Harry Potter was always poorly written slop that was poured on top of problematic garbage. I'm always surprised it became what it did until I realize the world I live in gives me the answers each day.
Are we sure these are made from people who aren't absolutely evil? Gonna have to dig through everyone's post history just to be sure. The easier answer is to just pirate stuff made by problematic people
Also the author of Conan is as problematic if not more so than whats-her-face that wrote Harry Potter. So if that’s your motivation for making this you ought to remove it too.
when i was still on the Apps one of the first things i'd ask was what are they reading and the amount of women 30+ who only read Harry Potter books was astonishingly sad
Final Fantasy IX, Space Amoeba, Dragon Quest IX, Little Witch Academia, Dungeon Meshi, Totoro, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dungeonmaster, 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Animorphs, LOTR, Dinosaur Sanctuary, Pokemon, One Piece, Lunacid, Conan, Panzer Dragoon Saga
but really I picked these out of a hat to make a point.
Naw man you good! It's hard to break out of one's information bubble, so when I see stuff like this, gotta take the opportunity to explore the new things. Some of this is familiar, and some is new, and they're all ingredients to cook with.
Oh man. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. THE most influential fantasy film of all time with special effects by The Master, Ray Harryhausen.
The entire trilogy worth checking out and obsessing over for the rest of your life, as are Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. Pure movie magic.
Someone tried to talk about harry potter once so as a counter I started talking about my fav book series from a brit, warhammer 40k. Couldnt even get to finding all the Primarchs before tapping out.
FFIX's Vivi is a way better kid wizard character anyway. The game itself has a way cooler fantasy world and a better trading card game called Tetra Master.
I'd highly recommend the Elric of Melniboné part of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion multiverse.
It's not just a groundbreaker for the fantasy genre but Michael Moorcock, its author, is WAY more politically applaudable than Rowling. He unashamedly tells stories to reflect his anarchist beliefs.
Indeed I do ! Goodness knows what he's doing now, not spoken for 15 years. The same man that tried to convince me that the pipe organ would never get me anywhere, yet it has taken me all around the world - and to owning an operating an expanding museum of such instruments.
My Dad isn't that shitty (yet, give it time) but he certainly holds views (Dad is a Scottish Tory) that Pratchett would find anti what his books were about.
He also, as an academic, did not get me wanting to be a theatre tech and didn't think I'd get far (but I did!)
The Panzer Dragoon games have a really cool setting. I really hope Sega brings back Saga after Zwei, even if they have to remake it from the ground up. It's not that long of an RPG compared to some other ones.
If so, I missed it. He contributed to the 30th anni show, but I read that was a requirement for every SJ author. Japan’s tolerance for Watsuki is bizarre and gross.
I’ve loved One Piece for a myriad of reasons and its positive (if sometimes clumsy) depictions of queer and trans people.
My rec for media with wizards and cool shit is the Familars trilogy (and the first book of that unfinished second arc they started in 2013 and never finished)
the fantasy genre is vast and diverse and fun and has so much to offer that isnt unsubtle bigotry by an outright bigot. people say the books arent bad like her, but they are. they really are. they just need to take the rose tinted glasses off.
i say this as an ex-harry potter fan. i read the books when i was young and didnt know better, but then jk rowling went full mask off and started openly hating me and my people, and i looked back and realized it was always there. her hatred was ALWAYS there. maybe not of us specifically, but still.
To me it will always be funny that Robert E. Howard, plagued with as much racism in his work as his contemporary *and* friend, H.P Lovecraft, still holds up better on female characters.
kinda handwavy on One Piece given how there are some extremely transphobic and misogynist parts, even if Oda is supposed to get better about it later on
I did that quite some years ago, when I took the few seconds it takes to realize just how poorly written the books are, that you couldn't even call them mid to be quite honest. 🤭🤭
Dinosaur Sanctuary, a manga about people who work in one of the last few ones. As they try to maintain it and the inhabitants in it. Portrays dinos as animals rather than monsters.
dinosan!!! god i love dinosan it’s like all of my favorite things put together and the art is so beautiful!!! i sit on the edge of my seat waiting for new volumes
I grabbed ALL of these images from random shit saved to my phone in the last 4 months. There is SO much cool art out there for you to obsess over and support.
