Never ask her anything at all. I mean… who cares? Why do people constantly try to squeeze infotainment from the emotionally ill? It ain’t healthy, all around. For anyone.
I mean I’m somewhat interested in how the Wizarding world manages to keep hidden despite all the kids from the muggleworld supposedly having friends and connections and things before Hogwarts.
I mean, which 11-year old wouldn’t want to tell their friends they’re special? Hmm… perhaps ones which fear some sort of “witch-hunt” if they out themselves as being different?
How about why don’t muggles just address the weird looking wizards who they see on the streets (at least in book 1 chapter 1) and on King’s Cross station. I mean, I can always spot a wizard.
i’d be concerned that she’d just fucking retconn everything and make it a nightmare or ruin it.
So yeah no, i’m good.
Oh, you got so angry you started stalking me? Aww, how cute. :)
gotta know how shitty your opinions are outside of one thread, how am i suppose to deliver personal attacks if i don’t have a properly documented structure of your behaviors?
Not that i would, because i’m too fucking lazy.
Ooh, I’m so flattered. You took it so personally, I became your life’s focus.
Thank you. <3
Doesn’t still excuse you denying Israeli war crimes though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I became your life’s focus.
nah, about 30 minutes a day. I spend the rest of the day building a 500 SPM factorio megabase because it’s more productive :)
“I devote half an hour of my life to you every day”
What can I say, I make people who defend child slaughter really into following me. :) Thank you for your time, fan!
So part of the significance of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is how our society has responded to it, and for a truly deep dive (that I’m in the process of going through, myself), check out the Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus which begins with the story of how Daniel Handler (that is Lemony Snicket) suggested Lolita to Jamie when she was still a kid looking for book recommendations.
Also as noted by Jamie, both the 1967 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation and the 1997 Adrian Lyne adaptation portray the story with Humbert Humbert as a sympathetic character (with James Mason and Jeremy Irons playing Humbert, respectively.)
So yeah, the story simultaneously invites the reader to walk a razor’s edge between sympathizing with a child predator and watching the story unfold the way one looks at an automotive collision, watching a monster deeply past the moral event horizon justifying his behavior.
Lolita doesn’t play out as a love story. Delores isn’t precocious or mature nor is she mentally equipped for an adult relationship, and yet Humbert insists his pursuit of Delores is proper and justified, despite not only Delores’ age and minor status, but also the power relationship, with Humbert the legal guardian of Delores. The story is psychological horror.
And the story plays out showing in older Delores the psychological consequences of child sexual abuse. This is not a story of a May / December couple in love living happily ever after. Despite Lolita being described as an Erotic Novel by critics and literary indexes.
But then, in the 1980s, one in three American women surveyed were victims of child sexual abuse. Also in 1987 Suzanne Vega put out the song Luka highlighting a long standing culture that whatever happens in your house is none of my business (🐸☕), and before the Satanic Panic and the SRA scares, CSA was not an oft-prosecuted crime (it was assumed incest laws covered them) and the believe was kids who were victimized not by drunken daddy were instead victimized by strangers in white vans offering candy (rather than say, John Wayne Gacy, who held frequent neighborhood barbecues, or the coach of girls’ physical education). Only in the 1990s and the new century have we taken CSA and human trafficking of children seriously, and then, not very, considering how some US states are letting kids work in hazardous conditions and letting children marry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that Lolita is thought of as romantic or erotic even when it is the testimony of an abuser.
It’s even more insidious than this. In many conservative value sets, children are viewed as property, and domestic issues are viewed as household business. Many many cases of obvious CSA (and physical abuse in general) over the decades have been dismissed as “I’m sure the parents know best,” or “it’s not our business,” or “I’m sure we don’t know the whole story.” It was only very recently that this veil was pierced even a little bit, but it was not without significant struggle. And even now there is a growing backlash to the idea that children are to be allowed any autonomy or agency beyond their parents. Many people still believe it is is ok to hit children, or that children should not be allowed to use a nickname in school. These are all vestiges or even new iterations of this exact same attitude which has enabled all manner of child abuse over the years.
Make no mistake, in the conservative worldview, child abuse is still, to this day, only bad if the parents say it is bad.
and letting children marry.
