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There's this fascinating twitter thread (unroll link for better reading) about A Minecraft Movie, and how it is fundamentally a Zoomer movie on an emotional level, not just a subject matter level. Specifically, he calls it (followed by some key excerpts, though I recommend the entire thread):
I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.
But in a way maybe this is all healing for Zoomers? There is definitely some actual awareness and maturity that their brains are on some level being cooked, they know they use TikTok too much, but there's still some earnestness left despite all that. Also, Minecraft is a weird thing because it is one of the few completely crossover experiences between Zoomers and Millennials, but even so, the actual experience is somewhat different. For Zoomers, it's a simple childhood exploration time and a cultural touchstone, with some nostalgia and force of memes and videos. For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, and with nerdy overtones. Spending time in Minecraft and building things creatively were quite literally different for the two age groups, in the aggregate. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close in the overt trappings, yet so far in their emotional response to modernity.
Thoughts? Is he way off base here?
About ten years ago, a new form of cultural criticism emerged on places as diverse as 4Chan’s /tv/, Twitter and Slate Star Codex’s Culture War Roundup thread.
The general message was always the same. An ostensibly mainstream or even outwardly progressive Hollywood movie was secretly Based™️, sometimes supposedly intentionally on the part of a secretly redpilled director or writer, mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.
I’ve written comments like this, I’ve enjoyed comments like this. But you can’t be too serious about them, and in fact you could write a similar narrative about almost any movie or TV show you can think of.
I mean, I am I completely misreading in Harry Potter the real world implication of the good guy position being that teens need to learn to fight while carrying their deadly weapons (wands) and it's only the bad guys that want to keep them unarmed, weak and vulnerable?
I don't think it can be read into everything, but I think there's definitely instances where the narrative strength of a trope that the author consciously rejects still forces them to argue for a position they abhor. Sometimes, especially when the author has strong cognitive dissonance in their worldview, a story wrestles away control of its own messaging from the author.
I think Harry Potter is an interesting example of the author not understanding her own text.
Or, well, it's an extraordinarily interesting text because of how widely and inconsistently it has been interpreted.
Structurally, as it were, the bones of Harry Potter are conservative or Tory. This is probably inherited a lot from the boarding school novel that it imitates, but it can't all be accounted for that way. Regardless of the origin, Potter is a series about legitimate institutional authority, tradition, family, and virtue. The demagogic populist Voldemort and the inept bureaucracy of the Ministry must both fold before these things. Harry is exuberant to the point of disobedience sometimes, but that is the necessary energy of a young man who is being trained into a stalwart defender of the moral order. Note the exaltation of marriage and family as well - Harry's significance comes from his parents, while Voldemort is from an orphanage after being abandoned by his mother.
J. K. Rowling, however, is a liberal feminist and a Labour woman, and when asked she interprets her own work along other lines - tolerance, feminism, anti-racism, a plea for equality, and so on. There are elements of the text you can read like this (anti-muggle-blood prejudice is certainly mocked), but on the whole this has never come off as terribly convincing. Hermione's experiments with civil rights activism, for instance, are generally played for laughs, and no character really takes a serious interest in large-scale change.
Finally there's the progressive fan read of it. Though the books are arguably pretty conservative, like Kirk/Spock, Harry Potter slash was massively influential and I don't think you can write a history of fandom in the 20th century while omitting it. That goes hand in hand with the interpretation of Hogwarts as something like a giant closet, and eventually the whole Resistance-coded reading of Potter that we've all seen widely mocked. Despite my tone here, I don't actually want to treat this reading with contempt. What a book becomes 'in the wild' can vary considerably from what the text actually says on the surface, and from what the author thinks it's about, and the huge explosion of creativity and fan interest in this version of Potter suggests that, however unintentional, there have been resonances here.
(I theorise that it's to do with the academic setting - the classic boarding school novel is set in a world where secondary and higher education are genuinely Tory, but the world of the 21st century, especially in America, is one where higher education has become a progressive bastion, so now the idea of the authority of the school and the values it seeks to impart to those in its care reads as progressive.)
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I suspect Rowling is simply completely unaware of the real-world implications of Defense against Dark Arts, and would instinctively shy away from recognizing the analogy. A more charitable view would be that she recognizes it but thinks that the world of wizarding is a throwback to earlier times when such things were necessary, and in our civilized world we have government to do our defense for us -- that sort of thing is not uncommon among American gun control supporters. It clashes with the idea that the magical ministries are pretty obviously satirizing the real ones, but whatever. There's a 0% chance Rowling meant people to take the lesson that children should learn to defend themselves effectively with deadly weapons, and if people actually took that lesson I am sure she would be horrified.
