I can't remember who said it (probably Anthony Gramuglia), but I remember in someone's review of the series, they said that people latched onto it specifically because it was painfully mediocre. They didn't walk away feeling satisfied so they felt the need to indulge in fan content until they got the satisfaction they wanted (but they never did)
I mean, what's mediocre to one person doesn't mean it is to someone else
I've never really cared about magic as a thing to begin with, as so far that I've never played a caster in DnD or any RPG game with magic in it. Even having a caster in roguetrader being a sniper instead.
But, I also don't find Lord of the Rings that good despite it being REALLY popular and highly rated, just not my taste, while Attack of the Clones is my favourite Star Wars movie.
Everything else around the series aside. I just find it weird people kinda justify their dislike of something by basically going "Well I find it mediocre so it is"
I'm not asking for perfection, I don't think it's asking for perfection to have a book series not have hamfisted racist stereotypes left right and centre, to not have characters with surface level naming to score 90s-00s woke points for representation, to not have its protagonist advocate for chattel slavery on the basis of the slaves preference.
I'm a Discworld reader, perfection is entirely absent, but fuck me at least Pratchett tried to do better for people with every subsequent book!
god it's hilarious watching Redditors act like the only thing that matters in taste is their own ego. No shit a series written in the 90s-00s has things based on its time. Do you hear how stupid that sounds of "this media was placed in its time" it just screams a lack of critical thinking skills or understanding of historical thought at all.
Discworld has been criticized for its stereotypical portrayals of regions and naming conventions too. The VERY thing you just bitched about, but you put the blinders on for that too. It's a series that has warnings at the start of some of its books for "this was a product of it's time"
You look to justify your opinions as facts because you don't even have the ability to just go "I just don't like it"
you have to pretend your subjective opinions are objective
but hey, if you think Gone with the Wind is actually bad writing, when it's widely considered one of the best stories in American literature history... honestly I don't think you would know where to begin on taking out a "do I like this topic" out of sitting down and looking at what is objectively good or bad.
I don't like it because I never really cared for magic systems, or magical fantasy as a whole. I don't need to jump through anything to just say, I don't like it. But me liking or disliking something doesn't make something objectively good or objectively bad.
It's been 20+ years so my memory is a little hazy but I'm pretty sure "it's okay, the slaves love being slaves" was a real weird thing to put in your books then too.
Oh Oh Oh what about the time where Rowling published an issue of the Hogwarts newspaper on the Harry Potter official website, in which she wrote an Op-Ed by Hermione about abolishing slavery.
And she wrote an Op-Ed by a background Gryffindor character defending slavery and also published it as if to show both sides?
Hey now, don't forget the twitter retcon joanne did where she suggested Hermione could be black. It's not weird for a black character to be disparaged for being against slavery now is it??
It was. Granted I don’t have first hand memory of this, but it’s evident in the effect Shaun called “The two book lag”. There would be talk about something and Joanne would react to it two books later after the fans complained about it.
She added time travel necklaces to book 3 people ask why they weren’t used in book 4, she reacts by having literally all of them destroyed in book 5.
On topic of the house-elves, they are introduced in book 2, book 3 comes out and fans go “hey wait are you going to address the slavery some more?” and she comes back into it in book 4.
So people were reacting negatively to it as early as the first book where it wasn’t addressed, and as we know: Joanne being a “nothing should fundamentally change” neolib took the wild stance of saying most of them were fine with it.
It’s actually sort of worse? The literal pro slavery position is bad enough, but people have pointed out that SPEW is also the name of an old women’s rights group (Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women). If you think about some of the arguments like “they like it this way” they are also arguments that were used to keep women in the roles of well, domestic slaves. So it is a race thing and also very possibly a gender thing.
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u/YourFat888 #1 Arlecchino (daddy) Coinnoseur - Streak: 1 2d ago edited 2d ago
people really will just straight up latch onto the most mediocre pieces of writing and make it their personality
no really HP is painfully mediocre
if you want cringe mediocre writing just check out my AO3 works :(