It should have been animated, but for some reason executives(and a big portion of the audience) think animation is a genre for kids and not a medium that can tell endless stories.
This is what I always felt! It would separate it and give it a chance to do things live action can’t portray. Also it wouldn’t matter if kids got older or actors left or died because there could be a sense of continuity that the original couldn’t.
Remaking a book/movie series that was originally very well received, not that long after original release, at its historically least popular state- due to the author, mostly- AND attaching her name to it is just an absolutely terrible idea. I have no idea why this ever got approved
Money. Money. Money. Capitalism does not care about anything but the bottomline. Mostly short-term. Long term it would be wise to focus on maintaining the franchise, but its a risk they are willing to take. Cause it will make money. Star Wars probably lost lots of money right after the disney trilogy, but I'm sure they made it back with the TV shows.
It's been over 23 years since the first book had an adaption. It's been plenty of time. It's also better than making up random stories about the series with the failed fantastic beast spinoff. WB is treating this IP like a break in case of emergency for easy money.
@@gilbertoflores7397 I think we disagree on the definition of plenty of time, honestly. The films aren’t outdated, they still visually hold up. Remaking them at this point screams “we have run out of ideas, hand us your cash”
@@princessadrigirl6774as someone who loves the movies, there’s a lot even in later movies that doesn’t hold up visually, like them flying through the burning room of requirement. Also, there’s endless post online about how much the movies left out from the books that a show could include
It bothers be that Hollywood's fear of risk has become associated with comic book movies. Comics take some of the biggest swings in the medium of story telling. Superman lived 400 years into the future and fought two robot clones of Hitler, batman once wandered a wasteland and carried jokers severed head in jar, the entire Marvel Universe was saved by Franklin Richards (a six year old boy) when he created a pocket dimension to keep the Avengers and Fantastic Four safe when they were almost killed by Charles Xavier being possessed by magneto. But they never adapt those stories. They just make movies where Iron Man acts like Dean Martin.
Harry Potter was a generational phenomena. But its done, living of nostalgia nowadays. The USA media need to understand stories are supposed to END and repeating the same story to milk it does not work...
@@internetkurator9256 Then you're just wrong. Huh, it's actually funny how simple things can be sometimes. You personally not wanting more of it doesn't mean more shouldn't exist.
The first Fantastic Beasts movie was not bad by a long stretch. It actually did a lot of really great things, and I'd argue that the choice to make the movie about some random throwaway character is actually the right choice for quality. It's a step in the opposite direction of the shameless fan-service/sequel/reboot territory. It was actually original and stood on its own, while still exploring aspects of the world that people fell in love with. That's what expanding a franchise should look like, taking a beloved world and telling new and unique stories within them rather than the obvious ones that everyone asks for. The sequel, however, fell into that shameless fan-service sphere with all of its attempts to tie it into Harry Potter. I highly recommend the video "The Fantastic Masculinity of Newt Scamander" by Pop Culture Detective, which touches on a lot of what makes the first movie (mostly Newt Scamander, admittedly) so good. I'll also add as someone who was recently diagnosed autistic, that Newt's character seems heavily coded autistic but is portrayed in a very positive and not super stereotypical way, a kind of representation that is severely lacking in media right now.
I super agree with you. Loved the first film so much. I think the failure is fantastic beasts 2 and 3. They forced the story of the wizarding war into newts story and as a result they were both worse than the first fantastic beasts. I would have watched ten films about Newt and his friends just adventuring around the world, solving problems related to fantastic animals and helping people everywhere they went. It could have gone back to the HP roots of mystery stories, and I would have loved it. Instead they forced Dumbledore and Grindelwald into Newts films, resulting in canceling the whole franchise because the writing was too scattered and no one was interested
I agree with you! I would have loved a mystical, 1930s version of Steve Irvin. Makes me so mad that they chose to focus on Dumbledore and weird family connections instead
I’d like the fantastic beasts movies better if they’d done separate movies for newt and separate ones for dumbledore/grindlewald. Their stories just don’t make sense when combined.
@Cruizinelli12 Il liked the first movie a lot. As for the second, I thought Dumbledore/Grindlewald was going to be a Wizard WW2 Era movie. Wizards and the Allies covertly fighting against the Nazis and their Wizard associates (the Nazis really liked occultism). But instead Grindy shows that the muggles are bad because they started WW2 meaning the wizards are fighting someone who wants to stop the war. It was a mess.
My classmate told me that he couldn’t read Harry Potter because it was satanic or play Pokémon because it supported evolution. This was 2010 in California
That's the same stuff religious parents said about it in the 90s and 00s when they were coming out. Good to know the crazy religious nuts never change.
Yeah, having been indoctrinated into fundamentalist Christianity, don't be too hard on the guy. It's hard to break free and when you do, the usual result is losing all your friends and your family. The price of freedom is too high for some, so they stay willfully ignorant.
The worst part is, Rowling is so good at naming. Say what you will about the woman, but she is damn good at naming things. And yet when it comes to Cho, she just did not care.
I have to disagree with one thing emphatically: the movie industry was always profit driven and most artistry had to be fought for tooth and claw except that now advertising and data analytics have developed far far more and there's much more data on what sells and how to cater to the biggest audiences. After all, people say Blazing Saddles couldn't be made today, but it also barely got made 40 years ago, and the movie industry monopolies were broken up 40 years before that. (Approximately in both cases)
You know, I've never considered how similar the straight-to-streaming and Marvel secrecy/green screen is to the studio-exclusive contracts in the golden age... Although I can't imagine a studio wanting an exclusive contract these days because it means they'd have to guarantee work.
@@Manakuuchiha I was literally thinking earlier today like "Did they cast Harry Styles in Eternals and similar actors just to have that established relationship whether or not the movie goes well?"
Marauders show is so obvious, it’s the biggest missed shot ever. Literally has an amazing school setting, great characters and character arcs, inbuilt powerful villain/threat.
They even have a morally complex set protagonists, given the fact that as teenagers the Marauders were, not terribly, bad people. They broke rules, were problematic with other students and they felt like they owned the right to do those things because they were smarter than their peers. But they could also show how friendship, time and responsabilities change us into better people.
If we're talking about racial sensitivity, taking nothing away from your main point, we need to recognise Parvati Patel as an explicitly named Asian character, long before Cho Chang.
Y'all I don't think the Indians who live along with all the other Patils and Padmas care about this. Like we love that there's people who r named like us. N we cringe at the pronunciations. We don't really have the energy to care.. Wait u prolly don't too. Lol. We just njyoin some internet drama
@@apilolomi4354 I apologize if English isn’t your first language but shackles are famously used to keep people in bondage usually against their will… it’s a bit less than ideal that Joanne thought to use shackles as the only black man’s name
The animorphs graphic novel is pretty good so far... But yes I agree HBO should adapt it, dark-and-gritty style. Also KA Applegate seems to be genuinely good and non-problematic.
The animorphs graphic novel is pretty good so far... But yes I agree HBO should adapt it, dark-and-gritty style. Also KA Applegate seems to be genuinely good and non-problematic.
The animorphs graphic novel is pretty good so far... But yes I agree HBO should adapt it, dark-and-gritty style. Also KA Applegate seems to be genuinely good and non-problematic.
It's just interesting. I remember people talking about wanting this on Tumblr years and years ago. Must have been 2014. There was this post saying, "no but imagine Harry Potter as a tv show sort of like Game of Thrones where each season is a book and each episode is a chapter everything could be fleshed out" And this was quite popular. It's weird to think about it in retrospect, because no one could have seen things unfolding like this at the time.
Kids on Tumblr thought no one was listening to them. Fandom became extreme there, but it was just a way for them to express their creativity. It was never supposed to make it to the mainstage and no one ever thought it would the way it is now
The concepts like the house elves, so called ‘half breeds’ like Hagrid and the Centaurs not being treated equally to wizards EVEN by the ‘good’ ones is actually the point. Good, kind and clever people can participate in bad things just because they’re normalised. That’s why Hermione as an outsider could see it and Ron couldn’t.
@@hayleyhellbound9513 The whole point of SPEW seemed to be 'Hermione does activation wrong.' It was treated as a joke, not as something positive. And while, yes, there is point that even 'good' people might not be 100% good, nothing is done with that point in the books or films.
But remember, Rowling made the narrative say Hermione was wrong and this system was CORRECT. Which is absolutely disgusting. Rowling had this entire book give a whole "Oh Hermione, you'll understand when you're older!" Giving a, "She's DIFFERENT. She's one of the GOOD ones. The EXCEPTION!" Which is... putrid. This is a real thing. And it's in these book and it should make your skin crawl. If a narrative has to do this sort of override, it's not a good narrative. It's telling the readers they're too stupid to make their own connections. This isn't what happened. There is a sort of caste system for magic in Harry Potter and Rowling is just fine to let it exist. Exceptions like Hermione are different because she's a human. Everyone else? Forget them. They are the rule. That SHOULD bother you.
you are forgetting one thing, if you are going to comment on it you have to show actual consequences and growth. its not the so called good ones doing it being the problem, its JK Rowling shows in the text and dialogue they are being correct. Why else would she describe every bad person as ugly and fat if not her thinking some of is ok?
Bang on. There are many things that have aged poorly in the books, Rowlings obvious disdain for fat people being the most obvious to me but the wizarding world being full of immorality and discrimination is one of the nuanced aspects of the books. At no point are you encouraged to think that Dobby's treatment is ok or the way Hagrid is shunned a good thing, the treatment of prisoners at Azkaban is explicity pointed out as being morally rephrensible, and Sirius's character is shown to be permanently damaged from his experience. JK Rowling has become a deeply reprensible character and if you examine her works then of course you'll find traces of it but the media literacy of the people going through Harry Potter looking for problematic issues, they always settle on these easily disprovable points and it's sad to see.
I think Rowling has had some kind of mind break where after she finished writing the original series, I think she has come to quietly resent it over the years or something cuz she doesn't seem to care how the quality of the associated projects have gone over the years. This reboot is gonna be a hot mess
And it all stems from her failed follow-up, where the only person who wasn't straight or white was the serial killer big bad. After that flop, she took the crack pipe all the way to supporting literal n@zis.
@@springshowers4754 Peeves is a mischievous spirit called a poltergeist that lives at Hogwarts and has a fairly significant presence in the novels. He's basically just a pest/nuisance, but he's fun and wacky and can have really good moments, especially when played against Filch, who DESPISES Peeves and basically assumes any disaster is probably his fault. He's just a quirky piece of world building that never had huge plot significance, but still added a ton to the flavor of the wizarding world.
I always had a hope that if they did ever plan a reboot/retelling of hp that they would do it as an animated series. With the success of series like arcane, I don’t think it would be too out of left field.
I will always stand by this: Fantastic Beasts should have been a book series. And I love the first movie. But the plots don't feel like movie plots. The screenplays are written like novels, so let them be novels. Maybe the cancellation was a blessing. We can get the final installments in a format that fits.
Yes, it should've been like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, she probably knew early on there was going to be a movie, but Collins is an author of novels. I'm not saying you can't be both, but it's always a bigger risk to go into a new medium.
I honestly agree, those movies felt like they were written like a novel and not a visual medium, the movie constantly implemented storytelling techniques specific to the written medium and further fumbled by failing to incorporate visual storytelling techniques. I’m a storyboard artist and I’ve encountered a lot of scripts over the years that were so obviously written by a novelist who didn’t understand the visual medium they wanted to work with 😓 while things like story structure and character arcs are universal to all storytelling mediums, many storytelling techniques are VERY medium specific. Honestly, if so hadn’t taken creative writing classes as my electives at university I don’t think I would’ve ever appreciated just how differently you have to approach storytelling depending on the medium you’re using. For instance, internalisation (especially when using First Person narration) is an amazing technique in a novel, such direct access to a character’s inner thoughts is the written medium’s greatest strength, but if you try to do a 1 for 1 of that in a visual medium like a movie, it’ll be an awkward voice over monologue completely detached from the visuals, visuals that could otherwise communicate the same information, mood, etc via its own medium specific techniques. Conversely, I’ve read books by authors who clearly were envisioning their story as a movie and their descriptions read more like the art and camera direction annotations on a screenplay than actual prose 😅 such novels are trying so hard to make the reader experience their story as a movie and are basically trying to tell their story via visual storytelling techniques and get bogged down trying to make the reader literally “see” their story as vividly as you see a movie rather than conveying the story through any of the non-visual storytelling techniques that good novels always use. So it definitely goes both ways; novelists and screenplay writers have to be VERY careful whenever they write a story for the opposite medium to what they’re use to, I’d honestly never advise writers jump from one medium to the other without explicitly studying the storytelling craft of that medium, you can utterly ruin a story if you don’t understand the medium you’re working with!
@@Sanakudou i recall when Hogwarts books first had geocities fanpages & i wrote real diary from syudent perspective,,,,myspace 2003,, 2010..i wrote 7 year ,, 25,555 day journal,,each hour a new class,,, new blog page every day ,,every hour ,,,i was a wizard all right ,, i would post & forget & never go back to edit,, cos i had no time ,,i was always typing 300 words an hour..lol...i 'd do it again too.....by 2015 we got the Ilvermorney School.. but no basic origin ,, so i made it up,, another 25,555 days,, in 2022 i thought ,, ah job done,, ah tv show,hmm.please hold ,,ok a Harry Potter tv show,,yeah ,,new 7 years til..2029.. hey show til 2036,,yeah 14 years ..more,,teehee ,, by 2040~ 2047.. thats 50 years ,,like starwars 1977~2027,, wow we got old,,
Ah, well. I grew up with Harry Potter and I do understand why my generation can't let go, but at the same time it's hilarious to see adult people refer to themselves as Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Co. on dating apps. I get it, Harry Potter had a huge impact on us and it's okay to love it, but we're at a point where it's romanticised too much and with that comes that any new movie or series set in the Wizarding World is doomed to fail. Nothing can compare the nostalgic feeling a whole generation carries and can't let go of. Accept that companies want to milk your precious nostalgia as much as possible. If you want to cherish your feelings towards Harry Potter til the end of your days: just ignore every new production instead of complaining it will ruin your childhood memories. Same with Disney. Just ignore it and you can live with your own imagination of Harry Potter or Arielle forever and ever.
If it's hilarious for grown adults to call themselves by a fictitious school house it should also be just as hilarious when they refer to themselves as having incorrect chromosomes.
@@orphanedhanyou I am begging you. Interact with real people outside. No trans person pretend they have the opposite chromosomes. They dont deny what they were born as. They just would like you to use preferred pronouns, and also take a shit without being told to get out, it isnt that hard.
I think HBO cannot be trusted with their current management after the season finale of House of the Dragon. The CEO got involved and demanded 8 episodes instead of 10 and stayed with that even when there was a writer's strike and nothing could be changed. The fact that he would meddle in their biggest show and actually make it worse, there is no way this Harry Potter series would not have this sort of meddling. This new management is not the same HBO that signed on for infinite seasons of Game of Thrones. THey cannot be trusted to fucked it up and they will because they are so blinded by money. I think the fact that the first thing they did after the merger was a planned Twilight reboot says it all. It's not about quality, it's about trying to squeeze all the money out of things and if they can't they will shelve things (like Batgirl) so no one can ever see it. If anyone is excited show them the last episode of House of the Dragon and I think that excitement will die immediately. They ruined my excitement about the whole world of Westeros shows they have coming up because Zlavits is going to put his little fingers into everything and sacrifice quality for the all-mighty dollar.
I really appreciate the section on "is harry potter bad, actually?" I think it's a reflex people have to write off a problematic person's past work as actually having been bad all along which always seems to be kind of missing the point.
It’s the only way for most to reconcile somethi by they love being made by somebody they hate. I imagine if it turned out Tolkien was a turbo racist and ate children nobody would look at his extensive world building with glee or that anything he ever made had any impact or was ever good despite literally all evidence to the contrary.
@@creed8712 I mean, his world building does contain a considerable amount of racism that people do regularly revisit without having to critically pan the rest of the books because they aren't actually that comparable to HP. HP does have a lot of writing flaws entirely separate from even its problematic elements. I think a lot of people like to pretend they ALWAYS saw it when they didn't, or pretend there's nothing redeeming or interesting about them (the films I think highlight the best of them whilst trimming the worst writing choices or at least distracting you from them). But... they actually aren't particularly well written, especially on a revisit. The bloat alone in those last few books...
@@elena_1776 I flat out hate that treatment cause again any books written before literally last year could be considered problematic and if the world is always perfect and has no problem then why the hell should we read it it tells nothing.
Back when the reboot was first announced, I watched a video from either Jessie Gender or Council of Geeks pointing out the announcing the new series was a strategic ploy by the cash-strapped copyright holder. I can't remember all the details (and I don't feel like rewatching the entire thing just to place a TH-cam comment) but the theory was that rights to the Harry Potter IP was one of the biggest asset they had, and the original seven novels was the most reliable money maker. So they pitched the series to their shareholders/bank/corporate partner as a way of pointing out how solvent they were in the long run. This strikes me as the most probable answer to the question about why they were doing a reboot now. Honestly, while it's impossible to to know yet, I find myself wondering how well this show will do. For the OG fans, their loyalty is already cemented to the movies. For younger kids, for whom 'Harry Potter' wasn't their childhood, they know the author as that unhinged transphobe who cyberbullies any woman she deems insufficiently feminine by Caucasian standards. Thus if they do give the show a try, it'll be with a jaundiced eye. If it's good enough, they'll probably watch it, but I doubt they'll fall in love with it like Millennials did. And that doesn't factor in what stupid things JKR does in the meantime to further destroy her reputation in the meantime. I commented that on another video about the upcoming series, before her online harassment of Imane Khelif. We've got roughly two years to go before the new series airs, so it's almost a given that Rowling is going to say more hateful things in the interim. Not only will turn off potential new fans, but even the long time HP stans may find it increasingly difficult to justify continued engagement. Just sayin'.
