urupotter

[urupotter]

I'm late to this but 10, 11, 15, 27, and 28 for the not from the US asks

10. Most enjoyable swear word in your native language?

I actually don’t enjoy the normal swear words all that much, but there’s a lot of pretty creative insults that are amusing even if I don’t really approve lol. “Hamburger graveyard” for a fat person is really mean but also amusing despite of it. “Lice slide” for a bald person is similar.

11. Favorite native writer/poet?

I’m not actually super familiar with local writers, but I do enjoy Horacio Quiroga I guess. Wrote a lot of horror stories that I read in school that I remember being unsettling and looking back probably weren’t age appropriate (there’s a particular one about a little girl getting her neck snapped like a chicken by her mentally handicapped brothers that really made me go wtf. Gotta promote the national literature I guess).

15. A saying, joke or hermetic meme only people from your country will get?

Hmm there’s a lot of very obscure football ones. One that someone who both knows Spanish and has recently seen a popular Netflix movie (Oscar nominated) might get is “no se lo come ni Parrado”, or “not even Nando Parrado would eat him” in English. Eating someone is a phrase often used to mean kissing, and Nando Parrado is a famous Uruguayan cannibal, who had to eat his friends corpses to survive after a plane crash left him stranded in the Andes mountains for three months (the movie Society of the Snow covers it on netflix, pretty great. Also Alive for an older take. Not as good though).

27. Favorite national celebrity?

I guess Diego Forlan gave me a lot of very happy memories as a kid, very good football player. Uruguay just doesn’t have a lot of famous people though lol. There’s some local celebrities but I don’t really care about that lol

28. Does your country have any mountains, rivers, lakes? What’s your favorite?

Uruguay is basically the capital + a bunch of towns and cities made for tourists on the coast. After you go inward it’s all flat grassland lol.

In the spirit of the question I really do think those beach towns are very pretty, there’s Punta del Este if you love glamour and party life (super expensive though), an actual city. If not you have places like cabo polonio or punta del diablo for more of a hippie feel.

#not hp #asks

[urupotter]

Makes sense. Tbh I don’t it’s possible for that message to not have been undermined, wizards in canon do essentially seem to be Muggles+, the same in every way except with fantastical powers. At least, not without going for some sort of explicit universalist message about how worth isn’t determined by skill/capability/intelligence/etc (an example would be Benthamite utilitarianism where ability to suffer confers moral worth, or any religion were it’s about holding to specific beliefs and rituals, or whatever. HP esque vibes based virtue ethics isn’t really suited to that sort of systemic morality imo).

I think your approach is perfectly canon coherent for what it’s worth. Wizards in canon shouldn’t be poor either what with transfiguration and conjuration, yet Lupin and Ron somehow have shabby robes either way (?). So making them actually vulnerable to muggle diseases even though in theory they aren’t fits with the rest of the sloppy worldbuilding well (in which stories the author finds interesting are prioritized over internal watsonian coherence)

I’m curious why you loathe the implication that wizards are immune to muggle diseases. Is it because it reinforces the idea that they aren’t really the same species as muggles?

thank you very much for the ask, @urupotter!

and the answer is - yes, pretty much.

how the body is understood, how illness and disability are thought about, how the medical system works etc. are all questions that i am primed to obsess over in any piece of media - even when they're not actually significant parts of the story.

which is to say, i completely understand the reason why the harry potter series treats these topics in the way it does. magical medicine isn't one of the themes the story is designed to focus on - which means that its purpose is as incidental worldbuilding detail which reinforces the whimsical vibe of the earlier books and the darker vibe of the later ones, and which means that its treatment in the text makes sense within the setting and genre conventions of canon. harry being able to take a bludger - a cast-iron cannonball moving at speed - to the head and living to tell the tale is the same as john wick being able to fall from a great height, land on his back, and then get up and walk around: he's an action hero in a fantasy.

and so wizards being more physically durable than muggles - and also wizards having their own magical diseases, and being immune to muggle ones - all makes sense within the context of the books as literature. kids don't want to read about harry having a cold. they want to read about him being a wizard.

but when i'm deciding to enjoy myself by taking the question of just how fucked-up wizarding society is much more seriously than canon does... the implication that wizards are immune to muggle diseases and that they are broadly unaffected by physical trauma unless that trauma has a magical cause really bothers me. entirely - as you say - because it directly undermines the series' thesis that the purity of magical blood is irrelevant and that the wizarding world's dehumanisation of muggles and muggleborns by treating them as, essentially, separate, lower species is wrong.

the main canon example of this which i detest is dumbledore's suggestion in half-blood prince that merope gaunt could have survived childbirth if she'd simply "raised her wand to save her own life". after all, if a little bit of magic makes one immune to experiencing complications during childbirth [unlike thousands upon thousands of muggles throughout history, who would probably have very much liked to have lived to see their children grow up]... then voldemort is completely justified in thinking merope's death was a selfish, shameful, deliberate choice.

