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There's three pieces of media that I think anyone critical of Harry Potter and JK Rowling should check out. And they aren't books. They aren't even movies or TV shows. They're video games. Specifically, Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 7, and Chrono Trigger.

Why am I suggesting these old JRPGs? Because while they weren't written this way on purpose, they still serve as excellent antitheses to the Harry Potter series. Let me explain why I mean by this.

The Harry Potter setting is pretty damn capitalistic. Harry's first exposure to the wizarding world is through a fun shopping trip. Magic in this world is also a constant provider Instant Conveniences and Whimsical Novelties, two things associated with capitalism. Even if it was only unconscious on JK Rowling's part, the implicit connection between magic and capitalism is very much there.

The games I just mentioned also make this type of connection if you want the full historical context), but it is 1. done very consciously, and 2. with full awareness that capitalism runs on unsustainable resource extraction. (Here's a video essay if you want to know more about why!) Each game explores this in a slightly different way with different levels and types of allegory, but they all talk about this in a very engaging way.

So yeah, if you're critical of Harry Potter and Rowling, I suggest taking a look at these games. They're a bunch of fun, and they offer some perspectives you might not have considered.

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SAPHIRA!!! Queen of the skies!

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It's actually such bullshit that the Eragon movie was such shit. Especially because Saphira was literally the most beautiful dragon to ever be put to live action (even if she didn't fit the book description super well). I'm so mad why was such an amazing dragon wasted on such a bad movie

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I have noticed that people often assume that characters in fiction will exclusively choose to socialize with each other, to the point where their social network effectively forms a closed network where every single node is attached to each other, like so:

As illustrated by the lack of lines between everyone else, all other people in this world are frequently assumed to merely just... exist. They are presumed to have nothing to do with the main characters, let alone anything to do with each other. If a new character is added to the mix, it's often assumed that they will become part of the closed network and connect to every other node in it, like so:

I've much less often seen a realistic depiction of social dynamics, where it's understood and assumed that everyone is ultimately connected, even if many of them never personally interact, more like so:

So yeah, that's... a thing.

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"I know JK Rowing is a terrible person but her books are so good-"

You sure about that?

I mean, just for a start, have you taken a good look at her fantasy creatures lately? A whole bunch of them are straight-up based on malicious and dehumanizing stereotypes about actual people.

Remember the werewolves? And being a werewolf was made into a kind of metaphor for having AIDS?

And you know how AIDS was first associated with gay men? And how conservatives back in the day were claiming gay men were preying on children in order to convert them to gayness?

Remember how Fenrir Greyback preyed on children in particular? Yeah, she put that subtext in there. She was an adult in the 90's. She knew damn well what she was doing.

Remember the house elves? Remember how most of them loved to serve and needed to have a home and a master or else they just wouldn't know what to do with themselves?

Did you know that's literally what slavers in the American South said about the Black people they kept enslaved? Go look up the happy slave myth.

Do I even need to get into the goblins and the antisemitic tropes they're based on? No, folkloric goblins were not gold-hoarding bankers waiting for their chance to stab humanity in the back.

"But the characters are so good!"

Are you kidding me?

Most of her characters are pretty one-dimensional, including Harry. Her idea of making a morally complicated character is giving a tragic past to a bully. Numerous characters are little more than stereotypes. (Looking at Fleur right now.) Literally anybody, including you, can easily make dozens of characters just as good, if not better. (It doesn't exactly take a lot of character designing skill to go, "hey, actually, having a sad backstory doesn't make it okay to bully children" or "hey, maybe I should not base a character on the first stereotype that pops into my head.")

"But the rest of the worldbuilding!"

Sorry, but her worldbuilding is just as basic as her characters. Magical castles and secret passages are stock tropes. Magical people who keep their true nature secret from humanity is the premise of pretty much every White Wolf TTRPG. Most of her fantasy creatures are just common European fairy tale and folklore creatures with shitty stereotypes projected onto them.

I'm not saying "basic worldbuilding bad." I'm saying, you could do just as good, if not better, with minimal effort.

Also there's her magical bioessentialism, where only Harry's abusive blood relatives could provide him with supernatural protection from Voldemort. Rowling thus effectively declared that non-biological family isn't quite real family, and that abusive biofamily can give you some essential thing that a loving, supportive family that isn't related to you just can't.

The Hogwarts houses are one of the most insidious elements of her worldbuilding. The idea of being sorted gives you a little dopamine hit because wow now you have a li'l niche where you belong!

But the actual function of the houses and sorting system and the House Cup is teaching children to see each other as rivals, and ensure that the most toxic views of the upper class get passed on to every new batch of kids sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts effectively prepares children for a dystopia where magic serves to distract its citizens from how nightmarishly awful it is. Economic inequality is so bad that people like Arthur and Molly Weasley can barely afford to put their kids through school, casual sadism is just an accepted norm in everyday society, and non-humans are second class citizens. Rowling sorta acts like she thinks this is a bad thing with certain lines she gave to Dumbledore, but in the end, her special boy protagonist becomes an auror; IE, a defender of the status quo. So.

If you've never seen it, Lily Simpson's video goes into even more detail on how the worldbuilding of Harry Potter is actually incredibly fucked up, and how it betrays small-minded attitudes on Rowling's part. There's no separating the art from this artist, because Rowling's rotten values pour out of nearly every page.

Yes, there are many things in Harry Potter that evoke feelings and inspire people, but there's absolutely nothing in it that this series has a monopoly on. You can find those same experiences in much, much better media.

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This user supports AO3

This user is anti-censorship

This user believes in “don’t like, don’t read”

This user believes in “ship and let ship”

This user believes that fiction tastes and preferences do not dictate moral character

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if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do... research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?

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Sometimes I think about how and why some people had such a *bad* reaction to the end of Steven Universe, specifically in regards to the Diamonds living.

Even though they no longer are causing harm to others and are able to actually undo some of their previous harm by living, some folks reacted as though this ending was somehow morally suspect. Morally bankrupt, even.

And I think it might be because so many of us were raised on a very specific kind of kids media trope:

They all fall to their deaths.

Disney loves chucking their bad guys off cliffs. And it makes sense- in a moral framework where villains *must* be punished (regardless of whether their death will actually prevent further harm or not), but killing of any kind is morally bad for the hero, the narrative must find a way to kill the villain without the protagonists doing a murder.

It's a moral assumption that a person can *deserve* to die, that it is cosmically just for them to die, that them dying is evidence that the story itself is morally good and correct. Scar *deserves* to die, but it would be bad for Simba to kill him. So....cliff.

Steven Universe, whatever else it's faults, took at step back and said "but if killing people is bad, then people dying is bad", and instead of dropping White Diamond off a cliff, asked "what would actual *restorative*, not punitive, justice look like? What would actual reparations mean here? If the goal is to heal, not just to punish, how do we handle those who have done harm?" And then did that.

Which I think is interesting, and that there was pushback against it is interesting.

It also reminds me of the folks who get very weird about Aang not killing Ozai at the end of Avatar. And like, Ozai still gets chucked in prison, so it doesn't even push back on our cultural ideas of punitive justice *that much.* and still, I've seen people get real mad that the child monk who is the last survivor of a genocide that wiped out his entire pacifist culture didn't do a murder.

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After months of staying silent on literary discourse here on Tumblr, I finally have something to contribute.

Fanfiction is not the problem. Fanfic is a free, communal and valid form of writing which, although not always high quality, has yielded some genuinely great stories. The real problem, the reason for ‘booktok books’ and the flaws in modern literature, is fanfic being hijacked by corporations. The minute people try to make money off of it, the minute fanfic and fanfic-style stories lose their meaning. Fanfiction is written on the notes app at 3am for you and 5 friends who share your taste. It is self-indulgent, chaotic, often told through a queer and/or neurodivergent lens, and free from any pressure to be commercially palatable. The minute a few stereotypical fanfiction tropes and ideas are stolen by commercial publishers and twisted into patriarchal, heteronormative versions of themselves with no character depth beyond the romance (a problem that for obvious reasons doesn’t apply to fanfic), that is where the real problem begins.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk

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recently dipped back into the Danny Phantom fandom 👻

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Roran my baby deserved better. I can understand and appreciate Nasauda's hands are tied but if I were reading this back before I read WOT and ASOIAF I don't think I would've fully understood the politics of her position and hated her.

Like it feels like she's taking everybody's loyalty for granted but I also know how worried she is and how hard she's been fighting to keep things handled... Like. It's very complicated and VERY well done I think and I can appreciate that.

So glad to see Roran getting his own command though.

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You have to make a fucking commitment that extends beyond your narrow, myopic definition of "normal" or you're going to continue to fail the fascism pop quiz, every fucking time.

You need to be willing to defend shit you find personally unsavory/unappealing/unintelligible. You need to be able to defend the weird porn. You need to defend the incomprehensible art. You need to defend the micro-identities that you think sound made up.

