So Good, He's Bad

I am, as I start this essay, re-reading The Once and Future King by T.H. White and I find… that I don’t actually like it all that much? I don’t like how a good chunk of the novel is laser-focused on the love triangle, and I don’t like how it tries to portray Lancelot and Guinevere’s actions as sympathetic when they’re kind of terrible. Having now read adaptations that brutally deconstruct or satirize the Lancelot/Guinevere relationship, seeing it played straight and the central part of the story feels…

I just kind of hate it. Not the book, overall, just this plot element. But the book doesn’t endear itself to me.

Anyhow this is something I’ve been thinking about since I started my Wheel of Time re-read last year.

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He’s So Good, He’s Bad

Something that bothered me in Wheel of Time during my re-read is the way Galad is depicted. Galad is one of the members of the royal family of Andor, and the brother of one of the main characters Elayne. Both Elayne and her brother Gawyn (yes, there are a lot of Arthurian-themed names in this series, go with it) don’t really get along with Galad because Galad’s a bit of a goody-two shoes, always turning them in if they do something wrong and being a stickler for the rules. This is framed as Galad being “too good.” He’s not a good person, he’s too good of a person. And this leads him to joining an extremist group called the Children of the Light, or the Whitecloaks, who are more or less what you’d get if you crossed the Inquisition with the Teutonic Knights on steroids, without any sort of Church or government that they owed allegiance to. In theory they stand against the Dark One, but they tend to label anyone they don’t like as Darkfriends and are so hypocritical that they hardly notice when their own ranks are infiltrated by Darkfriends, as they’re too busy pursuing the heroes.

And to be entirely fair to Robert Jordan, this statement of him being “too good that he’s bad” come from Elayne and Gawyn, who are his siblings. They hardly have an objective opinion on the matter. And Gawyn turns out to be even worse; by the end of the fourth book he’s a murderer who betrays his allegiances because he’s mad the good guys are keeping secrets from him, more or less. But Galad’s characterization bothered me a bit, because it seemed to imply that if someone was too concerned with doing the right thing, he or she will turn out evil. And that bothered me, because it was like a condemnation of the Lawful Good character type.

I don’t know; maybe I’m reading too much into it. I haven’t finished this series yet either, so I don’t know where Galad’s character arc will go. 

But then this past week I’m re-reading The Once and Future King by T.H. White, and I had some of these thoughts again because White… is actually incredibly cynical. He helpfully informs us that if Lancelot hadn’t been brought up to care about chivalry or morality or trying to do the right thing, he could have just run off with Guinever and the whole tragedy could have been avoided. White sees the knights who obtain the Holy Grail in a way that makes it seem like he doesn’t like them very much: Galahad is too perfect, that no one can really relate to him, Bors is explicitly a misogynist (a trait White keeps telling us but giving very little proof of other than that he’s a bit rude to Guinever), and Percivale is almost childish in how innocent he is. Percivale comes across the best, in White’s eyes, but it’s still kind of condescending that he equates this level of innocence with being childish.

To be a saintly person, White seems to say, you must be completely detached from reality in some way or another. And this… bothers me.

Again, being fair, Lancelot does come to the defense of his son Galahad by pointing out that Galahad is apparently someone born without sin; or at least, without the capability of committing mortal sin. You wouldn’t expect an archangel to act like a normal person, would you? And Arthur accepts this explanation, pointing out that the knights who Galahad bothers are the most worldly of them all. 

It’s not made any easier because very little of these characters is ever shown to us; Percivale is entirely off-page through the entire story. Their exploits are usually relayed to us by different knights, reporting back on what’s going on during the Grail Quest. So all we have to go on are these reports from others saying, “These guys? They’re just too perfect that they’re a pain in the butt to even be around.”

Like, imagine if there was a Marvel story that portrayed Captain America as a massive douchebag, not because he’s doing anything wrong, but because he’s too Lawful Good. That he’s so out of touch from the world and so neither the author nor the characters in the story care about him.

Oh wait, that did happen during the Civil War arc in the comics. A reporter accused Steve Rogers of being a hypocrite because he didn’t know what Myspace was. Rogers was flummoxed and stunned into shamed silence. And it was as stupid as it sounds. 

No really, this happened.

I’m not suggesting you can’t play around with Lawful Good characters, nor am I suggesting that cynical takes on them can’t happen. I’m not saying that all the heroes need to be Moral Paragons! I don’t want that and you don’t want that. But I’m not thrilled with this idea of saying, ‘Oh this character is a paragon of what is Good and Righteous? Then he or she must actually be a colossal dick, or a social reject, or else I must find some other way to take a dump on this character and on the idea of morality.’

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Samurai Jack Final Season Talk

We have an announcement for a new Assassin’s Creed! That’s something positive, at least. 

There is a possibility that I won’t have Netflix in the coming months, so I’m trying to finish at least the first season of Community. But I did finish Samurai Jack, and that’s what we’re going to talk about here today!

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Samurai Jack: The Final Season

There be some spoilers here, ahoy!

Let’s start with: I thought that the final season of Samurai Jack is great. It ties up the story in a way that satisfactory, it contains a lot of great action sequences, and is a strong conclusion to a story from over a decade ago. The fact that we got a final season that finished the show at all is almost miraculous, because I didn’t expect it to happen ever.

