I am not saying it did not sell. That’s the one thing it did really well. But it’s hardly a hot take to say success is not a measure of quality. Plenty of mainstream slop out there. HP is slop. It’s not offensively bad, but it’s certainly not good.

Over 6+ books it’s really sub-par writing to have a character who does not really grow because they already did not have any internal flaws or conflicts. The upside is that it’s really hard to hate a blank slate MC and you don’t risk writing yourself into a corner. I’m sure this is no small part of why there is so much HP fanfic specifically – it’s hard to write those characters badly as they lack so much depth!

Tons of things did the HP formula better, with well developed characters, good worldbuilding, good plot, good themes, yada yada. e.g. The Magicians (only saw the show) or Misfits&Magic. And in all of those the protags face strong personal hardships and are drastically different people by the end. Yeah, it’s hard, but that’s what storytellers do.

Harry Potter has no true self to discover. From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster. The story opens with “yer a wizard” in the first 50 pages and that’s the end of his character arc. From then on he’s a mere vessel for the reader to experience the world and the author to move the plot along.

… As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don’t remember much, but Neville and Hermione have a glowup and Harry’s uncle dies or something? And the weasleys open a shop? I certainly don’t recall anything that lends credence to the idea that Rowling even believes that either individual people or societies are capable of profound change. The story begins and ends basically in the exact same place except the characters are 10ish years older.

Not ever. Even when every male under the age of 50 is conscripted into one of Trump’s pointless wars against former allies, Democrats won’t do shit because resistance is illegal and they have an unshakably legalist worldview. Calexit was already a complete joke before their government started executing their own citizens in broad daylight with no repercussion - legal or otherwise.

Americans: stop with the escapist fantasies and start finding actual ways to fight back because your elected representatives aren’t going to do it for you.

Every French-speaking qwerty user should learn about https://qwerty-fr.org/. qwerty layout, all French special characters, even the ones that the standard azerty layout does not have, and no dead keys.

Other Latin alphabets might have something similar idk. If you write in Cyrillic, glhf I guess.

Sorry, I don’t hate the Brits, I just think UKans are being ridiculous to expect us to care. The onus is not on foreigners to have an opinion – much less weigh on – domestic issues such as Scottish Independance or Irish unification. Even if I wanted to have an opinion, I’m more than likely to eat my own foot.

Scotland and NI are nowhere near unique in their having a federalized governance and internal struggle for independence. However until independence happens, Scotland and NI are part of the UK and you can’t be mad at maps of Europe for reflecting that fact.

I support a sovereign Ukraine but a 1980 map of Europe would have it as a non-sovereign Soviet Republic and that’s not a contradiction.

Also very ironic that you would talk about “made up people” to a Belgian. I don’t even talk the same language or receive the same TV channels as my compatriots 50 km over. We’ve mastered having a national identity built on not having a national identity.

Also applies to the three regions of Belgium, FWIW. Even your ID card and passport will be slightly different depending on where you get it.

And don’t you start grandstanding about what you think that should mean for us, because regardless of what you say your outside understanding will be incomplete and your opinions will be ignorant.

The UK has a unique history that has led its constituent nations to conceptualize strong cultural and political identities - which is far from unusual. The only unusual thing is that Brits keeps pretending that the UK is somehow Special™ and foreigners should give any more of a shit about its subnational divisions than you do about US states or German States or Canadian Provinces.

Quite typical of the Brits to get pissy about you saying the truth.

They went all over the world drawing arbitrary lines separating or forcing peoples together, but try to get them to understand that the world considers the UK to be a singular entity and they blow a fucking fuse over the semantics. And they’re not even correct about the semantics!

The entitlement some British people feel over foreigners giving a shit for their internal politics is frankly outrageous.

Comparing US statistics to Dutch ones makes no sense. Their roads are several times more deadly than European ones regardless of vehicle.

Furthermore not all of their states have mandatory helmets (!) whereas over here it’s rare to see someone missing something other than pants. Except scooters, scooter riders are under the impression that they don’t ride a motorcycle and that flip-flops are appropriate apparel.

Then there’s a lot you can do as a motorcyclist to mitigate risk. Riding safely is one (not everyone seems capable of that, there’s quite a spread in riding behaviors, but also an obvious bias in which ones you’ll remember seeing on your commute). A strict no-alcohol policy is another, and not riding at night on weekends. You can also wear extra safety gear such as a high-vis airbag.

Also licensing requirements. Oh and American motorcycles don’t have to be equipped with ABS. They be crazy over there.

The complete lack of thought for obvious disastrous consequences is how you recognize a true Maoist policy.

I welcome or wet-ass bidet future, comrade.

So do Muslims. Jesus is to the Quran and the Book of Mormon what Moses is to the New Testament. A recognized prophet, but not the prophet because god apparently felt the need to send a new one down to earth to clarify a few things.

I don’t personally give a shit as I’m not even remotely religious, but the only reason Mormons pretend to be a Christian sect is because it’s politically convenient to them as a US religious minority to “blend in” better. The more you learn about their beliefs, the more you realize they might be further apart from Christianity than Christianity is from Judaism.