It's also an instance of a more general problem of fiction aimed at minors; you typically have to make people of similar age the major players in the book, and to do so you have to give them far more responsibility than they have in the real world. Or maybe the problem is not actually with the fiction.
I feel like the whole thing wasn't ever designed to be rigorous in the first place. The way magic works is inconsistent, consistently whimsy, and conveniently suited to whatever the plot is at the moment. I want to double-underscore whimsy here (the chocolate frog cards? ever-flavor beans? constant alliterations? freaking owls?) and point out it's really more whimsy for its own sake, rather than making a broader point (like magical realist novels do). Rather than world-building taking place from the start, offering hints as to future books, aspects of the world are constantly tacked-on in precisely the book they become relevant. Major events are plainly ret-conned as the series progresses. There is never a satisfying explanation for why the magical world actually manages to stay hidden nor how Muggle tech never gets used at all - except for, like, trains. I also feel like HP was ahead of the curve of the "modern" YA novel - later entries would be much more explicit in their attempts to place teenagers front and center in the plot.
So yeah, the point of the novels is to be whimsy, and explore a Chosen One narrative in a school setting. That's it. Everything else is bolted on and accessory.
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The simple, textual answer is just that DoDA in general only worked against bad guys. Expecto Patronus only kills Dementors, just like holy water only kills vampires. Indeed, when Potter et al are in duels, they largely rely on a disarming spell, not the death or pain spells. (The limited dueling repertoire is definitely a weakness of Rowling's action scenes.)
DoDA works on everyone; as I think Sluggy Freelance points out, levitate someone out a high window (perhaps after disarming them) and they're as dead as if you used the killing curse. And of course they DID learn the unforgivable curses; Harry tries to use two of them. There's Stupefy (stun), Petrificus Totalus (body bind), Sectumsempra (cut), Bombarda (explosion), Confringo (blasting), Incendio (fire), Levicorpus (hang someone in the air by his feet; strangely specific but probably quite useful for interrogation). Lots of good stuff that works on everyone.
This is even made explicit in the books themselves at one point: Harry defends his use of Expelliarmus in a broom chase by pointing out that Stunning them will make them fall from their brooms and kill them just as well.
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It has to be noted that unlike defending yourself with a gun, a wand is a lot more optionally lethal. The stunning curse that Harry habitually uses and teaches his classmates in Order of the Phoenix is probably less dangerous than a taser.
The caveat is that all those spells are only reliable against an enemy who can't use shielding charms. Avada Kedavra is the only spell advertised as something that can't be blocked.
The discrepancy isn't that Rowling "doesn't acknowledge they teach defense with a deadly weapon in Hogwarts". It's that they explicitly don't teach you to defend yourself in the only reliably lethal manner.
They DO, though. Well, "Mad-Eye" does, but he is the DaDA teacher at the time.
Right, but it’s noted that those lessons are basically illegal and permitted only on Dumbledore’s say-so. They’re also noted to be pretty unethical and leave Neville and Harry semi-traumatised. They don’t teach any of those curses either, just how to resist them. And finally of coursethey’re an initial hint that Mad-Eye is a Death Eater, although they can’t be that out of character for the original .
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Harry does in fact use two of them, right? In Deathly Hallows he uses both Imperius and Cruciatus. The only one he doesn't use is the Killing Curse, and even that seems a bit hollow considering that the conclusion of the novel hinges on him using magic to kill the villain.
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Forgive the geekiness, but Sectumsempra is very pointedly a bit of obscure dark magic that a teenager had no business learning - the whole deal is that he finds it in what later turns out to be Snape's old diary, and uses it on Malfoy without knowing what it'll do. It wasn't something he was taught in defense class.
Yeah, both Sectumsempra and Levicorpus were Snape's. He wrote them as a teenager, IIRC, being a dark genius himself. Still, even if you don't count those, there's plenty of DoDA spells that work just fine on good guys.
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Of course, and the people advocating kids being thaught to use and encouraged to carry weapons also hope and believe that the kids would only ever use reasonable force, only in situations where it's reasonable to do so, and wouldn't use them for anything like griveously hurting a classmate due to some run-of-the-mill bullying.
The students in Harry Potter mostly use disarming or stunning spells in combat, but they do separarely also learn fire spells, explosion spells and a lot of other spells which would require only a tiny bit of imagination to turn lethal.
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I think half the fun of these "misreadings" of the text is that it forces us to acknowledge the complexities of reality: even in a constructed magical world, "but what if I need to use (near) lethal force to defend myself?" is in fact a question that doesn't have a trivial answer. Well, some partisans on both sides would have you think it has two different ones, but I'll accept some level of nuance.
