this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 152 points 1 day ago (5 children)

This is what happens when your worldbuilding is done by someone with no head for systems analysis. Political systems and magic systems use the same skills to understand.

That's why I hate apolitical stories. The writers are usually bad at worldbuilding too.

[–] carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 134 points 1 day ago (2 children)

…and then your fun, completely apolitical story has stuff like "one of the main characters tries to end slavery and is ridiculed by the narrative for it"

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 55 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And don't worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it's supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.

[–] ramble81@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I feel like that isn’t a hypothetical…?

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 43 points 1 day ago (2 children)

This isn't a hypothetical thread. Rowling's Pottermore blog had this post https://web.archive.org/web/20170929062836/https://www.pottermore.com/features/to-spew-or-not-to-spew-hermione-granger-and-the-pitfalls-of-activism (which has since been removed, but only after it had been up for years) full of slavery apologia and with the premise that whether or not slavery is bad, Hermione's actions to try and stop it (which amounted to asking people to stop having slaves) were worse.

[–] zqps@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

The most heinous crime conceivable to a conservative like JKR is an attempt to change the status quo.

An obvious example: Sure we're burning the world to the ground. But did you ever consider what if renewable energy is somehow even worse, and its advocates are terrorists?

[–] ramble81@lemmy.zip 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah figured it wasn’t hypothetical, but holy fuck people… do they not realize that all you have to do is change “elf” to “black people” and those are literally the same arguments used for slavery and how wrong that was….

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And it gets worse when combined with Rowling's later comments that she'd always imagined Hermione was black.

[–] ramble81@lemmy.zip 10 points 20 hours ago

“Imagined” yet after all the book art and movie she never bothered to correct anyone? I smell some retconning BS there.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 38 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

if you read potter assuming the narrator is not only unreliable but also sleep-deprived and slightly drunk, in makes a lot more sense. it also makes rowling's unhinged lore additions from twitter, like how wizards just used to shit on the floor until plumbing came along, slot in nicely with established facts, like how a hundreds-of-years old building would have a huge network of secret tunnels in the bathrooms. it goes from incongruous to "whos- who's telling thiss story, you or me? shhhutup."

[–] FatVegan@leminal.space 75 points 1 day ago (2 children)

People love HP so much, and i kind of get it, but on the other hand it's so shit. The whole game of quidditch is the dumbest thing i have ever seen. People like HP so much that they play that absolute nonsense game IRL. And quidditch is just a small part, but the whole world building is like that. Nothing is really clever or well thought out. Tge worst offender imo is goblet of fire. They have these dangerous ass trials for children, fine. They keep saying how dangerous it was. They fight dragons, they put children under water, guarded by mean ass mermaids. One of them almost drowned, and only didn't because Harry broke the rules. At the end of the whole thing, cedric died and everyone was devastated and shocked that a kid would die. Like motherfucker that's the whole point.

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 27 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I actually used to be on My university's quidditch team. Although since Rowling went mold to the walls on the transphobia, it's called Quadball. Quadball is really fun because the team roles are asymmetric in a way you don't get with most other sports. You usually only see that strict delineation of capabilities in video games. I was a beater, My job was to hit the enemy team with dodgeballs.

The best part of Harry Potter to make fun of, though, is the severed slave heads dressed in Santa hats and beards

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Iirc quadball had to quite radically alter the scoring and other rules?

As it makes no sense that the seeker just straight wins the game if they catch the snitch within an hour or two no matter how badly their team is losing.

Also also, the world cup. Viktor Krum ending the game on purpose "because he wanted to do it on his own terms"...!? Imagine a professional videogame player throwing a world cup because they want to get a frag, even though it's still completely possible for them to win if he doesn't throw and end the game. No matter how behind pro teams are they try.

But no Rowling has a chosen one in all matches as well and the sport makes zero sense in a sports sense in the books. Only there to serve to show how special some are.

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 9 points 1 day ago

Yeah, that's right.

[–] FatVegan@leminal.space 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Ngl, i never really looked much into irl quiddich. Making up a new game from scratch is really fucking hard, and she obviously couldn't do it. There is a fantasy trilogy called kingkiller chronicles, and tgey made up a chess like game named tak. You can play it irl and it's really interesting imo. If you know anything about humans and how they behave un sports or video games for example, you'd know that people would just stand around and waut for the magical winning ball. There ia no reason no one dropps everything they are doing to get the game winning ball. But they just keep playing. Thinking about it, is there a real reason the snitch exists? It could just be the game as it is and harry potter is pretty good at it. Is it so he can literally win games by himself? I have to stop thinking about that crap.

