Harry Potter Reboot in the works?

[Spuro]

https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Marietta_Edgecombe

J. K. Rowling confirmed that Marietta's pimples faded but left a few scars, commenting "I loathe a traitor!".

[JAGzilla]

^ Yeah... It really is bonkers that Rowling can be so two-faced. She almost has to be some kind of evil genius. She doesn't believe a word that she wrote, but she knew what would sell, and then used the money and power to push her real agenda.

I don't believe Rowling was serious about that "I loathe a traitor" line, though. She forced Marietta into a total no-win situation and had her make a brave choice similar to the one Neville was applauded for back in Sorcerer's Stone. Marietta was humiliated, traumatized, mentally abused, physically scarred for life, and made an outcast, all for siding with her mother, the government, the media, and her teacher over the say-so of a stranger everyone says is a lying nut job. And then Harry uses really blatantly flawed logic ("Ron's dad works for the Ministry, too!") to condemn her, not considering all the major information advantages Ron has over Marietta. No way Rowling wrote all that and is cruel enough to actually see this poor kid as a traitor. Well. One would hope, anyway.

[HedorahIsBestGirl]

I always found the treatment of Marietta by both Rowling herself and a large portion of the fandom to be rather disturbing. Permanently scarring a teenager for making a questionable choice seems rather sadistic. It's not the only time Hermione does something fucked up like that, either. The HP fandom is always weird with the characters in condemns and those it defends though. Even though Snape and, to some extent, Dumbledore seem to have been reevaluated as shitty people, Draco Malfoy continues to enjoy a huge following with the flimsy (and false) justification of "He's just misunderstood," all because he wasn't evil enough to straight-up murder Dumbledore. Apparently, that and his daddy being mean to him excuse the fact that he's a cruel, bigoted, cowardly, snobbish bully. Let's also not forget that his "half-hearted" attempts to murder Dumbledore nearly resulted in two other deaths.

[JAGzilla]

I always found the treatment of Marietta by both Rowling herself and a large portion of the fandom to be rather disturbing. Permanently scarring a teenager for making a questionable choice seems rather sadistic. It's not the only time Hermione does something fucked up like that, either. The HP fandom is always weird with the characters in condemns and those it defends though. Even though Snape and, to some extent, Dumbledore seem to have been reevaluated as shitty people, Draco Malfoy continues to enjoy a huge following with the flimsy (and false) justification of "He's just misunderstood," all because he wasn't evil enough to straight-up murder Dumbledore. Apparently, that and his daddy being mean to him excuse the fact that he's a cruel, bigoted, cowardly, snobbish bully. Let's also not forget that his "half-hearted" attempts to murder Dumbledore nearly resulted in two other deaths.

I don't know what the fandom makes of Marietta; I've never been involved with the HP fandom. As far as Rowling goes, it's not that she was sadistically tormenting the character. She was portraying Marietta as a war victim. War is cruel and indiscriminate. Marietta tried to avoid the whole thing, was dragged onto the side she saw as the enemy, reluctantly made a stand, and was crushed for it, just like any number of forgotten nobodies in every real war ever. Hermione was also a victim. She's no sadist, and is in fact an extremely kind and generous person. She chose to stand up against dangerous injustice, found herself an uphill battle against a ruthless enemy that held all the cards, and she slipped. She got caught up in the emotion of it all, fell into the toxic "us vs. them" mentality, and started to believe that anyone who could support the other side must be a stupid sneak. As a result, she made a terrible, ill-considered mistake.

Malfoy was shaped by his upbringing. That doesn't excuse what he did, but it does make him somewhat sympathetic. He was a jackass and sometimes worse, but he had enough good in him that he avoided being totally ruined. He never became a Bellatrix Lestrange or a Fenrir Grayback.

[JAGzilla]

Something else that just occurred to me is that we need to take the race glasses off sometimes and look at the overall context. We've been zeroing in on Cho Chang's name and how it sounds like this or that, and forgetting about the setting. She's surrounded by White characters with goofy-ass names like Dedalus Diggle or Pomona Sprout or Draco Malfoy or Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. Wizards and witches having funny or unusual names is common throughout the series.

Hell, when I first read Prisoner of Azkaban as a kid, it didn't even immediately click for me that Cho was Asian. I just mentally filed it away as another wacky sounding and probably made up name like Hermione or Severus or Lucius or Minerva.

Putting the race glasses back on, it does occur to me just now that we have a Black guy named "Shacklebolt." I mean, in all fairness, it's his job to put other people in chains, so...