It is honestly a baffling choice to make the show to begin with and shows how disconnected corporations are with reality, for now we can only let time pass and hope to god that the writer gets succesfuly sued by Imane Khelif
@@sentineluno i hope she doesn't again, Rowling is not an evil person, and damn it i desire to see the show see the most accurate harry potter, not fucked over by some of the screenwriters. and the limits of 2 hours
@@emperor_msk Also, if we don't get more Owl House then the image of the original core story may remain untainted. What has the Harry Potter franchise put out since the movies ended that's been good or memorable? The first Fantastic Beasts? Perhaps. If we're being charitable. But all the set up got screwed up thanks to those horrendous sequels. I can't think of anything else that's been memorable or seen in an overall positive light.
I liked the Owl House as much as the next periphery demographic watcher but you're absolutely on one if you think it's anywhere close to HP, either in reach or popularity
I wouldn't say the books are "bad"... But they aren't great either. They're accessible and easy to read, Rowling seems to be good enough at pacing to keep events moving and keep the reader engaged. Otherwise, they're incredibly shallow and unless you're right leaning and libertarian, they are too steeped in Rowling's worldview for any message to stand up to adult scrutiny. Once you include her complete inability to accept any kind of criticism or to admit to any flaws or plot holes, the veneer of nostalgia fades quickly.
I never got that impression at all, and I'm kinda shocked so many people nowadays read the series as some sort of rightwing propaganda. I guess some things got lost in translation because I diodn't read them in English.
@@dn5633If read with a political lens, Harry Potter has pretty horrible politics. It’s steeped in 90s neo-liberal “we don’t need to change the system” bullshit. I mean, Harry literally ends up being a cop defending the same broken system that gave him so much trouble as a teen. Not to mention the narrative condones slavery as long as the owners are nice. Shaun has a really good video essay that goes into the shitty politics of Harry Potter if you’re actually curious.
HP is not great literature. It's a children's story by a children's author who grew past her abilities. The fundamental magic and economics were completely ignored or unacknowledged. It's a fun world, but can't compare with Middle Earth or Dune. An active editor empowered to push back would have been a huge help. Once they started filming and needing prompt content, there was no hope for fixing the technical issues with the world building.
>It's a fun world but can't compare with Middle Earth or Dune I disagree. I think a fundamental aspect of the reason Harry Potter doubles either of those franchises in total gross (at least movies-wise, but I'm sure the monetary gap is just as wide with books) is precisely because this nerd fantasy has greater appeal than the other two nerd fantasies. No one is looking for formulae laying out how Transfiguration works - they want to go to Hogwarts.
@@pbradleyking Fantasy literature can still be great without needing to be just as great as the two most popular and widely loved fantasy/sci-fi worlds ever. Hakeem is still an all time great even though he’s not Michael Jordan. No nuance to your argument.
@@GreylockMountain If you wanna base quality on the amounts sold you're ignoring factors such as: What era it came out in, how many installments were written (LOTR has 3 books, so naturally HP's 7 will make more money), who it was sold to (Harry Potter came out during the era where teaching kids to read was at an all time high thanks to books such as the goosebumps series and animorphs, while when LOTR came out, children did not read books, not to mention the amount of people on earth was nowhere near the same amount). That's also not mentioning how we then default to Endgame being the best movie ever made? Or Justin Bieber being the best musician of his time? Not how these things work.
@@dn5633 I disagree tbh. HP isn't great literature by any stretch of the imagination. After book 2, they all lost the plot and are terribly written. It just happens that the movies also came out and fit so well into the zeitgeist that it shot the franchise into the stratosphere. That's not a bad thing by any means, but the movies play a huge role in the continued success of HP. The first book was a huge success on its own, but the latter ones gained alot from the movies, the soundtrack, the acting, etc, which replaced alot of the bad stuff in the books.
Hey, so, I was personally only a year or two older than Harry himself as the books were coming out. I have dark hair and wear glasses and was a scrawny kid; this passing physical resemblance combines with a love of the books and literally earned me the nickname "Potter" which was used by *everyone I knew*, family and teachers included, and lasted until I finished high school. To say that the Harry Potter books were formative for me would be a hilarious understatement; I read every book through at least a dozen times, and the longer ones easily more than that - Order of the Phoenix was my favorite. When it later developed that Rowling was becoming what she is now, it was *agonizing* for me to try and associate the love, friendship, whimsy and fun I'd always felt reading the books with... what the author now was. It was only three years ago now that I managed to convince myself to throw away my last remaining hard copy of Order, and it was a painful experience which took that long to build towards and convince myself was the right thing to do. This is all to say that your description of the communities which sprung up around Harry Potter as being full of loving, inclusive, friendly people has helped to... I'm not sure, create a distinction in my mind between what Rowling is, and what Harry Potter is. I'm not exaggerating when I say I had to duck into the bathroom at work to hide my tears while I thought about what you'd said, and how having a lingering love for the series I felt it was my duty to distance myself from might not make me as much of a traitor as it always felt like I was. I say this with absolute sincerity - thank you for, in at least some small way, giving me back a part of something which had meant so much to me for such a large piece of my life. I'm thirty six years old now and will never spend a single dollar of my money in a way which might have any chance of reaching Rowling, but you have helped that twelve year old boy nicknamed Potter within me stop feeling guilty for existing. Again, truly, thank you.
Chapter Timestamps: Chapter 1: Franchise fatigue 3:19 Chapter 2: Reboots 4:52 Chapter 3: State of the brand 8:59 Chapter 4: JK Rowling 17:29 Chapter 5: Is Harry Potter bad, actually? 20:50 Chapter 6: The discourse 35:32 Chapter 7: The movies 38:42 Chapter 8: Mystery 45:08 Chapter 9: Could they pull it off? 47:54 Chapter 10: Death 52:05
There is nothing that this show could do that fanfiction hasn't. Lets be so honest. Every awful storyline element, racist undertone, or transphobic statement has been explored and fixed through the unimaginable mass of Harry Potter fanfiction on AO3. The marauders era fandom (built on almost no canon information) has taken on a deeply queer 'fanon' and produced more literary content than my public library could hold, and that alone is reason enough to know that a reboot is unnecessary. Unless Rowling dies almost immediately and somebody interview-with-the-vampire's that shit (lets it be gay) there is no concievable point to me
Maradeurs fandom already has countless movies and series, its called "Teen wolf" and "Euphoria" and "Smallwille" and "Winx live action" and countless other ips about 20-year old schoolkids engaging in vague mysteries and relationships
Coming back because I have more thoughts: I think there's a difference between the things the books' messaging was couched in and that messaging itself, and I think that gets pushed aside in a lot of retrospective looks at Harry Potter. Which, honestly, is understandable! I think you can make a good case for themes like the endurance of love, the importance and even beauty of death as "the next great adventure", and the strength and solidarity that comes from finding Your People being muddled and even ruined by the fact that Rowling regularly relies on misogynistic, racist, classist, ableist, fatphobic, transphobic, etc. characterizations of the characters who are supposed to be bad people, do bad things, or act primarily as set dressing. I think you can make a good case for those themes not being able to reach their true potential when put in a story whose protagonist is ultimately quite passive and a protector of the status quo, along with his friends and allies. I think we _should_ be able to make those cases, because I think that's how the next generation of writers learns to do better. But I also do ultimately think that, at that time, she meant well, and I think that for those of us who did speak that same language of tropes and stereotypes, who did understand the status quo as a good thing worthy of protecting, in writing a very basic "discrimination bad" story, she gave us some important tools to start deconstructing that language and understanding, even though she has clearly reached her own limits of that deconstruction. I think people like to mock the idea of Harry Potter being anyone's social justice starting point, but as someone who did grow up fairly conservative... I mean, it was for me, and I think it was for a lot of other fans I met and befriended over the years. It'd be a stretch to call it progressive for its time, but it was the first place I really learned that sometimes, questioning authority is a good thing. I guess what all that boils down to is that I can never really dismiss Harry Potter entirely. It's not an active part of my life anymore; it won't be as long as Rowling keeps going after trans people (and occasionally weaponizing lesbians like me in order to do it). But it was formative to me in a lot of ways that I think it would be pointless to deny, and I do think there's a lot of revisionism and unnecessary shaming going on when we say it was never good and we all should have known. And in line with (maybe expanding on?) what I said in my earlier comment, I think I would be curious at the very least to see what could be done with a TV reboot -- after Rowling has died and can no longer funnel her money toward organizations and policies that seek to make life worse for my friends. I'm not thrilled that this is happening so soon. But eventually.
I think that's a very balanced a reasonable view (and I wasn't even part of the target audience for the original HP, having been around 16 when the first books came out. I do like the movies though). Are there flawed details in the series? Yes. Is the world-building flimsy? Absolutely. Did JKR bit off more than she could chew with it as the story got progressively darker and more adult? Yup. But did this series capture the imagination of millions of young people with its themes of magic, friendship, loyalty and standing up for what's right? ABSO-FREAKING-LUTELY. I think by the end it fell victim of its own success, with people caring so much about it that they (and JKR herself) wanted it to be more than it set out to be: a whimsical magical story for children. When it failed to deliver, and when JKR fell into her current political stance, it was ripe for criticism, to the point where it's annoying how some people try to tear it apart over quite minor details, like they'd be embarrassed to admit there's anything good about it. It's a bit like with beloved sitcoms (like Friends or How I Met Your Mother) when after a period of adoration there comes a time of reassessment and suddenly everyone in those series is toxic and can't do anything wrong haha.
I agree that Harry Potter is a pretty good series of books and movies, but seperating the art from the artist is a harder pill to swallow when the artist is still alive to directly benefit from any financial endorsement of the product. As much as the series was formative for me as a child, nowadays I'm steering clear of it until Rowling's out of the picture.
Did anyone else feel like the Cursed Child made Bellatrix have less of an edge in hindsight? She’s supposed to be insane and obsessed with Voldemort, but if she was carrying his child wouldn’t she have stayed safe until birthing the child? She would be supposedly pregnant around when she killed Sirius Black. It makes it seem like she was just some girl who Voldy took advantage of, not a woman who decided for herself to be evil. Idk, it just rubbed me the wrong way. Makes her attempt at killing Ginny make less sense as well. You’d think you’d at least have a look of realization that she too is mother that is about to orphan her child when Molly stopped her
I like that you tried to be as nuanced as possible with this. It's hard to find anyone who has given HP any artistic credit, because it did have merit until so, so recently. I'm no longer a JKR supporter, though I was a fan literally since day one. It's been hard for me as a huge HP fan *and* a trans man to compartmentalize all of this. Thanks again for talking about this and being real.
A work of art lost its merit because its female author holds her own opinion of womanhood? Interesting. (And by that I mean I find it condescendingly interesting.) I still like The Fugees’ music even though Lauren Hill hates me for something I can’t control.
@@DanLovesBooks because it's terf author denies the OPs manhood* But still not really, no, because a lot of people have been dissecting the series for years even before Rowling started being a bigot and it just never was that good.
Can you help me try to understand why people are so angry with Rowling? I was a HUGE Potterhead during the release of the books but drifted away from the IP post-Deathly Hallows. I've never read Cursed Child, never watched the 2nd Fantastic Beasts, and don't follow J.K. on Twitter. I've only heard about the political issues peripherally. Please correct my understanding of events. To me it seems like J.K. Rowling genuinely wants to be an ally to the trans community. However, she thinks there should be a distinction between women and trans-women. She would still like to acknowledge trans-women as people who should be respected as much as anyone, and treated with dignity. It seems like she agrees with most of your values, genuinely wants to be an ally, and means well. The disagreement comes with her definition/distinction between woman and trans-woman. I don't mean to be dismissive at all. And I understand why someone could feel hurt by this "disagreement" (there is probably a better word to use). But is it really enough to call J.K. a "bad person"? She means well. You have to meet people where they are. J.K. seems to be an ally more than an enemy. She seems to want to help more than most people.
@@Jane-oz7pp jk has only said trans women and women are different...shocker. and denying ops "manhood'? R u serious? The op us trying to mimic being a man to relieve dysphoria, they're "manhood" isnt real .
The morals have aged well because they aren't nuanced.... like at all. Saying racism bad and leaving it there gives no room for bad actors to attack it. Which is good but its also kinda lackluster.
I kinda think the morals have some cracks in them if anything. In short there aren’t really any bad actions so much as there are people that we’re supposed to hate. Like, Harry can own a slave cuz he’s chill, but dobby must be freed because a bad guy owns him. The entire story is dedicated to returning to a comfortable status quo that the well to do protagonists can benefit from, merely by killing the big bad guy. None of the inequality or racism is ever systematically addressed by the end of the books. And Harry and his friends all get to become wizard cops and politicians lol
@@creed8712 the Japanese surrendered to allied forces under very complex political and cultural circumstances. the atomic bomb lays dubious at best claim to ending the war if that’s what you’re getting at
i think some people severely underestimate the general awareness of jk rowling’s behaviour there is in the general public. your typical coworker or friend of a friend at best has a vague knowledge that jk rowling has been cancelled but that does not impact on their love for harry potter in any way and would gladly devour a hbo series
There was some absolutely fantastic moments in this video but... It's a little frustrating that the acknowledged critiques stop at social critique because whilst bigotry does make a series worse, there's so much MORE foundational to HP's poor story telling (and I say this as someone who "was a fan" in the sense that I enjoyed the first four books and then forced myself to "enjoy" the last 3 because it was the only interest I had that anyone else was enthusiastic about). Bloated page counts, dull and tangential story telling (my god, book 6), inconsistent moral messaging ("good characters can fat shame but bad characters cannot" is bad not only because it's problematic, but because that's inconsistent and sloppy), poor tone control, copious moments where characters you're meant to like get unbearably grating, bad/missing foreshadowing (the deathly hallows are a particular standout - though clearly it's not for lack of planning, because the horcruxes were well established even if the magic changed), an unsatisfying conclusion that's about Who Got A Wand We Just Learnt About instead of a core theme or the protagonist's skill/traits, a further unsatisfying conclusion where it feels like a lot of potentially positive changes for the world were ditched in favour of the status quo.... the list goes on. And without getting unnecessarily CinemaSins Nitpick about it. It's part of the reason why the FILMS are particularly good - the scripts do a good job of trimming the fat and neatening the edges and I do think this recolours the original in a lot of people's brains because they are so iconic and memorable. Now of course the films took their material from the original so it's not as if there was nothing in those books that was 'good', so I can't fault anyone for being able to get past the flaws in them and genuinely enjoy them. But I know when I revisited them in that gap where Pottermore started getting weird but JK hadn't gone off the deepend yet I found myself walking away thinking "they... weren't that good, actually". As for the problematic elements - it's important to continually recontexualise that these are books for kids. Kids that are meant to age with Harry, sure, but still children. "This could be taken as a commentary on how activists are dismissed as annoying because hard truths are difficult to stomach" rings hollow when it's alongside a house elf who is depressed and alcoholic as a direct result of being freed from slavery. Most adults would probably not read it that way, let alone 13-14 yr olds. It's not revisionist to understand that the books problematic elements HAD been critiqued for years by minorities who finally started to be listened to as the cracks in JKR's armour started to show during Pottermore's early years. Unshockingly, it wasn't popular or often safe for marginalised people to critique the cultural juggernaut that was Harry Potter? I dunno man, "Cho Chang" has always been a racist name (etc) and people finally acknowledging that isn't "revisionist". That honestly added a weird taste to the rest of this video that was otherwise good. It's like... okay to have complicated feelings, it's okay to acknowledge the books/films had plenty going for them, but it felt... defensive. And for what?
Okay, well, after finishing the video and reading the comments, I feel like one more comment is necessary. My previous comments were all counter-points to things you said, but after seeing that the current comments seem to skew more in the negative direction than the positive, I think it's necessary to mention that this was an excellent video. Your arguments were very well-structured and thoughtful, and eloquently expressed. And the shifting of the recording setting was a cool touch as well. All in all, this video felt extremely professional and kept me thoroughly engaged to the end. It's certainly the quality of video I wouldn't be surprised to see on a large established channel.
I honestly don’t need a reboot…I love when they do stuff like “Tales of the Jedi” for Star Wars. To have small things focus of other characters that weren’t prominent in the films series. But…🤷🏻♀️
I hope they dont actually bother going through with it, but if they did start it, can you *imagine* her meltdown when it's inevitably canceled early (streaming shows just don't run that long, the economics of the model are so bad, especially for a show that will be expensive as hell to produce and the only possible product placement is its own merch.)
It’s going to do shit because it’s going to be shit and unsuited to steaming, but she’s going to spend all her time saying it failed because of a woke mob
@@Gomi422 lol it wouldn’t be a “woke mob”, it would just be another case of studios pouring money into a show that doesn’t offer sufficient returns cause the streaming platform economic model is kinda a nightmare and hard to finance. Shows get canceled very very often on streaming platforms because they’re hard to make money off of
There was a time where I would have really loved a marauder’s show but after all these years of jk rowlings terrible behaviour, I really don’t enjoy Harry Potter anymore :/
They can update the books to what they obviously always meant to say, according to JKR. Make all Death Eaters LGBTQ, Draco becomes crossdresser Drag-o, Hermionie makes studies of the age at which teenage girls are most ripe and fertile, Ron dies, so Hermione can get together with Harry, Dumbledore is now straight and has 23 children with McGonnagall (also he‘s played by Matt Walsh), Umbridge is a butch lesbian, the Dark Mark becomes the Rainbow Mark, and Voldemort‘s favourite spell is „Awokeakedavra“. Music sounds all like a Richard Wagner opera.
The funniest bit of this is actually that Wagner was one of the biggest inspirations for John Williams. His concept of the Leitmotiv is visible all throughout John Williams' work. The entirety of the Harry Potter soundtrack is heavily inspired by Wagner. So the original soundtrack already actually sounds like a Richard Wagner opera.
