urupotter

[urupotter]

Reading the Neil Gaiman charges… there are some deeply evil people in this world man. Some people are hollow inside and you’d never know

[urupotter]

Thank god Trump is doing the tariffs. The more he blows up the American economy the better, it’s necessary that his popularity tanks. Makes it much harder to establish a hybrid regime that way. Fascism cannot be allowed to become a successful electoral program in the global hegemon. It must be associated with failure

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I disagree with this in that I think trying to save Lupin in DH is a pretty strong counter example! It isn't really pragmatic (he risks his cover for basically no strategic benefit, Lupin isn't that important in the grand scheme of things to defeat Voldemort), and he still detests Lupin, is afraid of him and bigoted towards him for being a werewolf (which incidentally is another flaw given to losers!). It's straight out of stuff like the Knights Radiant in the Stormlight Archives lol (I will protect even those I hate, so long as it is right)

Tbh I'm not sure how much Snape actually despises children (other than Harry, he definitely hates Harry) and how much of the bullying is just stuff he does because he finds cruelty amusing. It's kind of like his social maladjustment. I think you can both interpret Snape as having really good social skills and emotional control (Occlumency, being a spy, etc) and the constant dickishness and cruelty and pissing people off being something he does because he enjoys it, or you can also interpret him as being socially kind of inept like I tend to see in fandom. Both takes on Snape are viable imo, depend on if you lean more into the competent parts of his character or into the loser parts.

One of the reasons I find Snape kind of unique as a character in the stories I've read in that his particular combination of traits is... rare. By this I mean in that A) he has virtues and skills that would normally appear in a main character, a hero, hell even a teen boy power-fantasy, completely larger than life demonstrations of competence and virtue, while at the same time B) having traits that would normally be given to petty villains in order to make them look lame/pathetic, in order for the audience to laugh at the loser. (petty villains are not the same as regular villains, it's the difference between Filch and Voldemort. Voldemort is infinitely more evil but is rarely someone you pity/think is a loser the way you do Filch).

For A) he is a genius immensely skilled at magic and is hyper competent, inventing spells and potions as a teenager, is self sacrificing and brave to ridiculous extremes, over and over again, more than any other character bar the protagonist himself, is a spy that constantly makes the main villain look like a fool, is so virtuous he risks himself to save people he hates because it's the right thing to do, has tons of sarcastic one liners and witty jokes, is intimidating and smooth and has presence, I could go on. All these are traits you give to the Harry Potters of the world.

For B) he's ugly in a very visceral way, he bullies children who did nothing to him and makes them cry, he's bullied and never truly gets his revenge, in fact the girl he's in love with gets together with his bully, he's constantly humiliated (i.e. the Neville boggart scene where he's made to dress in an old woman's clothes, Dumbledore telling him that he disgusts him, the SWM scene). All this is stuff you give to the Filch's of the world.

More interesting than gray morality of whatever the fuck, which I've seen before, Snape is unique to me in that he's as much of a classical hero, larger than life teenage hyper-competence power fantasy made to idealize and try (and inevitably fail) to live up to as he is a pathetic petty tyrant loser made for the audience to laugh at and feel sorry for while hating him at the same time. It's like if you fused Harry Potter's virtues with Argus Filchs flaws. And he never really stops being either of these things throughout the story, he is cool and pathetic always. It's what makes him so incongruous to me, and part of what makes him inspire such strong emotions. People, whether fans or people that hate him, don't really know on what traits to lean into more: Is he cool or pathetic? Lame or awesome? The reality is that he's both. At both extremes at the same time, writing Snape correctly requires toeing the line between power-fantasy and masochistic self-flagellation.

[urupotter]

“All art is political” where “political” is basically used to mean “the way society is organized and functions” isn’t even true as stated even if it weren’t a uselessly broad interpretation. Realistic self portraits are informed by the laws of physics and the way the brain interprets light, both of which are older than society

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Someone should write a vampire society fantasy story where the big twist is that it’s a giant vegan allegory and transitions into horror near the end. Just straight up copy industrial factory farming but for humans and have none of the characters (which you’ve spent the whole previous part of the story developing and having the audience connect with) bat an eye.

