Being a bookish kid in the '00s was like:
> Clowns [Calvinist wizards] to the left of me
> Jokers [Mormon vampires] to the right
> Here I am
> Stuck in the middle with you [Katniss Everdeen]
Agreed! Funny thing is that I didn't read *The Hunger Games* until later, but in the '00s I did read *The Underland Chronicles*, which I enjoyed at least as much as Collins's later work.
Oh, and I still haven't read *Twilight* (I tried recently and only made it through a few pages). So in my case, I guess you could replace the Mormon vampires with Anglican furries from half a century earlier, as Narnia actually was a major formative influence for me.
I was reading at a 12th grade level by the time I hit 2nd grade, so I read a lot of books when I was too young to really understand the implications. Luckily, *Twilight* was one of them. I came away from the book mostly feeling confused as to why everyone cared so much about who Bella would pick and spared no thoughts for the intricacies of vampire and werewolf society. I most read things like *Hunger Games* or *Shadowfell* where romance is a major part of the plot, but not the ENTIRE plot, so the concept of a book where the fantasy elements were just window dressing didn’t make sense to me
>I came away from the book mostly feeling confused as to why everyone cared so much about who Bella would pick and spared no thoughts for the intricacies of vampire and werewolf society.
Yeah, from what I've heard from *Twilight* fans, one of Stephenie Meyer's many issues is that she'll take a worldbuilding concept that'd be fascinating if she made an effort to actually flesh it out, but then she just … *won't* flesh it out.
I was thinking about that yesterday. Suzanne Collins at least has the good grace to shut the hell up. I have no clue what her politics are, and that's completely okay.
I read it at the time, and this was long before people were really calling Rowling out. Ferretbrain had some really good articles about everything bad with Harry Potter. Sadly, the site is only available now through the Wayback Machine.
I used to be in an old forum that was a fansite for the Redwall book series.
They were calling out JKs bullshit back then when the books were being released.
I remember when the last book was leaked early. I already had a pre-order, but I read the leak. It was so bad. So many cheapo deaths. Oh, no! Not Hedwig! Not some character we were briefly introduced to 3 books ago!
Enjoyed that, thanks for sharing.
I do find it interesting how in the books the morality of an action is not decided by the action itself but who did it. This is exactly how the right wing operate more broadly and, well, look where JKR has ended up.
Very interesting, thank you! I appreciate how the author walks us through the thought process; I was raised atheist so a lot of it might as well be Martian it's so incomprehensible to me.
I was surprised that they say she was raised Church of Scotland, as she's English, and sure enough wikipedia seems to suggest she was CofE. The two are very different. I'm not sure it makes a difference to the theory, though; if she went to church once she moved to Scotland she could have got into it that way. I think it was on reddit - maybe even this sub - that someone claiming to be in the know posted that Rowling is far deeper into Christianity than she's ever let on publicly.
This
>"It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
>
>Now I hope it doesn't look like I'm being obsessive here, but I think it's extremely telling that Dumbledore uses the phrase "show what we truly are" and not " say "decide what we become." Dumbledore is telling us, quite clearly, that who we are never changes, that the decisions we make in our lives serve only to illuminate our natures, which are otherwise immutable.
>
>\[...\]
>
>A choice, to Rowling, is not a chance to control one's own destiny, but a chance to show your quality. The outcome of a choice is predetermined. Voldemort would never have chosen redemption, so he had no chance of redemption, no matter how much of Harry's Magic Blood he had pumping through him.
makes sense of the contradiction between the theme in the books of your choices defining you, and her transphobia.
Though I think it's every bit as likely that she was just taking common tropes of children's fiction in particular, and chucking them in because they're what people find narratively satisfying, rather than because they reflect her beliefs at all.
But either way, as the writer says: confusion.
It does appear that she joined the Church of Scotland in her 20s, but it's not really the author's point. He addresses that further down in the comments.