For me, at least, this HBO reboot is just a cash grab. It’s too soon after the series. And with JK Rowling beliefs I’m not looking forward to it especially that my beloved book series will more likely get made terrible
I LOVED the series but growing older I was just kinda starting to feel off about some aspects. I mean as a girl it was kinda always bad because there are so little female characters and they all suck. JK Rowling REALLY hates woman (not just trans woman) and it really made me hate everything gilry about myself . 10/10 recommend a video "Top Top 28 Female Characters in Harry Potter (and what they say about J.K. Rowling…) " But like the thing that made me get the ick in fist place is the slave race that wants to be inslaved and that slavery is only bad if they treat their slaves bad and just how she wrote about Hermione wanting to free them. But now as an adult it is hard to read because its impossible to "seperate the art from the artist" because like the world building is so based around fasism is okay or atleast if we do it and slavery is fun and acutally what if we did an antisemitism and fatphobia and the list just goes on. I dont say it lightly or as a joke, so much of her world is just rasist but not to show its bad just to be like in a world i had all choices to create I will create rasism and let it exist. There are so good long videos about this, i cannot explain it all in a comment. Even though I want to enjoy it as when i read it it is not like good writing, it is just nostalgia.
The only women that are "good enough" are mothers who are celebrated for being only mothers or sacrifice everything for supporting their husband. Even then there's always a xenophobic stab at who they are, like Molly Weasley. There's ALWAYS an insult. Always something. Always a comment that makes me go, "Holy crap, even Roald Dahl isn't this hateful unless someone is evil for evil's sake." Narcissa Malfoy gets a pass and less insults just because she had a child and she's putting up with her husband's goosestepping because OH BUT BEING A MOTHER AND WIFE. HOW NOBLE. Give me a break she's got an armband on, too. But despite loving McGonagall she still has vitriol towards her for never loving again (and the cat lady thing) which is... what's the point? She gets the Dumbledore treatment; we only find out later she gets nieces and nephews she's devoted to which, okay why are you WEIRD about women being single or not having children in their lives or being even remotely feminine? It's WEIRD. It's CREEPY. This obsession is really weird because then she'll go OH WELL SHE LOOKS LIKE A MAN OR A PIG for other characters she wants to deeply villainize. What. Even as a child it felt deeply unsettling. I like pink. What's wrong with me then! I was going through puberty and my weight fluctuated each week. WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME, JOANNE?!
the point of her mentioning that character is that a female character that was only mentioned ONCE made it onto the list of female characters mentioned THE MOST IN THE SERIES. if the series had actual care put into its female characters, all of the female characters on the list would be mentioned at least 5-10 times. and video dives into the character arcs of the most popular female characters such as ginny, molly weasley, mcgonagall. almost all of their motivations are tied to their relationships to male characters, or being a mother.
i think it's kind of disingenuous to frame the criticisms of harry potter's larger themes as nitpicking the books to prove that jk rowling has always been evil or whatever when these are literally criticisms that already existed that people were already talking about years ago before she became poster child of the terfs. it really doesn't take much time to realize the books can be interpreted that way if you stop to think about them at all. like "why did jkr introduce slavery and then make the main character a slave owner in the happy ending" was a criticism my friends and i could come up with in middle school before the second deathly hallows had even come out, easily during the time that harry potter was seen as a masterpiece and jkr was seen as some kind of pop culture god. they aren't small issues. they were actively getting in the way of us enjoying the stories and we were writing fanfiction in our heads to solve the problems this posed for us. and we were HUGE harry potter fans who literally ran around during break time pretending to duel each other with pencils. these problems weren't just always there, they were also always obvious. i can't even remember how many times i met another harry potter fan who went on a rant about how it's ridiculous that everyone makes fun of hermione for being against slavery. we were children and we could make those critiques. because it's literally right in your face. the comic relief in book 4 is that hermione wants to abolish slavery. if you look back at critiques of harry potter and its world even from before jkr came out as a terf, these same critiques are already present. we were like 14 (around 2013ish, so before jkr started doing terf shit online) when we realized harry potter was poorly written upon a reread, and we were huge fans of harry potter. sometimes bad people do make good things, but harry potter is just mediocre. from a craft perspective it's not particularly well written or creative, and from a moral perspective the hero character is literally a slave owner in the happy epilogue, and that's not even touching the whole systemic oppression of all other magical species by wizards or the rampant fatphobia. harry is kind of insanely passive and also an asshole. none of the characters get real development. 90% of the books are boarding school book fluff completely unrelated to the actual plot, which gets ridiculous in the second half of the series when wizard hilter is out and about and we're reading about our characters just chilling and doing homework most of the time. it's just not a good series. half of the ideas in the books that are hailed as creative are ripped whole cloth out of the worst witch series. the reason anti hp people had the "read a different book" criticism was partly because they were just hating, but also they did have a genuine point. harry potter is just not well written and once you start reading other books, you realize that. like, you said it's grounded in altruism and thematically dedicated to the liberation of oppressed people. but it's objectively not. like voldemort is simultaneously a blood purist wizard supremacist racist nazi character who wants to oppress more people, but he's also the only one trying to reach out to the other oppressed magical species and offer them better treatment. both of those things are true and they're completely contradictory. all of magical society is built around wizards having the ultimate power and other species not even being able to use wands. this kind of stuff is mentioned repeatedly in the books which is why i still remember it. but they don't do anything about this. harry and co are only interested in maintaining the status quo. slytherin house is a cesspit of blood purist ideology, but even in the epilogue it still exists. nothing changes. slavery is introduced and it still exists. goblins and centaurs and giants and so on are treated as second class citizens despite being intelligent and this never changes. harry isn't even altruistic. he's basically a millionnaire and his best friend's family lives in poverty, but he doesn't financially help them out with anything. he doesn't even OFFER to compensate them for the car after driving it into the tree. he doesn't even buy ron any christmas presents! they're supposed to be best friends! harry and co decorate the severed house elf slave heads in sirius's family's house with christmas hats over the holidays. what part of this is altruistic? what part of this is thematically dedicated to the liberation of oppressed people? the problematic "undertones" aren't "there if you go looking". they are overtones. the book is actively slapping you in the face with how horrible these people are. i think the audience harry potter ended up cultivating says far more about the fans and the communities we created than it does about harry potter. we got what we wanted out of the books. we looked at a series of books in which the heroes want to continue to oppress others and we decided they didn't actually want to do that and that they were good people. part of the reason why is also that the movies left a lot of this malice out, so it's easy to remember that version of the story.
I would've loved a series on Umbridge honestly, been saying this for years, we have no clue to why she is so evil, why she believes what she believes, nothing... we got more on Voldemort and he is less hated than her
Rowling fell into my bad graces back in 2013/14, a time during which an active independence campaign was running in Scotland whcih was engendering much healthy debate. Anyway, along she came throwing her weight behind the anti-independence campaign and likening people who supported Scotland's self determination to death eaters, which to amyone who has ever interacted with a supporter of Scottish independence will know is a completely fatuous notion. Perhaps we should have been less surprised though given how Rowling portrays slavery as "common sense" and abolishionists and swivel eyed lunatics.
JFC, what is it with her and calling everyone who disagrees with her "Death Eaters"? Actual Scottish people who wanted independence AND trans activists? And it's pretty disturbing that they're both just groups of people sticking up for rights and self-determination they don't feel are provided by the current social order. I would 💯 read any pastiche novel that presented the conflict in the HP novels from that perspective.
If fanfics and the public domain has taught me, the Harry Potter franchise doesn't need rest, it needs to be free from corporate hands and Rowling's hands to let other fans and artists rejuvenate it with their own progressive ideas that changes it in a positive effect moving forward.
THIS, the amount of great writing made by fans is outstanding and fixes many of the issues that many have with the books and even expands the universe in actualy good and interesting ways
oh boy do I remember the satanic panic over HP! I was only a small child during the original one back in the 1980’s, but I definitely remember the HP one! I was in middle/high school at the time, and I will never forget my parents’ friend calling our house to leave a message (on the good old answering machine) begging them not to let me or my brother read HP. Because it was against Jesus or something. Thankfully, my parents never really prevented us from consuming any media as kids. It’s probably because they were both working full time, but still. We got to watch way too much HBO, even the R rated stuff, and listened to whatever music we wanted. So they weren’t about to start taking books away from us. That woman who left the message probably loves the franchise now, given rowling’s new allegiances and all. Wouldn’t be surprised to see any of those ridiculous stay at home moms who wanted to burn every copy of the half blood Prince then, now sporting a “I stand with jk rowling!” or “this witch doesn’t burn!” shirt.
Where I lived there was no Satanic panic, I didn’t even know it was a thing back then until I read about it on the internet when I was 17. I’m from Spain
Sigh.. I’m all for new ideas being done, however as a kid I always thought a animated Tv show of Harry, Ron and Hermione and their daily lives at Hogwarts depicting the rest of the school year outside of the main events of each book/movie would have been a fun idea. It would be animated and therefore not confused with the movies, but also explored all the growth and events that happened in a school year outside of the main plot of the books/movies. Each season was a year they were at school, and we could really get views into other characters times at Hogwarts as well and see some events that weren’t given time in the movies. Obviously now that I’m a little older and the final books and movies have been released I realize that’s a lot harder to pull off well and and adapt faithfully. However a full remake of each movie to accurately tell the stories of the book THIS soon is a level of overkill that even Disney and their mass production of Star Wars hasn’t reached… yet.
Sure man let's get a series out of a beloved children series like, nearly ten years after its relevancy has faded, and its creator is embroiled in a controversy that has placed the series under brand new scrutiny where people without nostalgia are analyzing it and everyone who was a diehard six odd years ago is starting to realize that the entire series was actually pretty poorly written but we couldn't see it because we were children. This is a good idea.
I really want to know where you're at that HP's relevance has faded, because it sounds like you're letting your distaste for Rowling color your perception. The books and movies are still insanely popular. And if an entry is good, like last year's Hogwarts Legacy, it'll still crack $1B.
I used to also love harry potter more than just about anything when i was really young. But as i got into my mid teens, a lot has tainted the franchise for me. I consumed much more literature that was frankly not aimed at kids. So, on top of the shitty additions to the franchise, i looked back at how flimsy the writing was for the original series. And rowling being repugnant doesn't help either. They are ideally books made for kids to enjoy, and it accomplishes that. But also, there are similar books made for kids that engross adults as well.
your take on the concept of death in harry potter reflecting in what is happening to it in the real world gave me goosebumps. i never thought of it in this way but it captures the essence of everything we say about this reboot era in general, and in harry potter in particular, so poetically and beautifully. thank you for that
I've been looking for a video like this for a little while now without even realising it, amazing content wowowow i wanna add my own thoughts because I've been reflecting on my past relationship with the material ever since the news came out that she might be being sued sometime soon i think there's something positive to be said about Harry reconnecting to a past he never knew I do truly think that the series peaks in its thematic richness in Prisoner of Azkaban, with that whole story being a beautiful exploration of how Harry can reclaim a relationship to the parents he never knew through spending time with his dad's old friends everything regarding how his patronus is conjured from a memory that he isn't even sure is real is super touching and I'm sure people never knew their parents would be able to find themselves in Harry in those moments in short, I love the part when Sirius tells Harry that the ones we love never really leave us, pure and simple that's when the series is at it's strongest, to me to me, everything that follows is weakened once you come to terms with the idea that the finale centres on a fight to vanquish fascism written by someone without a solid grasp on how fascism should be confronted - the fact that Voldemort is essentially defeated by wand loyalty mechanics rather than by anything explicitely anti-fascist speaks for itself - hell, Harry owns a slave by the end of the series ; ; with that being said, I'd be remiss not to mention Newt Scamander as a character. I do think that he's an amazing example of a positive masculine role model; kind, empathetic, peaceful, and I think it's brilliant that many read him as a positive example of an autistic protagonist,,,,, but you totally hit the nail on the head when saying that it's a shame that those movies aren't built for him and are instead concerned about a conflict nobody cares about I only ever stuck around for the first fantastic beasts film, didn't see the sequel because I wasn't comfortable seeing a film with Johnny Depp in it in 2018 and cut ties with the franchise once JK went fully mask off in 2020 but I still love Newt himself, at least conceptually 10/10 video, it feels like it was made by someone who's been making video essays for years - I'm sure next time the Harry Potter special interest takes over me, I'll be rewatching this, alongside Shaun's video and the ContraPoints video ^^
My breakup with this series has been one of the most painful and the most protracted breakups of my life, and so for that reason and a whole host of other reasons (including what you've covered in this video), I really do wish they'd just scrap any attempts at a reboot at _least_ until Rowling dies and she isn't funneling the money she makes from her IP into anti-trans organizations and politics. I'm grateful for the good messages the person she used to be had to share about the tangible forces involved in love and loss... but I can't look at it again until the person she is now _is_ no more. I would love for that to mean she deradicalizes one day, but I'm not holding my breath. Well-made video, in any case. It's nice to hear nuanced takes about the franchise itself no matter how people feel about it... and I think I do kind of miss talking about Harry Potter.
The only way I can really see this working in a new adaptation is to also change the visual media; if they did this as an animated series, I think it would probably work magnificently
Yeah unless they’re willing to shell out GOT level money per episode it’ll end up looking cheap. You can bet your ass there won’t be practical effects, it’ll all be added in with CG
it is a major oversight in your critique that you do mention that the books are very misogynistic, classist and fatphobic. If you talked about those things along with the racism and slavery, could you still really claim that the work is good and holds up?
Yes because those arent the merits of the criticism and if anything the books intentionally shine a light on classism, even if it doesnt magically solve it.
Cute how millennials attempt to reconcile their childhood love for a series of books with their much more recent drive for self-validation via attention whoring on social media. Cute and pathetic.
I could, but I’m not triggered by the author having her own opinion about womanhood. They’re fun books to read. Can’t have a good story without struggles, so sometimes the author has to touch on sensitive subjects. Would love to see your bestselling book that gets millions of people to read it and which contains nothing anybody might find disagreeable.
You could claim that the messages surrounding love, friendship, loss, grief, mortality, questioning authority, etc. are still worthwhile, even though they're not at their most expansive and true when couched in misogyny and classism and fatphobia and racism and weird accidental slavery apologia and upholding of the status quo. I think those nuggets of good have kept people afloat in the fandom for a long time (though I personally was on my way out with the second Fantastic Beasts movie, let alone when Rowling came forward as a vocal transphobe).
It's weird because the more you look into it, the series is just so at odds with itself. You have such great themes about bigotry and friendships and love while at the same time you have Rowling promoting fascism, sexism, and slavery.
You’re right: it’s totally about money. And I have to believe the studio has done their research that there’s enough people that will want to watch it that they’ll make money. I also think that they’ve seen that JKR is sort of a one-hit wonder. Just about everything she’s done since those first seven books have made the Wizarding World franchise worse. If she’s going to be deeply attached to it, a HP remake is really the only option. There are so many other stories that could be told from within the universe, but because of JKR, we’re stuck with either bad stories or remakes.
You know who asked for this adaptation? David Zaslav, CEO of HBO. Maybe not him specifically, but he has openly and frequently talked about how interested he is in franchises that print money.
It makes no sense cinematically, but perfect sense financially. Rowling has proved she can't make anything else decent; her input to the scripts on Fantastic Beasts was considered a big factor in why the films are so poor, and her adult fiction is overlooked unless it's stirring up controversy. HP is the cash cow, and the next generation aren't going to buy in unless there's a constant refreshing and laundering of the brand to keep it headline-relevant when the only thing we hear about Rowling, over and over, is a tirade of bigotry. It's a cash grab, and keeping the new park in-line with the old branding shows how little faith anyone has that it'll even take off.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and point out that.... essentially Harry Potter as a franchise isn't necessarily bad, but there's aspects of the original books alone that does not carry over to the film adapations that do make it bad on the whole. Like the fact that in the books Hermione takes a stand against *slavery* and overall the wizarding world tells her she's just wrong and Dobby not wanting to be a slave makes him "just weird" and nobody scrutinizes that aspect. That Hogwarts could be super cool with the diversity of creatures it has but instead the wizarding world still keeps draconian rules that prevent goblins and centaurs and other sentient species perfectly capable of reading and writing and even casting spells.... from ever attending or becomming a wizard themselves.
Wizard supremacy is also pretty explicit. Like its not right to be cruel to the muggles, but they are inferior creatures with nothing to offer who's lives have no value
There is a lot I agree with here, but the idea that Harry Potter is "explicitly anti-fascist" enough and its themes are so obviously there that conservatives won't go to bat for it is absurd. They fucking play MGS and don't comprehend the blatant anti-western sentiment in it, and the earnest adoration of Che. They watch Robocop and don't see that its politics condemn them. You put too much weight onto hypocrisy and consistency.
Her racism and the slaves like being slaves narrative just make it all unreadable/watchable. Edit : it was formaive for me but ive grown and you clearly haven't.
Well yeah, but imagine if you didn't come to Harry Potter as a kid to grow up with it, but as a young adult. So then all your hand-wavey stuff about its not being actually bad, doesn't exist for the rest of us. So there's that. Not just in terms of its problematic themes (like yay! slavery and all non-humans are lesser thans) but actually not great prose. So who knows if this show can do well? House of Dragons did better than expected, given how GoT seemingly dragon-flambéed its entire series/fanbase. Though I will say that S2 of that show it might lead it down its predecessor's path more than S1 (GRRM is going to even write again, he's so unhappy). Anyhew, maybe this show can be like that.
my first thought was not “already”, it was “better hurry up before it’s too late”. I will argue that us millennials will be the only generation to ever be obsessed with this franchise. gen z was obligated to find it cringe and uncool, and future generations will not even touch it because of who JK turned out to be. so if they still plan to bank on our nostalgia, they better hurry up, because I don’t really envision watching it in my 50s.
