Tag: harry potter

mwagneto:

ALSO literally every “”“gay”“” thing they put in the trailers as pretty obvious bait was no-homoed?? Idk if you noticed but pretty much every single second of Dumbledore’s screentime was used in the trailers, as was every “"gay”“ scene, EXCEPT for the ones that no-homoed them.

Hand holding? Oh, it’s the blood pact!

“I can’t move against Grindelwald” is it because he still loves him? no lol they literally made a blood pact and swore never to fight!

“oh we were closer than brothers” fuck you it’s the blood pact!

and yea obviously if you already know Albus was in love with Gellert you can read these romantically but the casual viewer won’t, which is EXACTLY the goal – Rowling took no risks here, the gay Albus fans will watch it because they want to see his sexuality represented and the homophobes will go watch it because any and every even subtly gay thing was explained.

ps: except for Grindelwald being uncomfortably homoerotic with both his black haired follower and Credence, but that’s a classic example of queer coding a villain which is a homophobic trope so no it super doesn’t count

pps mad props to Jude Law who quite literally saved the movie despite appearing for no more than 4 minutes

ppps yeah y’all could say “but he saw Grindelwald in the mirror!1!1!1111!1” my sister, who’s been a fan of Harry Potter since the beginning, watched the trailer and was like “no obviously that’s not a romantic thing they understand each other like no-one else understands them so Albus longs for the companionship of someone who’s essentially a brother to him” so no that means absolutely nothing to homophobic people Rowling played it as safe as possible and the whole thing ended up being a massive queerbait (as predicted)

naamahdarling:

hasufin:

swanjolras:

okay, most of what i do re: harry potter is criticism, and hp is flawed in such a number of ways, but sometimes i just sit here and

i mean, you all have a comprehension of just how drastically harry potter changed literature, yeah? like. it revitalized it. it blew the literary scene apart. the new york times had to create a separate bestseller’s list for children’s lit just because harry potter existed. harry potter changed reading.

so many people on tumblr were born in the ‘90s. when the first book came out, most of us couldn’t read. but we grew up in a world where everyone, everyone, everyone was reading harry potter, no matter how old they were; we grew up in a world where the most popular story in the entire world was a fantasy children’s book.

it’s sort of difficult to grasp, sometimes, the extent to which harry potter is not just a book. the extent to which what is basically a series of fun, interesting, and fairly good novels is such an enormous, enormous part of our lives, a cultural touchstone, a truly universal reference point, something so many people have shaped their lives around, a foundation for all of the stories we would read and watch for the rest of our lives– for so many of us, the first books we ever loved

the extent to which so many of us can’t call ourselves “fans” of harry potter, because it would like being a “fan” of, like, having lungs.

it’s not even about liking it or disliking it. it’s just a part of us.

This reminds me an awful lot about Starbucks.

No, seriously. Before Starbucks, America was a coffee wasteland. Coffee was a thing you got at diners and drivethroughs. It was a cheap hot thing you put made palatable with tons of cream and sugar, and most people (but waning!) had a coffee machine at home.

Starbucks told us that we could like coffee. That coffee could be an enjoyable thing, that it could be a status symbol and a ritual. That there could be a place where you go for coffee, and you enjoy it.

As a coffee snob, I think Starbucks’ coffee is awful. But Starbucks is why we have better coffee. Starbucks created the market space for third wave coffee shops and artisanal roasters. They reintroduced “espresso”, “latte” and “cappuccino” to the American lexicon.

We need stuff that’s heinously popular. That’s how culture works.

The cultural impact of the original 3 Star Wars movies was something literally phenomenal, something absolutely ubiquitous that changed the landscape of entertainment so fundamentally that things haven’t been the same since.

It was very much like Harry Potter. I know JK is le problematique but the books were fun, creative, and exciting, got a LOT of kids into reading in general and fantasy specifically, and gave us all some mew common cultural touchstones.

I feel very fortunate to have lived through both, and I wonder what will be next.

lilyprongspotter:

Honestly one of the most important scenes in the entire Harry Potter series is when nine-year-old Severus Snape uses magic to cause a tree branch to fall on Petunia. Even at nine he had no qualms about hurting people Lily loved. This really serves to underscore the idea that while Snape loved Lily, he was not truly invested in her happiness or well-being because he did not care about the people she loved. At age nine he didn’t care about hurting her sister and at age twenty he didn’t care about the imminent deaths of her husband and infant son. So I will always stand by my opinion that while Snape no doubt loved Lily, it was not a healthy love and he really never deserved to have it reciprocated.

bramblepatch:

hey so I’m not giving JKR any credit whatsoever for accidentally writing a nonbinary icon (bc if she’d meant to do it she’d never have shut up about it) but Tonks refuses to use even shortened forms of her heavily feminine given name with anyone except close family members and has The Classic Genderweird Dream Power of at-will minor shapeshifting and uses it to look punkishly androgynous with Cool Hair thank you for coming to my TED talk