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Complaining that the politics of the wizarding world are impractical and the rules for their magic are inconsistent is like complaining that Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory doesn't follow OSHA regulations and Matilda's psychic powers don't follow the laws of thermodynamics.
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Apr 14, 2020 03:07
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 22:37 |
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The British etymology of the term "glory hole" is that up until the end of the 20th century it was commonly used as a term for a small room or container to store things in, so what I'm saying is that Harry Potter spent his childhood living in his uncle's glory hole.Mooey Cow posted:How did he make it? A wizard did it. Roth posted:I think this is fine for the first few books which are definitely more in the realm of children's book, but starting with Goblet of Fire there is definitely a tonal shift towards young adult fiction. There is definitely a shift from whimsical British schoolboy adventures to young adult angst about the creeping rise of fascism during the war on terror but even in the later books it was never presented in a way that invites the kind of super in-depth CinemaSins-esque nitpicking about plot holes and consistent worldbuilding that people have been doing for almost 20 years now. I do think Rowling does bear some responsibility for how she keeps going back and adding more and more minutiae and history to the world in a way that the books themselves never did, but at least she didn't go back and change the books themselves like how Stephen King revised the first Dark Tower book after the series ended to put in more references to the later books and add a lot of the weird fantasy slang and patois he invented over the years. Pick posted:hagrid got in trouble for raising a litter of werewolves under his bed as a student Rowling was making it up as she was going along without much mind for continuity at the beginning so the early books have this problem a lot where a throwaway line goes against a major event or plotline in future books. Like how in the second book Harry has a throwaway line about his cousin throwing his Playstation out the window in a fit and then later they establish that his parents died in 1981 so he would have had a PlayStation in 1992. Even Tolkein had that problem sometimes, like in the first edition of The Hobbit there were references to modern life like policemen and airplabes that he went back and edited out of future reissues for the sake of keeping the series self-contained and not requiring outside knowledge.
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Apr 15, 2020 20:11
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How much must it have sucked to be one of the like five British actors who weren't even offered a part in the Harry Potter movies.
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Apr 15, 2020 20:30
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Tim Roth passed on playing Snape because he thought playing the lead in the Tim Burton remake of Planet of the Apes would be better for his career.
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Apr 15, 2020 20:40
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Going from mocking Harry Potter to unironic fanfic suggestions in the span of two pages, gg tropers
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Apr 16, 2020 03:05
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This thread is so totally a Hufflepuff.
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Apr 16, 2020 03:32
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reignofevil posted:Ron Weasley went through an entire year of school with a busted wand taped back together with the wizard equivalent of duct tape because he was too loving proud to ask his parents or his super wealthy best friend for some spare galleons so that he could not fail out of his second year at hogwarts. Ignoring the fact that it's silly to criticize a child (fictional or otherwise) for not being a perfect rational actor that's incredibly true to life in my experience. Especially with kids growing up in poor households and/or with lots of siblings or dysfunctional parents. There were plenty of assignments in school I turned in late because my parents were too cheap to have a printer at home and would instead want to print off their work computer and I outright failed a huge project because we didn't have a camcorder at home and the teacher required creating and showing a video to the class as part of it. And I think its a fairly common and relatable childhood experience to break or lose something expensive and have to go without or fix it the best you can and have it negatively effect your schooling as a result, having a hosed-up wand is just the wizard version of having to nurse a pair of broken glasses because your parents' insurance only gets new lenses every other year or losing your graphing calculator and having a way harder time doing math problems. Pick posted:The success of the books was predicated on kids wanting to attend hogwarts. I never did. I thought it sounded loving awful. The teachers all have massive personality disorders and the headmaster is a dipshit who openly plays favorites. Kids die. You learn to lift a feather with your brain? Who cares. You could probably write a thesis about how the two biggest kids media sensations of the late 90s were Pokemon and Harry Potter and both were predicated on the fantasy of getting to leave home when you're 12 and go on adventures with your friends. Even if that meant being in danger and at the mercy of a world that is uncaring at best and actively antagonistic at worst it was still preferable to riding out the End of History in the suburbs.