All art is problematic, because every person is, but there is still a gradient to this shit. Your cash and attention doesn’t have to go to someone demonstrably making the world a crueler place.
Oh, and give queer people money, especially for our art.
Yes. I'm not saying to someone "stop liking it". (I will privately think less of them, but I'm very set in my ways) Just stop giving money and publicly advertising by wearing merch etc. If you must watch or play, pirate it. It's like a boycott without inconveniencing yourself. 👀
Recently someone argued against this by saying "you'll cost the studios/company employees their jobs!". Sounds good, but weird they didn't say that when hoping publicly for Tesla and Amazon to crash and burn.
I always think if we know someone who worked on the game or film, we can donate them $70 or whatever we were going to pay. They're strangers. Support yourself first.
I also believe the consumer and not someone working a job deserves shame since they have an obsession with being flogged.
Absolutely the most problematic work listed here, but still essential queer fantasy reading to me personally for a number of reasons and, being in the public domain, if someone is truly hungry for some problematic, dated fantasy, certainly a more ethical option.
I keep forgetting that was a novel first and not a comic. I still have my late uncle copies of the comics from the 80s. Loved they brought him back recently
Add Piers Anthony both for his YA Xanth series and his more adult series The Croma series. Both are fantasy/sci fi series. Also includes any of Anne McCafree and her son’s works.
Such fantastic taste~!
I grew up on the more political/speculative end of Anthony's catalog and while I def should have probs been reading Xanth at the times, have gone back and re-reading all of Bio of a Space Tyrant (iirc I only got vol 3 and 5 as a kid).
1, I'm glad I didn't get all the books as a kid. *I'm really glad.* That series is full of traumatic events and Anthony does push some themes I am glad were not planted into my mind at a young age but rather are things I was able to take in context and assess properly.
2, Holy McFucking Shit, what a crate of cans of worms that series is. Anthony really covers a whole range of good, bad, and ugly topics and does a pretty good job at handling most of them though I'm more woke now than my last read and should re-read To Be Sure I'm not misremembering things
3 still def influenced me in big ways I was able to identify as I read the whole thing. For being the "Bio of a Space Tyrant" it sure did seem to be a lot about the importance of minority/workers rights and lefty politics
Anyways that said, Anne McCafree was a huge influence in my own early writing and I should revisit the Dragonriders now that I've gotten over my disdain for the phenomenon I observed of "Every Epic Fantasy Eventually Includes Sci-Fi"
It's really not. I bailed before JK controversial. Her books almost always reset to the status quo by the end and Harry really should have offered to paid for the car he helped wreck. The only good thing HP gave us was a wealth of fiction that's basically HP, but fixed.
To be fair, it's also not that hard to fix harry potter, or massivly improve it, all you really need to do is make a "what if Harry Potter wasn't a literal slave owner"
The Union episode of Little Witch Academy was so good. Reign of the Seven Spellblades, which is an OK anime on it's own, seems to have been hell bent on rebuking JK at every turn and I love it for that.
While reading a different woman author like Ursula K Leguin's Earthsea is probably best I still find it fascinating Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites reads as a satirical response to HP when it came out 10 years before the first HP book.
Or - hear me out - what if you boycott EVERYTHING just in case and focus your spare time in actually helping others, instead of escaping reality and spending money in non-productive luxuries. I know it's difficult, I'm still midway through it, but it will save you time, money and letdowns
to add onto this, Lev Grossman's The Magicians is a good adult fantasy trilogy that got adapted into a SyFy show (last I checked on Netflix) and was pretty good (imagine a magical grad school for the depressed in upstate NY)
K.A. Applegate, author of Animorphs, is an open supporter of trans people. She's even given her blessing for people to read PDFs of the books online. If you like 90s YA sci-fi, I would strongly recommend the series!!
