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Readers everywhere have fallen in love with the tale of a magical boy who escapes a decade of child abuse only to wind up in a facility with a worse child-safety record than the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, humanity's ability to simply enjoy the Harry Potter books and get on with their lives ended the very second two computers were connected together. These days, the rule of fandom is anything worth doing, is worth overdoing, often to a terrifying degree. Just take a look at... #5.
The Wizard Rock Festival
In what can only be an attempt by rogue mathematicians to create an actual physical empty set, someone organized the overlap of "Rock Festival Attendees" and "Hardcore Harry Potter Fans" in Brooklyn last September. If you've already guessed that the bands all had names like "The Cedric Diggorys" and "The Remus Lupins," well done on recovering from that attack on your faith in humanity faster than we did.
Tickets actually sold out, with 20 Muggle dollars earning you Wrock festival attendance (if you were wondering, yes, "Wrock" is "rock" about wizardly subjects). Though now that we look at it, it says about 300 fans and 17 bands turned up, a ratio that they could have managed if each band just got their friends and family to fork over the cash. Behold the face of Wrocking Out:
Wait a second, that's... a lot of girls there. Maybe the young dudes in the audience know something the rest of us don't, like that guy we all laughed at when he made it onto the cheerleading squad. This raises many, many questions, such as, do those dudes hit on the girls by claiming they got there by accident? "Yeah, it's OK I guess, but I only bought a ticket because I thought 'wrock' was wrestling where the dudes get to bash each other with rocks." Or is the opposite? Is this the one place on Earth where some 16-year-old dude actually increases his chances by openly recognizing the banner of Gryffindor on the wall? Will he win the heart of that girl on the left by telling her she looks like Cho Chang? #4.
The Intercollegiate Quidditch Association
As we mentioned yesterday, Quidditch is an incredible sport based entirely around magic and making the actions of everyone except a single primary character utterly irrelevant. This makes it the best movie game ever, but the most impossibly bad candidate for a real sport since synchronized shitting.
And if we told you a bunch of schools had organized a Quidditch league, you'd say, "Aww, that's so cute." Which is why we put "Intercollegiate" in the title; this isn't elementary schools, or perhaps kindergartens for the specially-differently-abled. Real actual universities like Princeton, McGill and Boston University have full-fledged Quidditch teams. Possibly as a "if we have to cut budgets we know where to start" measure. Oh, there's video: There's an easy way to tell if you're playing a real sport or just failing to realize you're four-years-old: Are you carrying a piece of equipment that doesn't do anything? In a real sport you carry a stick if you intend to hit an object (baseball), other people (kendo) or both (ice hockey). In Quidditch, you waddle along like an arts-degree penguin clutching the kind of broomstick that makes witches say, "Don't worry, it happens to every wizard."
Though we will say that once jetpack technology becomes common and inexpensive, this will be the most awesome fucking sport in the world. #3.
The Politician Who Must Not Be Named
A Russian man legally changed his name to "Harry Potter" in an attempt to win an election for governor and, while frighteningly insane, is by far not the worst thing a 32-year-old could be doing by pretending to be Harry Potter. We're not experts on Russian government procedure (and if the last 50 years are anything to go by, neither are they) but we're fairly sure that 12-year-olds don't get to vote. And magical interference in elections is punished by the ghosts of the KGB. Oh, and you're not allowed to use a changed name in a Russian election anyway. Kind of an afterthought at this point, since if the voters were going to elect the guy, really they kind of deserved what they got.
What's even more outrageous is that we're thinking this guy wasn't a Harry Potter fan at all. If so, he would have known those Soviet Durmstrang wizards from Goblet of Fire would kick the shit out of the snotty Hogwarts rejects any day of the magical week. If you're going to go with a fake wizard name on a Russian ballot, you need to put "Viktor Krum" on that shit. |
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Um, how on earth is number 1 even remotely weird?
I don't know if you've ever worked in academia or studied English literature but this just sounds like a fairly standard English literature conference.
Set methods of reading a text are one of the things that are taught as part of an English literature degree. Postmodernist readings, feminist readings, marxist readings, psychoanalytical readings, structuralist readings, q***r theory readings, etc. You take a standard model for literary analysis and then apply it to any text you so choose. You could do a marxist reading of TV guide if you so desired and thought you'd get something out of it.
Academics working in literature will always gravitate to works that are critically acclaimed or popular. Harry Potter is both and I imagine scores of work has been done analysing it in faculties all over the world. Whether its worth the effort is debateable but frankly i'd be more surprised if a marxist reading of Harry Potter had not been done by now.
