Andrew Tate (the audio is bad. like, hearing this on Behind the Bastards made me need to pull over for a minute):
The UK police had this in 2015. He ran to Romania because multiple women were coming forward and the police couldn’t keep blowing them off.
What he did in Romania was the kind of dystopian hellish sex trafficking that the alt right whips itself into hysteria about.
He also influenced tons of children. He grabbed many teenage boys minds in a disturbed way.
Not that all stories need to have morals attached to them, but I think showing older teen protagonists who also struggle with PTSD (the threstrals serve almost as a direct “visual” metaphor) as treating the symptoms of someone who is experiencing some sort of severe psychological shock so callously. It’s the kind of thing Harry might think of doing, because what she tortured him with the pen, but you should have your good protagonist consider how that would make them worse than the bad guys, or maybe have Dumbledore or McGonagall give a speech. It’s not that Harry Potter has to be moralistic, but it does try at times?
Shouldn’t they mentally be flashing back to St Mungo’s - to see how fucked up Neville’s parents were - the way that Bellatrix jokes about it is considered fucked or I think Malfoy also does at a point.
Should Hermoine feel some form of subtle guilt, or, even just respect for a fallen foe? I guess the assumption is she’s not dead and magic medicine can make brains better.
Not as much as you think. (That Rick and Morty episode is probably more accurate to what most millennial women would want…) I understand body dysmorphia, I get feeling insecure about your body - that’s kinda what the point of bringing up my transness in the conversation.
I do think porn might be doing to young men something along the lines of what beauty culture does to young women’s bodies. I am empathetic, but in general the impact your penis size has on your life is almost always irrelevant to its outcomes, barring those bell curves and your own self fulfilling prophecies.
The idea that this insecurity can motivate forms of fascism can be important to point out. There does to be an obsession with “virility” on Elon Musk’s part, from the “spread my genetics everywhere” grossness. The kinds of men who join fascistic movements are often motivated by feelings of sexual inadequacy and an obsession with machismo.
There’s nothing wrong with being a man, but I think a tool in dismantling that kind of compensating masculinity that harms others is pointing out what it does possibly root to for them. Freud was full of shit, but he had some things right.
We should call forms of masculinity that are harmful unmasculine behavior and mock people who exhibit such traits out of our community. Maybe I’m trying a Dances with Wolves or Avatar here but there’s some use in having waltzed around a lot of sides of the line.
Some others from the esoterica.
It’s really tragic how much conspiracy spaces have been overtaken by scary alt right ideologies. I think there was some purposeful targeting of seriously mentally ill and vulnerable people with some of those conspiracies.
I want a return to like Whitney Strieber’s Communion. I would shit myself with delight given the opportunity to attend a conference where people talk about the wars between the Dracos, and whether or not the Greys are on our side, but part of the Dracos plan is making us gay or something. There’s always been the antisemitism on the periphery, but David Icke started making that impossible to ignore.
Spirit Science guy I think still steers that line (Jews are space aliens, just good ones).
Roswell, New Mexico is amazing - the town eats that shit up, the museum is awesome, the McDonald’s is done up like a UFO.
I once went to a lecture on Bigfoot in a used bookstore in a small town, where a man described an encounter where he was terrified by a family of Bigfoot into staying in his RV to a captivated audience of 8 people, including myself, my ex husband (who was not eager in his attendance), the book store owner, and few elderly couples. It was great.
The first four books are decent kids literature. “Monster of the week” stories are fun. Hogwarts is very appealing for escapism, the castle and the food are the kinds of place your imagination (and the marketing) can fill in where Joanne can’t.
I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t have a great fucking time when I went to Universal (this was pre COVID, I think she was a bit anti trans then but someone else was paying anyway). I would love to be a Ravenclaw - I can picture myself making a case that I should be allowed in the Restricted Section of the library, or borrowing a Time Turner to take multiple classes at once, or just the feasts (the unofficial cookbook can’t make it real, unfortunately. Most butter beers are fine enough.)
It works when we aren’t thinking too hard. When the characters can be stock, never grow and everything resets at the end. (I started the series with Book 2 as a child, and it had zero impact.)
She just can’t think about larger picture things. Her worldbuilding is ad hoc, based on whatever seems fun at the time. This is very fun when it’s a series of loosely connected one offs. It just doesn’t cohere as a story though.