Don’t make the mistake of starting from the “enlightened centrist” hypothesis that everyone’s a little bit right and working backwards to a justification why an absolute moral position is supposedly hypocritical.

This isn’t about my feelings, this is about a right to self-actualization.

And you clearly didn’t understand my point if you are getting hung up on this idea of gender stereotypes. I could be 150 cm with humongous pendulous tits, hair down to my BBL, a miniskirt and a crop-top with my nipples poking through, 30 cm stillettos, Marilyn Monroe’s face, enough makeup to smother a small child, and the brattiest attitude you’ve ever seen in your life. That still would not give anyone the right to be sexist. You’re the one bringing sexism into this like it’s somehow inextricable from the experience of gender.

Fallacies upon fallacies.

The right to self-actualization is not equivalent to hatred nor an enforced social order of arbitrary and repressive rules. You don’t get to pull the “it’s just feelings” card to defend bigotry.

Gender characteristics are not the same thing as stereotypes and either way none of that is inherently sexist. Characteristics just are. The weighted sum of gender characteristics is how we perceive gender outwardly – which is not necessarily correlated to internal perception of gender. Sexism only happens because some people use that outwards perception of gender to make ill judgment and enforce unfair rules. That’s on them, not the person being perceived.

• Being trans isn’t about gender stereotypes. There are plenty of GNC trans people.
• Gender is a social construct and it doesn’t have to be sexist when consented to. No woman owes feminism to shave their head and wear cargo shorts. If gender truly is a choice then how could it be sexist?
• Some people feel strongly man or woman, some feel strongly neither or both, some don’t feel strongly any way. That’s just a fact of life and no amount of social theorizing will invalidate those people’s feelings.

On top of the answers you got there is a problem of semantics. “Feminine” can mean very different things in different contexts once you step even slightly out of the cishet gender binary.

Standard English lacks a concise way to convey the idea of fashion choices reclaimed from “feminine” fashion as its own (usually but not necessarily) male gay thing. We call that “femme” or “effeminate”, but the difference between a cross-dresser and a hairy gay man wearing a crop top and booty shorts is obvious. We call that “femme clothing” because we lack a better word for it, but that archetypal gay man isn’t any less masc for it and probably isn’t any closer to attracting archetypal lesbians or straight men.

Another way semantics betray us is when we call emotionally available/sensitive men “effeminate”. Usually in a misogynistic way, but regardless men who are emotionally sensitive aren’t “feminine”.

At the end of the day “being a man” is a vibe, the sum of countless things that aren’t offset simply because a small part of your gender presentation is borrowed from traditionally female things. And vice-versa, neo-nazis on their gym grind aren’t better men because they put on 100 kg of useless muscle and refuse to shake a woman’s hand.

Another big part of the Great Male Renunciation is that the Enlightenment was a time of revolution and violent rejection of the nobility’s privileges. The nobility whose defining fashion traits were to wear complex, frilly, colorful dresses and heels and wigs.

Muted fashion was a way for the new ruling class of capitalist bourgeois to set themselves apart from that history and to pander to the proletariat. We still see some of that for example with the stark difference between “luxury” brands like Gucci that are considered nouveau-riche and gaudy, and the fashion of billionaires which is “clothes that look like everyday clothes (but probably cost more than some houses)”.

The Enlightenment, fall of the “Ancien Régime”, and Industrial Revolution altogether explain the Great Male Renunciation, however the reasons why flamboyant fashion was pushed on to women (to then be reclaimed by gay men) have everything to do with misogyny.

The idea is theoretically viable, if you’re actually paying for carbon sequestration. You emit X tons of carbon, you sequester X+Y tons of carbon (where Y > 0), that’s a net win.

The problem is that no-one is doing that because it’s several orders of magnitude cheaper to offer carbon credits to “save” forests that no-one was planning on cutting down. You get a clean conscience at a reasonable cost, some middlemen get richer, the planet gets warmer.

Usually it’s because some chucklefuck put SSO in the requirements so now everyone has to suffer so that SSO users get their redirect before being shown a password field.

Sometimes though it’s an absolutely braindead web designer who definitely doesn’t have SSO as a requirement but has no idea what he’s doing and is just doing the mr-bean-cheating-on-a-test.gif and copying their Microsoft login form.

I’ve created the Aro community on blahaj, but I’ve found there’s just not much to talk about.

How do you talk about something you don’t feel or do?

One thing I’d be interested in is research into the causes of aromanticism, but last I checked there’s literally zero academic research that treats it as distinct from asexuality.

I expect a strong link with autism due to the involvement of oxytocin.
Maybe I should run a poll in aro communities to check my theory, but I’m afraid that sample size and bias would make the results meaningless.

Relevant for England but not Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland.

A good metaphor for Brexit I guess.

There are two main points to getting a diagnosis:

1. Access to mental health services and acomodations, which will often require “proof”. Up to you to decide if you need that.
2. Getting “closure” and self-understanding. Which is what most “high functioning” adults are really looking for with a late diagnosis. That does not require your psychiatrist to write anything down though. In your position I’d explicitly ask for that.

TikTok Gave Me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis