Rules: explain why
Ready player one.
That has to be one of the cringiest movies I’ve seen, is tries so hard, too hard with it’s “WE LOVE YOU NERD, YOU’RE SO COOL FOR PLAYING GAMES AND GETTING THIS 80S REFERENCE” message and the whole “corporation bad, the people good” narrative seems written for toddlers… The fan service feels cheap and adds nothing to the story.
Finally, they trying to make the people believe that very attractive girl with a barely visible red tint spot on her face is “ugly”… Like wtf?
Yet it received decent reviews plus being one of the most successful movies of that year.
I’m just gonna hop on to say that there is zero world building in Harry Potter. I know that’s because it was written for a youngish audience, but like the only things that are ever built on are used directly for the story in that book, then mostly left alone.
No one comes back years later with a Time Turner and wrecks havoc, for instance.
The few comparisons to Tolkien I’ve heard of her works are so unbelievably unfounded and off base.
Not to mention she’s a TERF
I’m just gonna leave Shaun’s review here.
Harry Potter unintentionally made a whole subgenre of fiction that could be called “Harry Potter, but fixed”. Little Witch Academia’s workers union episode was great and Reign of the Seven Spellblades is a mid, but still fun anime that seemingly takes aim at opposing Harry Potter and JK(specifically, her anti-trans shit) at every turn. I haven’t read it, but Shaun seems to think that The Hog Father is a direct reaction to the house elf shit in HP.
Hogfather as in the Discworld novel? I could have sworn that was older than Harry Potter.
Edit: it is, but surprisingly only one year older than the first Harry Potter book.
I’ll have to relisten to the review.
Sanderson’s third law of magic: Expand what you already have before you add something new.
Not sure why this was downvoted. It’s a very good point. Sanderson doesn’t like being openly critical of other authors but it’s pretty obvious that applying his laws to Rowling explains a fair amount of why her writing is bad.
Fuck I hate her bullshit inconsistency with this. Prior to that shitty play coming out I could have given you a simple explanation for this. First: the time turners were all made inoperable during book 5 when the team went to the Ministry. This was shown explicitly in the text (and is an example of Rowling’s delayed reaction to criticism that I think the Shaun video brings up). It could be bypassed pretty easily if you wanted, but it also works well enough to explain why nobody else uses one anymore, for a kid’s book.
But more crucially, the way time turners work in the original is pretty clear: it’s a one-way trip back in time. In book 3 they travel back a matter of hours, and then work back to the “present” in real time. You can’t use it to go back and kill Hitler or something like that, unless you want to be permanently stuck in the past. It’s never said, but it’s feasible that it could have been expanded on by placing a hard limit on how far back you can go at all. Then she went and wrote the play and (supposedly—I never read or watched it myself) completely broke all of that. I suppose you could be generous and say she was following Sanderson’s 3rd law, but IMO it wasn’t so much “expanding” on what she already had as it was “completely retconning the way it works in a way that also undermines previously-established plots”.
And they were made inoperable in the laziest way possible. Like someone bumped a cabinet and ALL of them broke. Easy, no more time travel.
Fine enough for a kid’s book, but it tried to take itself WAY more seriously than that, just to continue to pick up and drop plot points and ideas constantly. I wouldn’t mind it if a fair few people didn’t hail it as if it’s a great work