32:40: Well... no some Potterheads cannot simply passively enjoy a children's franchise as a surface-level condemnation of fascism. There are a minority of hardcore fans who have doubled down specifically on Rowling's terfism. So I wouldn't say Harry Potter NEVER pushed someone to the right. I really am enjoying and agreeing with this essay so far. But the fact is Harry Potter does have a a unique flavor of toxic fandom, especially since the Twitter shit has happened. And I think that definitely feeds into the backlash.
though at this point i have very little love left for the hp series after all of jkr's bigotry, just from a marketing standpoint i'm baffled as to why they decided to retell the original story instead of doing a marauder's era series. i'm not in touch with the fandom anymore but any time i cross paths with it online, it's mostly people talking about the marauders. seems like one of the few corners of the series that still has an active and engaged following and i have no idea why they aren't capitalizing on that
"I think I speak for a sizeable contingent of the target audience..." Dude, I don't think you're the target audience of Harry Potter anymore. I'm sure that HBO will try to incorporate more adult-oriented themes into the TV series for the middle-aged fans but ultimately this series is trying to attract a new generation of kids to the series. "...barely a full decade after it was finished." Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows - Part 2 released in 2011. The HBO series doesn't premiere until 2026. That's 15 years, my guy. And it's 25 years since the original Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone film debuted back in 2001. "By a wide margin there is no precedent for an IP this commercially successful being rebooted this shamelessly early." Are you familiar with Spider-Man? The first Raimi series ran from in 2002 to 2007. We then had the Amazing Spider-Man reboot in 2012, just five years after the Raimi series ended. That was followed by the Marvel reboot in 2017. What about Batman? The original Burton-Schumamacher films ran from 1989 to 1997. This was followed by three failed reboots before Christopher Nolan successfully brought Batman Begins to theaters in 2005. Yeah, that's right. There were three failed reboot attempts in an eight year period. Nolan had sequels in 2008 and 2012, followed quickly after by the launch of the DC cinematic universe in 2013 with Man of Steel. Now, the DC universe got messy but we first saw a new Batman played by Ben Affleck in 2016. Affleck also appears in Suicide Squad, also released in 2016, and Justice League, released in 2017. Batman then gets a reboot in 2022 with the release of The Batman starring Robert Pattinson. But the DC cinematic universe wasn't quite done, so we actually got to see Affleck suit up as Batman one last time in 2023 even though Batman had been rebooted the year before. And then I still need to mention The Joker series, which premiered in 2019 and depicts a child Bruce Wayne that is distinct from both the DC cinematic universe and Pattinson series. That means that there were three separate Batman series running concurrently with each other. So it's actually quite amazing that an IP as successful as Harry Potter went an entire 15 years without a reboot.
If anything, this series should be an anthology of scenes that either couldn't make the movies or had to be condensed for runtime. We don't need an entire season for Prisoner of Azkaban, but a book-accurate Shrieking Shack scene with all the Marauders' details? Yes, please.
I remember being in a fast food joint at night on the day that the 6th book released in the US bookstores. Some kid runs in, yells at the top of his lungs, "Snape kills Dumbledore!" and promptly runs out before anyone has any idea of what just happened. And my friends and I took a moment to absorb what we had just heard. Was quite the hard core way of spoiling something. Props.
Or ......and heres a crazy idea.....how about adapting a long book series that hasnt been done before ? Take a leap of faith maybe.? And stop beating a dead horse? Sincerely, a potterhead who rereads the books and re-watches the movies on a yearly basis.
IKR, you can tell that the executives just live outside of human costums and just see the numbers and statistics without any of the context, making baffling choices like this
when I was first starting to deconstruct and escape religious indoctrination I watched a video called "This is how church music manipulates you" and it was a helpful and eye-opening and saddening experience which I am very thankful for. That video has stayed floating around in the back of my head for a good few years. Now imagine my surprise when I find this Harry Potter themed video in my feed, really enjoy it so as I'm watching I check out the channel to see if this is something I want to subscribe to, aND FIND THE CHURCH MUSIC VIDEO?! I literally exclaimed "Wait, you're *that* guy?!" Subbed. Keep up the good work! Lol
The biggest issue is nobody needs to put more money in her pocket. I can't even read the books anymore because of her bigoted beliefs, let alone watch the movies or bother to watch a new pointless series. As far as I'm concerned she buried this series that I adored and it's dead and gone.
bell hooks was criticizing Harry Potter in like, 2006 for being completely uncritical of patriarchy, it has not been a universal consensus that it was "pretty good" until recently
My expectations are extremely low after seeing Percy Jackson and Netflix's ATLA. Both of them were utter garbage. These companies love to brag about their tv show budgets but they look like crap. Where does all the money go? And i get why the kids suck at acting, they're kids, but why do the adults?
My opinion on the movies hasn't changed at least: only the first two are worth watching as fun, lighthearted, fantasies. Even if I was still willing to consume hp, I think there is not just a question of quality in new adaptions, but also in how they are going to appeal to fans of all ages. It is a children's series, but the new content seems torn in trying to appeal to adults just as much.
The fact that it will be more like the books *the books that are pretty racist and sexist and have a lot of things that were super problematic to the point that the movies decided not to show them even back then makes the idea of the reboot even worse
Good people can essentially do bad things as well. I mean, if you were born in a society where something awful is normalised you'd probably be okay with it too. Best example, as you mentioned, is how everyone today is fine with eating factory farmed meat, which is essentially hell on earth for these relatively intelligent and emotional animals. Doesn't mean you're a bad person, but when judged by future generations you'll be seen as a monster who didn't stand against factory farming and even contributed to it.
Considering HBO cut house of the dragon S2 from 10 episodes to 8, despite the first season being massively popular and loved, does not make me think they really care about telling a good story. The cutting those 2 episodes was absolutely disastrous for season 2.
You’re missing a huge context here which is that HP came from the UK. I grew up in the UK in the 90s. Harry Potter reflected the conservatism of the time here - and that continued - and the creation of the films did soften those sharper edges - + the books ARE dreadful bc of that. You are charmed bc you don’t get the foundation 😅
I’m of the view that what HP should do would be to work with the international teams at Netflix and create Wizard school experiences from other countries - maybe Korea, Mexico, etc. places that Netflix has shown us can generate great series. We’ve seen Harry’s world, why not something different entirely in that massive world? Or, if it has to be Harry Potter’s life, start with PoA, the majority’s favorite book, or GoF, the first book to have cut significant material out of the book in its adaptation. Very few people really return to PS/SS or CoS expecting scenes not in the movies.
The criticism towards the name "Cho Chang" is utterly stupid. Cho Chang is a perfectly beautiful, normal name in Chinese. Chang is the romanisation of the Chinese surname 張 in both Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking countries except in Mainland China. It has a more common variation "Cheung" which happens to be another Cantonese romanisation. 張 is the third most common surname in Taiwan, the fourth most common surname in PRC and the most common surname in Shanghai but it is also a Korean surname. Zhang is the romanisation of 張 using Putonghua (Mandarin) pin-yin system which is mostly only used in mainland China. 張 is more commonly romanised as "Chong" and "Cheong" in Singapore and Malaysia. Chang and Cheung is also the romanisation of the Chinese surname 章 in Cantonese. Cho is the romanisation of many Chinese characters including 秋, 卓, 草, 曹, 楚, 早, 祖 in Cantonese. 秋，卓，楚，早 are the ones more commonly used in given names so I am only going to elaborate on these. 秋 originally means plentiful harvest but it can also mean "autumn". 卓 means "excellence, outstanding; profound; brilliant; lofty" but it is more commonly used in 2-character given names. Just so you know, 卓 is also a Chinese/Korean surname. 楚 is the name of an ancient Chinese state and originally means thorns, but it can also mean "arranged in order", "well-dressed", "a lovely lady" or "clarity". 早 just means "the morning" but I happen to know someone with that given name but with a different surname. Cho Chang is translated as 張秋 in Chinese, which basically means "Autumn Chang". I actually happen to know someone from primary school with that exact same name and romanisation when the Harry Potter movies were still coming out. This classmate of mine was incredibly disappointed by the fact that she got sorted into Hufflepuff instead of Ravenclaw in that Pottermore sorting quiz. As a kid, I used to have a headcanon that Cho Chang was a Hongkonger who moved to the UK due to the worsening political climate before the 1997 Handover as it was very common for Hong Kong families to emigrate to the UK back in the 80s to 90s. That would explain why Cho Chang didn't have an anglicised name as she was not born in the UK and most people from Hong Kong back then rarely put their anglicised given name as their legal name. I have actually never heard from anyone I know who grew up in Chinese-speaking countries or speak Chinese criticise this name. Cho Chang is a very commonly adored character in Chinese-speaking countries and the only thing I have seen people complain about her is her lacking characterisation or the fact that she didn't end up with Harry. I only learned that people didn't like this name after moving to an English-speaking country for university and I am tired of having to explain this repeatedly. People who make this "criticism" are the type of persons who think JK Rowling hates hungarian people because she made "Hungarian" horntail the worst dragon 😭
So basicaly the hate to the name is bad faith critisism that forgets to take into account the opinion of the culture they assume they are protecting, who could've fucking guessed God this wave of bad faith critisism towards HP is rough, like the video said, it's not perfect but it does have tons to apreciate, DESPITE the writer.
31:49 I don't know about that one chief. They liberated few marginalized people, without changing the systems in place, and in fact supporting them. Feels very much like helping only specific people, like dipping a toe into those themes, while leaving a massive swath of marginalized beings left in her world.
I haven’t gotten more than a few minutes in so far, so if this is something you say/ or bring up later in the video then my apologies- but I just gotta say I will never understand why they’re choosing to reboot the series when they could just do a completely original Mauruaders (dunno if I spelled that right) prequel series??? like I am not really in the fandom, but I do know the Maurauders fandom is *huge* so I am sure they’d watch. and any non- Mauruaders fans that are just generally HP fans will likely also watch when they hear the premise, since it has to do with the characters they already love’s parents, and characters they already know’s (like lupin, and snape) backstories. plus they’d have a decent amount of creative freedom, so it would be hard to mess up. like cmon. lol. I definitely don’t think show makers should get all of their ideas from the internet, but looking at what’s popular/ what people want every once in a while could help sooo many shows or potential shows lmao.
The Marauders fanon (anyone who liked ATYD basically) is not actually interested in the Marauders. Seriously, the fanoners would be the last ones to like it because there's a 0% chance any of the melodramatic headcanons they like will show up in any capacity. Non-Marauders-fanoners - the people who liked the canon info and want it expounded upon - would eat good, but Marauders fanoners would hate it resolutely.
I feel like people still quote/reference barbie fairly often? like "my job is Beach", people say "my job is Emails" or just last week glen powel talked about ryan gosling like "he's everything, I'm just Glen". I feel like "she's everything, he's just ken" is also a common meme format. (I know it's not the point of the video.....)
I just want to point out that on the race-swap topic, not everyone who criticizes or dislikes these kinds of choices is one of those people who views it as "the fall of western civilization", as you put it. I'm saying this because any criticism of choices like this tends to get lumped into one stereotype of the militant conservative "anti-woke" crowd, and I think that does a big disservice to the broader discourse. I've been lumped into this before for disagreeing with/disliking race/gender swaps, but my distaste for it is never coming from a place of hate. For me, the primary reason I dislike these kinds of changes is usually just that I visualize characters when I read about them, and their descriptions become pretty significant to my personal connection to them. So when their appearance is significantly changed for an adaptation, it makes it much harder for me to keep the illusion alive of them being the same character, and I feel less connected to them. That's not to say I can't form a new connection to that adaptation's version, and it's not to say I'll avoid watching the adaptation, it's just that the main draw for me in an adaptation of a book or series I love onto the screen is the ability to vicariously live through those characters that I fell in love with. And the more you change about how that character looks, the harder it is for me to do that. I just say this because there's a natural assumption that when someone dislikes a race or gender swap, they must be racist or sexist, and I think it's a rather lazy and uncritical way of looking at the situation that doesn't really help anything.
It also erases the opportunity for further inspection on the actual topics of race and other intersectional topics by forcing skin tone to equal representation, when there's more to it than that. Making a character who would have otherwise no POC characteristics dipped in pigment just to visually diversify is just modern tokenism. When they do try to address these topics with these characters it's always so forced and performative to pander, rather than being realistic portrayals of real people, so again just tokenism. It does suck that the second you're like "ehhh, maybe brown/black-washing existing IPs isn't the answer" it turns into needless moral grandstanding without listening to the other person's actual points and opinions.
The movies do it fine, aside they swap inbetween movies which, why. And the cursed fanfic, like it would be perfect fine to say, yeah i didnt wrote her with that as black, but thats a different medium, she is a good actress, the issue there was rowlings weird obvious lying. Hermoine was written as obvios white, and its fine to hire a black actress, saying its a different medium and adaption, would be more than enough to admit it. Notan " oh thats what i always had in mind, no matter how obvious it is i didnt"
@@cherryjello777 "Casting Black people is the real racism" is such a weird tactic for how often people like you trot it out. Well, "odd" isn't the right word, but as the thread op makes clear, calling racists racist makes racists mad.
The difference is how you act when it happens. If you don't watch an adaptation or rate it poorly because a character is now nonwhite, then it doesn't matter how many paragraphs of justification you write - you are racist.
The reason why people lump it into anti-woke is because the criticism is always really bad. I don't buy that your issue with race/gender swapping is just that it messes up your visualizations. If that was your issue then you wouldn't be focused specifically on race or gender and I can't imagine thinking that thats a good enough reason not to do it
Great video! I also often talk about how “they don’t make movies like they used to” literally, recently rewatched the OGs with an eye for cinematography and there is some great stuff with perspective, lighting, color grading, especially in the first three, that really sets the mood. The problem is that both the literal medium (the OGs were shot on 35mm film) and the studio structure have significantly changed (and IMO worsened) the visual quality of all media, especially TV.
the lighting of this video getting progressively darker is ABSOLUTE CINEMA.
Lol
it’s called a sunset it actually happens in my neighborhood every night it’s pretty crazy
@@krakatoa4747 life is full of wonders!!!
This is all so that they can have Dumbledore actually be calm when he asks harry about the goblet of fire lol
Which is funny because that’s the most interesting scene in that movie
Dumbledore's gonna be soooooo chill that people will complain.
HARRYDIDYAPUTYANAMEINZAGOBLETOVFIYAHH
@@amberr3662 *Dumbledore said calmly*
i almost hope they have him go even harder with that line this time
It should have been animated, but for some reason executives(and a big portion of the audience) think animation is a genre for kids and not a medium that can tell endless stories.
This is what I always felt! It would separate it and give it a chance to do things live action can’t portray. Also it wouldn’t matter if kids got older or actors left or died because there could be a sense of continuity that the original couldn’t.
iCarly is for adults and South Park is for kids.
I thought that too, but then look at the terrible animations we get like the upcoming LOTR anime
@@curtiswest7849 And in the worst ways possible, this is fairly accurate.
@@CheezMonsterCrazy 😆 that's why I said it!
Remaking a book/movie series that was originally very well received, not that long after original release, at its historically least popular state- due to the author, mostly- AND attaching her name to it is just an absolutely terrible idea. I have no idea why this ever got approved
Money. Money. Money. Capitalism does not care about anything but the bottomline. Mostly short-term. Long term it would be wise to focus on maintaining the franchise, but its a risk they are willing to take. Cause it will make money. Star Wars probably lost lots of money right after the disney trilogy, but I'm sure they made it back with the TV shows.
It's been over 23 years since the first book had an adaption. It's been plenty of time. It's also better than making up random stories about the series with the failed fantastic beast spinoff. WB is treating this IP like a break in case of emergency for easy money.
@@gilbertoflores7397 I think we disagree on the definition of plenty of time, honestly. The films aren’t outdated, they still visually hold up. Remaking them at this point screams “we have run out of ideas, hand us your cash”
@@princessadrigirl6774as someone who loves the movies, there’s a lot even in later movies that doesn’t hold up visually, like them flying through the burning room of requirement. Also, there’s endless post online about how much the movies left out from the books that a show could include
It got approved because of money. They’ve made billions, the billions have slowed down, so time to make more billions (or try)b
Took me 3/4 of the video being frustrated at the lighting to realise it was a hbo joke 🙈😂 touché. Can’t wait to not see any of this new series 😅
Is it not a joke about how the movies got darker? Not necessarily about hbo
I felt as if I was watching House of the Dragon. Thanks.
I went to the comments to check it a few minutes in
Took me reading this comment lol
what's the joke?
It bothers be that Hollywood's fear of risk has become associated with comic book movies. Comics take some of the biggest swings in the medium of story telling. Superman lived 400 years into the future and fought two robot clones of Hitler, batman once wandered a wasteland and carried jokers severed head in jar, the entire Marvel Universe was saved by Franklin Richards (a six year old boy) when he created a pocket dimension to keep the Avengers and Fantastic Four safe when they were almost killed by Charles Xavier being possessed by magneto. But they never adapt those stories. They just make movies where Iron Man acts like Dean Martin.
I don't think the Hitler clones were robots, they were just humans? The robots in that story were different. But could be wrong
Harry Potter was a generational phenomena. But its done, living of nostalgia nowadays. The USA media need to understand stories are supposed to END and repeating the same story to milk it does not work...
the comic industrie runs on that
@@Gotten1888 and fails, currently... 😆
This is demonstably untrue. Do you think Superman would have been better off ending back in the 40s?
@@GreylockMountain Yes.
@@internetkurator9256 Then you're just wrong. Huh, it's actually funny how simple things can be sometimes. You personally not wanting more of it doesn't mean more shouldn't exist.
