a-crumb-of-braincell - Tumblr blog

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nearly 300 people were arrested in nyc last night

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When's the new season of Séance Dog coming out? You mean the show? Probably not for another year.

INVINCIBLE (2021 - ) I 2.07

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"I know JK Rowing is a terrible person but her books are so good-"

You sure about that?

I mean, just for a start, have you taken a good look at her fantasy creatures lately? A whole bunch of them are straight-up based on malicious and dehumanizing stereotypes about actual people.

Remember the werewolves? And being a werewolf was made into a kind of metaphor for having AIDS?

And you know how AIDS was first associated with gay men? And how conservatives back in the day were claiming gay men were preying on children in order to convert them to gayness?

Remember how Fenrir Greyback preyed on children in particular? Yeah, she put that subtext in there. She was an adult in the 90's. She knew damn well what she was doing.

Remember the house elves? Remember how most of them loved to serve and needed to have a home and a master or else they just wouldn't know what to do with themselves?

Did you know that's literally what slavers in the American South said about the Black people they kept enslaved? Go look up the happy slave myth.

Do I even need to get into the goblins and the antisemitic tropes they're based on? No, folkloric goblins were not gold-hoarding bankers waiting for their chance to stab humanity in the back.

"But the characters are so good!"

Are you kidding me?

Most of her characters are pretty one-dimensional, including Harry. Her idea of making a morally complicated character is giving a tragic past to a bully. Numerous characters are little more than stereotypes. (Looking at Fleur right now.) Literally anybody, including you, can easily make dozens of characters just as good, if not better. (It doesn't exactly take a lot of character designing skill to go, "hey, actually, having a sad backstory doesn't make it okay to bully children" or "hey, maybe I should not base a character on the first stereotype that pops into my head.")

"But the rest of the worldbuilding!"

Sorry, but her worldbuilding is just as basic as her characters. Magical castles and secret passages are stock tropes. Magical people who keep their true nature secret from humanity is the premise of pretty much every White Wolf TTRPG. Most of her fantasy creatures are just common European fairy tale and folklore creatures with shitty stereotypes projected onto them.

I'm not saying "basic worldbuilding bad." I'm saying, you could do just as good, if not better, with minimal effort.

Also there's her magical bioessentialism, where only Harry's abusive blood relatives could provide him with supernatural protection from Voldemort. Rowling thus effectively declared that non-biological family isn't quite real family, and that abusive biofamily can give you some essential thing that a loving, supportive family that isn't related to you just can't.

The Hogwarts houses are one of the most insidious elements of her worldbuilding. The idea of being sorted gives you a little dopamine hit because wow now you have a li'l niche where you belong!

But the actual function of the houses and sorting system and the House Cup is teaching children to see each other as rivals, and ensure that the most toxic views of the upper class get passed on to every new batch of kids sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts effectively prepares children for a dystopia where magic serves to distract its citizens from how nightmarishly awful it is. Economic inequality is so bad that people like Arthur and Molly Weasley can barely afford to put their kids through school, casual sadism is just an accepted norm in everyday society, and non-humans are second class citizens. Rowling sorta acts like she thinks this is a bad thing with certain lines she gave to Dumbledore, but in the end, her special boy protagonist becomes an auror; IE, a defender of the status quo. So.

If you've never seen it, Lily Simpson's video goes into even more detail on how the worldbuilding of Harry Potter is actually incredibly fucked up, and how it betrays small-minded attitudes on Rowling's part. There's no separating the art from this artist, because Rowling's rotten values pour out of nearly every page.

Yes, there are many things in Harry Potter that evoke feelings and inspire people, but there's absolutely nothing in it that this series has a monopoly on. You can find those same experiences in much, much better media.

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the cis are doing gender essentiallism about dogs in my workplace

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some of your goofy asses for the past 20 years

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some people have senshi from dungeon meshi living in their brain reminding them to eat three fulfilling meals a day and to take the time to make food delicious. which is wonderful! i love the way that media can affect our habits and thoughts for the better! unfortunately the only character living in my brain is harry du bois and he keeps telling me to try molly

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FUCK YEA CANONICALLY HOT SENSHI

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The Sphere is, possibly, the most aggressively placeless structure ever built. For being a truly monumental object, its essence—a pure geometric shape—represents entirely nothing. And yet, based on its size, expense, and audacity, it could exist nowhere but Las Vegas. 

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In one blow, it lays bare the silliness of Vegas’ fake places. It reminds us that, no matter how much money you spend, all the fake Eiffel Towers in the world won’t have the charm of a single cobblestone in the Marais. In that sense, the Sphere gives Vegas a new dimension, but it also forces visitors to confront the artifice of the whole Vegas enterprise. Meanwhile, though it’s visible from miles away, the Sphere, like pretty much everything else along the Las Vegas Strip, does not even try to contribute to an urban fabric. Walkability, sense of place, and local culture are, as ever, absent in a city more closely wedded to consumerism than probably any other in the world. 

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He’s so right actually

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People from this country are so cool

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falling in love with the most obnoxious character like

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Mr. L remembers the sins of his past life