"Rowling's real importance lies in the fact that she is the only writer I have read."
It's hilarious when these condescending people end up just telling on themselves.
the libs are telling on themselves that they've truly never read another book
it's not even hard to reach for something obvious like Dickens or Hugo
Like, they even read fuckin' 1984 in school.
"If there is any hope, it lies in the proles"
And actually aren't poor, just all your massive wealth is in a bank you didn't know about
How can everything in one tweet be so wrong.
Apart from the obvious, she treats the Weasley’s like being poor is a fun sentimental thing. She does that insufferable lib class tourist thing of acting like being poor is actually more “real” than having wealth and ignores the hardships alongside it, apart from “Ron has some stuff from his brothers”
“ There's no glory in greed and want/but there's none in poverty either.”
How can everything in one tweet be so wrong.
It is not just about being wrong, but how they always write with so much confidence giving the impression they are explaining something to you like it is something that is so obvious but we are not smart enough to understand...
She does that insufferable lib class tourist thing of acting like being poor is actually more “real” than having wealth and ignores the hardships alongside it
It’s weird that she does that since it’s my understanding that she was very poor for some periods of her life. I know I’ve heard it said she and her two kids lived out of a car for a time before writing HP. Maybe that was very brief/temporary? Or a lie? Or maybe she was distancing herself from her own experience of poverty? I don’t know, I could look it up but it’s not worth it.
iirc she/the media pushed that narrative but she comes from wealth and was never actually struggling
could be wrong but that's what i remember reading somewhere
She went to one of the most expensive and prestigious private girls schools in the UK. She wrote the majority of HP1 at her brother in laws coffee shop and he owned like 8 of them. Wealthy family, comes from wealth, exaggerated her “struggle” massively. IIRC her ex said the “living out of her car” thing was literally that she spent a single night in a car with her kids after the relationship fell apart before she moved in with family.
IIRC her ex said the “living out of her car” thing was literally that she spent a single night in a car with her kids after the relationship fell apart before she moved in with family.
Ah, that makes more sense.
Harry goes from the "kid under the stairs" to essentially being infinitely rich as far as the story is concerned. He is instantly a millionaire in Book One. Money is literally never a problem in the books except when it is for no reason whatsoever.
We can't have a character unable to afford all of the frivolous magic shit. That would create too much character tension and motivation. Who wants to read a story about being poor in a fantasy setting?
As I wrote that, I realized more and more how little thought Rowling put into her created world. He spends time with a poor magic family and they still have things like a family house and land. They don't show adaptations they have to make while living in poverty like cutting costs on food or luxury items.
There was also a mistake on her part by making the dad obsessed with the nonmagical world, yet unable to utilize savvy to benefit himself or his family. I mean if you can't afford to buy clothes from the magical world, and they don't seem all that different from mundane ones, why not get a job in the muggle world where being able to magic shit would give an advantage?
And that in itself speaks to Rowling's lack of creativity. She could've illustrated arbitrary value on things. Like Ron getting dress code violations or teased for only being able to afford muggle shoes or whatever. A kid wearing expensive Air Jordans to magic school and getting a reality check on arbitrary markers of class? That would be interesting and you could still have the story be much the same.
Oh well...
He spends time with a poor magic family and they still have things like a family house and land.
Tbf in 1997, when the first book was published, this wasn't as impossible as it is today
We can’t have a character unable to afford all of the frivolous magic shit. That would create too much character tension and motivation. Who wants to read a story about being poor in a fantasy setting?
The best and most direct counterpoint to Harry Potter on this issue is Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books. It is the chad working-class part-time witch, part-time cheese maker / shepherdess / midwife / village doctor / village psychiatrist, versus the virgin trust-fund kid whose sole ambition is to be a wizard :top-cop:.
being poor in a fantasy setting
I'm imagining a world where spell components are only affordable to the uber wealthy, and everyone else born with magic either has to get a job as a magic cop/troop or never get to use their powers (and in fact it's illegal to try).
There are a few stories like that. I heard there's one where a single ruler who can allocate magic to others and the wealthy surround and pamper them in exchange for power.
Fantasy has so much potential to explore things like wealth and class. It's a shame that jkr is the extent to which most people know the genre.
a single ruler who can allocate magic to others
Reminds me of Reincarnated as a Slime, where the main character can dish out a portion of their power by giving low-ranking monsters a name. Naturally they go out of their way to give names to everyone they can because why would you horde something so beneficial?
