This is such a pervasive style choice on her part that I cannot imagine engaging with it as being "bad" at coming up with names
Like, you can fairly say it's not your bag, but the layers of on-the-nose, punny names are a feature, not a bug, of her creative process
Now, if you want to just talk about how you can't stand the books books anymore because the creative behind them is a major driver of bigotry and human rights rollbacks in the UK, well, don't let me slow you down
"She named the werewolf after wolves from Roman legend!"
I, yes? The whole classical and medieval reference game is a whole layer of the text? She was not going for absolute realism in her whimsical wizarding world?
I haven't read the books (started the first one, too YA to be enjoyable as an adult) but IIRC the movie framed it as a mystery. "There's a werewolf, who could it be?".
So having a Professor Lupine was an odd choice - made for a very different experience depending whether you know that word
Foreshadowing and cute hints to the reader are allowed!
This didn't pop into my head until today, but there's an old Mario van Peebles movie, *Full Eclipse*, where a cop goes to meet with the commander of the odd little unit he's been assigned to:
imgur.com/a/LZ3wC2U
I would describe it as stylistic choice that made some sense at the beginning when the first few books were aimed at younger kids, but is out of sync with the grown up themes of the other books.
Looking at the series as a whole, it does seem to have a lot of issues with Rowling being overly ambitious with worldbuilding a young kids’ fantasy series but being really green with the writing process. She locked in a bunch of details without seeing how it would all cohere or not by the end.
I don't think it holds up to the Tolkien-style analysis people want, but it's remarkable how well it handles the tone shift overall, how the changing relationship to magic comes to be a fairly deliberate metaphor for growing up, and how actually reading the books gives the *appearance* of cohesion
Tolkien if anything has the opposite problem - his protagonists and their POVs are *too* similar to the expected English reader given the world he's set up.
Though it's not really one in practice, both because he's a better worldbuilder, but also because the reader is obviously less familiar with Middle-Earth than they are with the Muggle "real world" in HP and so don't see any inconsistencies.
Yeah, it's another of those things that somewhat works as an entertaining kids' book but doesn't really work at any greater depth. Which is fine in itself, there's plenty of place for books like that, but of course people have come to treat HP as something more than that.
It works best when she is embracing that a magical world is chaotic and not internally consistent and a contrast to our drabber world, which she maintains *reasonably* well through the septology. her attempts to clean it up have been unconvincing
The close-third person narration style from the perspective of an audience-insert protagonist coming to all this from the "real world" is easier for readers to emotionally connect with but does also, albeit unintentionally, prompt "But what about X?" stray thoughts when they think about it more.
It's not suspension of disbelief- breaking while you're reading the story, because the ride of the story just brings you along with it, but when Rowling tries to worldbuild without the "protection" of the story it becomes very blatant.
The idea of a magical world just behind our boring predictable one is a classic setup.
I know it’ll never happen but I’d love to see the franchise broaden by letting other authors do series for other countries.
I thought and continue to think that the HP books are Fine, Actually. There are a couple of iffy choices (the SPEW business), but textually it's a pretty 90s, pro-inclusion, anti-classism narrative.
If anything, the fact that the books are pretty pro-diversity (hell, they've been read, not implausibly, as a trans allegory), makes JKR's subsequent heel turn all the more baffling.
(You can make a separate argument that the weakness of the books artistically is mostly a result of trying to graft an Epic War and Shared Universe onto what was originally a whimsical boarding school story--that, at least, is a take that I do buy).
not that the US lacks for rich people with very bad and regressive social views, mind you. but that particular fixation just doesn't have the power over here that it does over there.
For real - as cringe/twee as the names are, what's bad isn't that they're on-the-nose and punny, but that her choice of names for some characters imply that she sees them solely in terms of "the Asian girl (Cho)", "the Black kid (Kingsley)" etc.
I mean the actual token black kid in the story is named Dean Thomas, which isn’t especially racialized? Cho Chang is really the very worst of her choices IMO. Even with the Indian twins their names are pretty on the nose but they’re also plausible Hindi names
I'm also not quite sure what people *want* for Cho Chang; the criticism that it's a common Chinese personal name and a common Chinese surname raises the question for me, do people want a pun on Chinese? Would that scan as more sensitive?
I don't think the problem where the white Brits get punny names and the characters of color get names that flag them up as that is *nothing*, but it is also how she gets that into the text without drawing attention to the description and, no, really, people would hate a joke there more
Okay, actually, looking closer, I was under the impression that "Cho" was shared as a personal name between Korean and Chinese, but no, it's a *surname* in Chinese, and not related to the Korean name. Which is not great for Rowling *or* her critics, which feels about right, haha
Ah, okay, that makes the specific criticism I remembered make more sense, because if Cho isn’t used as a given name in Chinese then it’s more like she just took a Chinese name without bothering to do extremely minimal research
Wait is that the main criticism? I thought it was that it’s actually not something you would see as a name in China and it’s more just pushing two names together at random. Or (maybe?) that it evokes the whole “ching-chong” thing. If people are saying it’s too *common* then IDK, that’s odd to me
I def saw someone complaining it was a common name yesterday! You've seen my followup, and a frustration I have with a lot of Harry Potter criticism you'll get a fair analysis that is hard on the text and then a game of telephone into something else
