Hogwarts Legacy - Harry Potter open world action RPG prequel set in the late 1800s

[Dhaze]

I also think it's fun to read a book "actively" and try to figure out how the world works, what's going to happen next based on characters motivations, etc, etc rather than just passively and I find that good books often reward paying attention.

Fully agreed. And not only is it fun, but it's also a great learning tool. Even bad books can reward mindful reading—sometimes becoming more rewarding even than good books, in a certain way.

That said, I would have no particular beef with the woman's reputation or success, [...]

Yeah, that bothers me too. Certainly more than it should. Pratchett? Leiber? Moorcock? Nope: according to some there hadn't been a fantasy writer in the U.K. for decades.

I know at various points in their lives Moorcock and Christopher Lee envisionned, with enthusiasm, the possibility of the latter incarnating Elric on the big screen. But their plans didn't come to fruition, and as Lee became older and older, both men thought he would eventually embody not Elric but rather his patron Arioch, Lord of Chaos. But that didn't pan out either, and Lee eventually died. Imagine, had Lee played that role of Arioch after appearing in the LOTR movies, thus riding on the phenomal success thereof; it could have triggered a discovery or recollection of sorts in the mind of the british public, anent the wonderful fantasy writers they already had.

 

[Conan]

Chad tier writing tbh, only losers who obsess over crap nobody cares about waste time thinking about consistency.

Thinking of the way various details of a story commingle or conflict with one another can be an interesting endeavor in its own right. I'm not sure I envy those who don't care about consistency; though I guess they would make a fantastically easy-to-please readership.

Imagine Rusty reading a book centered around Pietro Aretino.

Chapter 17: Aretino writes his Soneti Iussuriosi.
Chapter 18: Having done so, he loses the favors of Clement VII.
Chapter 19: "... and Aretino, whose favor with the pope never faltered in the least, ..."
Rusty, forcing himself to not do a quick double-take: "Whatever. Don't give a shit. I'm not a loser."

For fiction made for adults sure, but Harry Potter was a series made for young children and the writing reflects this. Basically

What Grant Morrison (whoever that is) does not get is that you don't ask questions in *children's stories*. The rest are exempt from the dumb audiences.

 

[whydoibother]

Comparing Harry Potter to other childen's books (e.g. A Wizard of Earthsea, which also revolves around a boy wizard coming of age) doesn't do it any favors either.

Harry Potter isn't selling the fantasy of becoming a wizard. It selling the fantasy of finding out your real parents were famous brits and going to Oxford University to be a celebrity. Its for poorfag kids to pretend they are brit princes.
So much more of the fandom is about brit things, like traveling far away to study, living in a student dormitory at that young age, about inns and tea and the school being an ancient building full of historical portraits and so on. Its selling britdom more than selling wizardom. Its less Earthsea and more Beatles.

As for a coming of age wizard story, the more obvious choice is Wheel of Time. And that comparison looks even worse for HP, despite the author dying of fat before finishing it.

 

[wwsd]

Rusty, forcing himself to not do a quick double-take: "Whatever. Don't give a shit. I'm not a loser."

correct

I always wonder if Jacobean people walked out of the theatre in disgust when Shakespeare gave Bohemia a coastline. What a hack!

 

[Morenatsu.]

Plotholes are what total fags care about. Stories aren't for entertainment, they're for research into the hoomin mynd (of dumbfuck brit wimmins).

 

[Roguey]

P.S. on a side tangent, "it's a children book" shouldn't really be a free pass for sloppy writing.

The classic fairy tales weren't fixated on explaining the workings of all their fantasy elements and they were all the better for it.

 

[thesecret1]

The classic fairy tales weren't fixated on explaining the workings of all their fantasy elements and they were all the better for it.

Yeah, key point being fantasy elements, not logic.

 

[Roguey]

Yeah, key point being fantasy elements, not logic.

"It's illogical that Red Riding Hood doesn't immediately recognize the wolf as a wolf and instead asks a bunch of redundant questions about why her grandmother suddenly looks different."

 

[Dadd]

Comparing Harry Potter to other childen's books (e.g. A Wizard of Earthsea, which also revolves around a boy wizard coming of age) doesn't do it any favors either.

Harry Potter isn't selling the fantasy of becoming a wizard. It selling the fantasy of finding out your real parents were famous brits and going to Oxford University to be a celebrity. Its for poorfag kids to pretend they are brit princes.
So much more of the fandom is about brit things, like traveling far away to study, living in a student dormitory at that young age, about inns and tea and the school being an ancient building full of historical portraits and so on. Its selling britdom more than selling wizardom. Its less Earthsea and more Beatles.

As for a coming of age wizard story, the more obvious choice is Wheel of Time. And that comparison looks even worse for HP, despite the author dying of fat before finishing it.

Underneath it all it's a bare-bones shōnen.

 

[whydoibother]

Yeah, key point being fantasy elements, not logic.

"It's illogical that Red Riding Hood doesn't immediately recognize the wolf as a wolf and instead asks a bunch of redundant questions about why her grandmother suddenly looks different."

Wolves can't even talk.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

P.S. on a side tangent, "it's a children book" shouldn't really be a free pass for sloppy writing.

The classic fairy tales weren't fixated on explaining the workings of all their fantasy elements and they were all the better for it.

