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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 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.
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.
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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