For me it's Dragon Ball Z, that was a pretty fucked up show tbh.

Like holy shit, all the characters are terrible people except maybe Gohan and Trunks.

  • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]
    hexbear
    37
    9 months ago

    I think I was 12 or 13 when book 5 came out and it clicked for me that it wasn't setting up for anything, it was just creating obvious commentaries and then hand waving them. Nothing was coming about Potter's wealth and the Weasley's near poverty. "SPEW is a silly acronym" was everything we were getting about the house slaves. I hadn't even made the Semitic connections to goblins and was uncomfortable with the implications of them being exclusively bankers. The bad people were bad because they were bad, and the good people were good because they were good.

    At least by that time I'd discovered PTerry, so i already had better stuff to get on reading.

    • @pillow
      hexbear
      20
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      deleted by creator

      • Venus [she/her]
        hexbear
        18
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        I think Rowling was trying very hard to avoid favoring her "self-insert" character to the detriment of the story, and ended up detrimenting the story by overcorrecting for it. Hermione can't be right, she can't win, she can't be recognized as competent and capable and justified by the other main characters, because then that's just Rowling applauding herself. I think was her mindset, anyway.

        Not that it would have made the story good if Hermione were handled better, because Rowling still just isn't a good writer. But this is one flaw I can empathize with at least. It's a mistake I could see myself making, though I probably wouldn't imply that slavery is good in the process.

    • duderium [he/him]
      hexbear
      16
      9 months ago

      Five is when I stopped as a teenager because I just got bored with it? I think at that point they stopped editing JK Rowling because they realized that a shitload of people would buy almost anything Harry Potter-related with her name on it.

      • CthulhusIntern [he/him]
        hexbear
        9
        9 months ago

        Yeah, some friends and I decided to revisit Harry Potter, the movies and the books, and we noticed both Book and Movie 1-3 were much better than the rest. They managed to build a world without filling it with mindless exposition and actually tried to make it feel magical. We also had some specific criticisms of how the movies were made, as well as some of the actors (especially Dumbledore's later actor), but those had little to do with Rowling.

    • @daisy
      hexbear
      14
      9 months ago

      At least by that time I'd discovered PTerry, so i already had better stuff to get on reading.

      It's not usually regarded as his best novel, but "Jingo" is my favourite. It feels particularly relevant this past year.

    • raven [he/him]
      hexbear
      14
      9 months ago

      That's exactly where I was around that time, and when the last book came out it felt so half assed. It was the first time I really felt betrayed by a medium like that.

      She obviously had no plans whatsoever about how to wrap this story up and made up a bunch things that didn't really make sense in the context of the previous books for the last one.