From the top left according to my knowledge
Final Fantasy IX, Gamera/Kaiju films, Dragon Quest, Little Witch Academia, Delicious In Dungeon, Howl's Moving Castle, Ray Harryhausen movies, Baldur's Gate 3, Animorphs, Lord of the Rings, Kaiju no 8 (maybe? never watched/read), Pokemon, One Piece (cont.)
Conan rules and is woke AF in its own way. Conan is this accidental folk hero who goes town to town liberating the people from evil wizards because the town guards won't let him drink in peace. There's a fantastic anthology by Finn J.D. John that weaves in Robert E Howard's life's story too.
even in my earliest reading of HP back in the day i felt like there was something very mean spirited in her writing. i can't remember the tipping point anymore. i just remember one day deciding to get rid of anything having to do with JKR.
they were definitely a big part of it. also Filch, Neville, Hagrid, the entire Weasley family, they were characters made to just suffer and any writer who does that lacks empathy for their own creation.
I was a kid when I read it and my first thought is “Harry Potter has piles - literal hills - of money, and he tolerates seeing his best friend suffer poverty.”
Evil petty characters from the magical janitor guy to his adoptive family are abundant…and still kinda dumb
Comments
yaaaay
Wheragon
I hope everyone else does too.
Bullet Hells are forever
Also the author of Conan is as problematic if not more so than whats-her-face that wrote Harry Potter. So if that’s your motivation for making this you ought to remove it too.
but really I picked these out of a hat to make a point.
The entire trilogy worth checking out and obsessing over for the rest of your life, as are Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. Pure movie magic.
FFIX has Riverdance.
There is absolutely no metric by which FFIX isn't better than HP.
https://bsky.app/profile/jackal27.bsky.social/post/3lmx2cabsqs24
I feel like too many people sleep in ff9.
(Nice picks)
It's not just a groundbreaker for the fantasy genre but Michael Moorcock, its author, is WAY more politically applaudable than Rowling. He unashamedly tells stories to reflect his anarchist beliefs.
He also, as an academic, did not get me wanting to be a theatre tech and didn't think I'd get far (but I did!)
I’ve loved One Piece for a myriad of reasons and its positive (if sometimes clumsy) depictions of queer and trans people.
Dark Agnes de Chastillon is great, too!
also Witch Hat Atelier does the "outsider learns magic" thing really well if that's what you want
All art is problematic, because every person is, but there is still a gradient to this shit. Your cash and attention doesn’t have to go to someone demonstrably making the world a crueler place.
Oh, and give queer people money, especially for our art.
I also believe the consumer and not someone working a job deserves shame since they have an obsession with being flogged.
I really hate autocorrect
Absolutely the most problematic work listed here, but still essential queer fantasy reading to me personally for a number of reasons and, being in the public domain, if someone is truly hungry for some problematic, dated fantasy, certainly a more ethical option.
ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
(Also Astroboy/Megaman, check em out)
I grew up on the more political/speculative end of Anthony's catalog and while I def should have probs been reading Xanth at the times, have gone back and re-reading all of Bio of a Space Tyrant (iirc I only got vol 3 and 5 as a kid).
Again, great recommendations on your part <3
Though watch out for the worst infestations of all: students!
That game slaps so much and it’s a brisk 15 hours.
Final Fantasy IX, Gamera/Kaiju films, Dragon Quest, Little Witch Academia, Delicious In Dungeon, Howl's Moving Castle, Ray Harryhausen movies, Baldur's Gate 3, Animorphs, Lord of the Rings, Kaiju no 8 (maybe? never watched/read), Pokemon, One Piece (cont.)
immaculate image
there are so many better writers.
Evil petty characters from the magical janitor guy to his adoptive family are abundant…and still kinda dumb
But this is the protagonist…
like bitch were you ever a teen, anyone getting offered free money is gonna snap that shit up