It’s like The Boxcar Children or Junie B Jones or whatever the one that has like the time traveling tree house or whatever.
Like, I remember being excited to get Order of the Phoenix. I was the kind of Harry Potter fan that showed up to the last two book’s midnight releases, as well as the film. I have been “sorted” in costume. I don’t even feel cringe about this because it was fun. The fandom has made the series much cooler than it actually was. (HP famously got kids to read; playing Quidditch in gym was probably the only moment that class was not pure dhukka for me.) I say on this to make the point that my critique of her writing goes with a general appreciation of the series.
She’s a DM with ADHD. What the story is doing doesn’t matter, we’re just vibing. Some of the ideas are so fun and compelling that we’re bound to explore them further (there is some really compelling Left Behind fan fiction.)
The last three books just drop off in quality immensely. I wonder if some aspects of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are due to “George Lucas” syndrome - the editor can’t say “no” anymore. You can tell she’s trying very hard to make it seem like it was planned - “oh Tom Riddle’s diary was a part of this! Time to come up with a bunch of other McGuffins!”
Harry Potter doesn’t have any overarching narrative in the same ways that Warrior Cats, The Dark is Rising, Deltora Quest, or The Hunger Games series do. I guess you can include Chronicles of Narnia but that “overarching narrative” is literally a metaphor for C S Lewis’s beliefs about world history and religion. (A Horse and His Boy is a book I loathe the the point I seldom engage with the series.)
Voldemort is just a poorly characterized villain. The narrative falls apart because there’s no reason for him to do what he does. This is fine in silly “monster of the week” stories, not overarching narrative stories.
The motivation in the first four books is that he wants to live forever, because everyone kinda does, but he’ll do fucked up and evil things to get there. We can have stories where he is trying to come back but isn’t really a threat, everything is very low stakes.
The last three books try to steer us into the “overarching narrative” course. The big reveals as far as his true character tell us he’s cursed and evil essentially because he’s a mixed race baby, conceived in a rape by someone analogous to “white trash.” He’s insecure of his mixed race status, so he creates a fascistic cult and wants to institute a supremacist authoritarian government.
That is a very fascinating and interesting character, but unfortunately Joanne does not understand race at the level of complexity writing that kind of villain requires. She also does not have the kind of grace and empathy for human beings that are required to write such stories. It’s also not what the series was, so the tonal shift comes across as awkward as the time I used a racial slur in a short fiction piece in high school to come across as a serious author.
And when you compare her work to the standards of adult writing: she had to drop the pseudonym on her mystery novel when it wasn’t selling well. Remember how King did that with some pretty good work? Wonder where she got the idea from. She’s not a fan (anymore…)
She’s not a good writer, and I am saying this as someone who likes* the series.
I want to assure all cis men that essentially no women give a rats ass about your dick size. If you’re gay, then yeah you might get rejected by some size queens, but vaginas don’t care that much about anything past the first two inches. Size is really a neutral feature outside of extremes (too big and it hurts!)
I’m a trans man, and my “penis” is a micro penis. This doesn’t make me less of a person, but if I tried to compensate for it by being expressing a deranged and toxic masculinity (in Trump’s case, to the point of sexually assaulting multiple women), then pointing out that I am insecure about it would probably be a good way to call me out for being a shitty man.
Don’t forget love potions - a girl basically roofies Ron trying to get Harry. Voldemort is evil because his mom drugged his (muggle!) dad, and he left once she stopped drugging him.
Rowling is dealing with sexual trauma, as we know from her eagerness to weaponize it against trans people. But she also seems to have a morality system where anything the Good Guys do is Good, and anything the Bad Guys do is Bad. Whatever happened to Umbridge is something that was so traumatic even the sound can bring her back - and we are showing a character with signs of clear PTSD and with protagonists that think it’s funny to try to make them relive their trauma.
Professor Umbridge was lying in a bed opposite them, gazing up at the ceiling … Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her, either. Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were still bits of twigs and leaves in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed.
‘Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,’ whispered Hermione.
‘Sulking, more like,’ said Ginny.
‘Yeah, she shows signs of life if you do this,’ said Ron, and with his tongue he made soft clip-clopping noises. Umbridge sat bolt upright, looking around wildly.