[urupotter]

no im sorry but I definitely am going to need to know more about ??? A cannibal??? An ethical one?? Visiting your school to talk about cardiovascular diseases?? Please

Guy who visited went on a plane flight in the 70’s which crash landed into the Andes mountains along with his rugby team. He and the other survivors lasted about a week with the left over rations, but once their piss turned black they resorted to… other food sources. It was ethical because they only ate people that were already dead and they all agreed that if they died the others were allowed to eat them. They were stuck there for three months until the dude and one other guy went on a ten day trek and managed to find a guy. Dude’s name was Roberto Canessa, and later he became a cardiologist. There’s a movie about the event that came out recently on Netflix, it’s called Society of the Snow. I rec it

[urupotter]

HP x ASOIAF fusion. Remus Lupin is Barristan the Bold.

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Hard Man who makes Hard Decisions and sees himself as super rational but is actually a hypocrite and just as emotionally driven as the people he derides is a super common trope but I’d like to see the opposite.

Soft and warm man who sees himself as super in touch with his feeling and very passion driven but is a hypocrite since he’s actually rational and calculating

[urupotter]

GRRM should add a Romeo and Juliet plotline between House Bracken and House Blackwood at some point

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“And the meek shall inherit the earth”. Unreal cooking. Three Michelin star level stuff. Jesus was on fire with that one

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what's your most unhinged hp take?

Idk. Maybe that Snape’s arc is unironically the same type of arc characters like Peter Parker go through?

Not really unhinged though, just funny. Idk, I’d have to think about it more lol. If I ever think of an appropriate one I’ll reblog this post, so follow me anon if you want to stay updated

[urupotter]

HC that Dumbledore talking shop with Snape about Potions or Occlumency is probably the only time he dislikes talking about magic. Basically the only times he’s talking to a superior in any area of magic since Tom Riddle and Grindelwald, brings up bad memories.

[urupotter]

tbh i think its kind of awesome how bodybuilding has developed its own body-aesthetic sense basically unrelated to normie body-aesthetic sense. its unfortunate it invovles a sort of self destruction. altho many of these guys seem to be having fun with it. it takes all kinds. all gods critters have a place in the choir

[urupotter]

I'm late to this but 10, 11, 15, 27, and 28 for the not from the US asks

10. Most enjoyable swear word in your native language?

I actually don’t enjoy the normal swear words all that much, but there’s a lot of pretty creative insults that are amusing even if I don’t really approve lol. “Hamburger graveyard” for a fat person is really mean but also amusing despite of it. “Lice slide” for a bald person is similar.

11. Favorite native writer/poet?

I’m not actually super familiar with local writers, but I do enjoy Horacio Quiroga I guess. Wrote a lot of horror stories that I read in school that I remember being unsettling and looking back probably weren’t age appropriate (there’s a particular one about a little girl getting her neck snapped like a chicken by her mentally handicapped brothers that really made me go wtf. Gotta promote the national literature I guess).

15. A saying, joke or hermetic meme only people from your country will get?

Hmm there’s a lot of very obscure football ones. One that someone who both knows Spanish and has recently seen a popular Netflix movie (Oscar nominated) might get is “no se lo come ni Parrado”, or “not even Nando Parrado would eat him” in English. Eating someone is a phrase often used to mean kissing, and Nando Parrado is a famous Uruguayan cannibal, who had to eat his friends corpses to survive after a plane crash left him stranded in the Andes mountains for three months (the movie Society of the Snow covers it on netflix, pretty great. Also Alive for an older take. Not as good though).

27. Favorite national celebrity?

I guess Diego Forlan gave me a lot of very happy memories as a kid, very good football player. Uruguay just doesn’t have a lot of famous people though lol. There’s some local celebrities but I don’t really care about that lol

28. Does your country have any mountains, rivers, lakes? What’s your favorite?

Uruguay is basically the capital + a bunch of towns and cities made for tourists on the coast. After you go inward it’s all flat grassland lol.

In the spirit of the question I really do think those beach towns are very pretty, there’s Punta del Este if you love glamour and party life (super expensive though), an actual city. If not you have places like cabo polonio or punta del diablo for more of a hippie feel.

