As for Rowling, I think it’s (relatively) important to remember her reputation as a liberal spokesperson who was often brilliant on twitter, destroying the reactionary elements of society, until she suddenly revealed her massive blind spot on the trans community.

She’s exactly the repugnant person I’d expect from a bourgie lib.

I had a similar, although far less forgiving experience, stretched across a few years. I hated the first two films, loved Prisoner of Azkaban, didn’t care for anything else. I hated Dobby. I wanted to step on him and throw him against the wall. It says a lot when you’re more annoying than Jar Jar Binks.

The Neville and his parents moment is my favorite sequence in all of the books. It hits all the right emotional notes, and comes right around the time that you are learning that the prophecy could be about Neville instead of Harry and it just stays with you.

I think it’s very weird to treat the movies as the entry point into Harry Potter; they’re basically cliff’s notes versions of the books that aren’t especially entertaining or enjoyable on their own, beyond certain entries. 

The goblins who run Gringotts are basically every awful stereotype about Jews.

we’re still doing Aaron Sorkin after he had Jeff Daniels burn 30 years of goodwill with his boomer rant about everyone younger than them being shit? Fuck all the way off, Sorkin.

If Sorkin had been called before HUAC, he would absolutely have named names, and been proud of doing so.

I’ve always considered the movies a visual companion to the books. For the most part, they capture what I had in my head almost exactly.

Your “or so” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there for books that can exceed 700 pages.

Good thing Aaron Sorkin just makes boring TV shows and movies instead of policy, hot damn is that an ignorant statement that minimizes the harm that McCarthyism did.

The Half Blood Prince material was weird, because it really is kind of peripheral to the plot, but they couldn’t excise it entirely because “Half Blood Prince” is the title of the damn movie/book. So instead you have stuff like Shape randomly blurting out that he’s the “Half Blood Prince!” before running away at the…

The lawsuit where Shakespeare tried to sue them both was pretty entertaining though.

Voldemort deserved to die for the horcrux thing alone. Dude had the foresight to store his soul in various magical artifacts, but instead of burying them in the side of the mountain, or enchanting an old tin can and letting it sink to the bottom of the sea, he instead chose A) objects of enormous, easily guess-able per…

There were definitely some warning signs in the books—the rampant fatphobia, the whole “house elves love to be slaves!” thing—that crop up in hindsight, but yeah, Rowling was generally perceived as “one of the good ones.” Which made the “oh by the way, transwomen are faking it so they can assault me in the bathroom”…

Dobby is a bigger character in the books. His misguided attempts to “help” Harry in the second book are portrayed in a more complicated, ultimately sympathetic light. Plus it is made much more apparent how abusive Daddy Malfoy is towards Dobby. And then he appears in most of the following books and has a lot of charact…

Everything starting with Goblet of Fire on falls into the realm of “it made more sense in the books”.

This was a good article.

Aaron Sorkin would have a sense of irony, awareness, and a better understanding of the topics he has opinions on if he wasn’t so proud of his West Wing script that was filmed nearly word for word.

Honestly, my main criticism of Bardem’s casting just comes down to the fact that he looks too imposing and weathered to play someone who was kind of a baby-faced young-looking guy