What matters is harm. Actual, tangible, documented harm. Not hypothetical. Not theoretical. Actual harm. If it's not harmful, it should be allowed to exist and anyone who tells you it shouldn't, it's trying to radicalize you. Don't fucking let them.

And if it causes actual harm, commit to actual harm reduction. Specific, tangible actions to minimize the specific, tangible harm. Anything else is propaganda.

I'm begging you to rub two brain cells together and stop platforming fascist talking points under the thinnest veneer of respectability. Your definition of normal doesn't apply to anyone else but yourself. If you're queer, if you're disabled, if you're a minority in any axis, stop fucking licking the boot that wants to crush your throat.

They mean you. When they call for the death of freaks and undesirables. When they want to criminalize anything that threatens children's safety. When they insist they only want to target dangerous perverts and malicious criminals.

They mean you.

Stop fucking helping them!

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omg thank you! you get it! its so human i love it!

Something that I actually really enjoy about The Inheritance Cycle is that it's a war. And wars are a focus of a lot of media, especially fantasy, but they rarely get into the nitty gritty of it; the realities of war are a vague backdrop to the protagonists' stories, if they're mentioned at all, and the war always culminates in one or two huge and dramatic battles that look good on screen.

But Eragon is IN A WAR. The armies are marching but it's not directly to the capital and it's not an easy march. They struggle with supplies, food lines, creating space for camps, fortifying said camps, illnesses, escalating disagreements among both foot soldiers and commanders, families moving with the soldiers, dwindling moral, etc.

They have to launch sieges against well fortified cities and there's nothing glorious about it. There's lomg stand-offs where the Varden isn't willing to engage with a city's defenses (like Thorn resting on Dras Leona's walls) or where a city is well-supplied enough to be able to close their gates and wait out the enemy forces on their doorstep. They build siege towers and struggle to break through walls and gates while the majority of the army tries to find anything to do. There's a lot of time spent just in camps, either moving to a new location or anxiously waiting for something to happen.

Even the battles themselves aren't usually glorious like they are in similar stories. There's tense waits for enemy forces to arrive that last so long that Eragon falls asleep. Sometimes the POV character completely misses the culminating action because they were too wounded to continue or they ended up somewhere else. Even the magicians aren't usually flashy and dramatic because that's a huge waste of energy, so battles with spellcasters are usually tense and silent and often involve both sides anxiously waiting to see which magic user falls first. The commanders have to grapple with their soldiers looting homes and the fact that many people in captured cities are magically bound to the king and that's not THEIR fault but they still can't be trusted.

And Eragon is THERE for all that! He's not above the realities of the wars, he's not some shiny weapon only pulled out of his comfortable hiding place when he's needed at the peak of the battle. He's marching with the army and sleeping in a tent and wandering around camp and eating the same meals everyone else eats and just generally trying to be as helpful as possible even when he's not in a battle.

It's just such an interesting change of pace from how war is typically handled in fantasy and scifi and I'm sure plenty of people found it very boring but I for one am LOVING it.

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Hey did anyone else read this scene as a kid and get hit with a sort of soul-deep primal longing that stuck with them well into adulthood

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I don't know if you needed this today

Remember the 2006 Eragon movie? Of course you do. You're in this fandom, and if you're following me you know I occasionally go on intense, rabid rabbit holes of trying to find the missing scenes that got cut/actors who participated in it to try and get information on just what was left on the cutting room floor.

Remember Ed? Little 17 year old Ed Speleers? Blond-agon?

Well, I was chatting/yapping (as she calls it) with my new coworker/New Gremling/Towel (that is her new name here due to reasons I cannot discuss but yes I got her okay for it) and mentioned he had been in Downton Abby and nothing else. She looked him up and apparently he has been in several shows for multiple seasons.

Intrigued and very, very impressed, I asked her to look up a current picture for me and...

oh my god look. at. him. HE GREW UP! HE HAS FACE LINES! HE'S ACTUALLY PASSABLY HANDSOME?! Guys, I SHRIEKED when I saw it, "OH MY GOD HE HAS CROWS FEET HE GREW UP I LOVE THAT FOR HIM!"

Look, I am REALLY proud of him. Eragon was his first big picture role. They picked him BECAUSE they wanted to 'show him growing like Eragon did throughout the story' and thus wanted an inexperienced younger actor. And now look at him!

Honestly I'm just damn happy he got rid of that mop on his head lol but I'm really glad he's found good work after that first flop.

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pls love yourself and stop pre-ordering aaa games