP forum:

Related to this, I feel like these fantasy universes are now expected to prove themselves "productive" in order to justify their existence, because people just enjoying them is considered frivolous. In some people's eyes, this means explicitly promoting real-world political causes, or providing a threat for those causes to oppose. Whether the text actually supports either of these "purposes" or not.