I never actually knew anything about her, or cared, but I never liked the books, never thought they were particularly special, and never got on the bandwagon of them being good. They were okay but as the fad just kept lingering on, I got madder and madder that so many libs only ever read, and related to, those books, and no others.
Like, they're oozing with the culture of liberalism. There's wizards and then there's muggles. Wizards are born wizards. It's not a skill. It's a lineage. You can have half wizards, and you can have wizards who don't know they're wizards, but you can't, AFAIK, train a muggle to be a wizard. That's the liberal view of the bourgeois and the proles right there. She could create an entirely new world without limitations yet she has people just being one of four personality types that they can't change, they just get deduced and sorted by a magic hat, that affects their entire lives. And let's not dive too deep into the goblin bankers or the elves that want/need to be subjugated.
Anyways, my extreme distaste for the series and for why it both blew up then just wouldn't blow over, spilled over into me shitting on Rowling herself, despite thinking she was basically okay at the time. More or less, Rowling fans, upon learning how much I disliked the series, would swivel from the books to the person for some reason, no idea why but it just kept happening, and say how amazing of a humanitarian or whatever she is. After trying to swivel back a few times , I gave up and started saying that she probably kicks puppies or has bodies buried and it'll simply take time for that to surface. I just saw it was becoming a cult and her fans' image of her somehow affected how they perceived her writing, so I was crapping all over that, really.
And now that it turns out she's a mega TERF, a couple people who remember my invectives see it as me noticing something they couldn't, when really it was just overflow from being so goddamn mad that after literal decades, people still wouldn't shut up about a shitty overrated series of novels.
Wizards being born wizards I think was part of the appeal. It was escapism for the reader - the idea that your seemingly ordinary life could be upended without notice and you'd be free to escape from horrible reality without having to actually do anything to achieve it.
Definitely. But it also plays into cultural hegemony. It's the whole lost king trope, or whatever it's called. Like the temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Sure, you're among the rabble, but you're not like them. You're better. Of course everyone else believes that, too...
I never actually knew anything about her, or cared, but I never liked the books, never thought they were particularly special, and never got on the bandwagon of them being good. They were okay but as the fad just kept lingering on, I got madder and madder that so many libs only ever read, and related to, those books, and no others.
Like, they're oozing with the culture of liberalism. There's wizards and then there's muggles. Wizards are born wizards. It's not a skill. It's a lineage. You can have half wizards, and you can have wizards who don't know they're wizards, but you can't, AFAIK, train a muggle to be a wizard. That's the liberal view of the bourgeois and the proles right there. She could create an entirely new world without limitations yet she has people just being one of four personality types that they can't change, they just get deduced and sorted by a magic hat, that affects their entire lives. And let's not dive too deep into the goblin bankers or the elves that want/need to be subjugated.
Anyways, my extreme distaste for the series and for why it both blew up then just wouldn't blow over, spilled over into me shitting on Rowling herself, despite thinking she was basically okay at the time. More or less, Rowling fans, upon learning how much I disliked the series, would swivel from the books to the person for some reason, no idea why but it just kept happening, and say how amazing of a humanitarian or whatever she is. After trying to swivel back a few times , I gave up and started saying that she probably kicks puppies or has bodies buried and it'll simply take time for that to surface. I just saw it was becoming a cult and her fans' image of her somehow affected how they perceived her writing, so I was crapping all over that, really.
And now that it turns out she's a mega TERF, a couple people who remember my invectives see it as me noticing something they couldn't, when really it was just overflow from being so goddamn mad that after literal decades, people still wouldn't shut up about a shitty overrated series of novels.
Wizards being born wizards I think was part of the appeal. It was escapism for the reader - the idea that your seemingly ordinary life could be upended without notice and you'd be free to escape from horrible reality without having to actually do anything to achieve it.
Definitely. But it also plays into cultural hegemony. It's the whole lost king trope, or whatever it's called. Like the temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Sure, you're among the rabble, but you're not like them. You're better. Of course everyone else believes that, too...