Or you could have a conflict between the legal magic of the Oxbridge fancylads at Hogwarts and the illegal magic of impoverished rural witches, nomadic fortune tellers and immigrant sorcerers who can't afford a license to do magic.
I was thinking the big twist partway through the story is that there are no "magical people" at all, and that what you actually need to cast spells is enough people in one place who all want the spell to happen. Cop and troop spells are easy to cast because the bourgeois have class solidarity, but once the proletariat is similarly unified the horizons become literally infinite.
It's a bit on the nose as far as metaphors go, but I like it.
writing about class struggles is when you acknowledge that poor people exist
Accurately depicting a class-based society with vast wealth disparity is when literally everybody gets to go to wizard Eton/Oxbridge.
Actually it's still tuition based. Harry just has his covered from his trust fund. But this is still a setting where magic can substitute most forms of labor and still there's a poor under class and a fucking slave caste.
I think the tuition can't be that bad, right? Since all 7 Weasely siblings get to go to Hogwarts based on a single low-ranking government employee's salary? Just adds to the point that poverty and class for Rowling is a sentimental and/or aesthetic thing, since the "hardship" arising from poverty just means living in a rustic country house, having second-hand clothes and pets, and not exclusion from social and educational opportunities.
That's true. My gripe is more that there's an unexplored aspect in the books with having a tuition cost for the equivalent of k-12 education. In a setting where an uneducated person can do all sorts of catastrophic things if left untrained in magic. Then there's the lack of mention of the people who can't afford tuition. The poorest people depicted, as you said areare still very comfortable.
Like you said, poverty is aesthetic and cozy.
why don't poor people just use their government connections to get into prestigious schools??? :very-smart:
The only time the books even get into anything of a class analysis is when Hermione is trying to abolish actual chattel slavery of elves. She's intensely passionate about it, but most of the other characters treat her as some annoying shrill activist worried about nothing. Then she just seems to drop the entire thing later.
No other class structure seems to exist among wizards. Every wizard presented has a job as a government bureaucrat, athlete, teacher, or small business owner. I don't remember any wizards being described as wage based workers for a private business. Those types of jobs seem relegated to elves and goblins. I think I remember one book had a discussion about what the students wanted to do after they graduated and all of them said either magic cop, teacher, or small business owner.
Being poor in JK Rowling world is not a hardship at all. At worst you get some funny patches on your robes and you can't afford chocolate frogs. There is no portrayal or acknowledgement of destitute poverty in the Harry Potter books. In fact, wealth and "poverty" are contrasted in the books several times, but as analogous ways of describing intimacy. The "poor" characters are more humble, have a more vibrant family life, and only ever have aesthetic hardships. The wealthier characters (except the protagonist of course) are all sneering manipulative parasites who seem to all hate one another, including their own family, plus they're mostly a bunch of racists. Plus they engage in actual chattel slavery.
I cannot describe how much I despise JK Rowling and the damage she's done to the world. I read all those books several times through as a kid and I take it as a personal offense when someone praises them.
Well, I guess Oliver Twist was just a novel about how workhouses and the Poor Laws were the 19th century version of sigma quadrillionaire grindset, and The Chimney Sweeper were just poems about how dying of black lung at four years old was hella rad.
:agony-consuming:
The way he's trying to defend himself in the replies is so funny
The Little Match Girl all about the joys of Hypothermia and starvation
Thanks. Although I don't think Pratchett and Gaiman count as kid's lit, nor do Grimm & Andersen (which btw kids in my generation read in versions that edited out poverty & similar background matters. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found out why Hansel & Gretel were lost)
Just take the L and delete the tweet. Or don't. LMAO
Literally implying that children are inherently simpletons, and cannot enjoy any literature that's not dumbed-down rated-G stories about going to school or having tea parties with friends.
Cool, How about Roald Dahl, who has like half his protagonists so poor an orange is a celebration.
The first two books might as well have been cribbed straight from Dahl. Even the art cribs from his style.
The books of all hitherto existing society are definitely not at all about class struggle.
Terry Pratchett and Tolkien are simultaneously keeping TERF island afloat with angry spinning.