The first Fantastic Beasts movie was not bad by a long stretch. It actually did a lot of really great things, and I'd argue that the choice to make the movie about some random throwaway character is actually the right choice for quality. It's a step in the opposite direction of the shameless fan-service/sequel/reboot territory. It was actually original and stood on its own, while still exploring aspects of the world that people fell in love with. That's what expanding a franchise should look like, taking a beloved world and telling new and unique stories within them rather than the obvious ones that everyone asks for. The sequel, however, fell into that shameless fan-service sphere with all of its attempts to tie it into Harry Potter.
I highly recommend the video "The Fantastic Masculinity of Newt Scamander" by Pop Culture Detective, which touches on a lot of what makes the first movie (mostly Newt Scamander, admittedly) so good. I'll also add as someone who was recently diagnosed autistic, that Newt's character seems heavily coded autistic but is portrayed in a very positive and not super stereotypical way, a kind of representation that is severely lacking in media right now.
I super agree with you. Loved the first film so much. I think the failure is fantastic beasts 2 and 3. They forced the story of the wizarding war into newts story and as a result they were both worse than the first fantastic beasts. I would have watched ten films about Newt and his friends just adventuring around the world, solving problems related to fantastic animals and helping people everywhere they went. It could have gone back to the HP roots of mystery stories, and I would have loved it. Instead they forced Dumbledore and Grindelwald into Newts films, resulting in canceling the whole franchise because the writing was too scattered and no one was interested
I agree with you! I would have loved a mystical, 1930s version of Steve Irvin. Makes me so mad that they chose to focus on Dumbledore and weird family connections instead
I’d like the fantastic beasts movies better if they’d done separate movies for newt and separate ones for dumbledore/grindlewald. Their stories just don’t make sense when combined.
@Cruizinelli12 Il liked the first movie a lot. As for the second, I thought Dumbledore/Grindlewald was going to be a Wizard WW2 Era movie. Wizards and the Allies covertly fighting against the Nazis and their Wizard associates (the Nazis really liked occultism). But instead Grindy shows that the muggles are bad because they started WW2 meaning the wizards are fighting someone who wants to stop the war. It was a mess.
I agree!!!
My classmate told me that he couldn’t read Harry Potter because it was satanic or play Pokémon because it supported evolution. This was 2010 in California
That's the same stuff religious parents said about it in the 90s and 00s when they were coming out. Good to know the crazy religious nuts never change.
How the turn tables
Yeah, having been indoctrinated into fundamentalist Christianity, don't be too hard on the guy. It's hard to break free and when you do, the usual result is losing all your friends and your family. The price of freedom is too high for some, so they stay willfully ignorant.
based
@mnmnrt boring troll. Get a real hobby
Even as a (non asian) kid, I read the name "Cho Chang" and I was just like, "REALLY..?"
The worst part is, Rowling is so good at naming. Say what you will about the woman, but she is damn good at naming things. And yet when it comes to Cho, she just did not care.
I've met plenty of asian people with similar names, there's no problem
I have to disagree with one thing emphatically: the movie industry was always profit driven and most artistry had to be fought for tooth and claw except that now advertising and data analytics have developed far far more and there's much more data on what sells and how to cater to the biggest audiences. After all, people say Blazing Saddles couldn't be made today, but it also barely got made 40 years ago, and the movie industry monopolies were broken up 40 years before that. (Approximately in both cases)
TL,DR: society has gotten much better at capitalism in and after the Information Age.
You know, I've never considered how similar the straight-to-streaming and Marvel secrecy/green screen is to the studio-exclusive contracts in the golden age... Although I can't imagine a studio wanting an exclusive contract these days because it means they'd have to guarantee work.
@@Manakuuchiha I was literally thinking earlier today like "Did they cast Harry Styles in Eternals and similar actors just to have that established relationship whether or not the movie goes well?"
Marauders show is so obvious, it’s the biggest missed shot ever. Literally has an amazing school setting, great characters and character arcs, inbuilt powerful villain/threat.
They even have a morally complex set protagonists, given the fact that as teenagers the Marauders were, not terribly, bad people. They broke rules, were problematic with other students and they felt like they owned the right to do those things because they were smarter than their peers. But they could also show how friendship, time and responsabilities change us into better people.
If we're talking about racial sensitivity, taking nothing away from your main point, we need to recognise Parvati Patel as an explicitly named Asian character, long before Cho Chang.
her poor sister Padma was mentioned even less. she was basically unwilling arm candy for Ron at the Yule Ball when he couldn’t go with Hermione
not racist
Y'all I don't think the Indians who live along with all the other Patils and Padmas care about this. Like we love that there's people who r named like us. N we cringe at the pronunciations. We don't really have the energy to care.. Wait u prolly don't too. Lol. We just njyoin some internet drama
I wish we was getting HD re releases of the old Harry Potter games on modern consoles instead
Now this is a million dollar idea!
@@Umbravitae19 I also want the GBC and GBA Harry Potter games on NSO
This would feel like less of a cash grab to silence nay-sayers.
@@DogDayFromPoppyPlaytime180I miss those!
@@cherryjello777 I still have and play them I love the Harry Potter games
People don’t talk about the only black adult character being named “Kingsley Shacklebolt”…. Shackle… bolt…
💀
🤔People talk about it constantly though
1. They do, almost constantly.
2. What even is the problem?
@@apilolomi4354 I apologize if English isn’t your first language but shackles are famously used to keep people in bondage usually against their will… it’s a bit less than ideal that Joanne thought to use shackles as the only black man’s name
@@tgovaniAlso, I want to point out the ‘lightning association with black character’ trope to add onto your comment.
no one wants more harry potter junk. hbo, i'm begging you, adapt freakin ANIMORPHS, it would be so rad and no one has tried in like 20 years. come on
RIGHT!! would love a modern animorphs adaptation!!
The animorphs graphic novel is pretty good so far... But yes I agree HBO should adapt it, dark-and-gritty style.
Also KA Applegate seems to be genuinely good and non-problematic.
The animorphs graphic novel is pretty good so far... But yes I agree HBO should adapt it, dark-and-gritty style.
Also KA Applegate seems to be genuinely good and non-problematic.
The animorphs graphic novel is pretty good so far... But yes I agree HBO should adapt it, dark-and-gritty style.
Also KA Applegate seems to be genuinely good and non-problematic.
Psst HBO…adapt Redwall
It's just interesting. I remember people talking about wanting this on Tumblr years and years ago. Must have been 2014. There was this post saying, "no but imagine Harry Potter as a tv show sort of like Game of Thrones where each season is a book and each episode is a chapter everything could be fleshed out" And this was quite popular. It's weird to think about it in retrospect, because no one could have seen things unfolding like this at the time.
Kids on Tumblr thought no one was listening to them. Fandom became extreme there, but it was just a way for them to express their creativity. It was never supposed to make it to the mainstage and no one ever thought it would the way it is now
The concepts like the house elves, so called ‘half breeds’ like Hagrid and the Centaurs not being treated equally to wizards EVEN by the ‘good’ ones is actually the point. Good, kind and clever people can participate in bad things just because they’re normalised. That’s why Hermione as an outsider could see it and Ron couldn’t.
Ding ding ding, I’m only halfway through but I’m gonna guess that he didn’t read the books so has no idea SPEW was omitted.
@@hayleyhellbound9513 The whole point of SPEW seemed to be 'Hermione does activation wrong.' It was treated as a joke, not as something positive. And while, yes, there is point that even 'good' people might not be 100% good, nothing is done with that point in the books or films.
But remember, Rowling made the narrative say Hermione was wrong and this system was CORRECT. Which is absolutely disgusting. Rowling had this entire book give a whole "Oh Hermione, you'll understand when you're older!" Giving a, "She's DIFFERENT. She's one of the GOOD ones. The EXCEPTION!" Which is... putrid. This is a real thing.
And it's in these book and it should make your skin crawl. If a narrative has to do this sort of override, it's not a good narrative. It's telling the readers they're too stupid to make their own connections. This isn't what happened. There is a sort of caste system for magic in Harry Potter and Rowling is just fine to let it exist. Exceptions like Hermione are different because she's a human. Everyone else? Forget them. They are the rule.
That SHOULD bother you.
you are forgetting one thing, if you are going to comment on it you have to show actual consequences and growth. its not the so called good ones doing it being the problem, its JK Rowling shows in the text and dialogue they are being correct. Why else would she describe every bad person as ugly and fat if not her thinking some of is ok?
Bang on. There are many things that have aged poorly in the books, Rowlings obvious disdain for fat people being the most obvious to me but the wizarding world being full of immorality and discrimination is one of the nuanced aspects of the books.
At no point are you encouraged to think that Dobby's treatment is ok or the way Hagrid is shunned a good thing, the treatment of prisoners at Azkaban is explicity pointed out as being morally rephrensible, and Sirius's character is shown to be permanently damaged from his experience.
JK Rowling has become a deeply reprensible character and if you examine her works then of course you'll find traces of it but the media literacy of the people going through Harry Potter looking for problematic issues, they always settle on these easily disprovable points and it's sad to see.
I think Rowling has had some kind of mind break where after she finished writing the original series, I think she has come to quietly resent it over the years or something cuz she doesn't seem to care how the quality of the associated projects have gone over the years. This reboot is gonna be a hot mess
And it all stems from her failed follow-up, where the only person who wasn't straight or white was the serial killer big bad. After that flop, she took the crack pipe all the way to supporting literal n@zis.
The one reason I can see why anyone wanted a tv adaptation that they were one of the five people who were mad peeves was not included in the films
I'm one of the five! Love Peeves!
who tf is peeves though, seriously
@@springshowers4754 Peeves is a mischievous spirit called a poltergeist that lives at Hogwarts and has a fairly significant presence in the novels. He's basically just a pest/nuisance, but he's fun and wacky and can have really good moments, especially when played against Filch, who DESPISES Peeves and basically assumes any disaster is probably his fault. He's just a quirky piece of world building that never had huge plot significance, but still added a ton to the flavor of the wizarding world.
@@jaredwonnacott9732 oh ok. I haven't read the books since middle school, so he must have slipped my mind.
Wait, Peeves isn't in the movies??? how did i never realize this lmao
I always had a hope that if they did ever plan a reboot/retelling of hp that they would do it as an animated series. With the success of series like arcane, I don’t think it would be too out of left field.
I will always stand by this: Fantastic Beasts should have been a book series. And I love the first movie. But the plots don't feel like movie plots. The screenplays are written like novels, so let them be novels. Maybe the cancellation was a blessing. We can get the final installments in a format that fits.
Yes, it should've been like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, she probably knew early on there was going to be a movie, but Collins is an author of novels. I'm not saying you can't be both, but it's always a bigger risk to go into a new medium.
I honestly agree, those movies felt like they were written like a novel and not a visual medium, the movie constantly implemented storytelling techniques specific to the written medium and further fumbled by failing to incorporate visual storytelling techniques.
I’m a storyboard artist and I’ve encountered a lot of scripts over the years that were so obviously written by a novelist who didn’t understand the visual medium they wanted to work with 😓 while things like story structure and character arcs are universal to all storytelling mediums, many storytelling techniques are VERY medium specific. Honestly, if so hadn’t taken creative writing classes as my electives at university I don’t think I would’ve ever appreciated just how differently you have to approach storytelling depending on the medium you’re using.
For instance, internalisation (especially when using First Person narration) is an amazing technique in a novel, such direct access to a character’s inner thoughts is the written medium’s greatest strength, but if you try to do a 1 for 1 of that in a visual medium like a movie, it’ll be an awkward voice over monologue completely detached from the visuals, visuals that could otherwise communicate the same information, mood, etc via its own medium specific techniques.
Conversely, I’ve read books by authors who clearly were envisioning their story as a movie and their descriptions read more like the art and camera direction annotations on a screenplay than actual prose 😅 such novels are trying so hard to make the reader experience their story as a movie and are basically trying to tell their story via visual storytelling techniques and get bogged down trying to make the reader literally “see” their story as vividly as you see a movie rather than conveying the story through any of the non-visual storytelling techniques that good novels always use.
So it definitely goes both ways; novelists and screenplay writers have to be VERY careful whenever they write a story for the opposite medium to what they’re use to, I’d honestly never advise writers jump from one medium to the other without explicitly studying the storytelling craft of that medium, you can utterly ruin a story if you don’t understand the medium you’re working with!
@@Sanakudou i recall when Hogwarts books first had geocities fanpages & i wrote real diary from syudent perspective,,,,myspace 2003,, 2010..i wrote 7 year ,, 25,555 day journal,,each hour a new class,,, new blog page every day ,,every hour ,,,i was a wizard all right ,, i would post & forget & never go back to edit,, cos i had no time ,,i was always typing 300 words an hour..lol...i 'd do it again too.....by 2015 we got the Ilvermorney School.. but no basic origin ,, so i made it up,, another 25,555 days,, in 2022 i thought ,, ah job done,, ah tv show,hmm.please hold ,,ok a Harry Potter tv show,,yeah ,,new 7 years til..2029.. hey show til 2036,,yeah 14 years ..more,,teehee ,, by 2040~ 2047.. thats 50 years ,,like starwars 1977~2027,, wow we got old,,
Ah, well. I grew up with Harry Potter and I do understand why my generation can't let go, but at the same time it's hilarious to see adult people refer to themselves as Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Co. on dating apps. I get it, Harry Potter had a huge impact on us and it's okay to love it, but we're at a point where it's romanticised too much and with that comes that any new movie or series set in the Wizarding World is doomed to fail. Nothing can compare the nostalgic feeling a whole generation carries and can't let go of.
Accept that companies want to milk your precious nostalgia as much as possible. If you want to cherish your feelings towards Harry Potter til the end of your days: just ignore every new production instead of complaining it will ruin your childhood memories. Same with Disney. Just ignore it and you can live with your own imagination of Harry Potter or Arielle forever and ever.
If it's hilarious for grown adults to call themselves by a fictitious school house it should also be just as hilarious when they refer to themselves as having incorrect chromosomes.
@@orphanedhanyou I am begging you. Interact with real people outside. No trans person pretend they have the opposite chromosomes. They dont deny what they were born as. They just would like you to use preferred pronouns, and also take a shit without being told to get out, it isnt that hard.
@@orphanedhanyou wtf?
I think HBO cannot be trusted with their current management after the season finale of House of the Dragon. The CEO got involved and demanded 8 episodes instead of 10 and stayed with that even when there was a writer's strike and nothing could be changed. The fact that he would meddle in their biggest show and actually make it worse, there is no way this Harry Potter series would not have this sort of meddling. This new management is not the same HBO that signed on for infinite seasons of Game of Thrones. THey cannot be trusted to fucked it up and they will because they are so blinded by money. I think the fact that the first thing they did after the merger was a planned Twilight reboot says it all. It's not about quality, it's about trying to squeeze all the money out of things and if they can't they will shelve things (like Batgirl) so no one can ever see it. If anyone is excited show them the last episode of House of the Dragon and I think that excitement will die immediately. They ruined my excitement about the whole world of Westeros shows they have coming up because Zlavits is going to put his little fingers into everything and sacrifice quality for the all-mighty dollar.
It makes me kinda worried about The Last of Us, but it seems like management is keeping their noses out of it for now?
Seriously, why adapt the dragon civil war if you are unwilling to have the dragons fight because too expensive?
I really appreciate the section on "is harry potter bad, actually?" I think it's a reflex people have to write off a problematic person's past work as actually having been bad all along which always seems to be kind of missing the point.
It’s the only way for most to reconcile somethi by they love being made by somebody they hate.
I imagine if it turned out Tolkien was a turbo racist and ate children nobody would look at his extensive world building with glee or that anything he ever made had any impact or was ever good despite literally all evidence to the contrary.
@@creed8712 I mean, his world building does contain a considerable amount of racism that people do regularly revisit without having to critically pan the rest of the books because they aren't actually that comparable to HP. HP does have a lot of writing flaws entirely separate from even its problematic elements. I think a lot of people like to pretend they ALWAYS saw it when they didn't, or pretend there's nothing redeeming or interesting about them (the films I think highlight the best of them whilst trimming the worst writing choices or at least distracting you from them). But... they actually aren't particularly well written, especially on a revisit. The bloat alone in those last few books...
@@elena_1776 I flat out hate that treatment cause again any books written before literally last year could be considered problematic and if the world is always perfect and has no problem then why the hell should we read it it tells nothing.
having different opinions than you isn't problematic
@@merchantarthurnthere's no racism in lotr, since there are no real races in it.
Back when the reboot was first announced, I watched a video from either Jessie Gender or Council of Geeks pointing out the announcing the new series was a strategic ploy by the cash-strapped copyright holder. I can't remember all the details (and I don't feel like rewatching the entire thing just to place a TH-cam comment) but the theory was that rights to the Harry Potter IP was one of the biggest asset they had, and the original seven novels was the most reliable money maker. So they pitched the series to their shareholders/bank/corporate partner as a way of pointing out how solvent they were in the long run. This strikes me as the most probable answer to the question about why they were doing a reboot now.
Honestly, while it's impossible to to know yet, I find myself wondering how well this show will do. For the OG fans, their loyalty is already cemented to the movies. For younger kids, for whom 'Harry Potter' wasn't their childhood, they know the author as that unhinged transphobe who cyberbullies any woman she deems insufficiently feminine by Caucasian standards. Thus if they do give the show a try, it'll be with a jaundiced eye. If it's good enough, they'll probably watch it, but I doubt they'll fall in love with it like Millennials did.
And that doesn't factor in what stupid things JKR does in the meantime to further destroy her reputation in the meantime. I commented that on another video about the upcoming series, before her online harassment of Imane Khelif. We've got roughly two years to go before the new series airs, so it's almost a given that Rowling is going to say more hateful things in the interim. Not only will turn off potential new fans, but even the long time HP stans may find it increasingly difficult to justify continued engagement. Just sayin'.
