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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
Thank you god yes. Same feelings abound. Ursula K. Le Guin, take it away:

I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a school novel, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
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BiopunkOtrera said:
Okay here's one: The Harry Potter books were always kind of bad. Especially if, like me, you went to a Harry Potter style school and realised how awful it was.
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Eeeeeh yes and no. As much as I hate current day JKR I don't want to rewrite history, the first Harry potter book is an excellent children's adventure book. Nothing too groundbreaking but very enjoyable.
The books did get more and more objectively bad the more adult they wanted to be and thus the less they could hide their worst aspects of its world building under childhood whimsy. With the last books being both intensely self serious but also mechanically incoherent.
 
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Nobody else can see it, though. You need to set that gif's privacy settings in Google Drive to anyone with the link.
 
Squirtodyle said:
As I understand it, the name is historical and comes from the fact that they would accept pupils from anywhere, i.e the general public, as opposed to only accepting pupils from the surrounding area.
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IIRC, it was less about region, and more about religion and class. Anyone whose family could pay the school money could go to public schools, even if the father was some recently up-kicked nobody. And historically, schools and churches were very intertwined, and schools hence usually based on religious denomination.
 
Alex said:
Eeeeeh yes and no. As much as I hate current day JKR I don't want to rewrite history, the first Harry potter book is an excellent children's adventure book. Nothing too groundbreaking but very enjoyable.
The books did get more and more objectively bad the more adult they wanted to be and thus the less they could hide their worst aspects of its world building under childhood whimsy. With the last books being both intensely self serious but also mechanically incoherent.
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For some reason my favourite book in the series was always the fifth one, Phoenix Order. Mostly because Luna Lovegood is best girl and seeing the Weasley twins go full sicko mode before leaving Hogwarts. The last two books felt very boring though because the whole school thing fell to the background and everything was way too serious.

Also Dolores Umbridge was quite a bold choice for a self-insert from JKR's side I got to say. :V
 
I can still remember the moment, as a fourteen-year-old at the oldest, when I realized I just did not care about Harry Potter anymore. It wasn't dramatic or anything, not even per se sparked by anything, it just occurred to me that I had no interest in or positive feelings towards the series anymore. Made later finding out the author was rather terrible a lot easier, I suppose.
 
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I was initially just repelled by being the popular thing at the time, the fact I legitimately disliked the setting, as well as Rowling being outed as... well, Rowling probably made that easier to sink in.

That said, a part of me as a kid also didn't like how it was popular with the girls at my school. I was pretty sexist as a kid and I'm glad I moved past that.
 
I honestly have no idea how to deal with the HP series since as until around age 6 I hated fiction and only nonfiction(I liked learning about the immune system so much my parents got me a textbook on diseases that I read obsessively...I was a weird kid) and the thing that made me like fiction was the Harry Potter series...Which I read all the books in a week and is the reason why I started reading fiction. Like it would be revisionist and self-lying to say I didn't like them as a kid but I really don't want to endorse JKR's bigotry....
 
Is thinking HP isn't that good really an unpopular opinion (especially around here)...
 
I think there's sort of multiple strands of opinion on HP post-JKR becoming the TERF Grand Wizard, which definitely has influenced retrospective on the work:
  1. HP is good, its author being a terrible person is immaterial to it because death of the author
  2. HP was thought to be good but actually was always bad, and its author showing she's a terrible person justifies this thinking as she most likely inserted her terrible beliefs in the writing, everyone was just blinded by the hype
  3. HP is bad and has always been bad, its author being a terrible person is immaterial to it because death of the author so it sucked even before she ascended shit mountain
  4. Only the pre-dark turn (late book 4-Book 5) books were good
It really varies depending on where online you go, from the die-hard HP stans who either support JKR or struggle reconciling their obsession love of the series with the author being awful, to hipsters who always sneered at HP and felt vindicated by JKR's fall from grace, and everything in between.

I'm not sure where I fall on. I thought the books were decent to good as a teenager (and nostalgia is just as much a filter on its quality as is JKR's politics), but wasn't really obsessed with it, so growing up and seeing its numerous flaws didn't bother me. JKR could have stayed that super rich author who wrote a series that, in retrospect, was kind of meh and full of flaws, but had memorable characters and could be funny, but clearly the position of Richest Mediocre Writer in the world didn't satisfy her.

EDIT: I usually hesitate to backport her current politics to when she was writing the books because I figure she most likely was a different person back then, lots of current transphobes didn't develop or probably didn't think about trans rights until they were brain poisoned online or otherwise. However, Ursula K. Le Guin is absolutely right about the mean streak in the books (the attitude towards fat or ugly characters is especially prominent) and I think that trait can be found both in the books and the current person. One only need to think about her playing victim online and siccing her followers on small accounts calling out her transphobia.
Hawkatana said:
While obviously not all fiction is on that level
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Oh certainly, I wouldn't put myself on the same level as religions or anything.
 
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Another unpopular opinion but I think that the main problem with X of Swords is less quality and more the fact that you had multiple interesting/unique plotlines crammed together in one side story. Like if you had one side series for the Captain Britain stuff, one side series for the Apocalypse stuff and one side series for the Arakko stuff(maybe add it into X-Men Mars). Like all these are interesting things but since X of Swords is so big it basically drains the life out of these plotlines.