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Apr 17, 2020 21:34
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One unintentional parallel to real life that I really like about the Harry Potter books is that if you were a kid when they were coming out teachers and classrooms were being oblivious about, actively antagonistic to, or at the very least well behind the times when it came to computers and the internet and technology; at home you had personal computers and the world wide web but in school it was all paper and library books and Scantron machines as old as your parents. So when one teacher was telling you that the internet wasn't a valid source for research projects because the MLA hadn't yet established a way of citing websites and another was telling you that you could only use websites that ended in .org or .gov because .com meant it was a business and untrustworthy it may as well have been quills and parchment and letters delivered by owls compared to what we were doing in every other facet of our life.
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Apr 17, 2020 23:06
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dialhforhero posted:Haha is there harry potter porn haha like what would it have haha i bet their playboys move like in those pictures just wondering haha When the series begins magic is a puberty metaphor, and when it ends it uses lycanthropy as an AIDS metaphor and has a villain character who is a werewolf with the gimmick of intentionally infecting children for his own personal gratification. The fact that the series is largely sexless is a blessing because otherwise it would probably just be full-on Anne Rice poo poo. Also you can tell Harry Potter was written by a boomer woman because there's like zero acknowledgment or recognition of adolescent male sexuality and frustration and instead Harry just has very sanitized sitcom "I don't have a date..and the prom is tomorrow!" antics and chaste crushes that are all about pining without reciprocation. Nobody's expecting jokes about how hard it is to jack off in private when you're sharing a giant bedroom with a bunch of other guys in wizard school or whatever but as a teenager my eyes just about rolled out of my head whenever he starts pining for Cho Chang in a way completely unlike how me or anyone I knew were dealing with our feelings and relationships despite being the same age.
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Apr 18, 2020 14:29
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"I'm gay and also dead." -Maurice Sendak
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Apr 20, 2020 02:30
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Pick posted:I honestly honestly however find extreme interest in harry potter past the age of 16 to be an enormous red flag Despite there being exponentially more of them I've never encountered a Harry Potter superfan that is as outspoken and annoying as the average anime fan.
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Apr 20, 2020 18:14
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RBA Starblade posted:Wizard people, dear readers Uncle Porkflaps grabs Harry by the head, trying to pull Harry's wig off before remembering that Harry is a boy and probably his hair is real. "NO MORE MAGIC!" his throat rasps without it's usual gravy lube. Realizing that his throat is foodless, Uncle Porkflaps exits to the kitchen. VanSandman posted:It's more fun making GBS threads on HP if you were in deep before. Like blasphemy, only with a greater danger of being stabbed for it. Harry Potter is just the newest in a long line of popular nerd franchises like Star Wars and The Simpsons where the majority of people who grew up loving it and still have affection for the original good stuff just lost interest and moved on after it started getting bad but some people remained just as emotionally invested only that investment turned to actively hating the thing and going out of their way to continue to consume content and trivia about it solely to give them more to complain about.
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Apr 21, 2020 15:18
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ungulateman posted:prisoner of azkaban is directed so much better than the other films that it doesn't even feel like it's part of the series My incredibly geeky favorite thing about the Azkaban film was casting David Thewlis as Professor Lupin, because at the time the entire shipping/slash community surrounding the books was largely dominated by pairing Lupin and Sirius and an entire generation of awkward horny adolescent girls had built him up as some total dreamboat and then the movie comes out and he looks like an actual middle-aged chronically ill professor who sleeps under a tree instead of a bishounen fuckboy.
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Apr 22, 2020 14:58
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JethroMcB posted:Ahhh, that's right. They never once talk about the magical MacGuffin that makes the whole drat plot possible and why it becomes a fetish object for Harry. The Deathly Hallows being a thing that is introduced in the last book with zero foreshadowing or buildup was just one of many baffling decisions, but it gave us the arc of Harry becoming aware of his own mortality and then coveting the thought of living forever but ultimately rejecting it and accepting his own death which more or less carried a lot of the book. Its greatest sin was making the ultimate duel between good and evil be a convoluted logic puzzle about wand ownership.
