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?

  • CloutAtlas [he/him]
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    181 year ago

    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

  • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
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    831 year ago

    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.

  • nothx [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    If that’s real, she admitted she’s an idiot. Love to see it.

  • 420stalin69 [he/him]
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    1001 year ago

    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?

    • edge [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]
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        121 year ago

        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

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Doubledee [comrade/them]
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          231 year ago

          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 shrug-outta-hecks

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          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!

    • booty [he/him]
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      331 year ago

      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

      • Leon_Frotsky [she/her]
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        321 year ago

        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

        • Doubledee [comrade/them]
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • AfterthoughtC - he/ him
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • Doubledee [comrade/them]
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        461 year ago

        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.

    • FourteenEyes [he/him]
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      221 year ago

      Meanwhile I’m just here wondering how many lice infestations the Sorting Hat has facilitated over the centuries

    • ☂️-
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      1 year ago

      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

  • EllenKelly [comrade/them]
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    31 year ago

    ita fortunate racism wasn’t in vogue (like transgenderism today) when Joanne was a wee lass, else she might have turned out a racist piece of shit, phew, close one!

  • SSJ2Marx [he/him]
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    431 year ago

    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?

  • plinky [he/him]
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    371 year ago

    not one drop rule or spanish castas?

    fascinating education in terf island