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Of course, she didn't mean it, but she still wrote it, in detail, over multiple books. Her hand didn't slip. When writing a world that made sense to her, she basically wrote children should be carrying and training in the use of weapons that range from tasers to bazookas, in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.
She would be horrified to hear that's a takeaway from her books, but it still is an opinion that she persistantly expressed. I think it's not a meaningless accident but a fascinating window into discordant beliefs she holds (ie: mostly a clash between "Trust the Institutions" and "Fight the Power!")
There is an interesting moment in HP 7 where they are preparing to smuggle Harry and the Dursleys to safety. Vernon Dursley asks why he has to trust his family’s safety to randos and suggests talking to the Ministry of Magic.
“Harry laughed; he could not stop himself. It was so typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the Establishment, even in this world that he despised and distrusted.”
Ultimately the only way to hold both pro and anti establishment views is to also hold to a steadfast belief that there is a very narrow and clear line between a benevolent establishment you should yield to, and a corrupt one you should resist. Which is to say, you shouldn't need guns, except if you live in Nazi Germany or know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years. If Vernon had suggested that Harry asks Professor McGonagall, a "good coded" authority figure, would have Harry laughed him off?
But even that is hardly followed in Harry Potter. As while it's hard to know what would have happened if the heroes had yielded, the books seem to make a very broad anti-establishment point frequently, rewarding the heroes rebelling against the orders of even benevolent authorities. For instance, not sheltering when ordered to by Dumbledore and fighting a troll to save Hermione.
I think the key here is to trust tradition, which means some establishments but not others. Dumbledore is the central authority figure in the book and he is to be trusted implicitly. Where establishments are to be defied, it's because those establishments are modernising, bumbling bureaucrats. Dumbledore and Umbridge are both figures of institutional authority, but only Dumbledore is a figure of tradition. Umbridge is a come-lately, an interloper appointed by an authority that is both ignorant and interfering with something beyond its proper scope.
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I'm glad you're trying to steelman it, but isn't this a great counter-example to the "we don't need self-defense until it's almost too late" philosophy? Maybe 100k Jews got out of Germany to avoid the Nazis (peak Jewish-German population was in 1910, so many were surely leaving for other reasons too), and roughly another 350k got out after the Nazis took over but before they made emigration illegal and really started in on the mass murder of the remaining 150k ... but that didn't make as much difference as you'd think in the end, because the biggest single source of Holocaust deaths wasn't the victims who had failed to escape Nazi Germany, it was the 20 times as many Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. When Poland was invaded it had still been trying to negotiate a day before and it was conquered a month afterward. If you're only ready to defend yourself against corrupt establishments that give you a few years' warning then their natural countermove is to just not give you that much warning.
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To steelman as much as I can, yes to the first point (defending one’s own life and limb) but not the second.
DADA was never portrayed as being about defending against the government; it was always about fighting off malicious magical creatures (earlier books) or dark magic performed by evil witches and wizards (later books). That the Ministry of Magic was at first subverted by a recalcitrant Fudge who wanted to cover up Voldemort’s return, and then co-opted by Voldemort himself, was never mentioned as a reason for studying DADA.
Does it matter?
In practice the unsubverted government saw competent wizards (reacting to a real threat) as a threat to it. Its response was to select the longhouse manifest, Umbridge, to totally remove all practical knowledge in favor of book learning and indoctrination in schools.
The subverted government was obviously even worse. Most wizards are incompetent at defense magic, and as a result seem powerless once Voldemort starts imposing his will. The well-meaning apparatchiks like Umbridge reveal themselves to be tyrants just waiting for an excuse.
In practice the message ends up being that you can't trust the government (not even to protect itself) and so must defend yourself. That's basically the RW American take and the Ministry of Magic is arguably more arbitrary and illiberal than the US state.
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I think what @2rafa is getting at is that certain writers are "covertly based" i.e. they have edgy political opinions which they are consciously choosing to hide, and smuggling them into their works under cover of darkness.
I think what you're getting at is certain writers being "unconsciously based" i.e. they sincerely do not hold any edgy political opinions, but if you follow the implications of their writing to its logical conclusion you end up in a surprisingly edgy place, which the writer did not consciously intend.
I think the likelihood that JK Rowling believes (whether consciously or unconsciously) that real-life teenagers should be armed with deadly weapons is somewhere around nil, even if that's an entirely valid reading of the Harry Potter books.
