#the conversation was more broadly about the issues with the Harry Potter series

[remus-poopin]

Y’all I was fighting for my life to stay normal when the Christmas family dinner conversation shifted to Snape discourse

[jakesalablogs]

More Future Talk

Welcome back to my blog here on Tumblr! The blog rolls along with a new and exciting week of content. Today I will be taking a look at the following news story:

NFT Comic Books: The Promise, the Peril, and What The Future Actually Holds

By Jex Exmundo

From: https://nftnow.com/culture/nft-comic-books-and-the-open-future-of-storytelling/

I’m really interested in discussing the future this week. This is my second future focused post for the week and it’s a good one.

NFT storytelling from independent artists may present some issues for fans in the future. The first issue is likely to be confusion. According to Jex Exmundo (2022), “Case in point, let’s look at My Immortal — a piece of Harry Potter fanfiction so universally disliked that some have even speculated it to be an overly elaborate piece of satire lampooning the worst of what fanfiction had to offer. If J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World featured a similar structure to decentralized NFT franchises, then My Immortal would be recognized as actual canon within the franchise. In the real world, this piece did little to diminish the success of the Harry Potter franchise. From a certain subset of the Potterhead community, it may have even added to it. The same can’t be said if the work was actually recognized as a canon entry into the series. Just look at how quickly Game of Thrones seemingly disappeared overnight from the mainstream conversation following the broadly negative reception its final season received.” The decentralized nature of blockchain ledgers and NFTs allow anyone to create content. This will create confusion as to which works are actually consider canon and which are not. (Wikipedia defines canon as “the material accepted as officially part of the story in an individual universe of that story by its fan base”) Without a clear declaration of canon in the blockchain, consumers will be confused by the overwhelming possibilities of story generation.

This is especially true when considering the possibility of the destruction of the original physical comic book. Without the original work, fans may be left wondering if that work has been removed from canon. This is a complex situation worth monitoring in the coming years.

The other future outcome to monitor is the people versus profit aspect of comics. According to Exmundo (2022), “Creativity takes the backseat to profit,” Elf said about his experiences working in traditional media. “It’s the non-creative people at the top who make the final creative decisions. The antidote is to invert that model. What if [the fans and creators] actually got to sit in the creative driver’s seat? What kind of amazing product would you get from that model?” NFTs and blockchain represent the vast potential of a free and open marketplace of ideas. Gatekeepers and intermediaries are no longer a part of the equation. Moving forward, major comic publishers must keep this in mind in order to avoid alienating the intended audiences. The future is still uncertain. However, all parties involved have the opportunity to build something special from the ground up and create a fan-first community.

Be sure to check back here each week for my latest blog entries to stay up to date with the happenings in the industry. Also be sure to visit https://newhouse.syr.edu/ for more information about how you can get involved in this industry

[hecallsmehischild]

I don’t believe books should be banned. It bothers me to no end that the idea of banning books (and films) has returned. Especially now that I’m trying to inhale knowledge like I never cared to before. Like... rail against a book if you want. Shred its reasoning, decry its tone, TALK to your kids about the stuff you think is really bad or dangerous about the work, but whatever you do don’t ban knowledge or the exploration of knowledge or stories under any circumstances. 

I know this isn’t the same as what’s going on in the non-fiction world, but I grew up under the Harry Potter ban in the Christian community. My parents were doing their best to raise good kids so they adopted this stance at the time, and it’s not like I had a shortage of other books. Whether you accept this or not, in the Christian community there was a real belief that reading these books would prove harmful to the kids in a practical way. And so it was treated like a real threat and locked out.

But as I grew older and talked to more people about Harry Potter and watched the movies, I started to think how ridiculous the groupthink about the series was. I absolutely believe some people can be more spiritually sensitive to certain writings/movies than other people, so I think that choosing to consume or not consume a piece of media based on that criteria is a highly personal decision. The issue comes when it’s broadly enforced as a total community pressure. As an adult, I watched the movies, then I read the books, then I found a Harry Potter fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) that I thought was worlds better than the actual books and I’ve had a good romp with the story as a whole.

People were genuinely upset that the Christian community banned Harry Potter because it’s a good piece of literature that didn’t deserve it. Personally, I’m more upset by the groupthink aspect of it, and the general unwillingness to work through whether it was personally harmful to each family or not. And reading through the history of Christianity, it has (to my deep chagrin and sadness) been a hallmark of the church authority to blanket ban books that contradicted the known Orthodoxy.

So when I see titles disappearing off Amazon, and wars being waged about whether or not a book should even see publication, pressure not to read that book from influential secular people, it echoes a history I’m all too familiar with and it deeply disturbs me. I strongly believe books should not be censored. If their ideas are bad, that should be a massive incentive to  p r o v e   i t.

Read. Absorb. Listen. Learn. ALL THE THINGS. ALL of them. Then sit with that stew of ideas and see what rises to the top. Then continue to learn. Never stop testing ideas. Never stop modifying your model of the world. It’s bloody terrifying. I’m still scared. But now that I’ve started, there’s an edge of adventure on it.

Don’t ban books. Ever. Trust people to sort out the good and the bad information. They will get it wrong a lot of the time, but if they keep learning and growing, that can only be good in the long run. Don’t ban books. Don’t censor knowledge. Stop labeling things with names that shut down conversation. Communicate. Grow. Learn. Exchange.

Read. All. The. Books.