Most still do so long as the line being drawn is “is there any hypothetical situation in which a 17 year old can legally marry?” Most of those specifically allow older teens (16 or 17 depending on the state) to marry under narrow circumstances, usually requiring any minor have parental consent and/or court approval before allowing it. All states allowed under-18 marriage in some conditions until 2018, and only about a dozen have set a hard 18 limit with no exceptions since then.
With CA being one of the worst offenders in that it has no hard legal minimum age of marriage at all and relies on parents and courts to prevent serious abuse (no minimum but requires approval from one parent or guardian and the court). MA was very similar with no hard minimum at all until recently passing a hard 18 minimum.
Which means if you have the right people in your pocket (a parent or guardian and a judge) you could hypothetically marry someone very underage in CA then cart them off to a state where marriage is an explicit exception to age of consent (such as NM) and engage in legal CSA.
“There are two books whose final lines make me cry without fail, irrespective of how many times I read them,” Rowling told BBC Radio 4. “One is ‘Lolita.’”
(The other one, based on the context of the interview, seems to be “Emma.”)
Like many other admirer’s of Nabokov’s novel of a pedophile who pursues a 12-year-old girl, Rowling loves it for the writing style.
“There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabakov’s hands, a great and tragic love story, and I could exhaust my reservoir of superlatives trying to describe the quality of the writing,” she said.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/jk-rowling-favorite-books-2016-7?op=1#lolitaby-vladimir-nabokov-19
Like many other admirer’s of Nabokov’s novel of a pedophile who pursues a 12-year-old girl, Rowling loves it for the writing style.
Oh ok, fair enough. Not an especially controversial take.
"There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot…becomes…a great and tragic love story
Oh…oh no…
She missed the whole point. The great writing is what is supposed to make you realize that you can be manipulative by narrative to condone evils. Stupid.
I feel like George R.R. Martin was doing that with incest. Starts out with shocking incest between twins, and then spend a bunch of books getting you used to the idea until you find yourself reluctantly cheering for a dude hooking up with his aunt.
cheering for a dude hooking up with his aunt.
Which dude, exactly?
Only one example immediately springs to mind, but that hasn’t happened yet in the books. And the way it happened in the show, I’m not sure was executed very well, but I don’t think it was really portrayed as a case where we “cheer for a dude”. He barely seemed into it, definitely not as much as she was.
I’ve given up on anything happening in the books ever again.
It’s a great novel, but not a love story.
Although I haven’t read Lolita myself I recently came across a great video explaining how many people misunderstand the book as being some sort of tragic romance. LOLITA: The Worst Masterpiece
It’s ironic that one of the most famous and successful writers in the world made this same mistake of trusting and sympathizing with the pedophilic murderer protagonist while claiming that she wants to protect women and children from the evil trans agenda or whatever.
I haven’t read the book either but I heard this Lolita podcast series and it was a great breakdown about how it was misinterpreted. I couldn’t believe everything I knew about it from mainstream media was off.
Will definitely be checking out your video!
Jamie Loftus’ Lolita podcast? She’s AMAZING. I love when she* is a guest on Behind the Bastards too!
Jamie being a unisex name, I dunno if “she’s amazing” is the typo or “he is a guest” is.
Rushed typing, nervous at animal hospital D:
Hope your critter gets better!
Oh my God she said this on BBC Radio 4, which is basically the main, national Radio station in the UK. To put this in context, this is like if Orson Scott Card said he agreed with the Main Character in Points of Origin.
“There just isn’t enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabakov’s hands, a great and tragic love story”
But there’s plenty of time to discuss the opposite when it comes to trans people, apparently.
JFC if good prose is enough to make you okay with pesophilia maybe you weren’t that far away from it in the first place
pesophilia
love of the Mexican currency.
I just think it’s neat.
Transphobes be like “think of the children”, then recommend you a book about a pedophile
Which wouldn’t be a problem if she didn’t call it a tragic love story…
Tbf, they clearly are thinking about children.
Wait, all this time we thought “think of the children” because of security.
But they’ve been saying like “we wanna bang them”.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s an excellent horror novel told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.
I would not describe it as a great romance novel.
