Harry Potter and the Biased Misinterpretation of Fiction

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Your first point is ..exactly what I said. Maybe better than I said it.

About the second.
I
ts not obvious to me how either the Ring or the Harry Potter universes are "racist". Not that I have consumed more than a small part of either.

Be careful what you read into things.

When mom and dad read parts of the Hobbit to me when I was a child in the Sixties I couldnt NOT think of the alliance between the goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs, as being like the Axis Powers. And the alliance between the Hobbits, dwarves, elves, and whomever else,against them, as being like the allies. And it was not possible to NOT think of the big war "that ended the Third Age of the Middle Earth" as being some kind of allegory about World War Two.

Years later I cracked another Ring Trilogy book at a random place in the forward written by Tolkien. Happened to be at a paragraph where Tolkien was answering critics who accused him of "plagarizing the War" by protesting that "I started the novel in the Thirties and was done with most of the manuscript before war broke out in 1939"so f**k off critics. So I learned that my childhood self was not the only person to see WWII in his story, but I also learnd that he didnt actually put the war into his story on purpose. Interesting.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 28 Sep 2023, 10:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, and even in the case of the French, the point of Fleur is that Molly and Ginny Weasley were wrong about her. (Someone once tried to claim that Molly's dislike of Fleur was caused by "internalized misogyny." I thought it was more like "Nobody is good enough for my son.") Later, Rowling adds that Fleur's parents are wonderful people, when they come for the wedding.

Even with the giants, they go over to Voldemort's side, but that seems like the result of Fudge not taking Dumbledore's advice to improve relations with them. Hagrid, Madame Maxime and, to some degree, Grawp all go against the stereotypical view of giants.

I never thought of any of the fantasy races in The Wizarding World as being direct allegories for any real-life group of humans.

Meanwhile, the main villains are all human wizards and witches. They're all white, too, though so are most of the human characters. The main villain is an inbred, white "pureblood" supremacist fascist.

To the point that with my cultural and historical background, I interpreted it as a poor and unrealistic fantasy based on Hitler and his followers.

I mean I loved the harry potter series growing up, and idk it is dissapointing to hear that the author is kind of an anti-trans bigot. LIke she did good work writing those books but with those crappy views she has managed to alienate like half the fans...was it really the hill she needed to die on. Like idk if she admited like she just doesn't quite understand it or something that would be fine, but she outright tried to say it was wrong for people to be trans and she did not need to say that even if she had a hard time understanding it.

My opinion: she stepped into a pile of manure of T-ter fights and did not know when to run away and take a shower.
So she drowned in the crap.
A lesson for everyone, in the age of social media.

she should have taken that shower to wash away all the filth, but she doubled down on the filth and become a toxic part of anti-trans ideology. It is sad as like I said I really liked her books but I can not justify the awful stuff she thinks of trans people.

Yep, she drowned in the crap and became a part of it.
Sad.

It is sad, like that was a part of my childhood but idk it was also a part of childhood for a lot of trans people so like she is like one of the bad guys in her own books just being cruel and mean to a group of people she simply may not understand so well but instead of learning she just doubles down on her hatered of such jpeople. And I just don't see how a person could be like that or act that way. Like if I see someone who looks like a trans woman I treat them normal, like they are a fellow woman because trans women are women.

LIke you think a predatory man is going to get a sex change just to rape women, like no the people who get sex changes are reallly uncomfortable in their body they aren't just doing it for funsies like they are distressed about having the wrong sex so it is kind of just downright mean to try to imply that they are predators just trying to attack women, idk honestly I would be worried about a cis male committing rape before I'd worry about a male to female trans person.

Actually, I did experience this online. A fetishist who tried to gain access to the restricted part of a lingerie community, claiming we were discriminating against transpeople by not letting him in.
Honestly, if a gay woman behaved like he did, we would knock her out, too. It was all about behavior but "discriminating against transpeople" was the very real defence phrase he used.

But that's off-topic and let's not derail the thread.

My reaction to Harry Potter series was rather like shrug. Not really bad, not really good. Just a regular piece of fiction, full of regular tropes and sometimes annoyingly incoherent but nicely told when it comes to detailed depiction of the world.

Still though ick like using trans idenditdy to harm people is awful I just figure that is not what most trans people do, like though some gross criminals have been found to be homosexual I certianly do no think most homosexual men prey on young boys that is a seperate gross thing called pedophilia and it would seem a lot or right wingers have it with their trying to convince courts to basically lower the marrige age to 12. But trans people are the pedo's...trying to groom children? nah that is just projection.

Let's create a different thread, okay? This one is supposed to be about Harry Potter.

Here, okay?
viewtopic.php?t=416533
And let's leave this thread for discussing literature.

Star Wars was mostly based on Akira Kurosawa films. And on Flash Gordon. And on Barsoom. And on Lensman. And on Foundation. And on the Dam Busters. And on Lawrence of Arabia. And on the Vietnam War.

As I understand it George Lucas was a student of Joseph Campbell, and his theories about archetypal myth.

And he consciously followed the arc of "the hero's quest" in crafting the core story.

But that doesnt mean that he didnt also steal outward memes from both fiction and nonfiction.

Mixing and matching in ways that usually made no sense. Like the "light sabers". NO future civilization, capable of interstellar space travel, would ever develop a "weapon system" as idiotic as light sabers.

But we movie goers all wanna see the warriors have a one on one sword fight. So they deliver it to us...but try to make it look like its not anachronistic by making the swords into "lasers" so we can have our cake and eat it too!

And you forgot WWII. Darth Vader and his minions all wore headgear clearly influenced by German helmets of WWII.

So I had naïvely thought that was part of the original premise of the thread, after all, isn't that the usual motivation for throwing shade at Rowling?

Please accept my apology!

As for all the "analysis" regarding the originality of HP, or lack thereof, have you ever read Sword of Shannara? Compared to that, everything else is brilliantly original.

My original intent for the thread was discuss how people can interpret a work of fiction so that it "fits" with their views of the author's current real-world politics, even though the text doesn't support that interpretation. So Rowling's political views could be relevant to the discussion if it has to do with why people are misinterpreting her earlier work.

I have more I want to reply to, but I don't have time right now .