I know a lot of us, myself included, like to believe that piracy allows us to consume problematic media without supporting artists we do not like. But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product. HBO is absolutely keeping tabs on piracy of their show now and seeing our traffic the same way Crunchyroll used to keep tabs on pirated fan-translated anime back when they cared.
Also, there is a similar ethical zero-sum game with all other Harry Potter media and products. Normally we can buy on the secondary market if we need a hard copy to scan and rip but don’t want to support the creators. But almost every Harry Potter book in circulation is purchased by someone with intention to sell for a profit, and HBO is also likely keeping tabs on sales and resales of DVDs of the old movies. Every time money leaves your bank account for Harry Potter media, you are directly feeding the ecosystem which sustains the Queen of the TERFs.
It’s honestly pretty incredible how morally radioactive this one human is. Orson Scott Card is equally repugnant, but the Ender’s Game series doesn’t even have a small fraction of the market share of Harry Potter (IMHO this is the fault of that movie being just okayish, not good or bad, but that’s another topic.) Trump’s MAGA movement is comparable in badness, but there really isn’t much most of us can do other than voting and never shutting up about how unconstitutional the things he is doing is. Rowling really is comparable to Disney or Nestlé, and she’s just one person, not a whole company.
Right now, the only ethical way to consume Harry Potter is watching or reading movies and books on your copies that either:
- you obtained before 2020
- were given to you for free in some non-trackable way, e.g. offline or sneakernet.
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism. We will have to see if this changes once she is dead.
I’m just here to bring to your attention Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”, both the books and the assorted TV show, which is quite awesome in its own right, even if it diverges from the books by quite a bit. There’s a whole world of awesome outside of HP, and even if it wasn’t, I refuse to recast in my theater of the mind the extremely talented and deeply regretted Alan Rickman and Dame Maggie Smith.
I’ll add, the manga Witch Hat Atelier is a much better execution than Potter of the premise “a young orphan is abruptly brought over into a secretive world of mages overlapping with the mundane, but for mysterious reasons repeatedly draws the attention of dark forces.”
The Magicians show lost me with the sudden graphic rape, that was then portrayed a good thing. Sucks you got raped but you get a consolation prize of extra powerful magic! Also the rapist has magic semen, and they need to get more.
Look. You’re not wrong that there is a really scary (I would perhaps say very intense and absolutely triggering, but not explicitly graphic. There’s definitely graphic violence, but yeah.) scene with SA. But the god semen thing was a different deity and they gank the original trickster deity that did the SA.
When watching I do have the timestamps for that scene written down and do skip it. I skipped it when I introduced my wife to the show.
Not telling you what to do, but there is good content there. That’s probably the single scene in the series I seriously tell people to avoid.
I’m sorry it upset you the way it did. And now I’m seriously feeling like typing this is not the right thing, but my tism brain wants to explain more and better.
It’s all good, i enjoy a good explanation! I did mix those 2 up, I got farther in the series than I remembered. I had to go look it up and it’s still bad. The way all of her remaining friends(because her friends were murdered before the rape) just brushed her off afterwards was unpleasant. She wanted justice and they didn’t help her, so she went for it on her own. That messed up their plans and they were pissed in addition to being “concerned” she was turning dark. When they had originally abandoned her and looked down on her because of her lack of magic, now all of a sudden they “care”. Quinten was such a shit friend. After all that, she chose to save them, by takeing a part her rapists to make her a goddess. Yeah, her whole arc was rage inducing. I tried to only watch what was necessary.
Yeah, I tried to get past it but there were a couple other plot lines that were fairly disturbing. The living ship, that also was SA somehow or something. Creepy Russian teacher watching them fuck as foxes. The magic system had a lot of tie ins with sex and it was ick. The guy who got stuck in the the past or something and lived a life that was erased. Idk it was just a lot.
Yep Harry Potter for adults
I read the books as they came out and loved them. i tried watching the series as it was coming out but they really were so different from the books that when I had to wait for the next season I never picked it back up.
Are they worth watching though? If I go into it knowing it’ll be basically something loosely related?
I think it’s really good. The books… were frankly hard for me to get through. Not bad, but I only read the first few.
If you are going to watch the series, understand that the main cast are written as kind of assholes and are written like real people with real emotions and it’s stupid, but stupid good. Also there is an SA scene that can honestly be skipped Season 1, Episode 13 running roughly from the 40:00 to 42:00 mark.
Once you get through the first season it’s pretty smooth sailing through to the end of season 3. Then they have cancellation hanging over them so seasons 4 and 5 aren’t quite as… grand as they should have been.