‘Anything wrong, Professor?’ called Madam Pomfrey, poking her head around her office door.
‘No … no …’ said Umbridge, sinking back into her pillows. ‘No, I must have been dreaming …’
Hermione and Ginny muffled their laughter in the bedclothes.
I have taken some classes in religious studies, although I don’t know if I can say I formally “study” it. But it has been a lifelong “special interest.”
I just grabbed Hymnody from the thrift store so haven’t read it yet. But yeah, I read most of them.
As far as criteria, it’s complicated. I get a lot of books by thrifting - there’s usually a lot of bulk generic Protestant stuff, which I don’t usually pick up because one probably could fill an apartment with just shit associated with the Left Behind series or the Purpose Driven Life. (Or I Kissed Dating Goodbye in that above picture, that just got pruned into an art project because I could get another one for $1 pretty easily).
I’m usually seeking ideas that I haven’t encountered yet or things that are so ridiculous and kitsch that they amuse me. (Which goes for my book collection as a whole.)
Ie, the value in that SDA textbook Light Bearers to the Remnant is comparing what SDAs claim about Ellen White and the Kelloggs to mainstream history, and it would be fascinating to write an article on. Or I grabbed a copy of modern reprint book from the 1800s that argued that the wine in the New Testament wasn’t alcoholic, and watching someone contort themselves in knots claiming that Jesus turned water into grape juice is amusing.
The really kitsch stuff I enjoy stoned. I’ll watch videos warning Muslim women of the evils of painting their nails (you can’t clean your hands properly for prayer apparently, because water can’t get to the nail) or Bibleman or those classic Mormon cartoons.
As far as personal beliefs, I’m something like a Discordian ultimately. I don’t really “believe” in her, but I have rituals I do to worship Eris. (She wants me to get stoned, pretend to be Jackson Pollock and commune with her by typing random letters in the YouTube search bar - which is what I want to do anyway. She’s an awesome Goddess like that.)
Well yeah, that’s obvious. But I’m really trying to figure out what the opposing view point is.
She’s not really a great author? She’s an okay children’s author, who a lot of us have a tie to because we grew up with the series - but a great deal was tied into shred marketing. Scholastic and Warner Bros have a good deal of responsibility in making the series what it was.
The Deadly Hallows and the Horcruxes are both the most massive ass pulls in history. Cut most of books 5, 6, and 7; make the prophecy true but applicable to Neville; have Harry die at the end. Infinitely better.
The implication is that she was sexually assaulted by the centaurs.
The most immediately accessible gems of the collection.
I have a genuinely Scientology folder thing for a course and a Spanish DVD of Dianetics, but that’s at a friends.
I am fairly confident (as are my therapists) that I am somewhere on some sort of spectrum. However, when I looked at the process of getting a formal diagnosis, it was several thousand dollars which would not be covered by insurance and would be a full year at least on a waiting list. (I believe they also want to talk to your family…)
The average age of diagnosis for AFAB folks is around 30. Clinicians are not trained in recognizing the way that ASD presents in girls, and are to this day often taught that it doesn’t really present in girls at all (a current gig is tutoring intro psych - this was in a students textbook!)
Self-diagnosis is problematic, but you also must acknowledge that accessing resources to even get evaluated are often completely out of reach.
Oh yeah, if you have old BoM before some of the fun changes. Watchtowers would be fun too, only have got read through PDFs.
(I have training manuals for Mormon missionaries, the textbook on Seventh Day Adventist history as used in Seventh Day Adventist colleges, and watch the Left Behind with Kirk Cameron at least once a year or so.)
No!!! They are so much fun to collect! Keep them and send them to me!!!
The aliens show up and the world is supposed to end July 5, 1998, but the Conspiracy has deceived us such that we don’t even know what year we are in now.
Blackface is a bit more complicated and disturbing than “pretending to be like a black person for comic effect.” I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare it to to depictions of nerd culture.
It’s what stupid people think smart people sound like. I’ve never been able to watch it, but I remember hearing Sheldon brag about Ubuntu being his favorite Linux distribution? Like, can you imagine someone saying that in a room of Linux nerds?
It’s stupid and disrespectful to geeky people, but it’s not perpetuating harmful and violent narratives.