[i do understand that the idea merope chose to die is primarily included in the text so dumbledore can segue into saying that lily "had a choice too", contributing to the gradual reveal in half-blood prince and deathly hallows that she's the key to the whole mystery. but i still think that jkr could maybe have though a little bit harder about what she was suggesting with this than she evidently did...]

and so i think in fandom it's both fun and important not to accept the idea that wizards are automatically resistant to anything which might kill, injure, or disable a muggle - especially because it lets us really play with some of the big worldbuilding questions surrounding the conventions and institutions of wizarding society.

what do disability rights look like in a world which is so rabidly intolerant of difference, and which appears not to have any sort of welfare state? the nhs is a recent invention, created in a muggle britain which is culturally and institutionally separate from the wizarding one: so is treatment at st mungo's free - and, if not, what happens to those who can't pay? how is queerness understood in a society which appears to have views on sexual expression which are fairly conservative - and how does this mean the wizarding state responded to the aids crisis? what do reproductive rights look like in this kind of society? if the dementor's kiss results in - essentially - a vegetative state, what is done with the people the kiss has been performed on? what might it be like for your relative to develop dementia at 100... when you know they might live to 250? what impact do biases about blood status have on how muggleborn patients are treated?

i just think it's interesting!

[urupotter]

Margot Robbie’s monopoly movie is a once a decade chance for some georgist propaganda, given that the inventor of the game was a georgist woman.

[urupotter]

Milei cloning his dead dog multiple times and talking to it for advice is Kwisatz Haderach coded. He’s the Argentinian Leto II

[urupotter]

7 & 8 for the nationality ask game, if you want :D

7. three words from your native language that you like the most?

Pipon: it’s a way to say you’re full

Diplofenac: a specific medicine, love how it sounds.

Bobo: synonym for stupid

8. Do you get confused for other Nationalities?

Yes, people think I’m Argentinian because of the accent (I suspect you knew that ;) lol)

[urupotter]

“hi, I’m not from the US” ask set

given how Americanised this site is, it’s important to celebrate all our countries and nationalities - with all their quirks and vices and ridiculousness, and all that might seem strange to outsiders.

1. favourite place in your country?

2. do you prefer spending your holidays in your country or travel abroad?

3. does your country have access to sea?

4. favourite dish specific for your country?

5. favourite song in your native language?

6. most hated song in your native language?

7. three words from your native language that you like the most?

8. do you get confused with other nationalities? if so, which ones and by whom?

9. which of your neighbouring countries would you like to visit most/know best?

10. most enjoyable swear word in your native language?

11. favourite native writer/poet?

12. what do you think about English translations of your favourite native prose/poem?

13. does your country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions that might seem strange to outsiders?

14. do you enjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV?

15. a saying, joke, or hermetic meme that only people from your country will get?

16. which stereotype about your country you hate the most and which one you somewhat agree with?

17. are you interested in your country’s history?

18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language?

19. do you like your country’s flag and/or emblem? what about the national anthem?

20. which sport is The Sport in your country?

21. if you could send two things from your country into space, what would they be?

22. what makes you proud about your country? what makes you ashamed?

23. which alcoholic beverage is the favoured one in your country?

24. what other nation is joked about most often in your country?

25. would you like to come from another place, be born in another country?

26. does your nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you think about the portrayal?

27. favourite national celebrity?

28. does your country have a lot of lakes, mountains, rivers? do you have favourites?

29. does your region/city have a beef with another place in your country?

30. do you have people of different nationalities in your family?