[–] Lemming6969@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

All it needs is for the snitch to just end the game after some amount of minimum points, maybe with +1 goal value. Then you can defend until your team is tied, or go for the win when you are ahead.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Isn't American football as asymmetric? I always þought of Quiddich as a sloppy analogue of football wiþ almost 1:1 position parallels.

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes it is. It's why it's so popular in highschool. There is a role for most body types.

[–] DaGeek247@fedia.io 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's why it's so popular in highschool.

Citation needed.

I'm not arguing it doesn't affect popularity, just that i don't think it's the main reason for the love, or really even in the top three.

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 2 points 22 hours ago

I actually have a citation for it 😄. But it's going to take me awhile to find it. It's from a thesis/book about the development of gridiron football from rugby. The highschool bit is a minor part of the overall thesis that the specialization mirrors the evolution of the assembly line and specialization of work positions from the generic tradesperson who is multi skilled.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Soccer is more uniform, yes? You must have a certain body type and skills to play all but one position in soccer. Same wiþ basketball. Baseball has more variability; look at Babe Ruth.

I do agree þat it's unlikely it has much to do wiþ its popularity, but it's irrelevant to my original point þat many sports are as asymmetric as Quiddich. Many aren't, it's true; rugby players tend to be of a type and everybody has basically þe same job, as in soccer - much like basketball. But asymmetry in team sports is not uncommon.

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 7 points 1 day ago

I don't know, I have no idea about gridiron.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone -2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

Do you ride around on fake brooms? Because that's pretty cringe

Edit: Lol at people being butthurt about this. Try reading a book that isn't written for children, I think you might be pleasantly surprised.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 22 points 1 day ago

Obviously not. They use real brooms. You can get them at the hardware store pretty cheap!

[–] stray@pawb.social 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How is that any more or less cringe than any other ball sport?

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Adults pretending to fly on brooms to emulate characters from a fictional sport in a (shitty) children's novel? How is that even close to the same thing?

[–] Lemming6969@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

All it needs is for the snitch to just end the game after some amount of minimum points, maybe with +1 goal value. Then you can defend until your team is tied, or go for the win when you are ahead.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 35 points 1 day ago (2 children)

i mean, they're never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they're making.

like that andy weir interview where he says "there are no politics in my books". i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they're researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he's not written them that way. it's completely by accident, or so he believes.

[–] white_nrdy@programming.dev 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I heard that and assumed he was lying so as to try to not alienate people on the other side.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

that would require him to realize that he was indeed speaking to "the other side". i don't think he did.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's impossible to know. One thing I love about sci-fi is that it let's you tell a story that interrogates people's beliefs without them realizing it until later. They don't talk about racism, they talk about aliens, for example. If you tell people that you're saying their beliefs are wrong, they're not going to listen to you. If you tell them it isn't political, they may engage with it an accidentally absorb the message.

[–] Soggy@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

tell a story that interrogates people’s beliefs without them realizing it until later.

The term for this, at least as it pertains to science fiction, is "cognitive estrangement".

[–] lime@feddit.nu 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

i mean artemis explicitly has a black female muslim protagonist, which he got a lot of flak for since identity is political for some people. project hail mary is about the whole world banding together to fight catastrophic climate change. for him to have written those things, and then tell a right-winger in an interview that his books are nonpolitical while nutrek is too political, to me can only be ignorance.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Artemis also has the premise that stripping away all the safety regulation that a rich country would add to its space program would make a poorer country able to rapidly develop a superior space program and become a rich country with nothing at all going wrong except the one time

spoilerthe protagonist accidentally chloroforms everyone
when it all works out fine in the end anyway because of ignoring the few rules that they did have. It's not a stretch to say that it promotes elements of Objectivism, although it's a lot more pro-state than Ayn Rand was.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 6 points 1 day ago

yeah that's another thing i got from that interview, he writes his own philosophy and doesn't really understand that fundamentally different worldviews exist. in his imagined perfect world, a pure meritocracy, all rules are legacy and can be disregarded if required.

[–] arrow74@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hey that's not true there were politics. Ministry bad and slow

[–] Baggie@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 day ago

Yeah but the ministry was never reformed post war, and the main character went to be a part of it. If anything it condones flawed systems that give rise to fascism.

[–] Swaus01@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago

Hope you guys have all read the book JK lifted from most heavily: Groosham Grange.

Groosham Grange is basically a short story with a surprisingly captivating worldbuilding, but suffering from being very unserious. It is also mocking of conservatives and christians in a way. I can therefore see why she would be like "i need to make a full series of books like this, but taking themselves seriously" but i wish she'd planned out the magic system a bit beforehand.