[LSD Jellyfish]

Something else that just occurred to me is that we need to take the race glasses off sometimes and look at the overall context. We've been zeroing in on Cho Chang's name and how it sounds like this or that, and forgetting about the setting. She's surrounded by White characters with goofy-ass names like Dedalus Diggle or Pomona Sprout or Draco Malfoy or Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. Wizards and witches having funny or unusual names is common throughout the series.

Hell, when I first read Prisoner of Azkaban as a kid, it didn't even immediately click for me that Cho was Asian. I just mentally filed it away as another wacky sounding and probably made up name like Hermione or Severus or Lucius or Minerva.

Putting the race glasses back on, it does occur to me just now that we have a Black guy named "Shacklebolt." I mean, in all fairness, it's his job to put other people in chains, so...

I'm sort of disinterested in this as a debate, and more as a very hapahzard discussion, so if I stop responding to this thread, don't feel like I'm personally ignoring you or trying to dodge anything.

Anyways, I think what you brought up about Rowling's naming conventions is actually what a lot of people criticize the name choice for. Given the chance to name a character, Rowling chose something remarkably stupid, and something that can be construed as lazy and possibily offensive. I'm not aware of Shacklebolt, but that's also pretty unforunate as well.

To once again re-iterate, I don't think anyone (worth taking too seriously), is definitively trying to say that JK Rowling is actively racist, or that her writing contains some secretive subtext, over a few small errors or problems, rather that after a slew of recent controversies, revealing more inner nastiness, it's no longer worth giving the benefit of the doubt to. Her writing is full of weird, incredibly questionable stuff, and people are right for being somewhat concerned about it.

One reason I posted that Marge excerpt a page ago, was to show how also mean-spirited some of the Harry Potter prose, and characters/motivation can be. Marge says some very unkind things to Harry in that scene, abusive and hostile things, but she's turned into a human balloon in a big scene of comumppance. Revenge is a very common theme in Harry Potter, and a lot of very hostile and bizarre things are played for laughs/getting validated in some way, I recall a lot of cruelty inacted on many non-wizard characters, in the books, and many horrible things happening to side-characters throughout the series. There's an unpleasent taste to it all. I can see some positivity to it too, for children who are abused to sort of remain hopeful that a magical world, or something greater exists beyond the confines of their lives. This doesn't just apply to abused kids, but anyone who just doesn't have a sense of fitting in. However, that message gets very muddied by the end, when it becomes clear that Harry was always set to inherit everything from his parents and be the star of the show.

Literature and publishing in general, often don't get the types of allowances Harry Potter gets. A lot of stuff is intensely scrutinized and discarded, pretty much instantly. I'm not "shocked" in a reactionary way, but it is a bit interesting to see JK Rowling refer to Dudley, in the first few books a child, be reffered to as "piggy face" over and over again by the narrator. Spoiled or not, it was a little surprising to see that description float up a few times in a book to refer to a kid. I don't think more modern publications and editors would let that fly these days. It is worth saying though that academic circles love to tear things down to the tinest pieces, so there is no such thing as overanalysis and none of it is every absolute.

One final thing, is that the religious right generally doesn't like Harry Potter. I had a few friends growing up that just weren't allowed to engage with any sort of Harry Potter media because it was "satantic" or full of witchcraft. Most HP readers by my experience, were left-leaning, sometimes very progressive people, who drew inspiration from a lot of it. The fact that Rowling's antics have turned the left-leaning people against her, when her books were already controversial to some extent from certain groups, don't bode well for business and the culture surrouding her series.

[JAGzilla]

I'm sort of disinterested in this as a debate, and more as a very hapahzard discussion, so if I stop responding to this thread, don't feel like I'm personally ignoring you or trying to dodge anything.

Anyways, I think what you brought up about Rowling's naming conventions is actually what a lot of people criticize the name choice for. Given the chance to name a character, Rowling chose something remarkably stupid, and something that can be construed as lazy and possibily offensive. I'm not aware of Shacklebolt, but that's also pretty unforunate as well.

To once again re-iterate, I don't think anyone (worth taking too seriously), is definitively trying to say that JK Rowling is actively racist, or that her writing contains some secretive subtext, over a few small errors or problems, rather that after a slew of recent controversies, revealing more inner nastiness, it's no longer worth giving the benefit of the doubt to. Her writing is full of weird, incredibly questionable stuff, and people are right for being somewhat concerned about it.