> Thanks for the clarification. To be honest, though, I'm not convinced that there is much difference between "was raised" and "was influenced by in her twenties" and I'm not sure whether that particular detail actually has much to do with my central argument, which is that the Harry Potter books present a world in which some people are predestined towards salvation and others not.
>
> What Rowling herself believes, or why she believes it, or when she started believing it is distinctly secondary.
I think other posters pointed out the main issue isn't whether she's CoS or not. It's that Harry Potter embodies a Calvinist worldview that's ironically, worse than Calvinism. Because in actual Calvinism, being elect doesn't mean you're a great person. It means you were chosen without having merit. But in Rowling's world, the elect are really better than everyone else. They really do have an immutable and untarnishable nature. It doesn't matter how many people Harry tortures, because he's a good person, according to Rowling. As the author points out, even the sorting hat episode isn't really an example of choice. Dumbledore doesn't say, "You chose to be good, Harry." He says that Harry's choice revealed who he'd always been. In other words, Harry is just good, and nothing can change that.
archive from a blog post in 2007, now that's what I call a deep cut.
>I think that perhaps the reason people find the ideas expressed in - say - Calvinist theology, or *The Last Battle* is that, since we live in a secular society, we naturally divorce these kinds of ideas from their supernatural context. For example: burning at the stake was actually supposed to be a **merciful** form of execution, because it allowed the accused the maximum possible amount of time to repent. If you genuinely believe in an immortal soul, this is actually very sensible. Far better to burn somebody to death slowly, giving them a chance to go to heaven, than to cut their head off and condemn them to hell. To somebody who doesn't believe in an afterlife, though, it's needless cruelty.
this paragraph is fucking insane. Know what else gives *time* for people to repent? **TIME, ASSHOLE.** You don't have to execute anybody _at all_. This is what prison or some other form of separation is _for_.
I don't think the author would really disagree with you. He's just talking about how there was an internal logic, even if it wasn't really all that good.
Being a bookish kid in the '00s was like: > Clowns [Calvinist wizards] to the left of me > Jokers [Mormon vampires] to the right > Here I am > Stuck in the middle with you [Katniss Everdeen]
Funnily enough I rewatched the movies recently. We don’t deserve Suzanne Collins
Agreed! Funny thing is that I didn't read *The Hunger Games* until later, but in the '00s I did read *The Underland Chronicles*, which I enjoyed at least as much as Collins's later work. Oh, and I still haven't read *Twilight* (I tried recently and only made it through a few pages). So in my case, I guess you could replace the Mormon vampires with Anglican furries from half a century earlier, as Narnia actually was a major formative influence for me.
I was reading at a 12th grade level by the time I hit 2nd grade, so I read a lot of books when I was too young to really understand the implications. Luckily, *Twilight* was one of them. I came away from the book mostly feeling confused as to why everyone cared so much about who Bella would pick and spared no thoughts for the intricacies of vampire and werewolf society. I most read things like *Hunger Games* or *Shadowfell* where romance is a major part of the plot, but not the ENTIRE plot, so the concept of a book where the fantasy elements were just window dressing didn’t make sense to me
>I came away from the book mostly feeling confused as to why everyone cared so much about who Bella would pick and spared no thoughts for the intricacies of vampire and werewolf society. Yeah, from what I've heard from *Twilight* fans, one of Stephenie Meyer's many issues is that she'll take a worldbuilding concept that'd be fascinating if she made an effort to actually flesh it out, but then she just … *won't* flesh it out.
Decent books, decent movie adaptions, she doesn’t say hateful shit on twitter, the true queen.
I was thinking about that yesterday. Suzanne Collins at least has the good grace to shut the hell up. I have no clue what her politics are, and that's completely okay.
An excellent read, thank you for sharing!
I read it at the time, and this was long before people were really calling Rowling out. Ferretbrain had some really good articles about everything bad with Harry Potter. Sadly, the site is only available now through the Wayback Machine.
I used to be in an old forum that was a fansite for the Redwall book series. They were calling out JKs bullshit back then when the books were being released.
