#and actually a fucking TON of what Niel Gaiman does

[ghostliest-ghosty-ghost-bastard]

My favorite kinds of media is where I watch/read/listen to it and then leave it thinking "that felt like a fanfic"

#because fanfic is exactly what you want for certain characters and when they dont do dusty old things in media and just actuslly have fun #im so happy with it #im talking sbout Good Omens and Spiderverse soecificakly right now but there are so many examples #hell a lot of Star Trek episodes that wre centered around Data make me feek the same #and actually a fucking TON of what Niel Gaiman does #Niel feels like AO3 human incarnate but in a sassy wine uncle kinda way like he was just vibing then the spirits got to him & pilot him now

[chantylay]

So I was having a think about JKR's writing style in Harry Potter, and I had a realization that I thought was kinda interesting/funny. See, the books are written with this odd sort of tone where it seems pretty light-hearted until you think about it for 10 seconds. So you read it as a kid and it's a fun adventure story, then you reread it years later and are like "holy shit that's super fucked up wtf."

And HP isn't the only children's story written like that (think Coraline or A Series of Unfortunate Events). But where Niel Gaiman or Daniel Handler achieved this tone on purpose and handled the subject matter well, JKR seems to have done it completely on accident and therefore failed to grasp the implications.

Like, she never got to the point where she realized just how dark some of the subject matter was. She just went "I want to do a darker version of the shoemaker and the elves story by making it so the elves are functionally enslaved by rich wizarding families. This will give some weight to the villains' actions and let me explore how this fits into the world building in later books" And everyone goes "J, you just wrote a fuck ton of slavery apologia where the elves are horribly mistreated and very literally enslaved but for some reason insist that they generally like this and don't want freedom. You made any character advocating for elf rights seem stupid for challenging the status quo. You had the kids put santa hats on the taxedermy heads of the Black family's former slaves like that was funny. JKR, what the fuck are you doing?" And she just... does not understand where the line was crossed between "the characters and first time readers are meant to be a little too young to fully understand the implications of the wider world" and "actively making light of things that are way too real for this story."

She is just too immature in her own right to have actually handled half the shit she wrote into her books. So instead of the reread leading to an "oh that is fucked up and that's kind of cool" like you get when this tone is intentional, you end up with "oh, oh what the fuck, that's.... How did I not notice that? Why didn't this get more backlash when it came out?"

If she were competent, it could have been clever, but she's just fully stuck in the first read of a 10 year old mentality. She has 0 ability to reason through to the logical conclusion of her own ideas, even after it has been pointed out to her directly. And I think it says a lot about how she got to where she is now.

#j k rowling #harry potter #literary analysis