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Apr 22, 2020 16:40
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PeterWeller posted:I don't think she was going for self contained mysteries. The later books are constantly looking back towards and building off the earlier ones. The entire vanishing cabinet bit from book 6 is set up in book 2 or 3. I feel like the first three books were self-contained and then after the series blew up in popularity four served as a fulcrum to a back half that was more open ended and self-referential. A lot of young adult series seem to follow that arc to a degree, like how the first half of A Series of Unfortunate Events is adopted-parent-of-the-week stories until they go off the rails or how the third Hunger Games book doesn't actually have a Hunger Games in it. Dawgstar posted:It would have certainly been more interesting if Harry had actually bit it and, like, Neville saved the day. Certainly moreso than 'everybody marries their high school sweetheart and gives their kids ridiculous names.' For years Rowling swore that she had the ending of the series written out already and sealed in an envelope whenever people asked her if the series was planned out or of she knew how it would end, and it turns out that epilogue is what she was referring to. Which is why it's worse written and clashes horribly with the rest of the book.
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Apr 22, 2020 19:22
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PeterWeller posted:I tend to think Mockingjay doesn't have an actual Hunger Games in it because Collins is very conscious of how much Catching Fire is a rehash of the first book and she knows she has to address the society that creates the Hunger Games if she wants to bring any sort of satisfying closure to the series. I was mostly just being flippant, I actually put off the second one for a long time after finding out that it was about Katniss doing another Hunger Game because of all the directions to take a sequel in that seemed like the least interesting. Thankfully they pulled it off though. reignofevil posted:Series of unfortunate events is a good read. Spent a lot of time thinking about the ending. I read the series in high school even though it's targeted much younger just because the jokes were so good, Snickett giving definitions of things never stopped being funny and all the adults being lovely and stupid in ways any kid would recognize and had to have dealt with is so good.
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Apr 22, 2020 20:04
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josh04 posted:Series is very good but there's a few books where bad-parent-of-the-week is floundering and Snicket's struggling to find a new format that works, where Rowling's decision to go full-George RR Martin for book four, though people moan about it, kicked the whole thing into high gear. It's very funny to imagine a Harry Potter where all seven books were just him being both figuratively and literally haunted by the ghosts of his legacy with Voldemort getting Team Rocketed at the end each time like the first two.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:31
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Roth posted:One thing they find in the early episodes is JK Rowling has really weird and off ideas about Wiccans. Wiccans/Witches trying to latch onto Harry Potter as a way of pushing their religion on impressionable children were just the worst and it was a weirdly common thing in early internet. Neil Cicierega of Potter Puppet Pals/Old SomethingAwful was so into the books because his parents were both witches and they pushed them on him as a way of showing how cool magic was and how great believing in it was. But on the other hand Witches love claiming that millions of women were executed for witchcraft and that The Burning Times were on par with the Holocaust so
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Apr 23, 2020 03:48
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Moody was the most disappointing casting I think, I love Brendan Gleeson but with as rough and hobbled and battle-damaged as the character is described and illustrated as being, a chubby guy with a CGI monocle just isn't cutting it.Roth posted:Wiccans are no weirder than any other religious order Wicca was founded in the 1950s while claiming to represent milennia-old beliefs, there's actually a lot to unpack with how it's largely cultural imperialism and appropriation in a way that's unique beyond going "lol religion" Sleeveless fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Apr 24, 2020 01:46
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Tulip posted:I remember a person on Twitter being like "I used to think it was so crazy that Rowling built this whole world with like split schools and long term stays and turns out the creative parts are just normal British society" Early Harry Potter's thing of satirizing British culture and history was really good, like the wizard money being complicated and arbitrary like pre-decimalization British pounds were or how the rules of Quidditch are as impenetrable and chaotic as cricket.
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Apr 24, 2020 15:32
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Hufflepuff is relatable to anyone who is competent but unexceptional and largely views school/work as an obligation you have to fulfill to support the rest of your life that you actually care about. They're only lazy and stupid in the way that you're not a team player for not going to TGIFridays on your own dime with your co-workers as part of your office's mandatory fun program.