2rafa did mention the unconsciously based in passing, I was just pointing out that I don't think it's an exercise in mental masturbation to analyse it but rather a window into an internal conflict in the author. I wouldn't be so quick in saying that JK Rowling doesn't believe unconsciously that real teenagers should be armed. She probably will never admit it. But I think her bedrock beliefs would lead her to that position, because when she tried to write a story in coherent universe she built herself it naturally led her there. She will only persist in claiming the opposite because the anti-gun/gun control was strongly imprinted onto her by the society she grew up in.
Given the extent to which she's made herself persona non grata among the woke set by her refusal to budge or play along on the trans issue (the hot-button political issue of the day, especially in the UK; there are essentially no British equivalents to American 2A diehards insisting on the right to bear arms), I put a lot more stock in Rowling's willingness to speak her mind, even if doing so would make her unpopular. I mean, we're talking about a woman who went from being the most successful and beloved children's writer of her generation, to having her fans turn on her, dox her, send her death and rape threats by the thousands, compose creepy fanfiction about her violent death - all because of her obstinate refusal to mouth woke platitudes she didn't personally endorse.
I don't think Harry Potter is a coherent universe, and I don't think she ever intended it to be. Whatever pretense of internal consistency was abandoned as soon as she introduced time travel, then promptly forgot about it.
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Idk what you mean by misreading. It's certainly not JK Rowling's position. I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.
We have guns, we use guns, but for sport and hunting and as objects of beauty. I don't think the narrative you mention would even occur to most people - it's not that the anti-gun side has beaten down the pro-gun side, it's that for all intents and purposes the battle doesn't even exist in people's heads. Nobody would describe themselves as anti-gun either.
I'd say that a clear supermajority of the Finnish people hold this belief, at least - with the caveat that the definition would have the armed people being the Finnish nation as represented by the conscription-based Finnish Armed Forces and the bad guys and their oppressive government being Russia and Putin.
No, these are not the same and in context are close to opposites. Trusting the Finnish Armed Forces would be like trusting the Ministry of Magic.
I think this is a case where there is a lot of mutual incomprehension between Americans and Europeans due to different historical mythologies reflecting different histories.
In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the American Revolution*, liberty is secured by the ability of the nation-in-arms to check the power of the armed forces of the democratic state. In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the French Revolution, liberty is secured by the fact that the nation-in-arms is the armed forces of the democratic state**. Finland (alongside Switzerland) is one of the few European countries where that is still a realistic statement of how the armed forces work. Contra Nybbler downthread, if you accept that worldview then the Finnish government didn't corruptly turn on its own people in order to appease the Soviets - the Finnish government and people surrendered to the Soviets after losing the Continuation War.
* The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop on what we (wrongly) saw as the least important front of a three-continent mostly-naval war against France. This isn't quite true, but it is a lot closer to the truth than "Colonial militias were able to take down the British Empire by virtue of local knowledge and superior woodcraft."
** It wasn't
So, the difference is pretty much down to how much a state is considered to be contiguous/coterminous with its people, rather than being in a separate and implicitly-adversarial relationship?
Somewhat, though not entirely. Even when the French people consider themselves to be in an adversarial relationship with their government (which is most of the time), they expect that the army would ultimately take the side of the people over the government. (Or at least did during the period where France had a large conscript army.)
It is worth noting that at some level the US Red Tribe know that the French model is closer to factually accurate than the Paul Revere one. As soon as you start talking about the practicalities of "what happens if a Blue-controlled Federal government decides it is no longer willing to tolerate armed Reds?" everyone agrees that what would stop them wouldn't be the armed Reds shooting back, it would be the lack of sufficient Blue-aligned goons able and willing to enforce the order against trivial opposition.
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I know it's not the same thing, I was just playing around with the literal meaning of the words.
It has always struck me that the American belief that the most likely chance to have to face down an oppressive government from the inside is a belief enabled by the fact of belonging to the most powerful country in the world without any conceivable external enemy that could defeat it in warfare; in a small nation with a powerful authoritarian neighbor, the threat matrix and the perceived ways to combat that threat are obviously different.
Also, the same weapons and the same spirit that effectively precludes totalitarian domination also precludes domination by foreigners. Or in the vernacular, "welcome to the rice fields, motherfucker."
Quote attribution, please
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As Abraham Lincoln once said:
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The American belief goes back to the Revolutionary period, long before the US was the most powerful country in the world.
The Finnish Armed Forces and the state they are embedded in, of course, cannot be trusted. They'd be happy to appease their big Eastern neighbor by oppressing their own people rather than fighting; they did it before, after all.
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I know, I'm mostly expanding on the aspect 2rafa mentioned with:
Which is likely the case with JK Rowling. I just think it's a very worthwhile aspect to analyze in media, and likely the result of an author not examining their own beliefs honestly, and not just an empty thought experiment. Not every children's book ends up making an accidental case for teens carrying guns to school.
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