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At about book four I was hankering for a Yank to appear at Hogwarts as an exchange student. He'd have no real impact on the plot, mind you, but just kinda swagger around, impress all the ladies with his accent, and dual-wield wands in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Instead of tracking down some fan fiction, I'm just gonna buy the hell out of 'Magicians.'Obligatory Toast posted:Knowing this country, we'd have 4 or 5, all vying for the top spots on lists for best wizarding schools, and each would be more expensive than the last. Until the state-run magic Universities start vying for top spot in the coveted 'Play Warlock' biggest party schools. "Go Badgers!" 
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Aug 16, 2010 02:24
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Professor Red posted:Until the state-run magic Universities start vying for top spot in the coveted 'Play Warlock' biggest party schools. VVV Of course it's magical!! It's painted red! Obligatory Toast fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Aug 16, 2010 |
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Aug 16, 2010 02:49
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Harashaw posted:
And yet they ride a train to Hogwarts. Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but the Hogwarts Express doesn't seem very enchanted to me. Just a regular Muggle locomotive.
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Aug 16, 2010 03:25
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One of the greatest things about the Magicians is how Lev Grossman is aware he's basically writing the American Harry Potter. At one point a character is late for something, and the others ask where he was, and he says "Sorry, I was just changing out of my Quidditch robes," and the other characters all laugh.
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Aug 16, 2010 03:56
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I just finished reading The Magicians on the strength of the recommendations in this thread, and there is one particular scene (in the 8th chapter of book I) that absolutely scared the gently caress out of me. Jesus Christ. Harry Potter this is not.
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Aug 16, 2010 10:18
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Ebba posted:And yet they ride a train to Hogwarts. Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but the Hogwarts Express doesn't seem very enchanted to me. Just a regular Muggle locomotive. That is true. Kings Cross Station is full of platforms that you get to by walking through a solid wall and steam trains that appear to be invisible to everyone in the country who is not a wizard. Yes, not at all magical.
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Aug 16, 2010 14:04
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Hobnob posted:I just finished reading The Magicians on the strength of the recommendations in this thread, and there is one particular scene (in the 8th chapter of book I) that absolutely scared the gently caress out of me. If you're talking about the first scene with The Beast, I agree. At that point I went from "This is a wacky and mildly amusing Harry Potter cash in" to "HOLY gently caress, I'M SCARED, HOLD ME ;_;"
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Aug 16, 2010 14:49
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Hedrigall posted:If you're talking about the first scene with The Beast, I agree. At that point I went from "This is a wacky and mildly amusing Harry Potter cash in" to "HOLY gently caress, I'M SCARED, HOLD ME ;_;" Yep, that's the one. Also I wasn't expecting him to return, so when he did much later in the story it creeped me the gently caress out all over again. I'm trying to imagine Rowling putting a scene like that into Harry Potter and giving a good proportion of the world's children nightmares for weeks.
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Aug 16, 2010 18:08
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Hobnob posted:Yep, that's the one. Also I wasn't expecting him to return, so when he did much later in the story it creeped me the gently caress out all over again. Especially with who he ended up being!
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Aug 16, 2010 18:47
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Hedrigall posted:If you're talking about the first scene with The Beast, I agree. At that point I went from "This is a wacky and mildly amusing Harry Potter cash in" to "HOLY gently caress, I'M SCARED, HOLD ME ;_;" Thirding/fourthing/whatevering "The Magicians". My absolute favorite part is at the very end, when Quinten asks Jane(?) "If you've got a time machine, why don't you go back and rig things so there's a happy ending" and she says something like "I've spent a hundred lifetimes going back and trying to rig things to defeat The Beast. Most of the time your merry little band gets slaughtered halfway out the starting gate. This is the first time I've gotten anything close to a 'happy ending'. Sorry your girlfriend's dead, but this is what you're going to have to live with" and smashes the time machine. As for Harry Potter, my jaw dropped when Hedwig died in the first ~30 pages. It's very much a "poo poo just got real" moment. One thing I noticed specifically about how Deathly Hallows is set up, in many ways it's a complete inversion of all the other books in the series. In the first book, he hates the Dursleys, being bullied by Dudley, and living on Privet Drive. Hogwarts is a wonderful magical place where he can be himself, be safe, and actually have fun. By the time the seventh book rolls around, he's realized that Privet Drive is actually the safest place he can possibly be. Going to Hogwarts is completely and utterly out of the question, and the wizarding world is unsafe and cannot be trusted. Further, the constant movement, fleeing, and sense of dread and foreboding in large portions of DH felt to me like a large-scale, book-wide callback to the final acts of all the previous books, where the heroes venture into uncharted territory: Going into the hiding place of the Philosopher's Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, messing with the time turner to go back in time, the final stage of the Triwizard Cup, the Department of Mysteries, and the watery cave in HBP. A pretty ingenious way to structure DH, as almost all of the familiar conventions of the earlier books are discarded or reversed upon themselves.