@@astrinymris9953 Jessie gender is a moron
It is honestly a baffling choice to make the show to begin with and shows how disconnected corporations are with reality, for now we can only let time pass and hope to god that the writer gets succesfuly sued by Imane Khelif
@@sentineluno i hope she doesn't again, Rowling is not an evil person, and damn it i desire to see the show see the most accurate harry potter, not fucked over by some of the screenwriters. and the limits of 2 hours
We already got a new Harry Potter for the future, and it was actually better than the original thing. It's called The Owl House.
That's finished though
@@dreye3215 Who cares? So is Harry Potter.
@@emperor_msk Also, if we don't get more Owl House then the image of the original core story may remain untainted. What has the Harry Potter franchise put out since the movies ended that's been good or memorable? The first Fantastic Beasts? Perhaps. If we're being charitable. But all the set up got screwed up thanks to those horrendous sequels. I can't think of anything else that's been memorable or seen in an overall positive light.
I liked the Owl House as much as the next periphery demographic watcher but you're absolutely on one if you think it's anywhere close to HP, either in reach or popularity
@@GreylockMountainno one said anything about it having more reach or popularity, they said its better, better does not mean more popular
I wouldn't say the books are "bad"... But they aren't great either. They're accessible and easy to read, Rowling seems to be good enough at pacing to keep events moving and keep the reader engaged. Otherwise, they're incredibly shallow and unless you're right leaning and libertarian, they are too steeped in Rowling's worldview for any message to stand up to adult scrutiny. Once you include her complete inability to accept any kind of criticism or to admit to any flaws or plot holes, the veneer of nostalgia fades quickly.
They're perfect for kids, but there are other books that are perfect for kids that age way better for an adult to read.
I never got that impression at all, and I'm kinda shocked so many people nowadays read the series as some sort of rightwing propaganda. I guess some things got lost in translation because I diodn't read them in English.
@@joshuagreen818 How on Gods green Earth are the lessons from Harry Potter right leaning
@@dn5633If read with a political lens, Harry Potter has pretty horrible politics. It’s steeped in 90s neo-liberal “we don’t need to change the system” bullshit. I mean, Harry literally ends up being a cop defending the same broken system that gave him so much trouble as a teen. Not to mention the narrative condones slavery as long as the owners are nice. Shaun has a really good video essay that goes into the shitty politics of Harry Potter if you’re actually curious.
@@edienandyyes this!!!!
Soon Imane Kalif will own Harry Potter, I’m looking forward to what will be in store under her leadership of the brand ❤
HP is not great literature. It's a children's story by a children's author who grew past her abilities. The fundamental magic and economics were completely ignored or unacknowledged. It's a fun world, but can't compare with Middle Earth or Dune. An active editor empowered to push back would have been a huge help. Once they started filming and needing prompt content, there was no hope for fixing the technical issues with the world building.
exactly, not to mention about the morals of the story, it's so deeply tied to her own political view
>It's a fun world but can't compare with Middle Earth or Dune
I disagree. I think a fundamental aspect of the reason Harry Potter doubles either of those franchises in total gross (at least movies-wise, but I'm sure the monetary gap is just as wide with books) is precisely because this nerd fantasy has greater appeal than the other two nerd fantasies.
No one is looking for formulae laying out how Transfiguration works - they want to go to Hogwarts.
@@pbradleyking Fantasy literature can still be great without needing to be just as great as the two most popular and widely loved fantasy/sci-fi worlds ever. Hakeem is still an all time great even though he’s not Michael Jordan. No nuance to your argument.
@@GreylockMountain If you wanna base quality on the amounts sold you're ignoring factors such as: What era it came out in, how many installments were written (LOTR has 3 books, so naturally HP's 7 will make more money), who it was sold to (Harry Potter came out during the era where teaching kids to read was at an all time high thanks to books such as the goosebumps series and animorphs, while when LOTR came out, children did not read books, not to mention the amount of people on earth was nowhere near the same amount). That's also not mentioning how we then default to Endgame being the best movie ever made? Or Justin Bieber being the best musician of his time? Not how these things work.
@@dn5633 I disagree tbh. HP isn't great literature by any stretch of the imagination. After book 2, they all lost the plot and are terribly written. It just happens that the movies also came out and fit so well into the zeitgeist that it shot the franchise into the stratosphere. That's not a bad thing by any means, but the movies play a huge role in the continued success of HP. The first book was a huge success on its own, but the latter ones gained alot from the movies, the soundtrack, the acting, etc, which replaced alot of the bad stuff in the books.
Hey, so, I was personally only a year or two older than Harry himself as the books were coming out. I have dark hair and wear glasses and was a scrawny kid; this passing physical resemblance combines with a love of the books and literally earned me the nickname "Potter" which was used by *everyone I knew*, family and teachers included, and lasted until I finished high school.
To say that the Harry Potter books were formative for me would be a hilarious understatement; I read every book through at least a dozen times, and the longer ones easily more than that - Order of the Phoenix was my favorite.
When it later developed that Rowling was becoming what she is now, it was *agonizing* for me to try and associate the love, friendship, whimsy and fun I'd always felt reading the books with... what the author now was. It was only three years ago now that I managed to convince myself to throw away my last remaining hard copy of Order, and it was a painful experience which took that long to build towards and convince myself was the right thing to do.
This is all to say that your description of the communities which sprung up around Harry Potter as being full of loving, inclusive, friendly people has helped to... I'm not sure, create a distinction in my mind between what Rowling is, and what Harry Potter is. I'm not exaggerating when I say I had to duck into the bathroom at work to hide my tears while I thought about what you'd said, and how having a lingering love for the series I felt it was my duty to distance myself from might not make me as much of a traitor as it always felt like I was.
I say this with absolute sincerity - thank you for, in at least some small way, giving me back a part of something which had meant so much to me for such a large piece of my life.
I'm thirty six years old now and will never spend a single dollar of my money in a way which might have any chance of reaching Rowling, but you have helped that twelve year old boy nicknamed Potter within me stop feeling guilty for existing. Again, truly, thank you.
Chapter Timestamps:
Chapter 1: Franchise fatigue 3:19
Chapter 2: Reboots 4:52
Chapter 3: State of the brand 8:59
Chapter 4: JK Rowling 17:29
Chapter 5: Is Harry Potter bad, actually? 20:50
Chapter 6: The discourse 35:32
Chapter 7: The movies 38:42
Chapter 8: Mystery 45:08
Chapter 9: Could they pull it off? 47:54
Chapter 10: Death 52:05
There is nothing that this show could do that fanfiction hasn't. Lets be so honest. Every awful storyline element, racist undertone, or transphobic statement has been explored and fixed through the unimaginable mass of Harry Potter fanfiction on AO3. The marauders era fandom (built on almost no canon information) has taken on a deeply queer 'fanon' and produced more literary content than my public library could hold, and that alone is reason enough to know that a reboot is unnecessary. Unless Rowling dies almost immediately and somebody interview-with-the-vampire's that shit (lets it be gay) there is no concievable point to me
Women are people who were born female.
Maradeurs fandom already has countless movies and series, its called "Teen wolf" and "Euphoria" and "Smallwille" and "Winx live action" and countless other ips about 20-year old schoolkids engaging in vague mysteries and relationships
Coming back because I have more thoughts: I think there's a difference between the things the books' messaging was couched in and that messaging itself, and I think that gets pushed aside in a lot of retrospective looks at Harry Potter. Which, honestly, is understandable! I think you can make a good case for themes like the endurance of love, the importance and even beauty of death as "the next great adventure", and the strength and solidarity that comes from finding Your People being muddled and even ruined by the fact that Rowling regularly relies on misogynistic, racist, classist, ableist, fatphobic, transphobic, etc. characterizations of the characters who are supposed to be bad people, do bad things, or act primarily as set dressing. I think you can make a good case for those themes not being able to reach their true potential when put in a story whose protagonist is ultimately quite passive and a protector of the status quo, along with his friends and allies. I think we _should_ be able to make those cases, because I think that's how the next generation of writers learns to do better. But I also do ultimately think that, at that time, she meant well, and I think that for those of us who did speak that same language of tropes and stereotypes, who did understand the status quo as a good thing worthy of protecting, in writing a very basic "discrimination bad" story, she gave us some important tools to start deconstructing that language and understanding, even though she has clearly reached her own limits of that deconstruction. I think people like to mock the idea of Harry Potter being anyone's social justice starting point, but as someone who did grow up fairly conservative... I mean, it was for me, and I think it was for a lot of other fans I met and befriended over the years. It'd be a stretch to call it progressive for its time, but it was the first place I really learned that sometimes, questioning authority is a good thing.
I guess what all that boils down to is that I can never really dismiss Harry Potter entirely. It's not an active part of my life anymore; it won't be as long as Rowling keeps going after trans people (and occasionally weaponizing lesbians like me in order to do it). But it was formative to me in a lot of ways that I think it would be pointless to deny, and I do think there's a lot of revisionism and unnecessary shaming going on when we say it was never good and we all should have known. And in line with (maybe expanding on?) what I said in my earlier comment, I think I would be curious at the very least to see what could be done with a TV reboot -- after Rowling has died and can no longer funnel her money toward organizations and policies that seek to make life worse for my friends. I'm not thrilled that this is happening so soon. But eventually.
I think that's a very balanced a reasonable view (and I wasn't even part of the target audience for the original HP, having been around 16 when the first books came out. I do like the movies though). Are there flawed details in the series? Yes. Is the world-building flimsy? Absolutely. Did JKR bit off more than she could chew with it as the story got progressively darker and more adult? Yup.
But did this series capture the imagination of millions of young people with its themes of magic, friendship, loyalty and standing up for what's right? ABSO-FREAKING-LUTELY. I think by the end it fell victim of its own success, with people caring so much about it that they (and JKR herself) wanted it to be more than it set out to be: a whimsical magical story for children. When it failed to deliver, and when JKR fell into her current political stance, it was ripe for criticism, to the point where it's annoying how some people try to tear it apart over quite minor details, like they'd be embarrassed to admit there's anything good about it.
It's a bit like with beloved sitcoms (like Friends or How I Met Your Mother) when after a period of adoration there comes a time of reassessment and suddenly everyone in those series is toxic and can't do anything wrong haha.
All of Rowling's beliefs are correct
word.
I agree that Harry Potter is a pretty good series of books and movies, but seperating the art from the artist is a harder pill to swallow when the artist is still alive to directly benefit from any financial endorsement of the product. As much as the series was formative for me as a child, nowadays I'm steering clear of it until Rowling's out of the picture.
Did anyone else feel like the Cursed Child made Bellatrix have less of an edge in hindsight? She’s supposed to be insane and obsessed with Voldemort, but if she was carrying his child wouldn’t she have stayed safe until birthing the child? She would be supposedly pregnant around when she killed Sirius Black.
It makes it seem like she was just some girl who Voldy took advantage of, not a woman who decided for herself to be evil. Idk, it just rubbed me the wrong way. Makes her attempt at killing Ginny make less sense as well. You’d think you’d at least have a look of realization that she too is mother that is about to orphan her child when Molly stopped her
Cursed Child is non canon
No one ever accused Joanne of consistency
I like that you tried to be as nuanced as possible with this. It's hard to find anyone who has given HP any artistic credit, because it did have merit until so, so recently. I'm no longer a JKR supporter, though I was a fan literally since day one. It's been hard for me as a huge HP fan *and* a trans man to compartmentalize all of this. Thanks again for talking about this and being real.
A work of art lost its merit because its female author holds her own opinion of womanhood? Interesting. (And by that I mean I find it condescendingly interesting.) I still like The Fugees’ music even though Lauren Hill hates me for something I can’t control.
@@DanLovesBooks because it's terf author denies the OPs manhood*
But still not really, no, because a lot of people have been dissecting the series for years even before Rowling started being a bigot and it just never was that good.
@@Jane-oz7ppSaying HP was never that good is actually crazy.
Can you help me try to understand why people are so angry with Rowling? I was a HUGE Potterhead during the release of the books but drifted away from the IP post-Deathly Hallows. I've never read Cursed Child, never watched the 2nd Fantastic Beasts, and don't follow J.K. on Twitter. I've only heard about the political issues peripherally.
Please correct my understanding of events. To me it seems like J.K. Rowling genuinely wants to be an ally to the trans community. However, she thinks there should be a distinction between women and trans-women. She would still like to acknowledge trans-women as people who should be respected as much as anyone, and treated with dignity. It seems like she agrees with most of your values, genuinely wants to be an ally, and means well. The disagreement comes with her definition/distinction between woman and trans-woman.
I don't mean to be dismissive at all. And I understand why someone could feel hurt by this "disagreement" (there is probably a better word to use). But is it really enough to call J.K. a "bad person"? She means well. You have to meet people where they are. J.K. seems to be an ally more than an enemy. She seems to want to help more than most people.
@@Jane-oz7pp jk has only said trans women and women are different...shocker. and denying ops "manhood'? R u serious? The op us trying to mimic being a man to relieve dysphoria, they're "manhood" isnt real .
The morals have aged well because they aren't nuanced.... like at all. Saying racism bad and leaving it there gives no room for bad actors to attack it. Which is good but its also kinda lackluster.
I kinda think the morals have some cracks in them if anything. In short there aren’t really any bad actions so much as there are people that we’re supposed to hate. Like, Harry can own a slave cuz he’s chill, but dobby must be freed because a bad guy owns him. The entire story is dedicated to returning to a comfortable status quo that the well to do protagonists can benefit from, merely by killing the big bad guy. None of the inequality or racism is ever systematically addressed by the end of the books. And Harry and his friends all get to become wizard cops and politicians lol
@@happyfriendshippalthat’s just reality though.
@@creed8712 explain
@@happyfriendshippal how did ww2 end exactly?
@@creed8712 the Japanese surrendered to allied forces under very complex political and cultural circumstances. the atomic bomb lays dubious at best claim to ending the war if that’s what you’re getting at
i think some people severely underestimate the general awareness of jk rowling’s behaviour there is in the general public. your typical coworker or friend of a friend at best has a vague knowledge that jk rowling has been cancelled but that does not impact on their love for harry potter in any way and would gladly devour a hbo series
There was some absolutely fantastic moments in this video but... It's a little frustrating that the acknowledged critiques stop at social critique because whilst bigotry does make a series worse, there's so much MORE foundational to HP's poor story telling (and I say this as someone who "was a fan" in the sense that I enjoyed the first four books and then forced myself to "enjoy" the last 3 because it was the only interest I had that anyone else was enthusiastic about). Bloated page counts, dull and tangential story telling (my god, book 6), inconsistent moral messaging ("good characters can fat shame but bad characters cannot" is bad not only because it's problematic, but because that's inconsistent and sloppy), poor tone control, copious moments where characters you're meant to like get unbearably grating, bad/missing foreshadowing (the deathly hallows are a particular standout - though clearly it's not for lack of planning, because the horcruxes were well established even if the magic changed), an unsatisfying conclusion that's about Who Got A Wand We Just Learnt About instead of a core theme or the protagonist's skill/traits, a further unsatisfying conclusion where it feels like a lot of potentially positive changes for the world were ditched in favour of the status quo.... the list goes on. And without getting unnecessarily CinemaSins Nitpick about it. It's part of the reason why the FILMS are particularly good - the scripts do a good job of trimming the fat and neatening the edges and I do think this recolours the original in a lot of people's brains because they are so iconic and memorable.
Now of course the films took their material from the original so it's not as if there was nothing in those books that was 'good', so I can't fault anyone for being able to get past the flaws in them and genuinely enjoy them. But I know when I revisited them in that gap where Pottermore started getting weird but JK hadn't gone off the deepend yet I found myself walking away thinking "they... weren't that good, actually".
As for the problematic elements - it's important to continually recontexualise that these are books for kids. Kids that are meant to age with Harry, sure, but still children. "This could be taken as a commentary on how activists are dismissed as annoying because hard truths are difficult to stomach" rings hollow when it's alongside a house elf who is depressed and alcoholic as a direct result of being freed from slavery. Most adults would probably not read it that way, let alone 13-14 yr olds. It's not revisionist to understand that the books problematic elements HAD been critiqued for years by minorities who finally started to be listened to as the cracks in JKR's armour started to show during Pottermore's early years. Unshockingly, it wasn't popular or often safe for marginalised people to critique the cultural juggernaut that was Harry Potter? I dunno man, "Cho Chang" has always been a racist name (etc) and people finally acknowledging that isn't "revisionist". That honestly added a weird taste to the rest of this video that was otherwise good. It's like... okay to have complicated feelings, it's okay to acknowledge the books/films had plenty going for them, but it felt... defensive. And for what?
Okay, well, after finishing the video and reading the comments, I feel like one more comment is necessary. My previous comments were all counter-points to things you said, but after seeing that the current comments seem to skew more in the negative direction than the positive, I think it's necessary to mention that this was an excellent video. Your arguments were very well-structured and thoughtful, and eloquently expressed. And the shifting of the recording setting was a cool touch as well.
All in all, this video felt extremely professional and kept me thoroughly engaged to the end. It's certainly the quality of video I wouldn't be surprised to see on a large established channel.
I honestly don’t need a reboot…I love when they do stuff like “Tales of the Jedi” for Star Wars. To have small things focus of other characters that weren’t prominent in the films series. But…🤷🏻♀️
I hope they dont actually bother going through with it, but if they did start it, can you *imagine* her meltdown when it's inevitably canceled early (streaming shows just don't run that long, the economics of the model are so bad, especially for a show that will be expensive as hell to produce and the only possible product placement is its own merch.)
It’s going to do shit because it’s going to be shit and unsuited to steaming, but she’s going to spend all her time saying it failed because of a woke mob
Yeah, the eight movies she had just do not happen. She got lucky.
