Not tagging this spoiler cause fuck TERFs, don't buy the game, uphold TC69 Thought etc. Have gotten this all from the above article and reviews that support it.
Yep, anti-semitic, slave-owning, Protocols of Zion plagiarising, let's join the anti-goblin pogrom game.
Yes the MacGuffin unambiguously belongs to the Goblins, who have a labour theory of ownership. No you can't join the Goblins. Yes you kill a bunch of them. Yes, there is a fucking quisling that's seen as good actually. Yes, every teacher thinks fighting the goblins is a good thing, despite a few token missions that apparently show how oppressed they are.
No, you never critique that this and every other aspect of the wizard world might be a bad thing.
I am once again calling for the House Elves to rise up, slit every slaver-wizard throat in Hogwarts, and place their heads on pikes outside the entrance as a warning to the others.
Don't. Buy. The TERF. Game.
The first book is warmed over Roald Dahl novel. No worse than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach.
Setting aside the farce that is Quidditch, the story through book 4 is on the better end of YA fiction. Certainly better than Twilight or Hunger Games.
After that they degrade rapidly. Book 7 is just a meandering clusterfuck.
But to just kinda write off a wildly popular series like this as "bad writing" feels reactionary. Just Ben Shapiro tier criticism.
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I find The Worse Witch, let alone Narnia or The Dark is Rising to have generally better world building, all predate Rowling so she has no excuse.
Narnia was another series with a very strong start and a wet fart of an ending. The Last Battle was awful. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader literally went nowhere. There's a reason they gave up making those movies halfway through.
Dark is Rising was cliche and boring compared to the LotR source material it desperately wanted to be.
Never read the Worse Witch so, shrug
Yeah, I agree (though I really like Dawn Treader, actually. It's not very filmable though, given it getting increasingly less adventure tale and more introspective. Also Horse and his Boy despite it being deeply, deeply problematic is a genuinely fun book)
Dark is Rising...I always thought it took more from Dunsany and Poe and maybe Walton than Tolkien. Certainly it's not as derivative as GG Kay's work
It's a textbook case of why you need to set aside being Woke sometimes and just enjoy things. Probably the best book in the series, even if Magician's Nephew is kinda my favorite.
I mean, what do I know? I never made it past the first book.
Maybe I'd just been too heavy on high fantasy at that point and just couldn't stomach the tropes.
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Ah, in that case. Idk. That writing did look like crap
I'm specifically criticizing the worldbuilding. JKR plays fast and loose with how the setting works and can't leave well enough alone.
Things like the Time Turner, the canon information about magic outside of Hogwarts/UK, the oversimplified house system, and categorizing several sentient species as 'magical creatures' In this instance, it's the portrayal of goblins.
I think a lot of the fans who were drawn to it, me included, brought our own imagination to the work. That's good to capture an audience like that, but jkr's politics easily seep into the way the world works.
The Time Turner wasn't any worse than any other bit of magical realism in the setting. It existed to build Hermonie - the workaholic - and Harry - the hero worshipper - as characters, not to magically solve all their problems.
Past that, its just nitpicking. The fact that she has a broader world and its not just four different kinds of Specials locked in a cage death match together puts it head and shoulders above most YA fiction.
The politics shifted over time, and that's what really poisoned the series. What starts as this existential struggle between generations - the very opening scene is the Old World Dying and The New Being Born - lapses into a McGuffin Hunt in defense of the status quo.
So much of the Problem With Dobbie isn't in Book 2. It shows up in 5, 6, and 7 when Rowling just kinda abandons the idea of emancipation and social justice.
The underdog story mutates into a crime drama and the protagonists change from revolutionary insurgents into child soldiers.
fellas is it reactionary to dislike harry potter
Hunger Games features a proletariat revolution.
It features a white woman power fantasy wearing a revolutionary hat. Libs jumped all over it for a reason.
Sort of. It portrays Katniss as a near-useless mascot. Everybody at the front of the prole uprising acknowledges she's a useless mascot. She spends the third book fucking around in a sewer while the actual masses take the fight to the gates of the capital.