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Aug 17, 2010 03:17
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Luna reminds me of the red head girl from American Pie 2. I don't know why, but once I realized that I now picture Luna as her 
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Aug 17, 2010 16:07
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Epikhigh posted:Luna reminds me of the red head girl from American Pie 2. I don't know why, but once I realized that I now picture Luna as her Replace "flute" with "wand" and they're pretty much the same character.
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Aug 17, 2010 17:47
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That's hot as gently caress (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Aug 17, 2010 22:18
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She's a teenager you creepers. On my current read through I've had to resort looking at fan art of the characters to recapture my original mental images of them, because I don't want to read through the books and only picture the actors from the movie. There are a few exceptions though where the casting was beyond perfect (Filch, McGonagall, Hagrid). But the movie versions of the kids are all wrong, as are the Sirius/Remus/Snape generation who are all cast waaay too old. As much as I love Gary Oldman and David Thewlis and Alan Rickman, those characters are meant to be in their mid 30s dammit!
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Aug 17, 2010 22:23
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Gary Oldman can play any age. He's been loving Dracula AND the Commissioner for gently caress's sake.
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Aug 17, 2010 22:36
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Hedrigall posted:She's a teenager you creepers. I saw the first two movies before reading the books, I can't not see them as the movie cast. Also that kid that plays Luna in the movies is so spot on it's scary. Alyson Hannigan? Really? What? Even in American Pie she was in her mid 20s at least.
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Aug 17, 2010 23:32
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Whatever mental images I originally had of the characters were completely pushed out by the movies. (Well, I guess the Mary Grandpre illustrations formed my original mental images, but only for the characters depicted in said illustrations.) Other than that, I can't say that I have any problems with any of the casting decisions, but that's probably because I'm often so easy to please. I understand that Rowling thinks that Harry was wonderfully cast - that Daniel Radcliffe is almost exactly how she imagines Harry. So take that, Hedrigall! 
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Aug 18, 2010 06:09
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Pththya-lyi posted:Whatever mental images I originally had of the characters were completely pushed out by the movies. (Well, I guess the Mary Grandpre illustrations formed my original mental images, but only for the characters depicted in said illustrations.) Maybe when he was 11, but then he became that creepy old woman from Drag Me To Hell:  I really love Mary GrandPre's art. I've only ever read the UK editions so I had never seen her drawings until I sought them out online, but her more recent illustrations of the trio have been uncannily close to my mental image of them:   edit: I don't like her Umbridge though. Compare it to the one by one of my favourite fan artists, Makani, below:  
Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Aug 18, 2010 |
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Aug 18, 2010 07:08
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^^^ That pic of Dan is awkward as gently caress, but I blame the photographer more or less. Terry Richardson is kind of a creepy gently caress, you know. Dan was cute as a kid though: And gently caress it, he still looks spot on.
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Aug 18, 2010 08:00
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I really didn't like the way he looked in the first few movies. Something about it bugged me. Can't really complain about the rest of the cast, though.
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Aug 18, 2010 14:12
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Hedrigall posted:I don't like her Umbridge though. Compare it to the one by one of my favourite fan artists, Makani, below: The perfect actress(she was Trunchbull in Matilda) to portray Umbridge was wasted in the Goblet of Fire movie as Aunt Marge. And I agree about the previous generation. I pictured Trent Reznor as Sirius when reading OoTP because of the illustrations of Sirius in the books looking just like him.
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Aug 18, 2010 17:28
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Silhouette posted:And I agree about the previous generation. I pictured Trent Reznor as Sirius when reading OoTP because of the illustrations of Sirius in the books looking just like him. So I know who Reznor is, but had no idea what he looked like, so I looked him up. And yes, that is Sirius. drat, it's spot on.
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Aug 18, 2010 17:52
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Silhouette posted:The perfect actress(she was Trunchbull in Matilda) to portray Umbridge was wasted in the Goblet of Fire movie as Aunt Marge. God I love Gary Oldman as much as the next person but Trent Reznor as Sirius would have so been 
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Aug 18, 2010 18:01
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I'll always maintain that Hazel Blears is the perfect Umbridge.
