As a nine year old I thought the Death Eaters were meant to be like the Nazis, but I guess Rowling is so dumb she didn't make the connection until after she wrote them?
Don’t the “good guys” in Harry Potter sort you into a life-defining group based on apparently innate qualities they determine by measuring your head?
most of the "good guys" have house elves, a species bred to be slaves. (but its no problem see they like being slaves)
im surprised it took us this long to notice the writer's, uh, tendencies..
most people only saw the movies where the screenwriters were smart enough to tone down some of this shit.
They also added a star of David to the floor of the bank the goblins control
Hmmm yes... stong brow ridge, aggressive... pronounced occipital protuberance... recessed frontal bone, not the brightest are we? But focused, shallow orbital plate... you have the phrenology of... a GRYFFINDOR!
a skull-measuring device that can speak and read your thoughts to make it fun for kids
I think the idea is that it needs to be on your head in order to determine certain intangible things about you. The houses don't make much sense though and one of them is just "you're a fascist" so
Well, just to try and be a bit fair (Rowling and HP both suck a lot, we can dunk on them entirely fairly) the sorting is explicitly quite arbitrary. Harry was told by the sorting hat that he'd be well suited to the nazi bad guy house, but he said he didn't like that idea so it stuck him in the good guy main character house instead. And it's not really life-defining as far as I remember, once you're out of school you can identify with it or ignore it as much as you want, it doesn't really follow you in any way on its own
Ironically Harry is so inert and cares so little about anything besides sports and defending the status quo that the hat was probably right in saying he'd make a good fascist. His only thoughts about endemic slavery are "I wish my nerd friend would stop being so annoying about all the slaves" and in book 2 he is preoccupied, not with the possibility that his ability to talk to snakes is an indicator that he's made bad decisions/might be doing something wrong, but that people are being rude to him because he appears to be a fascist.
it's like the political version of easily figuring out the author's thinly veiled fetish.
doesn't really follow you in any way on its own
Except that all the members in the Hitler youth house ended up joining the wizard SS
It's still weird that there's a house where pretty much everyone who joins it turns evil, yet the school doesn't ban them? Seriously, Snape is the only Slytherin who is arguably good but even he only did the right thing for incel reasons.
Yeah the one founded by an open wizard supremacist who created a snake monster to kill children he considered to be impure. The one named after him hundreds of years after his death.
Snape feels like this stand-in for authority Rowling does not like/ does not want the reader to like, or a cheap plot device to trick readers into accepting Harry's lack of development. Two things that come to mind:
Philospher's Stone: After Harry stopped Voldemort from getting the stone he is asking Dumbledore in the infirmary what happened after losing consciousness. Harry asks about the red herrings and Snape's demeanor that suggest Snape was the true culprit. Instead of something reasonable like "Snape protected you because he is a teacher, it's his job and there's a huge difference between being nasty to discourage bad behaviour and wanting to harm you" Dumbledore says that Snape resents Harry's father and that he helped Harry because he owes something to his father or something like that. Harry thus walks away without having to reexamine his own behaviour.
Prisoner of Azkaban: When Harry sneaked out when he was not allowed to Snape catches Harry and starts interrogating him. The scene felt like we were supposed to see Snape as obstructive and not Harry as being irresponsible for sneaking out to places where he should not be when there is a (alleged) killer that wants him dead on the lose.
Note that these were all in the first few books, way before the incel stuff got introduced.
I remember reading the first book as a kid and being vaguely upset at the idea I could be segregated from my friends because of personality traits and shit
Its an elite invite-only boarding school, so you're unlikely to know anybody when you arrive. But also, it tends to clump people together by family cough bloodline cough and common interests, so the theory is you'll make friends more quickly when you're coughWEAZEcough segregated into like-minded groups gaspGAGchoke fuck me its really bad the more I think about it, isn't it?
A bit more seriously, its not crazy unusual for schools and unis to organize people into fraternities and clubs and houses and other social units early on in your college career. Then you tend to just end up with these people as your friends by virtue of proximity. By applying a certain degree of blind randomness, or by sorting via interest and passion rather than letting people congeal based on their own historical biases, you get a better mix of students than you would if everyone just clumped by who they knew or thought they'd like.
The system doesn't have to be modern phrenology.
I'd want to join House Owl, based purely on the mascot.
very respectable choice, i think i'd be pretty torn between rat and opossum. maybe i take rat but hang out with opossums most of the time anyway
Meanwhile I'm just here wondering how many lice infestations the Sorting Hat has facilitated over the centuries
From what I vaguely remember about the movie, it doesn’t really measure their head but more just reads their mind. Ostensibly it’s basically a personality test, but I think Harry pretty much told it what house to put him in.