Ok? But that has hardly anything to do with what I wrote.
JK Rowling's writing wasn't unimpressive only because "It didn't explain things" and Tolkien's writing wasn't good just because it did.
In fact, Tolkien used to deliberately omit a lot of background information/additional context for the stories he wrote, even in cases where he already had previous write-ups about the topic.

 

[thesecret1]

Yeah, key point being fantasy elements, not logic.

"It's illogical that Red Riding Hood doesn't immediately recognize the wolf as a wolf and instead asks a bunch of redundant questions about why her grandmother suddenly looks different."

This is explained by the wolf being in disguise. The wolf being able to talk is the fantasy element and needs no explaining. Red Riding Hood mistaking him for her granny does need explaining, hence it being mentioned that the wolf is in disguise. Even a little kid would note the discrepancy otherwise.

 

[Sarathiour]

Yeah, key point being fantasy elements, not logic.

"It's illogical that Red Riding Hood doesn't immediately recognize the wolf as a wolf and instead asks a bunch of redundant questions about why her grandmother suddenly looks different."

Wolves can't even talk.

Well, try explaining this then, smartass :

 

[Serus]

Comparing Harry Potter to other childen's books (e.g. A Wizard of Earthsea, which also revolves around a boy wizard coming of age) doesn't do it any favors either.

Harry Potter isn't selling the fantasy of becoming a wizard. It selling the fantasy of finding out your real parents were famous brits and going to Oxford University to be a celebrity. Its for poorfag kids to pretend they are brit princes.
So much more of the fandom is about brit things, like traveling far away to study, living in a student dormitory at that young age, about inns and tea and the school being an ancient building full of historical portraits and so on. Its selling britdom more than selling wizardom. Its less Earthsea and more Beatles.

As for a coming of age wizard story, the more obvious choice is Wheel of Time. And that comparison looks even worse for HP, despite the author dying of fat before finishing it.

No, no, no... No. Just no! As poorly written Rowling might be she isn't worse than Robert Jordan. Wheel of Time is the most bland, boring, derivative piece of fantasy writing i ever had misfortune of reading. First 2 or 3 books or so, it was a gift. I was in early teen and even then i understood quickly how bad writing it is and stopped reading. Later it turned out that this is not only bad writing bad a scam of sorts. Lower than WoT you have only things like fanfics. And maybe Twilight - haven read that one.

 

[whydoibother]

Braid tugging is based and you are a fag.

 

[thesecret1]

Pratchett wrote best british fantasy. It's too bad that alzheimer and his woke daughter both cooperated to make the last several of his books complete dogshit, but the works he made prior is some of the best fantasy stuff out there. And that's despite him being a liberal leftist with retarded politics.

 

[NecroLord]

that it is Batboy who does it after cleaning up all the jizz in the Wayne sex dungeon every morning.

 

[NecroLord]

 

[Nifft Batuff]

"Fantasy is like porn. Nobody cares about plot holes."
-- J. K. Rowling

 

[moon knight]

Harry Potter's writing is great. And it's a children's book only for the first 2-3 entries.

 

[Morenatsu.]

The best harry potters were the old games and legos!!

 

[Dadd]

The best harry potters were the old games and legos!!

Old Harry Potter games were terrible.

 

[Roguey]

Harry Potter's writing is great. And it's a children's book only for the first 2-3 entries.

What’s happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale bookstore and bought and read a copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character “stretched his legs.” I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now only read J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn’t, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn’t that a good thing?

It is not. “Harry Potter” will not lead our children on to Kipling’s “Just So Stories” or his “Jungle Book.” It will not lead them to Thurber’s “Thirteen Clocks” or Kenneth Grahame’s “Wind in the Willows” or Lewis Carroll’s “Alice.”

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, “If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King.” And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read “Harry Potter” you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I’m 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I’ve seen the study of literature debased. There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she’d been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn’t even good nonsense. It’s insufferable.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

The first Harry Potter book reminded me of some books by Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach) -- a poor, mistreated child discovers that the world is a far more expansive and wonder-filled place than he ever imagined. But the writing was far more pedestrian and the world-building made the mistake of trying to straddle the line between fairy tale and reality. Nobody asks why OSHA didn't toss Willy Wonka in prison, because those kinds of realism-based questions so obviously have no place in the fantastic world Dahl created. Rowling tried to integrate the wizarding world with the real one and she needed to work out the implications of a fiction containing both. She utterly failed to do so.

 

[Lambach]

Harry Potter's writing is great. And it's a children's book only for the first 2-3 entries.

What’s happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale bookstore and bought and read a copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character “stretched his legs.” I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now only read J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn’t, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn’t that a good thing?

It is not. “Harry Potter” will not lead our children on to Kipling’s “Just So Stories” or his “Jungle Book.” It will not lead them to Thurber’s “Thirteen Clocks” or Kenneth Grahame’s “Wind in the Willows” or Lewis Carroll’s “Alice.”

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, “If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King.” And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read “Harry Potter” you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I’m 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I’ve seen the study of literature debased. There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she’d been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn’t even good nonsense. It’s insufferable.

Pop literature written to simply entrertain people isn't a masterfully crafted piece of high art, news at 11.

"Jungle Book" may very well be a million times better in terms of writing, but for the target audience of Philosohper's Stone (kids and young teens), a story about some Pajeet that grew up with animals will never be more interesting than a story about a seemingly normal boy suddenly being told he's "The Chosen One", getting invited to live in a magic castle, flying on a broom, fighting a giant troll, becoming invisible when he likes etc.