@@ezrafriesner8370 lol nah, the show will do just fine as long as it’s decent…everyone knows the woke mob can’t cancel shit
@@Gomi422 lol it wouldn’t be a “woke mob”, it would just be another case of studios pouring money into a show that doesn’t offer sufficient returns cause the streaming platform economic model is kinda a nightmare and hard to finance. Shows get canceled very very often on streaming platforms because they’re hard to make money off of
There was a time where I would have really loved a marauder’s show but after all these years of jk rowlings terrible behaviour, I really don’t enjoy Harry Potter anymore :/
They can update the books to what they obviously always meant to say, according to JKR.
Make all Death Eaters LGBTQ, Draco becomes crossdresser Drag-o, Hermionie makes studies of the age at which teenage girls are most ripe and fertile, Ron dies, so Hermione can get together with Harry, Dumbledore is now straight and has 23 children with McGonnagall (also he‘s played by Matt Walsh), Umbridge is a butch lesbian, the Dark Mark becomes the Rainbow Mark, and Voldemort‘s favourite spell is „Awokeakedavra“. Music sounds all like a Richard Wagner opera.
That is funny how people hate Rowling for both being too inclusive and not inclusive enough...
Sound fuckin awesome
@@CarmenElRose literally nobody hates rowling for "being too inclusive" lmao
@@7PlayingWithFire7 I do. I knew the franchise was fucked the moment she said "well ackchually dumbledore was gay all along"
The funniest bit of this is actually that Wagner was one of the biggest inspirations for John Williams. His concept of the Leitmotiv is visible all throughout John Williams' work. The entirety of the Harry Potter soundtrack is heavily inspired by Wagner. So the original soundtrack already actually sounds like a Richard Wagner opera.
im the nerd that liked the first fantastic beasts movie... for the beasts
That's what they should have focused on tbh
For me, at least, this HBO reboot is just a cash grab. It’s too soon after the series. And with JK Rowling beliefs I’m not looking forward to it especially that my beloved book series will more likely get made terrible
I LOVED the series but growing older I was just kinda starting to feel off about some aspects. I mean as a girl it was kinda always bad because there are so little female characters and they all suck. JK Rowling REALLY hates woman (not just trans woman) and it really made me hate everything gilry about myself . 10/10 recommend a video "Top Top 28 Female Characters in Harry Potter (and what they say about J.K. Rowling…) "
But like the thing that made me get the ick in fist place is the slave race that wants to be inslaved and that slavery is only bad if they treat their slaves bad and just how she wrote about Hermione wanting to free them. But now as an adult it is hard to read because its impossible to "seperate the art from the artist" because like the world building is so based around fasism is okay or atleast if we do it and slavery is fun and acutally what if we did an antisemitism and fatphobia and the list just goes on. I dont say it lightly or as a joke, so much of her world is just rasist but not to show its bad just to be like in a world i had all choices to create I will create rasism and let it exist. There are so good long videos about this, i cannot explain it all in a comment.
Even though I want to enjoy it as when i read it it is not like good writing, it is just nostalgia.
What on earth are you talking about? You weirdos just invent problems to get upset about.
You mean the video where the girl complains that an unseen for most of the series author of textbooks didn’t have more of storyline?
The only women that are "good enough" are mothers who are celebrated for being only mothers or sacrifice everything for supporting their husband. Even then there's always a xenophobic stab at who they are, like Molly Weasley. There's ALWAYS an insult. Always something. Always a comment that makes me go, "Holy crap, even Roald Dahl isn't this hateful unless someone is evil for evil's sake." Narcissa Malfoy gets a pass and less insults just because she had a child and she's putting up with her husband's goosestepping because OH BUT BEING A MOTHER AND WIFE. HOW NOBLE. Give me a break she's got an armband on, too.
But despite loving McGonagall she still has vitriol towards her for never loving again (and the cat lady thing) which is... what's the point? She gets the Dumbledore treatment; we only find out later she gets nieces and nephews she's devoted to which, okay why are you WEIRD about women being single or not having children in their lives or being even remotely feminine?
It's WEIRD. It's CREEPY. This obsession is really weird because then she'll go OH WELL SHE LOOKS LIKE A MAN OR A PIG for other characters she wants to deeply villainize. What. Even as a child it felt deeply unsettling. I like pink. What's wrong with me then! I was going through puberty and my weight fluctuated each week. WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME, JOANNE?!
that video was really good and eye opening
the point of her mentioning that character is that a female character that was only mentioned ONCE made it onto the list of female characters mentioned THE MOST IN THE SERIES. if the series had actual care put into its female characters, all of the female characters on the list would be mentioned at least 5-10 times. and video dives into the character arcs of the most popular female characters such as ginny, molly weasley, mcgonagall. almost all of their motivations are tied to their relationships to male characters, or being a mother.
i think it's kind of disingenuous to frame the criticisms of harry potter's larger themes as nitpicking the books to prove that jk rowling has always been evil or whatever when these are literally criticisms that already existed that people were already talking about years ago before she became poster child of the terfs. it really doesn't take much time to realize the books can be interpreted that way if you stop to think about them at all. like "why did jkr introduce slavery and then make the main character a slave owner in the happy ending" was a criticism my friends and i could come up with in middle school before the second deathly hallows had even come out, easily during the time that harry potter was seen as a masterpiece and jkr was seen as some kind of pop culture god. they aren't small issues. they were actively getting in the way of us enjoying the stories and we were writing fanfiction in our heads to solve the problems this posed for us. and we were HUGE harry potter fans who literally ran around during break time pretending to duel each other with pencils. these problems weren't just always there, they were also always obvious. i can't even remember how many times i met another harry potter fan who went on a rant about how it's ridiculous that everyone makes fun of hermione for being against slavery. we were children and we could make those critiques. because it's literally right in your face. the comic relief in book 4 is that hermione wants to abolish slavery.
if you look back at critiques of harry potter and its world even from before jkr came out as a terf, these same critiques are already present. we were like 14 (around 2013ish, so before jkr started doing terf shit online) when we realized harry potter was poorly written upon a reread, and we were huge fans of harry potter. sometimes bad people do make good things, but harry potter is just mediocre. from a craft perspective it's not particularly well written or creative, and from a moral perspective the hero character is literally a slave owner in the happy epilogue, and that's not even touching the whole systemic oppression of all other magical species by wizards or the rampant fatphobia. harry is kind of insanely passive and also an asshole. none of the characters get real development. 90% of the books are boarding school book fluff completely unrelated to the actual plot, which gets ridiculous in the second half of the series when wizard hilter is out and about and we're reading about our characters just chilling and doing homework most of the time. it's just not a good series. half of the ideas in the books that are hailed as creative are ripped whole cloth out of the worst witch series. the reason anti hp people had the "read a different book" criticism was partly because they were just hating, but also they did have a genuine point. harry potter is just not well written and once you start reading other books, you realize that.
like, you said it's grounded in altruism and thematically dedicated to the liberation of oppressed people. but it's objectively not. like voldemort is simultaneously a blood purist wizard supremacist racist nazi character who wants to oppress more people, but he's also the only one trying to reach out to the other oppressed magical species and offer them better treatment. both of those things are true and they're completely contradictory. all of magical society is built around wizards having the ultimate power and other species not even being able to use wands. this kind of stuff is mentioned repeatedly in the books which is why i still remember it. but they don't do anything about this. harry and co are only interested in maintaining the status quo. slytherin house is a cesspit of blood purist ideology, but even in the epilogue it still exists. nothing changes. slavery is introduced and it still exists. goblins and centaurs and giants and so on are treated as second class citizens despite being intelligent and this never changes. harry isn't even altruistic. he's basically a millionnaire and his best friend's family lives in poverty, but he doesn't financially help them out with anything. he doesn't even OFFER to compensate them for the car after driving it into the tree. he doesn't even buy ron any christmas presents! they're supposed to be best friends! harry and co decorate the severed house elf slave heads in sirius's family's house with christmas hats over the holidays. what part of this is altruistic? what part of this is thematically dedicated to the liberation of oppressed people?
the problematic "undertones" aren't "there if you go looking". they are overtones. the book is actively slapping you in the face with how horrible these people are. i think the audience harry potter ended up cultivating says far more about the fans and the communities we created than it does about harry potter. we got what we wanted out of the books. we looked at a series of books in which the heroes want to continue to oppress others and we decided they didn't actually want to do that and that they were good people. part of the reason why is also that the movies left a lot of this malice out, so it's easy to remember that version of the story.
I would've loved a series on Umbridge honestly, been saying this for years, we have no clue to why she is so evil, why she believes what she believes, nothing... we got more on Voldemort and he is less hated than her
Rowling fell into my bad graces back in 2013/14, a time during which an active independence campaign was running in Scotland whcih was engendering much healthy debate.
Anyway, along she came throwing her weight behind the anti-independence campaign and likening people who supported Scotland's self determination to death eaters, which to amyone who has ever interacted with a supporter of Scottish independence will know is a completely fatuous notion.
Perhaps we should have been less surprised though given how Rowling portrays slavery as "common sense" and abolishionists and swivel eyed lunatics.
JFC, what is it with her and calling everyone who disagrees with her "Death Eaters"? Actual Scottish people who wanted independence AND trans activists? And it's pretty disturbing that they're both just groups of people sticking up for rights and self-determination they don't feel are provided by the current social order. I would 💯 read any pastiche novel that presented the conflict in the HP novels from that perspective.
If fanfics and the public domain has taught me, the Harry Potter franchise doesn't need rest, it needs to be free from corporate hands and Rowling's hands to let other fans and artists rejuvenate it with their own progressive ideas that changes it in a positive effect moving forward.
THIS, the amount of great writing made by fans is outstanding and fixes many of the issues that many have with the books and even expands the universe in actualy good and interesting ways
HBO, what about instead let`s adapt the most popular HP fanfics. Now that would be something.
The squid and the castle? 👀
Manacled 😢
oh boy do I remember the satanic panic over HP! I was only a small child during the original one back in the 1980’s, but I definitely remember the HP one! I was in middle/high school at the time, and I will never forget my parents’ friend calling our house to leave a message (on the good old answering machine) begging them not to let me or my brother read HP. Because it was against Jesus or something. Thankfully, my parents never really prevented us from consuming any media as kids. It’s probably because they were both working full time, but still. We got to watch way too much HBO, even the R rated stuff, and listened to whatever music we wanted. So they weren’t about to start taking books away from us. That woman who left the message probably loves the franchise now, given rowling’s new allegiances and all. Wouldn’t be surprised to see any of those ridiculous stay at home moms who wanted to burn every copy of the half blood Prince then, now sporting a “I stand with jk rowling!” or “this witch doesn’t burn!” shirt.
And all the dorks who grew up loving it hate it now because Rowling spoke the truth. You are the same as the crazy religious people.
@@espo221bOK holocaust denier.
Where I lived there was no Satanic panic, I didn’t even know it was a thing back then until I read about it on the internet when I was 17. I’m from Spain
Sigh.. I’m all for new ideas being done, however as a kid I always thought a animated Tv show of Harry, Ron and Hermione and their daily lives at Hogwarts depicting the rest of the school year outside of the main events of each book/movie would have been a fun idea. It would be animated and therefore not confused with the movies, but also explored all the growth and events that happened in a school year outside of the main plot of the books/movies.
Each season was a year they were at school, and we could really get views into other characters times at Hogwarts as well and see some events that weren’t given time in the movies. Obviously now that I’m a little older and the final books and movies have been released I realize that’s a lot harder to pull off well and and adapt faithfully. However a full remake of each movie to accurately tell the stories of the book THIS soon is a level of overkill that even Disney and their mass production of Star Wars hasn’t reached… yet.
Sure man let's get a series out of a beloved children series like, nearly ten years after its relevancy has faded, and its creator is embroiled in a controversy that has placed the series under brand new scrutiny where people without nostalgia are analyzing it and everyone who was a diehard six odd years ago is starting to realize that the entire series was actually pretty poorly written but we couldn't see it because we were children. This is a good idea.
I really want to know where you're at that HP's relevance has faded, because it sounds like you're letting your distaste for Rowling color your perception. The books and movies are still insanely popular. And if an entry is good, like last year's Hogwarts Legacy, it'll still crack $1B.
How was it "poorly written" exactly?
@@sandygonsalves4646 Extremely poorly written. If you read some better books, you'll quickly realize it.
@@7PlayingWithFire7 that's not an argument..just an opinion
Women are people who were born female.
I used to also love harry potter more than just about anything when i was really young. But as i got into my mid teens, a lot has tainted the franchise for me. I consumed much more literature that was frankly not aimed at kids. So, on top of the shitty additions to the franchise, i looked back at how flimsy the writing was for the original series. And rowling being repugnant doesn't help either. They are ideally books made for kids to enjoy, and it accomplishes that. But also, there are similar books made for kids that engross adults as well.
Yeah I don't think they are necessarily bad, they are just not at that level of other great fantasy
@@ricebix theyre really mid though. it is the biggest crime to literacy that her books are the most sold books of all time after the bible
rowling isn't repugnant.
your take on the concept of death in harry potter reflecting in what is happening to it in the real world gave me goosebumps. i never thought of it in this way but it captures the essence of everything we say about this reboot era in general, and in harry potter in particular, so poetically and beautifully. thank you for that
I've been looking for a video like this for a little while now without even realising it, amazing content wowowow
i wanna add my own thoughts because I've been reflecting on my past relationship with the material ever since the news came out that she might be being sued sometime soon
i think there's something positive to be said about Harry reconnecting to a past he never knew
I do truly think that the series peaks in its thematic richness in Prisoner of Azkaban, with that whole story being a beautiful exploration of how Harry can reclaim a relationship to the parents he never knew through spending time with his dad's old friends
everything regarding how his patronus is conjured from a memory that he isn't even sure is real is super touching and I'm sure people never knew their parents would be able to find themselves in Harry in those moments
in short, I love the part when Sirius tells Harry that the ones we love never really leave us, pure and simple
that's when the series is at it's strongest, to me
to me, everything that follows is weakened once you come to terms with the idea that the finale centres on a fight to vanquish fascism written by someone without a solid grasp on how fascism should be confronted - the fact that Voldemort is essentially defeated by wand loyalty mechanics rather than by anything explicitely anti-fascist speaks for itself - hell, Harry owns a slave by the end of the series ; ;
with that being said, I'd be remiss not to mention Newt Scamander as a character. I do think that he's an amazing example of a positive masculine role model; kind, empathetic, peaceful, and I think it's brilliant that many read him as a positive example of an autistic protagonist,,,,, but you totally hit the nail on the head when saying that it's a shame that those movies aren't built for him and are instead concerned about a conflict nobody cares about
I only ever stuck around for the first fantastic beasts film, didn't see the sequel because I wasn't comfortable seeing a film with Johnny Depp in it in 2018 and cut ties with the franchise once JK went fully mask off in 2020 but I still love Newt himself, at least conceptually
10/10 video, it feels like it was made by someone who's been making video essays for years - I'm sure next time the Harry Potter special interest takes over me, I'll be rewatching this, alongside Shaun's video and the ContraPoints video ^^
10/10 comment, great pin.
"You either care enough to be _Fallout_ or fail hard enough to be _Halo."_
- Harvey Dent, maybe.
My breakup with this series has been one of the most painful and the most protracted breakups of my life, and so for that reason and a whole host of other reasons (including what you've covered in this video), I really do wish they'd just scrap any attempts at a reboot at _least_ until Rowling dies and she isn't funneling the money she makes from her IP into anti-trans organizations and politics. I'm grateful for the good messages the person she used to be had to share about the tangible forces involved in love and loss... but I can't look at it again until the person she is now _is_ no more. I would love for that to mean she deradicalizes one day, but I'm not holding my breath.
Well-made video, in any case. It's nice to hear nuanced takes about the franchise itself no matter how people feel about it... and I think I do kind of miss talking about Harry Potter.
Same here.
Jeez, get a grip
@@AgentGodzillaRP1701 Jeez, get a life outside of putting other people down online ;)
Seriously, large portion of the fan base is hurt. This show isn't going to fix that. And Rowling is going to go nuts when this show doesn't do well
@@ramywiles rather have the series and Rowling alive then your bs wants. Rowling has the right to make money off her work
The only way I can really see this working in a new adaptation is to also change the visual media; if they did this as an animated series, I think it would probably work magnificently
Yeah unless they’re willing to shell out GOT level money per episode it’ll end up looking cheap. You can bet your ass there won’t be practical effects, it’ll all be added in with CG
it is a major oversight in your critique that you do mention that the books are very misogynistic, classist and fatphobic. If you talked about those things along with the racism and slavery, could you still really claim that the work is good and holds up?
Yes because those arent the merits of the criticism and if anything the books intentionally shine a light on classism, even if it doesnt magically solve it.
Cute how millennials attempt to reconcile their childhood love for a series of books with their much more recent drive for self-validation via attention whoring on social media. Cute and pathetic.
I could, but I’m not triggered by the author having her own opinion about womanhood. They’re fun books to read. Can’t have a good story without struggles, so sometimes the author has to touch on sensitive subjects. Would love to see your bestselling book that gets millions of people to read it and which contains nothing anybody might find disagreeable.
You could claim that the messages surrounding love, friendship, loss, grief, mortality, questioning authority, etc. are still worthwhile, even though they're not at their most expansive and true when couched in misogyny and classism and fatphobia and racism and weird accidental slavery apologia and upholding of the status quo. I think those nuggets of good have kept people afloat in the fandom for a long time (though I personally was on my way out with the second Fantastic Beasts movie, let alone when Rowling came forward as a vocal transphobe).
It's weird because the more you look into it, the series is just so at odds with itself. You have such great themes about bigotry and friendships and love while at the same time you have Rowling promoting fascism, sexism, and slavery.
woah i assumed this was a big channel until i went to subscribe at the end of the video!! great job man; can't wait for more of your videos :)
You’re right: it’s totally about money. And I have to believe the studio has done their research that there’s enough people that will want to watch it that they’ll make money. I also think that they’ve seen that JKR is sort of a one-hit wonder. Just about everything she’s done since those first seven books have made the Wizarding World franchise worse. If she’s going to be deeply attached to it, a HP remake is really the only option.