Yeah, it initially wanted to put him in the evil wizard house, but he repeatedly thought 'not there', so it acquiesced and stuck him in Gryffindor instead
The sorting hat actually asks you what you want too, Harry was the one who chose between Gryffindor or the snek fuckers
Also, the lore of Harry Potter is completely held together by duct tape
Like the school houses, people mistake "pure-blood", "half-blood", and "muggle-born" as being original creations of Rowling despite being typical parts of British boarding school culture.
How many fascists did Asimov kill with grenades, eh?
how many gay people and communists did asimov snitch on to the government?
Basically just Peter Smollett. Like the list is some brain wormed and harmful shit, and clearly shows Orwell to be a racist, homophobic, anticommunist monster, but nobody in the British government gave a shit about the list, and the communists he actually managed to name were already pretty public about it except for Smollett. But the British government ignored the list so it didn't matter.
Like E. H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher weren't exactly secret about it. Carr was speaking on the radio about the need for an Anglo-Soviet socialist alliance, and Isaac Deutschers position on the matter had been known publicly since the early 40s. Same for most other communists he writes about. Other people he named like Kingsley Martin were anti communists, some were libs.
Orwell didn't snitch, or at least his primary thing wasn't snitching, that word gives him too much credit. Snitching implies you're aware of something and telling it to an authority who will use that information and Orwell did neither. He was an ignorant, racist, homophobic, anticommunist dipshit who wrote commentary on publicly avowed socialists, libs he didn't like, and people who had turned down his manuscripts, and handed it to the british governemnt who promptly threw it in the trash. At best he's an attempted snitch. Too much of a dumbass to properly snitch
He was a snitch, he was just terrible at it. Much like how he was a writer, but terrible at that too.
The moment you try to snitch you're a snitch. Whether the people you're snitching to do anything useful with your snitching is another matter entirely
I've actually read Homage to Catalonia, so the same number as Orwell. Zero.
Zero, and went home to whine and moan about the communist faction.
Astonishing that anyone on here feels the need to defend this colonial cop.
no one:
online "leftists": ackshually, after reading homage to catalonia, I decided I was an anarchist.
How many Jews, reds and gays did he report to the British intelligence services? How much anti-communist propaganda about the USSR did he publish without ever visiting it?
Le Guin is the goat. My favorite author. Terry Pratchett too, but Le Guin's the goat.
These two are people I read and realize I barely know English. Like their command of the language is so good I wish I could do anything with such skill as they write.
I also get that impression from Le Guin's work. I wish I'd found her as a child. I remember that the only author I ever read who struck me that way as a kid was Tolkien. I recently read The Left Hand of Darkness and I was like "oh yeah, this is what it felt like to be sitting under my covers 2 hours past my bed time struggling to appreciate the work of a master of the English language"
Been rereading Tolkien and Its clear why they're classics. Writting generally stands above even with it's flaws. But it really gotta read Le Guin. Every book I've read is great yet I've missed many
Me in 2024 learning what Germany was up to in the 30s and 40s
"They did WHAT"
*removed externally hosted image*
edit: dang apparently from hexbear view images like this don't display, this is an outrage
It's because of the instance, some users from foreign instances trolled Hexbear by posting porn sometimes ago so they had to block that
Show
Yeah that makes sense, just another reason for me to make a proper hex account!
I suspect she's trying to make herself seem better by coincidentally opposing Nazi ideology without even knowing about it. "I'm such a good person my book's villains were Nazis before I even knew what they were!"
🤡
Not at all, "I'm an adult who went decades without caring about one of the worst acts against humanity enough to know the basic facts."
She's just lying. Joanne also claimed she didn't know she had written a fantasy book until after the first Harry Potter was published.
She likes to pretend she was never influenced by anyone or any work, and came up with everything all on her own.
Is she really trying to pull the ol' "I've never even seen that movie, or that syndicated TV series based on the movie, so how could I copy it" trick on The Holocaust?
They pretend to not know to avoid admitting they agree with all of it
they pretend to not know because they all want the credit of coming up with it originally
Bragging about how you independently developed Nazism from scratch.
imagine being in your 30s in a westoid country and not knowing what the nazis were
what a dumbass
not one drop rule or spanish castas?
fascinating education in terf island
She's trying to hide her anti-Semitism.
Oh the goblins are all the negative stereotypes for Jews? I didn't know they had negative stereotypes until I visited the holocaust museum. I only knew good things about Jews. The goblin traits are co-incidental