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Aug 18, 2010 18:47
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Shyrka posted:I'll always maintain that Hazel Blears is the perfect Umbridge. Ann Widdecombe. Or would that be too scary for a 12a classification?
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Aug 18, 2010 20:47
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Shyrka posted:I'll always maintain that Hazel Blears is the perfect Umbridge. Pfft haha, oh my god that face!
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Aug 18, 2010 21:01
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Harry dropped his scribbling quill gently on the desk and heaved a sigh. He heaved a heavy, haggard sigh, precisely the sort of sigh one might expect out of a young man who had been cursed at a young age with a burning forehead tattoo signifying the inadvertent but temporary death of the darkest and most foul wizard to ever blight the land, a wizard who then returned rather bumblingly and with frequent interruptions from sprightly young things (of which our Harry was one) but, nonetheless, returned, and, drenching the land in murderous pitch, offed one or two of our favorite minor characters before offing himself once again as he tended to do, leaving Harry to pursue some lightly-attended-to career that, without explanation, has landed him (now in his twenties) as a bored professor at his former boarding school, Hogwarts, ripe with ennui but without so much as a single rough hand to pluck him from his pedagogical branch. It was just such a sigh, and it was just such a day, that the breeze that from yonder window belched seemed somehow sympathetic. "I am so bored," Harry exposited generally. He could barely hear himself mutter over the din of departing students, clear-eyed and dustless children that seemed somehow like ghosts to Harry. So he repeated more loudly, “I am so bored,” and now, hearing himself well enough, settled backward into his unreasonably stiff wooden chair. Architecture, aesthetic, and ergonomics were somehow less reasonable concerns in the world of wizardry. Little wonder, then, that anybody who had been there long enough might feel at least a bit uncomfortable. It wasn’t just boredom, though. Harry knew that. It was a much deeper feeling. It was something that tugged at Harry from deep within, pushed at the pit of his gut, pulled on his epiglottis, and scraped along the walls of his esophagus like some radioactively-enhanced gastrointestinal cockroach. It was as though an endless and frankly quite boring game of Quidditch were being played in his guts. “Except,” said Harry to himself, “I’m not that fat.” And then he looked around quickly to make certain that nobody had heard him. Indeed, all the students had shuffled out of the class. Harry stood up slowly, scooted in his absurdly constructed chair, and quietly strode over to the belching window to squint out at the mid-day grounds. Below, like elegantly adorned ticks, hundreds of impudent neophytes scuttled to and fro. Harry heard their lilting chirps and boorish laughter and sighed once more. Look there: young Edwin, just the spitting image of his father (who also often spat). And over there: a pack of gangly, pimpled Slytherin, bending and swaying with the crudity of their breeding. Ah, and… oh. A slack-jawed, glassy-eyed ginger, tagging alongside a frowning little bespectacled bitch of a girl. They, hurrying to class, still in the bright ignorance of youth, headlong running into certain adventure… Do not stare too long into the lake, thought Harry. Just then, he noticed a pick-up game of Quidditch had gone awry outside. Several disgusting children were barking at a snitch that had proven particularly elusive and had no intention of returning to its confinement. Well, thought Harry, at least I’m still good for something. “Accio snitch,” he explained, wondering why nobody had ever tried that during an actual Quidditch game. But when the snitch arrived, he saw that it was no ordinary snitch. It did not have wings, and seemed to propel itself through the air by sheer force of rotational inertia. Moreover: although it was round, it was adorned only by a single fat lightning bolt that wrapped itself around the ball, extruded outward. Without knowing why, he pressed his finger gently on the lightning bolt. There was a brilliant flash, a plume of smoke, and then the ball had disappeared - in its place - and here Harry coughed as though he were not used to sudden plumes of smoke by now - there lay a note. Harry, I need your help. The Space Pirates have got me cornered because they know I’m onto something. Something bad, Harry - there are worse things in this world than Voldemorts. Still a bitch, Hermione "They who must not be named," corrected Harry, gritting his teeth. He removed his wand from its holster. "Looks like this old warhorse... is going for one last ride." END OF CHAPTER 1
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Aug 19, 2010 06:16
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For this Magicians book, someone mentioned loving. Is it going to be like ASOIAF levels of glistening wetness or a little less graphic? I currently have two friends reading through the books for the first time, they're both on book 6. It's pretty funny hearing two mid-20s guys get excited about whats happening in these books. They're already seen the movies but there's still other bits we've tried not to spoil. I want them to get through 7 soon,
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Aug 19, 2010 08:13
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Hedrigall posted:She's a teenager you creepers. I loved Alan Rickman as Snape. The disconnect between the pubescent fantasies of Snape that a lot of girls seem to have had of him and the way he's actually described in the books (greasy, slimy, gross, pretty much insufferable and openly antagonistic) always bugged me, Rickman may be a little old and too cleaned-up but he perfectly plays that insufferable smug bastard aspect of the character. I think the one casting that really bothered me was Mad-Eye Moody, he was described as worn and ancient looking with bits of his face missing and a big, heavy wooden leg and in the end we got...a slightly old guy with an eyepatch. They should have broken out the prosthetics or something.
