Right. Ordinarily, we criticize a director when they don’t adapt their signature style to the material. We don’t, for example, say that Spielberg should get to continue using his signature style when filming Schindler’s List.  His ability to adapt to the needs of the story being told, whether that’s popcorn…

I think a lot of it has to do with the very modern trend of crowning a given director after they’ve directed 1 film of note. A lot of them just turn out to be mediocre to average storytellers who used up all of their best ideas on their first film. I am not saying that Chloe Zhao is one of them, but the director of A…

Holy counterpoint Batman!

There’s a lot of “Eternals is bad but I can’t put any blame on Zhao” stuff from critics right now.

I’ve never read the books, and I think the movies are just all right, but I don’t get this reaction. Why celebrate that you never got into something after learning that the creator is a bigot?

IIRC you can’t teleport in or out of Hogwarts, though.

I mean, that’s hard to know, since no children’s book has ever been Harry Potter big, except for Harry Potter. But you’re not wrong about that being a considerable factor in what made it so big.

I pretty much locked myself in my dorm room and had the final book delivered to me the day of release. No way I was gonna risk getting spoiled after the viral (in 2005!) spoiler video at the midnight release of the previous book

“ And I was like, “Harry is STILL pining away for his parents he never met?”

 At least 25% of the roundtable was made up of an actual fan of the property. So it had that going for them, which is nice.

I did enjoy Sanchez’s repeated “why am I even here?” responses.

I was traveling the day that book came out, and every other person in the airport was toting a copy. If a movie/show depicted that many people reading the same book I’d say “yeah right,” but there it was.

what was the point of this?

For me, it depends on how separable the artists’ issues/faults are from their art.  Like, it seems impossible to separate Woody Allen from the dozens of movies he’s made about neurotic older men and the attractive younger women who fall for them, but tons of LGBTQ+ kids saw a message of acceptance in the HP books, so…

Discworld is mostly a bit much for children though, no? I mean aside from the handful of entries specifically aimed at younger readers. Otherwise, I think even though they’re lighthearted to a grownup reader, they’re chock full of complex cultural references and otherwise heady concepts. But yeah, Discworld is…

So this is a roundtable on Harry Potter by a group of people who mostly don’t give a shit about Harry Potter? I know J.K. Rowling sucks now and deserves nothing, but what was the point of this?

I haven’t read the HP books and probably won’t, but if they’re good, they’re good. There’s the art and there’s the artist. If the art is fine, it doesn’t become less fine when the artist’s shortcomings are revealed. Otherwise, we’d have to throw out a ton of books, paintings, movies, music. Miles Davis and Herman…

As someone who grew up with the series it’s fascinating how much damage Rowling did to it even before opening her mouth about people of colour and transpeople. The continued forcing of new addons that take away from the original novels, the incessant retconning to deal with plotholes (having the Hogwarts Express in…

I’m amused by people saying they came late to Harry Potter meaning they first encountered the series in their teens. I first encountered it in my late 30s, when I had a child who had just gotten old enough to ask me to read it to her. Later that year the Order of the Phoenix movie came out, and after that, the final…

I loved the books. I think the first book came out when I was ten, so I literally grew up with Harry. I still think Rowling is very skilled writer, and purely in terms of plotting, characterization, worldbuilding and dialogue, the books hold up. Politics-wise...yeah, they’re problematic. I still have no idea what…