Other unopular opinion is that I like what Fall of Krakoa did with Iron Man. Since it felt higher stakes. Like various corporate groups misusing stark tech for war profiteering has been done before but with Fall you have Tony seeing his tech being repurposed for genocide and the other Fall books show that the tech makes it very hard for even experienced X-Men to fight against groups of Stark Sentinels
 
all fictions said:
I think there's sort of multiple strands of opinion on HP post-JKR becoming the TERF Grand Wizard, which definitely has influenced retrospective on the work:
  1. HP is good, its author being a terrible person is immaterial to it because death of the author
  2. HP was thought to be good but actually was always bad, and its author showing she's a terrible person justifies this thinking as she most likely inserted her terrible beliefs in the writing, everyone was just blinded by the hype
  3. HP is bad and has always been bad, its author being a terrible person is immaterial to it because death of the author so it sucked even before she ascended shit mountain
  4. Only the pre-dark turn (late book 4-Book 5) books were good
It really varies depending on where online you go, from the die-hard HP stans who either support JKR or struggle reconciling their obsession love of the series with the author being awful, to hipsters who always sneered at HP and felt vindicated by JKR's fall from grace, and everything in between.

I'm not sure where I fall on. I thought the books were decent to good as a teenager (and nostalgia is just as much a filter on its quality as is JKR's politics), but wasn't really obsessed with it, so growing up and seeing its numerous flaws didn't bother me. JKR could have stayed that super rich author who wrote a series that, in retrospect, was kind of meh and full of flaws, but had memorable characters and could be funny, but clearly the position of Richest Mediocre Writer in the world didn't satisfy her.

EDIT: I usually hesitate to backport her current politics to when she was writing the books because I figure she most likely was a different person back then, lots of current transphobes didn't develop or probably didn't think about trans rights until they were brain poisoned online or otherwise. However, Ursula K. Le Guin is absolutely right about the mean streak in the books (the attitude towards fat or ugly characters is especially prominent) and I think that trait can be found both in the books and the current person. One only need to think about her playing victim online and siccing her followers on small accounts calling out her transphobia.

Oh certainly, I wouldn't put myself on the same level as religions or anything.
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I think I somewhat fall in 2 and 3 here.

But what I think my real thesis is is that JK Rowling was always likely to become a reactionary in the same way that Blarites have all become kind of reactionary now. That's the natural path for a group who want to replace the ruling class without changing anything else, which is what the books primarily want/are about. You replace the ruling class, you find that the ruling class are the way they are because of a set of material conditions rather than because they're uniquely evil individuals, and then you become as bad as they are.

In terms of the books themselves, I think the big issue is also that the setting of a magic boarding school and the plot of adventure are a very awkward fit together because a boarding school is a total institution. This is why anime school plots usually have an absurdly powerful student council and kind of write teachers out of the plot. Because if there's teachers around doing stuff why are kids the ones solving the problems?

Edit: The house elf thing actually put me right off Harry Potter even as a teenager.
 
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BiopunkOtrera said:
In terms of the books themselves, I think the big issue is also that the setting of a magic boarding school and the plot of adventure are a very awkward fit together because a boarding school is a total institution. This is why anime school plots usually have an absurdly powerful student council and kind of write teachers out of the plot. Because if there's teachers around doing stuff why are kids the ones solving the problems?
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Personally I'm a hard #3 so I agree with your overall point but I feel this specific "issue" is more on the audience's side then the story's. Past a certain point if one cannot or will not employ suspension of disbelief it's kind of on them. Citing anime school plots is a good example of this, a absurdly powerful student council is no more sensible then HP's inexplicably hands off faculty. If one accepts the former but not the latter that says more about them then the story itself.

I don't think HP was ever good but this isn't a strong criticism. Allowances have to be made for genre regardless of story quality, a hypothetically actually good HP would be just as vulnerable to these kinds of critiques.
 
My thread unpopular opinion is that HP's perceived terribleness is a frankly very online opinion. Hogwarts Legacy's massive success demonstrates that there's a huge segment of people who are not plugged into JKR's terribleness and are still casual fans of the series, enough to drop $60 for the game.

Like, I'm not a diehard, I didn't buy Hogwarts Legacy, I don't even consume Harry Potter fanfic much when fanfic is my primary media consumption nowadays, but HP still has considerable cultural cachet.
 
I might be remembering wrong, but isn't the half of the adventuring in HP books (well, at least before 6th book) mostly trying to avoid getting caught, and school faculty trying to keep kids from getting into trouble?

Last I checked the teachers are trying to solve the mysteries when they can, but its not like they have access to all information.

Renewal said:
My thread unpopular opinion is that HP's perceived terribleness is a frankly very online opinion. Hogwarts Legacy's massive success demonstrates that there's a huge segment of people who are not plugged into JKR's terribleness and are still casual fans of the series, enough to drop $60 for the game.

Like, I'm not a diehard, I didn't buy Hogwarts Legacy, I don't even consume Harry Potter fanfic much when fanfic is my primary media consumption nowadays, but HP still has considerable cultural cachet.
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Pretty much. Unless you are taking concious effort to avoid HP because you dislike Rowling, most because have good to "meh" opinions about HP books. Like, sure, one can argue they aren't exactly high literature, but they never were. A lot of the "books are actually bad" seem to be applying her views in retrospective.

I think they are good adventure book as long you don't have some gremlin in your ear constantly telling you "must dislike this". They aren't really that deep and worldbuilding is more or less "what is cool at the moment" rather than anything to do with consistency, but for it's intented audience it's pretty decent adventure romp.
 
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god, it really does suck that jkr is still so popular. terf is a slur to silence you? wow, i sure wish it worked.
 
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