The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (a thread for Potterheads)

Don't worry, I was just posting it because I only just saw the comic. House titles was the most recent Avada Kedrama I saw. :::PPP

 

Ah, ok.

 

Me: House names? What h-
Me: *googles*
Me: Oh hell no. D:

 

I was excited for the briefest of moments.
And then I was disappointed.
So, so disappointed.

Rowling, plz. Just... stop. Or hire a cultural consultant. Or do some GODDAMNED RESEARCH.

 

Why does the AMERICAN SCHOOL have houses.

...actually, are houses a thing at Canadian schools?

 

The only thing I could find said it wasn't confirmed, so hopefully that's something that she considered and then dropped but... yeah, no, american schools really wouldn't have houses. The closest you can get are fraternities and sororities, and those are both opt-in and typically not associated with a particular mascot animal so much as an overarching set of standards (with requisite latin/greek tacked on.)

I really hope it's not implemented ever, because I really would prefer JK stop digging herself into a horribly racist ditch.

 

Here's a link!

Basically, some lowlevel datamining pulled the potential American House Names, almost all of which are Native American mythical creatures, which is pretty ironic given that this is a distinctly British schooling system. Also sort of typical of all the grace and nuance that JK's been treat Native American mythology with.

 

Fraternities and sororities are also for college, too.

 

Some colleges do have houses (but they tend to be like Harvard)

But that doesn't change the eh

 

the closest thing to "houses" I can think of
is like technical/agricultural schools and their shops/majors?

 

That was the thing I got super stuck on too, even regardless of the culture insensitivity issue. She's been pretty bad about treating other places as "England with different window dressing."

 

Responding from the BYF thread --

I have to point out that there are midlist authors who have to write four to five books a year in order to be able to eat and put a roof over their head, who back up their worldbuilding with actual research. Rowling is, what, a billionaire? She could hire an army of skilled research assistants to do the research and pare it down to relevant points for her to incorporate. This is genuinely a thing that would be useful to throw money at.

 

I was talking with friends about that they other day and we decided that the best way to worldbuild American wizarding society would be to put together a committee made of historians and people from as many different American subcultures as you could find and have them work everything out together.

We started off going "she should have gotten an American to write it" and then quickly realised that, given how big and diverse America is, just one American wouldn't cut it. I mean, I'm American and I would be totally lost trying to do worldbuilding covering the entire country, because I'm a homeschooled military brat who spent my childhood moving every eleven months to three years, has little to no contact with any of my extended family, and is too much of a socially anxious introvert to know much about any of the places I've lived in. I couldn't write a book about American wizards. Or, well, I could maybe write some history, or a book about homeschooled nomadic American wizards, but it would take years of research for me to feel confident enough to write them interacting with anyone outside of their particular tiny insular subculture.

Conclusion: committee.

 

Yeah. HP would really benefit from an expanded universe with works from lots of different authors and contributors in general, I think.

 

Or has a giant Lack of Clue. It might not be that she doesn't accept that the rest of the world isn't just England with different paint but that it just hasn't... penetrated... somehow. Like, if she hasn't traveled much despite her fat wads of cash, that could lead to a super narrow view of the world.

Not that it matters either way, it's still baffling and insulting.

 

clearly she needs to go on a road trip or something around america before she writes this stuff, in addition to research. maybe interview some people
(am I the only one who would really enjoy a book of fake interviews with people in magical communities all over america? that would be fun. and there could be little bits from the interviewer, too, like a diary of their trip.)

 

If the really quite British and nowhere near as well off Neil Gaiman can write America properly, I'm sure Rowling can if she steps up her game and applies some money to the situation. (There's so much you can make better when you have gobs of money to throw at it!)

 

And I think that if you're going to do just enough research to pick up Fun And Interesting Native Creatures for your window dressing, you ARE obligated to do your research for the rest. It's like weaboo white authors writing about yokai and ninja with no understanding of the underlying cultural basis of either-- it is offensive, because you're not treating them as a people or a culture, but instead like something kitschy from Pier 1 to make your novel more boho.

 

SERIOUSLY.

This makes me so salty because like... I recently spent at least 10 working hours doing research on period appropriate phones, cars, clothes, furniture, and NYC neighborhoods for a ten thousand word novella and one I'm doing at half rates as a favor to a local startup game company, at that. Lady with a billion goddamn dollars who will earn money hand over fist for just about anything she writes doesn't seem to bother doing even that much. IT MAKES ME MAD.

 

Please ignore this post, it's stupid and I had no idea what I was talking about. I need to get rid of my stupid tendencies to think like this, and I'm working on it, but I fucked up and I'm sorry.

Yeah, she probably should have got consultants for the US stuff. I mean, I honestly think it would have been done much better as like a warner brothers project with minor jkr oversight. Or the expanded universe stuff.

I don't think she thinks other countries are like the UK. I think she wrote something inextricably tied to UK boarding schools, and copied it for other countries because she felt like that's what people were asking for. And she's bad at worldbuilding. I think she half-assed it because she didn't really want to do it, but people were asking for the hogwarts equivalent for their continent.

I mean, just with the houses - they're a really central thing to how people interact with HP as fans. So I can see why she tried to shoehorn them into settings where they clearly don't fit. They're really central the the wizarding world she wrote, that people love, so she tried to fit them into the rest of it.

I think the Neil Gaiman comparison is unfair. He's lived in the US for how long now? His wife's american.

And it really weirds me out that people are just complaining about the US stuff, and how she should have understood the US better. It just strikes me as very 'entitled american'.