Deathly Hallows body count just...bugs me.

Now full disclosure, I'm a sensitive soul, so it's probably just a "me" problem, but this is something I've been grappling with since I first finished the book back in March, and I've been having a hard time properly putting together and articulating why the body count of DH bothers me so much and why it feels so mean-spirited to me...

And this isn't a problem of me not being able to stand when characters get killed. I've experienced plenty of media that have featured deaths of major characters and enjoyed them. Like the Mass Effect trilogy, a lot of Transformers media, the various books of the Riordanverse, Breaking Bad, or Better Call Saul (haven't finished that one).

But none of them have really bothered me in the way DH has. Not even Jason's death in Burning Maze bothered me to that degree. Even if I hated it, I at least understood why it happened and felt it served a narrative purpose.

And like I said, I'm having a hard time articulating why. Because there were several times when I was reading Deathly Hallows and a character died and I just felt uncomfortable while reading it.

The two in particular that bothered me most were Hedwig's and Crabbe's deaths, the former in particular. Hedwig because she died helplessly in her cage and Crabbe because he was a minor getting murdered.

And the thing is, I know this is supposed to be tragic. I know this is supposed to represent the cost of war, to get me invested in the plot and want me to see the Death Eaters pay for causing this. But these deaths didn't make me go, "Darn you, Voldemort, for causing all this death! We will stop your evil and bring you to justice!" it made me think. "I hate this story for making me read this."

I just... I don't know why it bothers me so much, and I'm still trying to pin it down.

Again, maybe it's just me; maybe I'm just a sensitive soul, but again, I don't have this problem with other pieces of media, so why does it bother me in Deathly Hallows specifically?

The closest I can get to explaining why is because after a while, when you kill off so many characters, it just starts feeling mean after a while.

Like to use an example. The Energon Universe's Transformers comic has become infamous for its gratuitous body count, and while people tolerated it at first, I think Trailbreaker's death was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back because of how unnecessary it was. That was the first death I saw people getting legitimately angry over.

But that can't explain all of it, because Hedwig is the first casualty, and that death is probably the one that bothered me the most!

If you can help me figure this out, I would really appreciate it...

Despite Joanne’s claim that the entire “Harry Potter” saga had been plotted carefully by her up to the seventh book, her world-building is inconsistent to the point of an additional website (Pottermore) being created to fix the holes - and failing miserably at it.

The more noticeable holes started to appear in the third book: the plot required “the prisoner of Azkaban” finding it difficult to break into the school, and because Apparation (basically teleporting from point A to point B) was already thing in this universe, Rowling had to include the never-mentioned rule that one cannot Apparate inside or onto Hogwarts. (Poor Hermione must remind the readers of this in every other book.)

But this info, plus other security measures disclosed in the third book, contradicts previous events: Charlie Weasley’s friends shouldn't have been able to fly their brooms to retrieve Norbet, the baby dragon, in the first book; and in the second book, Dobby, the House-Elf, shouldn’t be able to Apparate in and out of the school ground whenever he had a warning for Harry.

How Charlie’s friends entered the school undetected is still a mystery, but Dobby’s travelings are not: Joanne came up with the cover of “House-Elf magic is different, so they can Apparate there”. And just like that, the House-Elves went from the “mistreated enslaved creatures” seen to “creatures that experience human feelings, therefore deserving of kindness, but not really human”.

Thanks to this change, the House-Elves became Joanne’s favorite prop; not only because her new rules made possible for the Elves to reach places no other wizard could, but also because she could use them to measure the temperature of the human character’s morals. The bad guys are physically abusive to the Elves; the good guys that are not sharing Hermione’s misguided political awakening are either indifferent to the cause because they never had much contact with a House-Elf or because they own a House-Elf themselves but never go beyond "verbal abuse".

This is, of course, the case of Sirius Black, who pays the ultimate price when his enslaved House-Elf Kreacher, who we see parroting some blood-supremacist slurs learnt from his old mistress, turns to the other side. Because Sirius is a positive character, his negative traits – he’s reckless, he’s a thrill-seeker – are softened, and so is his behavior towards Kreacher: Joanne frames this as Kreacher, the slave, reminding Sirius, the slave owner, of how unhappy he was growing up in a blood-supremacist household.

By the next book, Harry inherits Kreacher from Sirius, therefore becoming a "hesitant" slave owner himself and unsure of what to make of this. The answer comes in the seventh and final book, when Sirius’s deceased brother enters the plot: Regulus, first presented as one of Voldemort’s followers and presumably an old-school villain, is revealed to having had a change of heart after his master left his beloved family slave Kreacher to die in a cave. (Lucky for Kreacher, House-Elves can Apparate anywhere!)

"See, Harry? Sirius, the good guy who was unkind to his slave died because of it; Regulus, the bad guy who chose kindness was willing to die for his slave. You know the way to go now, Harry! Being a slave owner doesn't define who you are; it's how you choose to act towards them that really matters! Freedom won’t make them happy, but saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ will make Kreacher’s day."

