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How did Rowling ever get published?
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Her works are utter shit in prose and content.

Furthermore, she included in her serious the spell "Avada Kedavra", which is the killing curse (for non-readers) and cannot be stopped with any known shielding spell. HOWEVER it can be countered by an equally powerful caster using a similar offensive spell. And yet, she is an anti-gun liberal cunt in real life, somehow doesn't see the parallel to actual guns. Are there any other authors this out of touch with the themes of their own novels?
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>>8221746
Series, not serious. Wtf?
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>>8221746
>And yet, she is an anti-gun liberal cunt in real life, somehow doesn't see the parallel to actual guns. Are there any other authors this out of touch with the themes of their own novels?

It's a fictional story, fampai

also
>implying objective value
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>>8221746
It remains a mystery to me, anon. I truly detest this woman and any of her fans who think that HP is legitimate fantasy.
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Expecto Patronussss XD
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>>8221746
Typical modern day new fiction with a movie combo,

Rowling was good enough and got lucky. It was students in a "School of Magic"; look at the main audience, kids who grew up reading and watching heir works.
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they're kids books you autist
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i wish you'd "Avada Kedavra" yourself you dumb faggot
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>>8221746
The book was for ten year olds. And it did it's job by getting them reading in a time when every bedroom had a tv. Get over it.
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>>8221868
If Harry Potter was real suicide would be most common use of that spell.
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>>8221746
shitty people like shitty things and most people are shitty. it's obvious.

get ur edge up lad, if you're not a misanthropist by now you need to read more
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>>8221746
>themes
Yeah, that's not a theme is, friendo.
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What did he mean by this?
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>>8221812
>legitimate fantasy
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>>8221936

>still doesn't understand the lesson imparted to Nietzsche by the horse of Turin
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>>8222215
what did he mean by this
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>>8222215
J.K should have included a spell for suicide, or a kamikaze spell.
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>>8221746
Because that's significantly more dramatic
>I kill u
>lel no u don't
vs
>I kill u
>no I kill u first
Not to say any of it is clever, but then neither are you
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>>8221746
>anti-gun liberal cunt
wrong board, child
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She wrote a charming story within a fun creative wizardry world for kids.

/thread
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>>8222454
>fun
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>>8221746
the whole series is full of plot holes, inconsistencies in the rules of book's world, and the protagonist is a grade A moron who acts like a whiny bitch in every book except maybe the last.

the reason for this is it's written for children, and she isn't some autistic retard who cares that dumbledore is happy to let Harry abuse a time turner to save sirius black but wont use one to go back in time and halt the triwizard tournament and stopping voldemort from ever returning and saving the lives of hundreds or more.

it's just frothy YA teen drama with a veneer of serious fantasy stuck on.
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>>8221746
By writing for children.

You don't have to be the second coming of Joyce to get a children's book published. In fact, it helps if you aren't because hardly anyone even wanted to touch Joyce classic back in his day.
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>>8221915
much like civic use of guns
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>>8222433

>implying /lit/ is leftist

hahahahhaHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA

>>>reddit
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>>8221746
>How did Rowling ever get published?

It's not hard to get published tho

Why aren't you published yet anon?
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>>8224045
>>>/reddit/
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>>8221746
I agree entirely that it's fucking shit. I've read like the first 4 books untill they started to get up to 600+ pages of unreadable, boring shitty filler. At that point it was obvious that she was just going for milking this story to the maximum and fully adopted this quantitative mindset. Not that I'm saying it had any artistic merit or good writing in the first place.

So what did it make so successful, if the writing was pure shit?
I thought about that a lot myself. They weren't really children's book, if you really think about it, the books were more like detective stories (disguised as fantasy) than anything else.
And for a detective book they were ok.

The book blatantly pushed progressive ideologies, anti-racism and anti-fascism (muggle-high born feud, giants etc.), so I guess that was a big plus for publishers with an agenda.

I had a feeling reading about all that magic stuff, brooms, wands, cloaks, magic candy and other magic brands that the book's sole purpose was promoting commercialism and consumer society. I mean if you translated all of those into real life, what would you get: "Harry looked at his new Adidas Terminator football shoes dazzled. They were awesome. He was overfoating with joy. The shoes had flawless ergonomic design, steel nails for maximal grip, but they were extremely light at the same time; the beautiful horizontal red stripes were just the icing on the cake. Harry tried them on. They fit perfectly..."
The books were literally full of lines like that. These parts worked as a fantasy projection for children: Harry, despite being an orphan, somehow always got he coolest items, so anything is possible for me too if I do all the right things. Pure plain consumerism disguised as fantasy again.

