Huh turns out JK is even less creative than we thought and maybe/prolly cribbed off some (A LOT) of the concepts from Ursula K Leguin's works.
"So, then, what’s the difference between being influenced by a body of work and admitting it, and being influenced by a body of work and not admitting it?
This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter. I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H.White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn't plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise."
Yes, and trans positive as well, in case Left hand of darkness doesn't tip you off. Her parents were field anthropologists I think so she grew up with a real awareness of how western identities are socially constructed
Well...it's ok...but until fairly recently...there were, uh, some bad takes in the field involving the usual calipers.
Feminist, socialist, overall chad. My favorite saying from her is "capitalism seems ever vast with no end, but people thought the same on the rights of kings".
Tbf modern fantasy has probably cribbed more from LeGuin than any other writer at this point. Except maybe Vance.
Tolkien still holds the crown I think. It would be better if they stole from her though
i dont think they ever steal more than the surface from tolkien.
they're not actually producing realistic textual ruins. nobody who wants to make a living can afford to invent that much history.
Micheal Moorcock too. for dark fantasy at least. the best fantasy authors are leftists
i keep meaning to ask to do a megathread on him but i've been so beat down from work and also RIP my inbox which already has issues.
it's cool though pretty sure he's still posting in his forum despite his age. being a cranky old anarchist and calling shit out.
I've seen a lot of "JK Rowling Plagiarized..." lines that (a) really do not get the concept of plagarization and (b) don't seem to understand how banal the idea of "Wizard High School" was even back in the late 90s.
Before that even. That basically the setting for the Xmen. Weird boarding schools would be even more familiar to a brit
Yeah, heck, even the universities. You get why His Dark Materials was written because I swear Oxford exists in another reality and the bus from london switches over in the last 20 min.
Plagiarized? Nah, however I hate how JK is attributed as the "creator" of the wizard school concept in fiction when she clearly was not, and has not even offered resistance to that idea (i.e. liberals when they don't want to accept fiction like any field is built on the efforts and labor of multitudes).
I hate how JK is attributed as the “creator” of the wizard school concept in fiction when she clearly was not
Yeah, that shit is annoying, but more because of the way people incredulously buy into it.
Honestly goes to show how major corporate book and media entities were able to so effectively shove that shit into us as kids that we always have that subconscious thought on JK as "creator of wizard school"
I predated HP by a decade or two, so I must have missed that. LotR was always the benchmark for fantasy for me.
Yeah it's more for the millennials cuss that shit was everywhere (the author of this vid also has another great vid on the corporate media blitz on HP which she goes into detail on).
(b) don’t seem to understand how banal the idea of “Wizard High School” was even back in the late 90s
I was in middle school in the mid '90s and my buddy an I tried to write a fantasy novel, the first half of the book was set in a school for magic users. Every idea we had for that story was blatantly stolen from some other book we'd read.
Yeah again doesn't seem like pure plagiarism but instead stealing from other before on the concepts of tutelage for figures such as Merlin and Gandalf (i.e. how do the wizards become so wise and what does that system look like?" Sadly as always JK is, like all neolib fiction writers, a person that creates shallow caricatures within their fiction without care or concern in what it means for their fictional world or to the reader (i.e. the creation of a fucking magical slave state with fascist undertones even before you include the mask off wizard nazis).
Honestly JKR steals more from the worst witch, especially in the early novels. And Earthsea gets very non Harry Potter after book 1.
Random thought about "wizard schools" in fantasy works but I think its kinda cool to have a contrast between a militarized wizard academy and individualized wizard tutors out in the world.
Howls Living Castle did this kinda and I liked that contrast and also how using magic in the way the military wizards did it destroys your humanity.
Feist's Greater/Lesser magic dichotomy also does this.
Lesser Magic has to be taught by an individual master/student relationship, but it's also the only way to make magical devices and do most of the more useful things, while greater magic require systemic teaching and is extremely flashy and destructive.
The Commonweal also has building the first wizard school as a main plot, after centuries of individualised teaching that inevitably makes already fairly unstable wizards slightly and unpredictably mad. (The alternative being either "very mad" or "mass extinction event")
I think the Recluse books do this. There's an extreme thermocline between order and chaos magic, with order being taught formally, but then it turns out to be complicated.
Imagine if instead of the transphobic wizard school simulator: antisemitism edition we got a Disco Elysium style rpg where you learn magic in Roke and deal with the fallout of your youthful hubris. Truly a cursed timeline we live in.
Honestly that sounds pretty dope, Pentament has something kind of similar (has two different time periods in the same location to show cause and effect of actions). Really just want more leftist art and video games :deeper-sadness:
There's another British wizard series that came out shortly before HP that is a more likely source of "inspiration" for Rowling but I can't remember what it's called.
Oooh! Let me know the name if you ever remember it, be dying to find out other stuff JK was "inspired by".