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Aug 19, 2010 09:00
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Quid posted:For this Magicians book, someone mentioned loving. Is it going to be like ASOIAF levels of glistening wetness or a little less graphic? It's never graphic. One sex scene is a bit weird if you took it out of context, but it's bizarrely fitting to the mood of the book at that moment. I'm talking about the first sex scene between Alice and Quentin, in Antarctica, when they are... not people. There is a little bit of homoeroticism, but if you're like me, that only makes the book better.  But there's no graphic descriptions of sex, be it homosexual or heterosexual....of SCIENCE! posted:I think the one casting that really bothered me was Mad-Eye Moody, he was described as worn and ancient looking with bits of his face missing and a big, heavy wooden leg and in the end we got...a slightly old guy with an eyepatch. They should have broken out the prosthetics or something. Brendan Gleeson is awesome, but yeah, a healthy-looking fat Irish dude is not the Moody I pictured. (actually for some reason I kinda pictured him as Ian McKellan, only very haggard like you describe) PRI Caulk posted:
 Amazing. Write more.
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Aug 19, 2010 12:43
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...of SCIENCE! posted:I loved Alan Rickman as Snape. YES. Alan Rickman is the perfect actor for utter bastard roles. He would have been excellent as any of the villains. Or all of them. Including Umbridge and Petunia Dursley.
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Aug 19, 2010 17:43
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Harashaw posted:YES. Alan Rickman is the perfect actor for utter bastard roles. He would have been excellent as any of the villains. Or all of them. Including Umbridge and Petunia Dursley. Oh god, as I read that Alan Rickman saying "Duddykins" instantly popped into my head. 
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Aug 19, 2010 18:46
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Paragon8 posted:I recommend that you all read Magicians by Lev Grossman. It's a very similar concept to Harry Potter but treated in a much more adult fashion. This book arrived from Amazon about two hours ago, and holy poo poo, it's really really good. Thank you for the suggestion!
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Aug 19, 2010 21:00
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CaptainJuan posted:This book arrived from Amazon about two hours ago, and holy poo poo, it's really really good. Thank you for the suggestion! I'm glad you like it! I've started a reread. Does anyone think it's worth starting a Magicians thread?
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Aug 20, 2010 00:11
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Paragon8 posted:I'm glad you like it! I've started a reread. Soysaucebeast fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Aug 20, 2010 |
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Aug 20, 2010 01:09
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If they told the Muggle government about Voldemort the next book would have been five pages long. I don't think Wizards have a block incoming cruise missile traveling at mach 8" spell.
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Aug 20, 2010 03:05
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Cap. Monocle posted:If they told the Muggle government about Voldemort the next book would have been five pages long. I don't think Wizards have a block incoming cruise missile traveling at mach 8" spell. Well, they did at the beginning of book six. Voldy still got two full books worth of rampaging time.
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Aug 20, 2010 03:34
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I just discovered this blog, in which a guy reads and comments upon the Harry Potter books with nearly no prior knowledge of the books or the movies. It's hilarious. Here's an excerpt:
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Aug 20, 2010 07:38
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That guy also did a version with Twilight. Ohhhh shiiit and he's already up to GoF?? Christ, this is going to be a good, crazy ride. Hahaha, commentary on chapter 4 is basically a gigantic love letter to Hagrid. 
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Aug 20, 2010 08:51
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Hedrigall posted:I just discovered this blog, in which a guy reads and comments upon the Harry Potter books with nearly no prior knowledge of the books or the movies. It's hilarious. Here's an excerpt: Goddamnit, I just read his entire blog, and now I want him to read more/faster, so I can read more. Augh, why do you do this to me.
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Aug 21, 2010 21:01
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