It’s unfair to compare them because Rowling is a novelist and Lucas, while a highly competent producer, is an awful hack writer whose first movies only succeeded because the actors refused to say the lines he gave them. When Rowling adds material to her oeuvre it’s generally of the quality and consideration of her written work, when Lucas has added material after the first trilogy, it hasn’t been screened and filtered by a panoply of artists to prevent us from realizing how bad his ideas are.
I don’t think there are any formal or procedural lessons to be drawn. One produces good material, the other never has.
That was a common complaint meand my brother had. It was 'Team Hero, Team Smartass/Cloud Coocoolander, Team… they… exist? and Team Asshole.
Slughorn was debatable ‘good’, ambitious, but he was protective of his students and was there at the end helping.
I’ve heard people argue Malfoy isn’t evil ‘because he loves his family.’
As Ben Wade once said, even bad men love their mamas.
It just bugs me from a thematic standpoint that you have this house that is unambiguously wrong/evil/morally bankrupt and full of sociopaths. Show some of the possible good qualities. Show some of Gryffindore’s bad qualities. IE that ‘rush headlong into crap without a care for the rules’ actually land people in deep and it not be at the hands of someone who’s vindictive by nature.
Sure they’re kids books but hammering in time and again ‘ambition is evil. you can ignore the rules if you think you’re doing the right thing and know better’… bleyh.
As for Han shooting first. Google ‘harmy’s Despecialized Edition’ and go down the rabbit hole. Fans have done the best they can to recreate a high def version of the ORIGINAL movies in theri original form. Just the youtube of how it was done is fascinating.
Didn’t Harry Potter’s Dad & Chums bully Snape horribly when they were in Griffindor? Generally, I agree though. The goodness and badness of the two houses (and the remaining two houses are pretty much utterly insignificant) is so all-permeating that any attempt to nod towards a more ambiguous history just gets washed away by this simplistic determinism. Makes you wonder why they don’t just strangle the kids that get sorted into Slytherin from the get-go.
No, it isn’t; which is precisely what is wrong with it. It’s a weird combination of fan-service tweets and interview drivel. I guess it’s not entirely her fault as she is continually bombarded with somewhat infantile questions about what happened to characters before the books or would happen to them after, instead of questions about what she had actually written, but I think it’s almost a bit creepy of her,