[urupotter]

Makes sense. Tbh I don’t it’s possible for that message to not have been undermined, wizards in canon do essentially seem to be Muggles+, the same in every way except with fantastical powers. At least, not without going for some sort of explicit universalist message about how worth isn’t determined by skill/capability/intelligence/etc (an example would be Benthamite utilitarianism where ability to suffer confers moral worth, or any religion were it’s about holding to specific beliefs and rituals, or whatever. HP esque vibes based virtue ethics isn’t really suited to that sort of systemic morality imo).

I think your approach is perfectly canon coherent for what it’s worth. Wizards in canon shouldn’t be poor either what with transfiguration and conjuration, yet Lupin and Ron somehow have shabby robes either way (?). So making them actually vulnerable to muggle diseases even though in theory they aren’t fits with the rest of the sloppy worldbuilding well (in which stories the author finds interesting are prioritized over internal watsonian coherence)

I’m curious why you loathe the implication that wizards are immune to muggle diseases. Is it because it reinforces the idea that they aren’t really the same species as muggles?

thank you very much for the ask, @urupotter!

and the answer is - yes, pretty much.

how the body is understood, how illness and disability are thought about, how the medical system works etc. are all questions that i am primed to obsess over in any piece of media - even when they're not actually significant parts of the story.

which is to say, i completely understand the reason why the harry potter series treats these topics in the way it does. magical medicine isn't one of the themes the story is designed to focus on - which means that its purpose is as incidental worldbuilding detail which reinforces the whimsical vibe of the earlier books and the darker vibe of the later ones, and which means that its treatment in the text makes sense within the setting and genre conventions of canon. harry being able to take a bludger - a cast-iron cannonball moving at speed - to the head and living to tell the tale is the same as john wick being able to fall from a great height, land on his back, and then get up and walk around: he's an action hero in a fantasy.

and so wizards being more physically durable than muggles - and also wizards having their own magical diseases, and being immune to muggle ones - all makes sense within the context of the books as literature. kids don't want to read about harry having a cold. they want to read about him being a wizard.

but when i'm deciding to enjoy myself by taking the question of just how fucked-up wizarding society is much more seriously than canon does... the implication that wizards are immune to muggle diseases and that they are broadly unaffected by physical trauma unless that trauma has a magical cause really bothers me. entirely - as you say - because it directly undermines the series' thesis that the purity of magical blood is irrelevant and that the wizarding world's dehumanisation of muggles and muggleborns by treating them as, essentially, separate, lower species is wrong.

the main canon example of this which i detest is dumbledore's suggestion in half-blood prince that merope gaunt could have survived childbirth if she'd simply "raised her wand to save her own life". after all, if a little bit of magic makes one immune to experiencing complications during childbirth [unlike thousands upon thousands of muggles throughout history, who would probably have very much liked to have lived to see their children grow up]... then voldemort is completely justified in thinking merope's death was a selfish, shameful, deliberate choice.

[i do understand that the idea merope chose to die is primarily included in the text so dumbledore can segue into saying that lily "had a choice too", contributing to the gradual reveal in half-blood prince and deathly hallows that she's the key to the whole mystery. but i still think that jkr could maybe have though a little bit harder about what she was suggesting with this than she evidently did...]

and so i think in fandom it's both fun and important not to accept the idea that wizards are automatically resistant to anything which might kill, injure, or disable a muggle - especially because it lets us really play with some of the big worldbuilding questions surrounding the conventions and institutions of wizarding society.

what do disability rights look like in a world which is so rabidly intolerant of difference, and which appears not to have any sort of welfare state? the nhs is a recent invention, created in a muggle britain which is culturally and institutionally separate from the wizarding one: so is treatment at st mungo's free - and, if not, what happens to those who can't pay? how is queerness understood in a society which appears to have views on sexual expression which are fairly conservative - and how does this mean the wizarding state responded to the aids crisis? what do reproductive rights look like in this kind of society? if the dementor's kiss results in - essentially - a vegetative state, what is done with the people the kiss has been performed on? what might it be like for your relative to develop dementia at 100... when you know they might live to 250? what impact do biases about blood status have on how muggleborn patients are treated?

i just think it's interesting!

[urupotter]

Margot Robbie’s monopoly movie is a once a decade chance for some georgist propaganda, given that the inventor of the game was a georgist woman.

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Milei cloning his dead dog multiple times and talking to it for advice is Kwisatz Haderach coded. He’s the Argentinian Leto II