I haven't laughed that much in ages. Some of the comments are quite good too.

 

"Dumbledore, memorably, falls in love with a younger man in the third installment. " I'd like to think the author is confusing fanon with canon, but given the rest of the article, oh lordy!

Either way, I laughed. Good find.

 

The point of that was to insult JKR about her cowardice regarding making Dumbledore gay out of book, after the last one was released, rather than in-book.

 

Funny, if somewhat inaccurate. Heading up the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and actually, well, leading Dumbledore's Army has to count for something. Besides being far more effective in combat, and far less narrow in vision. In DH, Hermione has some clever spells, but her chief role, as related by Dumbledore at 'King's Cross,' and by the plot itself, is actually to forestall Harry.

In DH, there's a rather oppressive, over-arcing pattern of Harry wanting to go places or do things which make reasonable sense, and Hermione being either afraid or dubious of Harry's ideas. Then, when it's almost too late, she not only acquiesces to Harry's plans, but claims them and the reasoning behind her acceptance as her own, though it almost always mirrors Harry's original idea. In this regard, she's rather like the character who wonders aloud after a plan of action and receives an answer that appears to go unheard, only to turn and announce that exact plan a second later. Or in her case, weeks later.

 

Harry is Head Auror, not Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement (the difference between pre-HBP Scrimgeour and Amelia Bones).

Hermione works in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, but it's not clear if she's the head (if she is, she'd be Harry's boss).

Edit: since when did Harry use reasoning to justify his plans? I was under the impression he just followed his gut.

 

Thankfully, through the genius vision of Steve Kloves, the Harry error was corrected somewhat in the films.

Rowling clearly gave Harry and Ron some interesting lines and exploits out of a misguided sense of pity. Kloves reabsorbed many of those back into the Hermione character, as it should have been all along.

 

That's because it's a joke, Sesc.

 

I don't get it either. I think it's a feminist being sarcastic in the assumption that everyone that reads it is as ultrafeminist as them and therefore will see that it's using sarcasm to underline the oppressive male patriarchy phallus penis penis penis oppression of womyn, but I can't be sure because the site it's on is just yet another vaguely-left-leaning soapbox aggregation instead of the hyperfeminist black hole of bullshit I expected when I scrolled up after reading it.

Put another tally in the IDGI box, because I really don't.

 

What she's saying basically boils down to "Despite us seeing everything from Harrys' POV, the books were actually about Hermione."

That and "Hermione is a Mary-Sue Self-Insert."

At least that's how it came across to me, but then I'm probably biased.

 

The joke comes in two parts:

1. In Hermione Granger, JKR has a much better character than Harry for the hero of the books, possessing much more admirable traits in addition to being genre-busting and not the total cliché that Harry is. This is the main joke: that JKR had this character but didn't write it (prompting the false confusion joke over the series being called "Hermione Granger and the..."). And further: that despite JKR not writing it, she still made Hermione pretty much solve all their problems for them (E.g. "oh yeah I just happen to have these books about destroying horcruxes").

2. Connected to the first joke, the piece mocks JKR for being a coward: for not writing a gay Dumbledore despite wanting to, for using a prophesy as a plot device, for having few female characters with any kind of depth, for falling into every cliche about Harry, etc.

The confusion comes because the jokes are delivered through a combination of apparently earnest but deliberately false statements about canon ("Dumbledore, memorably, falls in love with a younger man in the third installment"), but also statements about canon that are true but given an interpretation in line with the joke (e.g. "In the end, we see Harry married to some girl he met as a teenager, dropping his kids off at school, and reminiscing about his glory days" and "And it pays off. Hermione saves the day, over and over; in every book"). On that front, the humour is clumsily done.

 

This. The irony is this:

Hermione Granger and the Philosopher's Stone would have never, ever been published, and then where would we be?

 

Well, I understood the article kinda like Taure had.

Some things, however, that stood out:

First, the author critizes JKR for her lack of daring to publish the series under her full name - meaning: disclosing her full name, as in Joanne. After all, the series did indeed get published using the abbreviation "J.K. Rowling" - the fear was, that nobody would read a fantasy book written by a female, if I recall it correctly.

Second, Rowling - according to Doyle - chose too many a stereotypical and lame characteristics in portraying the protagonists: not daring enough to make the main one female, "normal", e.g. without the "Chosen One"-thing, without the prehistory of being a son to a well respected pureblood, too lucky for it to be believable, etc.

tl, dr
All in all, she states all the flaws she sees in the story by pointing them out in a sarcastic way. I don´t think that it was meant as a joke but kind of meant to promote feministic views Doyle has (as writtenin one of the comments there). But I might be wrong.

 

This is pretty awesome, sarcasm that you know is actually funny

 

So wait...

Doyle is implying that JK isn't a very good ... author?

>.>

<.<

Who fucking knew.

 

Is anyone sure he hasn't been browsing a few rants on here about Hermione?

JK Rowling might not be a good author to a lot of people... but she is fucking rich, and that counts for a lot in the world. =)

 

No, it really doesn't. Go kill yourself.