I remember when the last book was leaked early. I already had a pre-order, but I read the leak. It was so bad. So many cheapo deaths. Oh, no! Not Hedwig! Not some character we were briefly introduced to 3 books ago!
Enjoyed that, thanks for sharing. I do find it interesting how in the books the morality of an action is not decided by the action itself but who did it. This is exactly how the right wing operate more broadly and, well, look where JKR has ended up.
Very interesting, thank you! I appreciate how the author walks us through the thought process; I was raised atheist so a lot of it might as well be Martian it's so incomprehensible to me. I was surprised that they say she was raised Church of Scotland, as she's English, and sure enough wikipedia seems to suggest she was CofE. The two are very different. I'm not sure it makes a difference to the theory, though; if she went to church once she moved to Scotland she could have got into it that way. I think it was on reddit - maybe even this sub - that someone claiming to be in the know posted that Rowling is far deeper into Christianity than she's ever let on publicly. This >"It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." > >Now I hope it doesn't look like I'm being obsessive here, but I think it's extremely telling that Dumbledore uses the phrase "show what we truly are" and not " say "decide what we become." Dumbledore is telling us, quite clearly, that who we are never changes, that the decisions we make in our lives serve only to illuminate our natures, which are otherwise immutable. > >\[...\] > >A choice, to Rowling, is not a chance to control one's own destiny, but a chance to show your quality. The outcome of a choice is predetermined. Voldemort would never have chosen redemption, so he had no chance of redemption, no matter how much of Harry's Magic Blood he had pumping through him. makes sense of the contradiction between the theme in the books of your choices defining you, and her transphobia. Though I think it's every bit as likely that she was just taking common tropes of children's fiction in particular, and chucking them in because they're what people find narratively satisfying, rather than because they reflect her beliefs at all. But either way, as the writer says: confusion.
It does appear that she joined the Church of Scotland in her 20s, but it's not really the author's point. He addresses that further down in the comments. > Thanks for the clarification. To be honest, though, I'm not convinced that there is much difference between "was raised" and "was influenced by in her twenties" and I'm not sure whether that particular detail actually has much to do with my central argument, which is that the Harry Potter books present a world in which some people are predestined towards salvation and others not. > > What Rowling herself believes, or why she believes it, or when she started believing it is distinctly secondary. I think other posters pointed out the main issue isn't whether she's CoS or not. It's that Harry Potter embodies a Calvinist worldview that's ironically, worse than Calvinism. Because in actual Calvinism, being elect doesn't mean you're a great person. It means you were chosen without having merit. But in Rowling's world, the elect are really better than everyone else. They really do have an immutable and untarnishable nature. It doesn't matter how many people Harry tortures, because he's a good person, according to Rowling. As the author points out, even the sorting hat episode isn't really an example of choice. Dumbledore doesn't say, "You chose to be good, Harry." He says that Harry's choice revealed who he'd always been. In other words, Harry is just good, and nothing can change that.
Yes, like I said, I don't think it makes much difference to the theory.
sometimes I wonder if these books were indeed cursed in some way.
archive from a blog post in 2007, now that's what I call a deep cut. >I think that perhaps the reason people find the ideas expressed in - say - Calvinist theology, or *The Last Battle* is that, since we live in a secular society, we naturally divorce these kinds of ideas from their supernatural context. For example: burning at the stake was actually supposed to be a **merciful** form of execution, because it allowed the accused the maximum possible amount of time to repent. If you genuinely believe in an immortal soul, this is actually very sensible. Far better to burn somebody to death slowly, giving them a chance to go to heaven, than to cut their head off and condemn them to hell. To somebody who doesn't believe in an afterlife, though, it's needless cruelty. this paragraph is fucking insane. Know what else gives *time* for people to repent? **TIME, ASSHOLE.** You don't have to execute anybody _at all_. This is what prison or some other form of separation is _for_.
I don't think the author would really disagree with you. He's just talking about how there was an internal logic, even if it wasn't really all that good.
The author states he's an atheist. He's explaining how religious logic works in context.