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Apr 24, 2020 16:25
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RBA Starblade posted:I always wondered why the american exchange student wizard didn't solve the wizard hitler problem by going and getting a gun We know that wizards and witches still use regular weapons because things like Godrick Gryffindor's sword exist, so there's no reason to think that they wouldn't also use guns. It's just that using a gun is the Harry Potter version of being a white dude with a mall katana and nobody wants to be around that guy.
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Apr 24, 2020 20:51
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Pick posted:They can literally summit up food out of nothing, even ignoring that some people still live with food insecurity, you could suddenly have cruelty free meat. I assumed the magic was just summoning existing food because otherwise why would the school need a huge kitchen and staff of slaves to make food for everyone. reignofevil posted:The philosophical implications of turning a teacup into a mouse are stunning. For me the biggest existential nightmare of the books is how casually mind control and memory erasing is used on muggles by the wizarding world. Like the fundamental concept of consent and individuality just holds no weight on their leaders and they regularly casually just mind wipe people "for their own good". Like they put it on par with torture and murder when it's done to other wizards but blasting a campground owner into a shell of a person over the course of a weekend because they can't be assed to stay hidden.
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Apr 25, 2020 18:30
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Considering that the books established that world leaders are aware of wizards and actively work with them to cover up wizarding-related disasters that are too big to hide from the public I'm just going to assume that means Harry Potter either failed to prevent 9/11 or actively worked to create the cover of the plane hijackings.
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Apr 27, 2020 05:46
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Middle-aged Harry Potter swearing in interviews that if he hadn't missed his flight that fateful morning he could have stopped the hijackers.
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Apr 27, 2020 06:54
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Ron, let me ask you a question. When you came pulling in here, did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said "Dead Muggle Storage"? 
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Apr 28, 2020 02:42
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Impression I got, though I may be importing Dresden Files ideas (which has its own silliness but at least tries to be consistent in a bless-his-heart way) is that the wizard world is about 70 years or so behind the muggle one, since they have wireless radio, and given enough time and most of the old fuckers dying they eventually get the hang of technology and incorporate it into magic. I love the hoops the Dresden Files jumps through to explain how a wizard who can't exist around technogy or use computers is able to constantly reference movies and make snarky internet references, like going to a drive-in theater and playing D&D with a.bunch of internet nerd werewolves so he's up to date on the latest memes.
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May 2, 2020 19:14
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Aglet56 posted:There's definitely a horror movie scenario in the Dursleys' situation, though. They spend years abusing this kid due to hosed up family dynamics and then they find out he's capable of unknown but clearly lethal power; 9 months or so after they find this out, he comes back from his crazy magic school having learned god knows what and maybe he killed a teacher? and they gotta live with him and they know he's not happy with em Great, you just made me remember that Alan Moore did that whole thing in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where Harry Potter is the Antichrist and shoots lightning bolts out of his dick.
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May 4, 2020 14:10
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https://twitter.com/leslieleeiii/status/1256985769278930944
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May 5, 2020 00:15
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Goons will spend years of their adult life in the thrall of a video game where trolls have dreadlocks and smoke weed and practice voodoo and the minotaurs live in teepees and smoke peace pipes and tell you to keep your ear to the ground and commune with nature and the pandas love kung fu and philosophy and worship a jade dragon and then turn around and scoff at how all the normies are crypto-fascists because Harry Potter references real-world historical mythology on par with leprechauns having a pot of gold.
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May 13, 2020 20:37
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It's a decent attempt at trying to reconcile how problematic Chosen One narratives are by making it so that there was nothing intrinsically special about Harry. Aside from his family's wealth and privelege of course, but even then Neville covercomes all that to basically be Harry's equal and carrying on his work at Hogwarts in the final book.
