Difficulty Getting 100% Immersed In Fictional Settings?
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funeralxempire
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Today, 11:26 am
Inspired by this post:
Texasmoneyman300 wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:
Texasmoneyman300 wrote:
Count Dracula...Mr.Burns from the Simpsons.....JR Ewing. Potter from Its a Wonderful Life and Gordon Gekko. Walter White. I know some of those were from movies but the movies are shown on tv. Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermoine Grainger.I am not endorsing all of these characters. I just enjoy watching them.I regard every character in Harry Potter except the Dursleys as evil because the Dursleys were not magical and pretty much everyone else was. The Dursleys are my favorite characters in all of Harry Potter because I view them as the most moral in that franchise.
If we accept magic as innately evil, doesn't that sort of leave Harry and company as anti-heroes since Voldemort and his companions are really clear-cut, simplistic villains?
Quote:
Voldemort's obsession with blood purity signifies his aim to rid the wizarding world of Muggle (non-magical) heritage and to conquer both worlds, Muggle and wizarding, to achieve pure-blood dominance.
...
He is the leader of the Death Eaters, a group of wizards and witches dedicated to ridding the Wizarding World of Muggles and establishing Voldemort as its supreme ruler.
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He is the leader of the Death Eaters, a group of wizards and witches dedicated to ridding the Wizarding World of Muggles and establishing Voldemort as its supreme ruler.
You know, Wizard Hitler.
By comparison, Wizard Jesus is a pretty clear cut 'good guy', even if his tools for doing so are taboo. He doesn't want to rule regular folks, so his evil sorcery doesn't really involve us. Sorta like how Han Solo and Blade are bad guys, but who's narrative role is mostly protecting regular people from worse guys.
J.K. Rowling doesn't really seem to understand nuance so of course her 'big bad' is basically Hitler but worse and her hero is basically a more tragic Jesus (the chosen one, come to save us from Big Bad, but now he's an orphan).
I just view magic as pure evil in all cases because thats what the Bible says. I view everybody in Harry Potter except the Dursleys as evil because of that reason and even then the Dursleys treated Harry badly but I think they are the least bad people in Harry Potter.
I wonder if these sorts of stories can be ruined to some extent for some portion of the audience based on their pre-existing beliefs and their 'internal BS detector'.
For example, when worldbuilding for a fantasy setting I end up mapping out a whole history of that world through deeptime when I could just handwave it and just allow magic to be real and not need all the internal explanations that will never be revealed to my audience.
Indeed, I could have a fantasy setting where gods and magic are real and directly influence people's actions, but that doesn't seem like a believable setting to me even though on some level worldbuilding casts the worldbuilder as a creator god whether they like it or not.
Fantasy settings where the gods behave like that (like say Forgotten Realms) I find very difficult to get into, even when I'm otherwise drawn towards the story. Likewise, I struggle to accept the notion of inherently evil humanoid races—I can accept radically different social values, I can accept radically different psychology, etc but at the end of the day the idea of a group existing solely to be evil just for the sake of being evil can't make it though my BS detector.
I feel like what you're describing with Harry Potter is an analogous lens, even if it's not the same lens. JK Rowling isn't exactly subtle about making Harry an unambiguous, messianic good guy but it seems like no matter how heavy-handed she is with her framing your internal BS detector interferes with accepting her framing of her world and Harry is still a bad guy in your head canon.
It's like that internal BS detector forces us to interpret the story as though there were an unreliable narrator involved, even when that wasn't the intention of the author.
Anyways, I'm wondering what other peoples experience has been in this regard. Are there stories you enjoy, or would like to enjoy that cause your internal BS detector to go off and require some amount of head canon in order to engage with?
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