One reason I posted that Marge excerpt a page ago, was to show how also mean-spirited some of the Harry Potter prose, and characters/motivation can be. Marge says some very unkind things to Harry in that scene, abusive and hostile things, but she's turned into a human balloon in a big scene of comumppance. Revenge is a very common theme in Harry Potter, and a lot of very hostile and bizarre things are played for laughs/getting validated in some way, I recall a lot of cruelty inacted on many non-wizard characters, in the books, and many horrible things happening to side-characters throughout the series. There's an unpleasent taste to it all. I can see some positivity to it too, for children who are abused to sort of remain hopeful that a magical world, or something greater exists beyond the confines of their lives. This doesn't just apply to abused kids, but anyone who just doesn't have a sense of fitting in. However, that message gets very muddied by the end, when it becomes clear that Harry was always set to inherit everything from his parents and be the star of the show.

Literature and publishing in general, often don't get the types of allowances Harry Potter gets. A lot of stuff is intensely scrutinized and discarded, pretty much instantly. I'm not "shocked" in a reactionary way, but it is a bit interesting to see JK Rowling refer to Dudley, in the first few books a child, be reffered to as "piggy face" over and over again by the narrator. Spoiled or not, it was a little surprising to see that description float up a few times in a book to refer to a kid. I don't think more modern publications and editors would let that fly these days. It is worth saying though that academic circles love to tear things down to the tinest pieces, so there is no such thing as overanalysis and none of it is every absolute.

One final thing, is that the religious right generally doesn't like Harry Potter. I had a few friends growing up that just weren't allowed to engage with any sort of Harry Potter media because it was "satantic" or full of witchcraft. Most HP readers by my experience, were left-leaning, sometimes very progressive people, who drew inspiration from a lot of it. The fact that Rowling's antics have turned the left-leaning people against her, when her books were already controversial to some extent from certain groups, don't bode well for business and the culture surrouding her series.

Yeah, I get it. I'm not really approaching this as a debate over anything specific at this point, and just kind of posting thoughts as they occur to me. I've been a massive fan of this series for almost 23 years now, but mostly never thought about it analytically like this before, so this is all just interesting and fun for me as much as anything else. I'm learning a lot and finding new things to appreciate about the books and Rowling's writing ability, while also becoming more frustrated at the cartoonish level of hypocrisy in her beliefs. I'm going to have to start looking into her social media posts myself at some point, here.

As far as the mean-spirited stuff goes, I would say you're right about some of it. There are places where you can definitely say that Rowling goes too far, probably is motivated by negative beliefs, could have found a better way, comes across as insensitive or even offensive. My overall point here has just been to try to put these things into context within the story and what it's about. That won't always absolve them of guilt, but sometimes it will explain them. Often Rowling knows that the things she's writing are terrible, and that's the point she's deliberately making.

[Gigantis]

Some news popped up. It sounds like instead of movies, the reboot will be a television series on HBO.
https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23 ... -series-tv

Each season is supposed to be a different book, so Season 1 will be the Philosopher's Stone and it goes from there.

[JAGzilla]

Yeah, that's the obvious way to go. Some of the movies just didn't have the runtime to cover everything or let the stories breathe. The structure of a show will bring its own new challenges, but I'm sure it can work.

[Spuro]

Great news! Now we can get the house elf pro-slavery subplot realized onscreen like we always wanted.

(Man I turned bitter. I used to be a huge fan, lol.)

[Gigantis]

If anyone was doubting it was true..

[ShinGojira14]

*siiiiiigggggggggghhhhhhhhhh*... ... ...

For Mother Miranda fuck's sake.

[CyberZilla]

I wonder what they’ll do to try and top the original films. ESPECIALLY the castings and score. I’m not terribly interested in this series yet, but I’ll keep an eye on it as it develops and releases, just to see what it’s like.

[Gigantis]

I wonder what they’ll do to try and top the original films. ESPECIALLY the castings and score. I’m not terribly interested in this series yet, but I’ll keep an eye on it as it develops and releases, just to see what it’s like.

I don't think they're gonna try to top the films, unless you count telling a more book-accurate story as topping. That's what most HP fans seem to be hoping for anyway, and I think they definitely have enough room to do so in a 7-season show spanning 10 years.

The actors have huge shoes to fill though, that's for sure.

[ShinGojira14]

Great news! Now we can get the house elf pro-slavery subplot realized onscreen like we always wanted.

(Man I turned bitter. I used to be a huge fan, lol.)

To say nothing of the transphobia that is all but guaranteed to skyrocket...

[JAGzilla]

I hope the John Williams music doesn't actually make it into the show. It's outstanding, obviously, but we've heard it before. I want this show to start from scratch.

[Spuro]

I hope the John Williams music doesn't actually make it into the show. It's outstanding, obviously, but we've heard it before. I want this show to start from scratch.

If I may turn off my cynicism towards the franchise for a moment, Jeremy Soule (Elder Scrolls composer) proved that certain composers can do a score just as well as John himself. His stuff for the early Harry Potter games is top notch.