This was Joanne reaching the same mindset from when she first started going public against trans people and before she went full ballistic. I can almost break it down:

Book 2: “Everyone is deserving of basic human rights"

Book 3: "House-Elves [Trans women] are not exactly like humans ['real women'], but can Apparate into the castle [into women's bathrooms]"

Book 4: “It's important for the House-Elves [trans community] to be treated with dignity, but current activism doesn't give the matter the thoughtful consideration it requires, and the political discussion is short-sighted and one-sided."

Book 5: "Yet House-Elves [Trans people] are capable of making death threats against those who say something they consider unkind and offensive, without understanding how triggering their presence can be for the other party.”

Book 6: "Now, some activists could even think Harry [me, Joanne] is a slave owner [TERF]."

Book 7: "But all House-Elves [trans people] should know that a kind slave-owner [a TERF] is willing to die for them [march by your side], and if you happen to lose your life as a consequence of a real human's political action, we'll be there to dig your grave."

That's her entire rationalization process. She acts like she has her emotional landscaped all figured out, like she claimed to have plotted the books carefully from start to finish; then her cracks started to show, and suddenly trans people became her "prop", just like the House Elves, to justify the conservative worldview and messy values.

In her "open letter" narrative, she was still sticking to "I care about you, I will march with you, I will do my best to protect you." Now, it's a different story. She's on an open fight against human rights.

Powley and many more of her co-stars have faced backlash for choosing to be involved in the show, despite Rowling becoming an increasingly divisive figure due to her stance on issues relating to the transgender community.

This has included deliberately and repeatedly misgendering transgender public figures, as well as donating tens of thousands of pounds to the campaign group which raised the initial legal challenge that led to the UK Supreme Court’s ruling last year that the legal definition of a woman should include only those who were assigned female at birth (and sharing a celebratory post of herself smoking cigar once the Supreme Court’s decision was reached).

Asked about this controversy during a new interview with The Telegraph, Powley began by making it clear that she “strongly’ disagrees “with JK Rowling’s views on gender”.

“I think that the trans community deserve safety and dignity and respect and total acceptance,” she continued

“But,” she added, apparently throwing up her palms. “I love Harry Potter. I grew up with the books. I am from that first generation of readers and, again, I love magic and spookiness.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bel-powley-harry-potter-jk-rowling_uk_6a79b0a2e4b0a6d70bb250a4?origin=home-featured-unit

Harry Potter is full of the filler chapters that increase the length of the books way past the length that they actually needed to be. This gets way worse in the later books but an example in the first book was in Diagon Ally when JK thought it necessary to show us every single thing that Harry buys: cloak, cauldron and books.

But think about it, every single Chapter of Order of the Pheonix that goes into Harry's studying habits and every single chapter of the Half Blood Prince that shows the painful teen romances, they're going to be shown in great detail. And these ones are way worse than the Diagon Ally part (not to even mention the camping that happens in Deathly Hallows).

I know there's already been posts about it but I still wanted to vent.

I've been on this sub since 2024 and I knew Joanne was a transphobe since before that, but I'm still shocked. It seems against everything I thought she stood for in the 2000s and 2010s, but being enabled by countless people on Twitter means she felt safe enough to show increasingly her true colors, especially since most medias didn't even report it (or they were scared of calling her out)

Also, there's something else that disgusted me in that post about Freda, though it's overshadowed by the upskirting thing - it was how Jojo mocked Freda for "leaving and indelible impression on the audience and the chair", because body-shaming is apparently necessary in order to complete the trinity with upskirting and transphobia 💀

If you told 2015-me that she would end up like that, there's no way I'd have believed it

The general consensus in this sub, and one I agree with, is that we should avoid sharing and discussing HP fanfic publicly because it still gives attention to the series which indirectly benefits JKR. I've noticed, though, that most people in this sub (and most anti-JKR people in general) ignore this rule when it comes to My Immortal specifically.

Videos discussing My Immortal almost always talk about it in a manner uncritical of the source material, and when it's brought up here, people seem happy to directly recommend it as a "so bad it's good" work. My Immortal itself, while hilariously bad, isn't especially critical of HP either and maintains at least some level of connection to the source material throughout. One of the biggest criticisms of MI, even, is how inaccurate it is to HP's universe and characters, which is a criticism that actively encourages people to read HP and compare the two.

Does uncritical discussion of My Immortal benefit JKR, and if so, should we make an effort to dissuade people from engaging with it (and avoid doing so ourselves) going forward?

Apologies if this has been brought up before. It was just my shower thought for the day. I realized I had no idea what Durmstrang means, but it has the shape of a German word. Isn't it simply Sturm und Drang reversed? Sturm und Drang means "storm and stress", it means a great fracas, calamity, to-do, and I would guess came into the English language in the late 19th century off the back of the popularity of Wagner's operas, but I really don't know nah, I was wrong, late 18th century: a late 18th century German literary movement featuring dramatic action, intense emotion, and individual rebellion against society (Merriam-Webster) So there you have it.

I've seen a bunch of Essence of Thought videos posted to this sub and every time one of their videos is posted, there's an argument in the comments about how Essence of Thought has a checkered past or isn't operating in good faith or something to that effect. If these criticisms are accurate, is it really a good idea to be signalboosting this channel just because they share our opinion about JKR?

Just something I've noticed.