BTW a marxist reading doesn't necessarily mean somebody read Harry Potter and immediately thought "this is a rallying cry for the new socialist dawn" but rather that they looked at the relationship between the characters in the book, money, power, means of production of money and power and how it affects relationships between those characters (i.e. ron is poor so he is sad).
As for the Holocaust reading. What are you blind? The villains in the book are tattooed, black clad upper bourgeoise intellectuals with an obsession with purity led by a charismatic leader who wishes to commit genocide despite ironically not matching the standard of purity he himself advocates. They couldn't be more thinly veild Nazi stand-ins if Rowling had called the villain "Hitlermort."
I think the objection is due to the fact that Harry Potter started off as a kid's story and all this analysis is kind of ridiculous, given the subject material. But other than that I do agree with you. And "Hitlermort" is going to be my next username.
Haters!
All these things make the world more awesome. That is except #2. WFT? I'm part of the Harry Potter fandom and I don't know anything about that.
check 4chan and you'll know what these guys are talking about
Lmfao. I love Harry Potter but I totally agree, especially with #5. X(
hahahaha quidditch LOL. i live in princeton, nj, and the local high school has a team as well as the university. it's quite popular actually. of course the high school also has a Meat Club and a Intercolonial Space Colonization Club so there's that..
I made my way to the bottom of the first page and couldn't proceed any further...Jesus Christ...just...Jesus Christ.
while i agree with most of this stuff. some of the holocaust stuff was actually legitimate. in the seventh book there were some, almost far too clear references in it that kind of left me going "really can you be more obvious on what you're referencing" and thus defeating a purpose of creating a goddamn meeting on it! anyone that has 1) read the 7th book and 2) knows about the holocaust woulda gotten it
Not to mention that in the Intercollegiate quidditch commercial they spelled seeker wrong.
I thought I was the only one to notice.
Grammar Nazis ftw.
I'm a fan, but this is disturbing.
wanna know what the worst thing is? occidental college, which is in my area, possibly has a freaking quidditch team
While I'm not a potter fan, is this really any worse than Star Trek?
Sure, most of the sports you see are very real (Fencing is all I can think of), but I'm sure people have made tongo boards, and whatever that 3d chess s**t is called that picard is always on about.
Anyway, thats about all I care to write.
It's not as bad, but Star Trek is a universe, many TV shows, many movies, many books, and is 45 years old. Harry Potter is none of those things. Potter-mania isn't the biggest mania ever, but it's one of the largest for a book series and movies based off the books.
Also, Spirk is not anywhere near the same realm of horrifying as Snarry is. I just... why is this so popular?! Especially considering a LOT of slash fans are women. Why?!
:| not funny
the Quidditch thing looked really dangerous...
Don't forget the anti-fandom either. You know, the folks who claim that Rowling is a Satanist and that the books are teaching witchcraft to impressionable youngsters.
I believe another name for those folks is "bible thumpers"
i believe i read somewhere that the guy at the symposium talking about the holocaust stuff was actually trying to say that J K Rowling was a Nazi sympathiser, and that she was responsible for Jewish persecution, not just about the parallels.
"If you can make parallels between the Holocaust and Harry Potter and honestly believe you're contributing to society, keep your ass at least one ICBM range away from our boots"
Right, because that's clearly a big stretch from Voldemort to Nazis. What with anyone with muggle blood being rounded up and having to declare that they were muggle born, people being yanked out of their homes by death eaters never to be seen again...
You haven't read these books, have you
I've read notes from that symposium and I'll admit - I had a hard time making the parallel.
while some of this is beyond disturbing,
that quidditch video was possibly the best piece of internet i've seen in a while.
lmao.
1:12 of the trailer, a guy gets kicked in the face.
My university, yes, UNIVERSITY, is starting a quiddich team.
Author's draw on all sorts of ideas, especially ones where the evil really gets their ass kicked after being really, really evil for a while.
Pulling on the Holocaust as an outline for the story isn't the weirdest or worst thing an author has done.
Yeah, I agree with Choklad. The line between Voldemort-ruled Harry Potter world in book 7 and Nazi-ruled Europe is pretty blurry. I can see that statement if you didn't read the last book, but there's pretty much no way anyone half way through high school or older could have missed that unless they were suffering from brain injuries. Sorry, but good points just went down the drain due to a lack of research.
LOL! all fandoms are crazy! hello, twilight's edward cullen dildo?!
You forgot to mention the people who are scared to death that these fictional books are going to turn there impressionable young children in to satanic wizards...like omg little billy is going to start sacrificing goats on a stone alter because he read this made up story about magic that's not based on any fact...