Another reason may be that magic, hidden knowledge and a sense of danger were always a thrill in popular culture and Harry Potter had all of those.

It's a shame really that this could happen. Rowling as a writer has no artistic merit; her works are mediocre at best and I would go as far as they have no morality either apart from cartoonistic pure villans and empty shells of puppet protagonists. All of her characters are as simple as a brick, like a manifestation of one single amplified trait. The story is also full of inconsistencies and logical fallacies, terrible writing overall. It just happens that it had the perfect combination of progressivism, consumerism and occultism while playing on the curiousity of the masses with its detective storylines and it worked out perfectly.
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>>8224018
Source?
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>>8223411
>>8222454

>it's written for children

I think that's firstly a cop-out, and secondly became less true as the series progressed and Rowling's publicists realised they could grab a wider age group for an audience.
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>>8221746
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?

It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."

Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
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>>8224257
>Our society
>equating society with a certain part of the middle class
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>>8224045
It is.
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It all boils down to the setting. She made a believable magical school and that was enough.

As Tolkien showed, kids love above all else a fantastic, different and immersive world. They haven't yet experienced the many years of dull working life that make us grown ups want to bitterly draw back from the idea of a world that's full of all the wonder and adventure denied to us by our 9-5 jobs.

She's no Tolkien and realized she didn't have the time or skill required to make a whole world, but in focusing only on the setting of school she neatly targeted something that occupies a great portion of children's minds, and put a transformative spin on it.
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>>8224265
>being THIS new
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>>8224265
incidentally, the only part of society which on the one hand does posess some culture, but on the other hand lacks any direct involvement in the course that that culture is moving in. what's your point? that we shouldn't discuss the state of literature today just because people are dying of poverty?

>>8224353
implying one cannot reply to pasta
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>>8224331

Basically this, she made a stand out but popular fantasy setting in a sea of when everyone was trying to imitate Tolkien's world, I think that's honestly one of the very few things I like about it since it didn't need to rely on Tolkien derived
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Martin the Warrior >>> anything Harry Potter
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Rowling is a literal retard, writing HP was like winning the Powerball any chimp with a pen could've done it
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WINGARDIUM LEVIOSAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR xD
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>>8224177
Underrated post.
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>>8221841
I grew up reading Harry Potter and now in my short 24 years of age absolutely hate that shit...

I tried to re read them and the only ones I can still tolerate are the 6th and the 7th books, it was probably the autistic fanbase fault, althought I really like the movies, contrary with other the Lord of the Rings for example which the movies are my absolute favorite movies of all time but I still take the books over watching them
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>>8224177
this is probably the best criticism I've read for Harry potter in a long time (and that shit don't comes often since pretty much everyone and their grandma loves the shit out of the series)
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>>8221746
Yes the prose and content is pretty shit, but prose and content isn't the be all and end all of getting published.

The factors that go into getting published are so intricate and numerous that to try and ask something like "how did she get published?" is the wrong way to think about it. The fact of the matter is that the infinite number of factors needed to line up correctly DID line up in this case and she got published. Try not to think about it too much, it'll just make you angry or put you into a state of existential crisis when you realise how obscenely intricate cause and effect are.
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>>8221746
>how did she get published
because publishers saw the potential to make money and she stuck with it
>equating magic with guns
are you... and autist?
>seriously considering the themes of Harry Potter even though OP starts post with how bad they are
why don't you sit a few plays out champ?
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>>8221746
You mean if someone shoots at you, you have to hit their bullet with yours and it cancels ou?t
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>>8224045
its apolitical cuck
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>>8224257

>73 years old

Not at all disregarding what this guy is saying, but I've never once imagined reading a post written by a senior here. That's not a bad thing; 4chan's not exactly a secret anymore. But, I mean, is this par for the course on /lit/, along with legitimate discussion?

I'm really just fascinated.
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>>8224662
Well, that should be possible if you shoot very, very precisely.
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>>8224678
it's bloom copypasta from more than 10 years ago
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>>8224331
>>8224383
These two have it. I admire Rowling's writing ability no more than the rest of /lit/, but her worldbuilding is outstanding. If she had published a Hogwarts /tg/ setting instead, I would play the shit out of it.
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>>8224685
That makes more sense. I don't frequent /lit/.
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>>8224177
This has the potential to replace the 'stretched his legs' pasta, or at least supplement it. I'm so impressed that I'm saving this for future reference.
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>>8221746
They're cartoonish kids books

Calm down, dude
Thread replies: 56
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