#these are fun

[urupotter]

Every once in a while a random Snape post of mine from 2/3 years ago goes viral… still got it

[urupotter]

Lionel Messi’s son writing his Harvard application:

“As the son of a working class physical laborer from the global south, who had to rely on employer funded healthcare to manage his disability to work in a mentally and physically demanding job with high risk of injury, and who grew up in the thriving immigrant communities of Miami, I could provide valuable insights…”

[urupotter]

Being a top bodybuilder and top model are probably the jobs with the biggest delta between how difficult a job they’re perceived to be and how difficult they actually are. Basically living in body dysmorphia and eating disorder hell

[urupotter]

Big thick spinal erectors are probably the muscle that makes people look most freakish once it grows in size, followed by the traps

[urupotter]

Jesus is interesting in that for a figure as old and influential as he was (which means there’s huge interest on knowing more about his life) he has remained relatively “unproblematic” and uncancelled. Nobody hates him. Even people who hate Christians give him a pass. Whenever someone criticizes Christianity it’s extremely common to see it done through the lens of not living up to Jesus’s teachings rather than attacking the man himself

Genuinely only people I’ve seen actually hate Jesus are like, weird pagan Nietzscheans. (Though interestingly even Nietzsche himself viewed Jesus in a better light than Christianity, see his quote about how there was only one Christian and he died on the cross). I wonder if that speaks to A) Christian morality being so totalizing and influential we don’t even notice its influence, even people who reject it or B) universal values that he just happened to embody really well.

[urupotter]

Type of guy who wants to be like Jesus but isn’t willing to bear his cross

#remus lupin

[urupotter]

Other examples of this are when a character’s flaw is “recklessness”, yet half the time (if that) they act recklessly they get lucky and the consequences aren’t severe and sometimes beneficial.

Or (very very common in male protagonists) anger issues which only ever express themselves upon the deserving, basically anger that only appears as righteous indignity. Oh wow, you “saw red” when the bad guy insulted your friends, much flaw, much complexity!!1!

Is there anything lamer than a character’s “flaw” being something like “he cares too much” or “she works too hard” or “he’s too loyal to his friends”. That isn’t a flaw lmpao, that’s a virtue that you’re pretending is a flaw so you can pretend your character has depth. (Loyalty to your friends can be a real flaw but only if the characters friends are pieces of shit, which they never are)

[urupotter]

Harry: I wonder if Snape is happy in the afterlife?

[urupotter]

Online American leftists who spent years virtue signaling about how they’d be willing willing to pay higher prices in exchange for better pay for workers posting stuff like this is hilarious in a gallows humor way, since they were very obviously just lying. A permanent underclass is worth it to not pay more for my Mega McBurger ultra bacon with XL sodapop.(bleak is what it is, this stuff trickles down to the rest of the world via American cultural dominance).

Americans currently have the best post Covid economic recovery in the world due to their progressive fiscal and monetary policy. As a result, unemployment is at a decades low and wages (mainly for bottom earners) are rising. Their progressive fiscal and monetary policy is also partly the cause of high inflation in the 2022 period.

If the lesson sent to politicians is that it’s better politically in recessions to just fuck over the poor and have 8%+ unemployment to avoid inflation (which is what happened post 2008, response was much weaker), that’d be a disaster, first for American citizens and then for the rest of the world who model some of their behavior based on what Americans do copying those same shitty ideas. It happens with culture war stuff, gun control, and I’ve seen it happen with economics (like a proposed £15 minimum wage I in England I remember seeing was a clear and blatant import)

[urupotter]

Handsome Snape would basically be Al Pacino in my head tbh

[urupotter]

Thinking about it a bit and I can think of two characters who fulfill this description. (Obvious spoilers)

Contessa from Worm and Leto Atreides II from God Emperor of Dune

Both are characters with precognitive powers which allow them to see the future who know with relative certainty that unless they do certain things (some of which are atrocities) then all of humanity will die.

They ticks all the boxes. They care about being good people, they’re sincere. They actually increase utility, if they don’t do the atrocities then they fail and all humanity goes extinct. And they’re antagonists. (Contessa is at least, Leto II idk since I’ve only read the wiki but he does seem framed in antagonistic manner, what with being a tyranic god emperor worm creature)

Utilitarian villains are only compelling to me when two conditions are met:

1) they have to be sincere, it can’t be just an act to appear sympathetic and dupe people (this is the most important condition).

2) they have actually increase utility. Those who oppose them can’t, for example, just choose to save everyone in the trolley problem.

For all that I don’t know if I remember any villain who actually fulfills these criteria.