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May 14, 2020 15:59
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MonsieurChoc posted:Rowling wanted Terry Gilliam for the movies, and you know what he'd have made something interesting out of that. A Harry Potter movie where 3/4s of the runtime is baby boomer whining about how bureaucracy is inefficient and people used to talk to each other maaaan. a.lo posted:i bet they have a statue of harry potter at hogwarts that motherfucker Harry Paterno and the Statues of the Living
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May 17, 2020 16:12
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Butternubs posted:In the human wizard war that Voldemort imagined how was he planning on dealing with all the crazy non magic weapons? Does an ICBM give you enough warning to disapparate away? does St. Mungo's know how to deal with Nerve gas injuries? Can you Avada Kedavra someone through 2 inch thick steel tank armour? the death eaters would 100% get crushed by the muggle military industrial complex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCqjR1gHyIQ
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May 21, 2020 16:28
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Even if the game itself wasn't very good and the story didn't really do justice to the setting I always liked the premise of the old computer game Arcanum where magic and technology are continuously ebbing and growing in inverse power to each other and recorded history is just the millennia of relative calm and quiet in between the cataclysms that inevitably result when magic or technology reaches the point of being powerful enough for people to destroy not only themselves but their entire civilizations. Like in Harry Potter world magic has been steadily declining for centuries and technology has been making leaps and bounds each generation, and the segregation of wizarding society from common people is as much about being in denial of the fact that all their most powerful wizards and spells and relics came about long ago and even the most powerful modern wizards like Voldemort and Dumbledore are still left fighting to reclaim the leftovers of those days like the Deathly Hallows while muggles are growing exponentially more powerful developing weapons of mass destruction and the internet. Nicolas Flamel gave up his immortality from the Philosopher's Stone because he is the only living person who is old enough to remember how things used to be and he can no longer stand the existential terror of steadily growing weaker while technological apocalypse looms on the horizon with no way to stop it.
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May 21, 2020 19:03
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Butternubs posted:Hermione is the only sane character. Like imagine you find out magic is real, how is your first instinct not to learn everything you can do with it. Harry and ron are just like yeah cool we can do these 5 spells that'll do potions class sucks, who needs to know how to make a potion that gives you a huge dick or wings or w/e guess I'll just expelliarmus. Hermione is such a neurotic overachiever that she had a physical and mental breakdown three years into her schooling from overloading on classes. She literally broke the laws of time and space to do more homework, it's no wonder so many libs idolize her because she's like the embodiment of the kind of nerd that aspires to wear a lanyard for a living and engage in slogan-based activism on the weekends and distracts themselves from approaching middle age alone by thinking of refundable tax credits.
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May 22, 2020 14:54
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amigolupus posted:It's depressing just how true this is. Despite hating Harry for being James' spawn, he's still somehow the only one who can view Harry objectively. As for the others: The idea that it's better to grow up with an abusive father rather than none at all is a hell of a take, I'll give you that. Especially with how the past decade of children's media has shifted to be more about how non-traditional families are valid, the idea that the grown adult who used their position of authority over you to emotionally and sometimes even physically abuse you over the course of seven years was a positive influence because at least he taught you how to be a real man and besides that's just how he expressed himself and deep down inside he just wants what's best for you even if you don't recognize it is just...wow.
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May 22, 2020 20:09
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Roth posted:https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/a32653364/she-ra-noelle-stevenson-theory-bow-trans/ Deflecting from the lack of trans characters in your show by whatabouting a popular pop culture punching bag isn't really a good look.
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May 29, 2020 21:28
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If I could smoke weed with one Harry Potter character it would definitely be Hagrid.
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May 31, 2020 17:47
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reignofevil posted:Check it. You smoke weed with Mrs. Sprout. She's the one who taught herbology. One smoke sesh and you're set for life because now you know life fifty magical ways to get high, have a cure for your allergies and also occasionally you'll poop out solid gold. She's too square. Mrs. Sprout is the wizarding world equivalent of a stock photo of a bunch of nonthreatening white people playing Jenga in an article about how profitable it is to invest in the cannabis industry. Plus you just know she'd keep going on a ramble about the history of a strain or the best pH for the soil without passing the pipe first.
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May 31, 2020 18:30
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 Never forget.
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Jun 2, 2020 17:26
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