There are so many other stories that could be told from within the universe, but because of JKR, we’re stuck with either bad stories or remakes.
You know who asked for this adaptation? David Zaslav, CEO of HBO. Maybe not him specifically, but he has openly and frequently talked about how interested he is in franchises that print money.
It makes no sense cinematically, but perfect sense financially. Rowling has proved she can't make anything else decent; her input to the scripts on Fantastic Beasts was considered a big factor in why the films are so poor, and her adult fiction is overlooked unless it's stirring up controversy. HP is the cash cow, and the next generation aren't going to buy in unless there's a constant refreshing and laundering of the brand to keep it headline-relevant when the only thing we hear about Rowling, over and over, is a tirade of bigotry. It's a cash grab, and keeping the new park in-line with the old branding shows how little faith anyone has that it'll even take off.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and point out that.... essentially Harry Potter as a franchise isn't necessarily bad, but there's aspects of the original books alone that does not carry over to the film adapations that do make it bad on the whole.
Like the fact that in the books Hermione takes a stand against *slavery* and overall the wizarding world tells her she's just wrong and Dobby not wanting to be a slave makes him "just weird" and nobody scrutinizes that aspect.
That Hogwarts could be super cool with the diversity of creatures it has but instead the wizarding world still keeps draconian rules that prevent goblins and centaurs and other sentient species perfectly capable of reading and writing and even casting spells.... from ever attending or becomming a wizard themselves.
Wizard supremacy is also pretty explicit. Like its not right to be cruel to the muggles, but they are inferior creatures with nothing to offer who's lives have no value
There is a lot I agree with here, but the idea that Harry Potter is "explicitly anti-fascist" enough and its themes are so obviously there that conservatives won't go to bat for it is absurd. They fucking play MGS and don't comprehend the blatant anti-western sentiment in it, and the earnest adoration of Che. They watch Robocop and don't see that its politics condemn them. You put too much weight onto hypocrisy and consistency.
Her racism and the slaves like being slaves narrative just make it all unreadable/watchable. Edit : it was formaive for me but ive grown and you clearly haven't.
Well yeah, but imagine if you didn't come to Harry Potter as a kid to grow up with it, but as a young adult. So then all your hand-wavey stuff about its not being actually bad, doesn't exist for the rest of us. So there's that. Not just in terms of its problematic themes (like yay! slavery and all non-humans are lesser thans) but actually not great prose.
So who knows if this show can do well? House of Dragons did better than expected, given how GoT seemingly dragon-flambéed its entire series/fanbase. Though I will say that S2 of that show it might lead it down its predecessor's path more than S1 (GRRM is going to even write again, he's so unhappy). Anyhew, maybe this show can be like that.
my first thought was not “already”, it was “better hurry up before it’s too late”.
I will argue that us millennials will be the only generation to ever be obsessed with this franchise. gen z was obligated to find it cringe and uncool, and future generations will not even touch it because of who JK turned out to be. so if they still plan to bank on our nostalgia, they better hurry up, because I don’t really envision watching it in my 50s.
The proper way to reboot it would have been to make an animated show that was line by line honest to the source.
what a sure-fire way to make a garbage product
32:40: Well... no some Potterheads cannot simply passively enjoy a children's franchise as a surface-level condemnation of fascism. There are a minority of hardcore fans who have doubled down specifically on Rowling's terfism. So I wouldn't say Harry Potter NEVER pushed someone to the right.
I really am enjoying and agreeing with this essay so far. But the fact is Harry Potter does have a a unique flavor of toxic fandom, especially since the Twitter shit has happened. And I think that definitely feeds into the backlash.
though at this point i have very little love left for the hp series after all of jkr's bigotry, just from a marketing standpoint i'm baffled as to why they decided to retell the original story instead of doing a marauder's era series. i'm not in touch with the fandom anymore but any time i cross paths with it online, it's mostly people talking about the marauders. seems like one of the few corners of the series that still has an active and engaged following and i have no idea why they aren't capitalizing on that
"I think I speak for a sizeable contingent of the target audience..." Dude, I don't think you're the target audience of Harry Potter anymore. I'm sure that HBO will try to incorporate more adult-oriented themes into the TV series for the middle-aged fans but ultimately this series is trying to attract a new generation of kids to the series.
"...barely a full decade after it was finished." Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows - Part 2 released in 2011. The HBO series doesn't premiere until 2026. That's 15 years, my guy. And it's 25 years since the original Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone film debuted back in 2001.
"By a wide margin there is no precedent for an IP this commercially successful being rebooted this shamelessly early." Are you familiar with Spider-Man? The first Raimi series ran from in 2002 to 2007. We then had the Amazing Spider-Man reboot in 2012, just five years after the Raimi series ended. That was followed by the Marvel reboot in 2017. What about Batman? The original Burton-Schumamacher films ran from 1989 to 1997. This was followed by three failed reboots before Christopher Nolan successfully brought Batman Begins to theaters in 2005. Yeah, that's right. There were three failed reboot attempts in an eight year period. Nolan had sequels in 2008 and 2012, followed quickly after by the launch of the DC cinematic universe in 2013 with Man of Steel. Now, the DC universe got messy but we first saw a new Batman played by Ben Affleck in 2016. Affleck also appears in Suicide Squad, also released in 2016, and Justice League, released in 2017. Batman then gets a reboot in 2022 with the release of The Batman starring Robert Pattinson. But the DC cinematic universe wasn't quite done, so we actually got to see Affleck suit up as Batman one last time in 2023 even though Batman had been rebooted the year before. And then I still need to mention The Joker series, which premiered in 2019 and depicts a child Bruce Wayne that is distinct from both the DC cinematic universe and Pattinson series. That means that there were three separate Batman series running concurrently with each other. So it's actually quite amazing that an IP as successful as Harry Potter went an entire 15 years without a reboot.
Im seriously impressed by the quality of this and just really like your overall vibe. You've got a new fan for sure bro.
If anything, this series should be an anthology of scenes that either couldn't make the movies or had to be condensed for runtime. We don't need an entire season for Prisoner of Azkaban, but a book-accurate Shrieking Shack scene with all the Marauders' details? Yes, please.
JoJO just wants a new cast to try to overshadow the ones who turned against her over her bigotry,
She either doesn't realize these ones will also grow up, or she just plans to replace them too
Harry Potter isn’t bad. It’s mid which I feel like is a little bit worse.
9:16 tell that to sanrio and pokemo- oh wait.. their brand isn't heavily ascociated with bigotry sooo... :3
I remember being in a fast food joint at night on the day that the 6th book released in the US bookstores. Some kid runs in, yells at the top of his lungs, "Snape kills Dumbledore!" and promptly runs out before anyone has any idea of what just happened. And my friends and I took a moment to absorb what we had just heard. Was quite the hard core way of spoiling something. Props.
Or
......and heres a crazy idea.....how about adapting a long book series that hasnt been done before ? Take a leap of faith maybe.?
And stop beating a dead horse?
Sincerely, a potterhead who rereads the books and re-watches the movies on a yearly basis.
IKR, you can tell that the executives just live outside of human costums and just see the numbers and statistics without any of the context, making baffling choices like this
when I was first starting to deconstruct and escape religious indoctrination I watched a video called "This is how church music manipulates you" and it was a helpful and eye-opening and saddening experience which I am very thankful for. That video has stayed floating around in the back of my head for a good few years. Now imagine my surprise when I find this Harry Potter themed video in my feed, really enjoy it so as I'm watching I check out the channel to see if this is something I want to subscribe to, aND FIND THE CHURCH MUSIC VIDEO?! I literally exclaimed "Wait, you're *that* guy?!" Subbed. Keep up the good work! Lol
The biggest issue is nobody needs to put more money in her pocket. I can't even read the books anymore because of her bigoted beliefs, let alone watch the movies or bother to watch a new pointless series. As far as I'm concerned she buried this series that I adored and it's dead and gone.
@@gdave53925_ then piss off this isn't for you crawl in your miserable hole and hide from the world.
bell hooks was criticizing Harry Potter in like, 2006 for being completely uncritical of patriarchy, it has not been a universal consensus that it was "pretty good" until recently
My expectations are extremely low after seeing Percy Jackson and Netflix's ATLA. Both of them were utter garbage. These companies love to brag about their tv show budgets but they look like crap. Where does all the money go? And i get why the kids suck at acting, they're kids, but why do the adults?
Movies 4 5 and 6 were such bad adaptations that they created the need for a future reboot as soon as the last movie was released.
My opinion on the movies hasn't changed at least: only the first two are worth watching as fun, lighthearted, fantasies.
Even if I was still willing to consume hp, I think there is not just a question of quality in new adaptions, but also in how they are going to appeal to fans of all ages. It is a children's series, but the new content seems torn in trying to appeal to adults just as much.
The fact that it will be more like the books *the books that are pretty racist and sexist and have a lot of things that were super problematic to the point that the movies decided not to show them even back then makes the idea of the reboot even worse
Good people can essentially do bad things as well. I mean, if you were born in a society where something awful is normalised you'd probably be okay with it too.
Best example, as you mentioned, is how everyone today is fine with eating factory farmed meat, which is essentially hell on earth for these relatively intelligent and emotional animals. Doesn't mean you're a bad person, but when judged by future generations you'll be seen as a monster who didn't stand against factory farming and even contributed to it.
Considering HBO cut house of the dragon S2 from 10 episodes to 8, despite the first season being massively popular and loved, does not make me think they really care about telling a good story. The cutting those 2 episodes was absolutely disastrous for season 2.
You’re missing a huge context here which is that HP came from the UK. I grew up in the UK in the 90s. Harry Potter reflected the conservatism of the time here - and that continued - and the creation of the films did soften those sharper edges - + the books ARE dreadful bc of that. You are charmed bc you don’t get the foundation 😅
I’m of the view that what HP should do would be to work with the international teams at Netflix and create Wizard school experiences from other countries - maybe Korea, Mexico, etc. places that Netflix has shown us can generate great series. We’ve seen Harry’s world, why not something different entirely in that massive world?
Or, if it has to be Harry Potter’s life, start with PoA, the majority’s favorite book, or GoF, the first book to have cut significant material out of the book in its adaptation. Very few people really return to PS/SS or CoS expecting scenes not in the movies.
The criticism towards the name "Cho Chang" is utterly stupid.
Cho Chang is a perfectly beautiful, normal name in Chinese. Chang is the romanisation of the Chinese surname 張 in both Mandarin and Cantonese-speaking countries except in Mainland China. It has a more common variation "Cheung" which happens to be another Cantonese romanisation. 張 is the third most common surname in Taiwan, the fourth most common surname in PRC and the most common surname in Shanghai but it is also a Korean surname. Zhang is the romanisation of 張 using Putonghua (Mandarin) pin-yin system which is mostly only used in mainland China. 張 is more commonly romanised as "Chong" and "Cheong" in Singapore and Malaysia. Chang and Cheung is also the romanisation of the Chinese surname 章 in Cantonese.
Cho is the romanisation of many Chinese characters including 秋, 卓, 草, 曹, 楚, 早, 祖 in Cantonese. 秋，卓，楚，早 are the ones more commonly used in given names so I am only going to elaborate on these.
秋 originally means plentiful harvest but it can also mean "autumn". 卓 means "excellence, outstanding; profound; brilliant; lofty" but it is more commonly used in 2-character given names. Just so you know, 卓 is also a Chinese/Korean surname. 楚 is the name of an ancient Chinese state and originally means thorns, but it can also mean "arranged in order", "well-dressed", "a lovely lady" or "clarity". 早 just means "the morning" but I happen to know someone with that given name but with a different surname.
Cho Chang is translated as 張秋 in Chinese, which basically means "Autumn Chang". I actually happen to know someone from primary school with that exact same name and romanisation when the Harry Potter movies were still coming out. This classmate of mine was incredibly disappointed by the fact that she got sorted into Hufflepuff instead of Ravenclaw in that Pottermore sorting quiz. As a kid, I used to have a headcanon that Cho Chang was a Hongkonger who moved to the UK due to the worsening political climate before the 1997 Handover as it was very common for Hong Kong families to emigrate to the UK back in the 80s to 90s. That would explain why Cho Chang didn't have an anglicised name as she was not born in the UK and most people from Hong Kong back then rarely put their anglicised given name as their legal name.
I have actually never heard from anyone I know who grew up in Chinese-speaking countries or speak Chinese criticise this name. Cho Chang is a very commonly adored character in Chinese-speaking countries and the only thing I have seen people complain about her is her lacking characterisation or the fact that she didn't end up with Harry. I only learned that people didn't like this name after moving to an English-speaking country for university and I am tired of having to explain this repeatedly.
People who make this "criticism" are the type of persons who think JK Rowling hates hungarian people because she made "Hungarian" horntail the worst dragon 😭
So basicaly the hate to the name is bad faith critisism that forgets to take into account the opinion of the culture they assume they are protecting, who could've fucking guessed
God this wave of bad faith critisism towards HP is rough, like the video said, it's not perfect but it does have tons to apreciate, DESPITE the writer.
31:49 I don't know about that one chief. They liberated few marginalized people, without changing the systems in place, and in fact supporting them. Feels very much like helping only specific people, like dipping a toe into those themes, while leaving a massive swath of marginalized beings left in her world.
I haven’t gotten more than a few minutes in so far, so if this is something you say/ or bring up later in the video then my apologies- but I just gotta say I will never understand why they’re choosing to reboot the series when they could just do a completely original Mauruaders (dunno if I spelled that right) prequel series???
like I am not really in the fandom, but I do know the Maurauders fandom is *huge* so I am sure they’d watch. and any non- Mauruaders fans that are just generally HP fans will likely also watch when they hear the premise, since it has to do with the characters they already love’s parents, and characters they already know’s (like lupin, and snape) backstories.
plus they’d have a decent amount of creative freedom, so it would be hard to mess up. like cmon. lol. I definitely don’t think show makers should get all of their ideas from the internet, but looking at what’s popular/ what people want every once in a while could help sooo many shows or potential shows lmao.
The Marauders fanon (anyone who liked ATYD basically) is not actually interested in the Marauders.
Seriously, the fanoners would be the last ones to like it because there's a 0% chance any of the melodramatic headcanons they like will show up in any capacity. Non-Marauders-fanoners - the people who liked the canon info and want it expounded upon - would eat good, but Marauders fanoners would hate it resolutely.
@@GreylockMountain ah that’s sad. I have just seen it is really popular.
I feel like people still quote/reference barbie fairly often? like "my job is Beach", people say "my job is Emails" or just last week glen powel talked about ryan gosling like "he's everything, I'm just Glen". I feel like "she's everything, he's just ken" is also a common meme format. (I know it's not the point of the video.....)
I just want to point out that on the race-swap topic, not everyone who criticizes or dislikes these kinds of choices is one of those people who views it as "the fall of western civilization", as you put it. I'm saying this because any criticism of choices like this tends to get lumped into one stereotype of the militant conservative "anti-woke" crowd, and I think that does a big disservice to the broader discourse. I've been lumped into this before for disagreeing with/disliking race/gender swaps, but my distaste for it is never coming from a place of hate.
For me, the primary reason I dislike these kinds of changes is usually just that I visualize characters when I read about them, and their descriptions become pretty significant to my personal connection to them. So when their appearance is significantly changed for an adaptation, it makes it much harder for me to keep the illusion alive of them being the same character, and I feel less connected to them. That's not to say I can't form a new connection to that adaptation's version, and it's not to say I'll avoid watching the adaptation, it's just that the main draw for me in an adaptation of a book or series I love onto the screen is the ability to vicariously live through those characters that I fell in love with. And the more you change about how that character looks, the harder it is for me to do that.
I just say this because there's a natural assumption that when someone dislikes a race or gender swap, they must be racist or sexist, and I think it's a rather lazy and uncritical way of looking at the situation that doesn't really help anything.
It also erases the opportunity for further inspection on the actual topics of race and other intersectional topics by forcing skin tone to equal representation, when there's more to it than that. Making a character who would have otherwise no POC characteristics dipped in pigment just to visually diversify is just modern tokenism. When they do try to address these topics with these characters it's always so forced and performative to pander, rather than being realistic portrayals of real people, so again just tokenism. It does suck that the second you're like "ehhh, maybe brown/black-washing existing IPs isn't the answer" it turns into needless moral grandstanding without listening to the other person's actual points and opinions.
The movies do it fine, aside they swap inbetween movies which, why.
And the cursed fanfic, like it would be perfect fine to say, yeah i didnt wrote her with that as black, but thats a different medium, she is a good actress,
the issue there was rowlings weird obvious lying. Hermoine was written as obvios white, and its fine to hire a black actress, saying its a different medium and adaption, would be more than enough to admit it.
Notan " oh thats what i always had in mind, no matter how obvious it is i didnt"
@@cherryjello777 "Casting Black people is the real racism" is such a weird tactic for how often people like you trot it out. Well, "odd" isn't the right word, but as the thread op makes clear, calling racists racist makes racists mad.
The difference is how you act when it happens. If you don't watch an adaptation or rate it poorly because a character is now nonwhite, then it doesn't matter how many paragraphs of justification you write - you are racist.
The reason why people lump it into anti-woke is because the criticism is always really bad. I don't buy that your issue with race/gender swapping is just that it messes up your visualizations. If that was your issue then you wouldn't be focused specifically on race or gender and I can't imagine thinking that thats a good enough reason not to do it
Great video! I also often talk about how “they don’t make movies like they used to” literally, recently rewatched the OGs with an eye for cinematography and there is some great stuff with perspective, lighting, color grading, especially in the first three, that really sets the mood. The problem is that both the literal medium (the OGs were shot on 35mm film) and the studio structure have significantly changed (and IMO worsened) the visual quality of all media, especially TV.