It’s good. It’s satisfying. Buuuuuut---

In many ways the final season doesn’t feel like Samurai Jack. I get that by necessity, it can’t; one of the things that was signature to Samurai Jack was that it was almost entirely standalone episodes that didn’t relate to each other, with very little need of continuity. A conclusion to the story, by its very nature, would feel an aberration, because it would need continuity. No matter how it came about, it would need to take all these bits and pieces and put them together in the finale to be something that the fans would love. I suppose you could do a Samurai Jack finale without referencing the Guardian, or the Scotsman, or the three gods who made the sword, but I think it would feel a bit empty.

So fine, the Samurai Jack finale was never going to feel like the rest of the series. Let’s accept that. But the final season has a few elements that don’t feel like Samurai Jack, most notably the reliance on dialogue throughout. I suspect much of that has to do with the fact that the final season is only ten episodes long, and it is more convenient to deliver that information by having the characters say things rather than just showing it to you. But I don’t think it had to be. We didn’t need to have all of the dialogue during the training of the Daughters of Aku; there is quite a lot that would have been picked up from scenes with much less dialogue. Jack’s internal struggle is displayed with him arguing with voices in his head, alternate personas that manifest to tell us what he thinks. But it doesn’t need to do that either, at least not to the same extent; the show very easily could convey his despair, loneliness and conflict through other means.

It doesn’t help that one of the big conflicts of the first few episodes rings hollow to me. In the first battle with the Daughters of Aku, Jack tells himself “They’re just nuts and bolts,” and becomes horrified when he kills one of them and discovers that she’s a human woman. In his conversation with himself afterward, he says that he’s never killed a human being before.

Even if we assume that in the fifty years he’s been wandering as an ageless samurai, he’s never killed a human being before (which okay, he’s a bit of a badass, so let’s give that one to him), what bothers me more is that it apparently never even occurs to him that Aku might send minions or bounty hunters that aren’t robots. Which is bulshimflarkus. He knows this isn’t true. He’s fought plenty of opponents that were flesh and blood before this point. And even if that weren’t the case, many of the robots we have seen have been intelligent, rational beings that seemingly have their own personalities. This angle, this whole, “Now he has to kill for the first time to survive” thing doesn’t feel right at all.

Compounding that, the final season seemingly contributes a lot of elements only to drop them unceremoniously. In the episode that brings him back halfway through the season, the Scotsman declares “We have to find Jack,” only for this to not be an ongoing subplot; he appears in the final battle, and he’s AWESOME, but despite teasing that he and his would be searching for Jack throughout the season, this doesn’t happen. Likewise, Scaramouche’s attempts to go inform Aku that Jack has lost his sword feel wasted, because by the time he does it, Jack has already reclaimed his sword.

[This last one is a bit more forgivable, because Aku going after Jack when he learns this does go somewhere, just not where it said it was going.]

Finally, there’s the Guardian, a plot point set up in the original series. Jack comes upon a time portal protected by a mysterious Guardian, who won’t let him through because he’s not the one destined to use it. We, the audience, find out that he is, but he isn’t yet; that at some point in the far future, Jack will be ready to go back to the past. This is dropped like a hot potato, where Jack comes upon the place where the portal used to be, and finds the Guardians glasses, implying that he’s dead.

And yeah, of course the show has to address why this thing didn’t happen, but… why didn’t this thing happen? Why bring it up at all in the original series if it wasn’t going to go anywhere? It just feels wasteful.

I suspect that a large part of why these problems occurred were because the final season was rushed. They were only given ten episodes, instead of the usual thirteen, and I suspect that if this story had been spread out over a couple of seasons it would have felt, if not more organic, then more Samurai Jack.

Like I said at the essay’s opening, I still think it’s a very good finale. We got a finale to Samurai Jack in 2017, and if you’d asked me a year before if I ever thought that was going to happen, I’d tell you ‘no.’ But we did, and I’m thankful for it. I found myself cheering during the final battle, and that’s not something I usually do when I’m watching cartoons by myself these days. It’s certainly worth watching if you’re a fan of the series, though I can’t help but think it could have been something more.

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Vimes and Sybil

I think that maybe quarantine is getting to me, but then again, I wasn’t really in an emotionally stable state before this all started anyway, so maybe it’s just me being emo again. I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey again, but I think that maybe I’ll stop because… well, I’m not actually doing much there, just kind of spinning wheels. So I’ll switch, if I haven’t by the time this Note is posted, to something I got for free/on sale. I put a question on Tumblr asking if I should do Journey or Shadow of War next and so far Shadow of War is winning.

Also people seem to like my Book Diary, and that’s cool!

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Vimes and Sybil

There was a Note I released some time ago when I said Terry Pratchett didn’t really write compelling romance. I stand by that, for the most part. While they aren’t completely without sparks, many of the couples in his books don’t feel as if there’s that much hardcore romance, not that much buildup. Heck, the book that’s explicitly written to parody Romeo & Juliet is also about football and Mr. Nutt coming to terms with who he is. And it’s fine; after all, Pratchett wasn’t setting out to write romance stories.

A friend pointed out though that there’s one couple that lasts throughout the series and I’d be kind of remiss to not count them as one of the great romances of literature. And that is Sam Vimes and Sybil Ramkin.

Now to be clear, their romance in Guards! Guards! isn’t one of the most epic ones in fantasy literature. It’s not out of nowhere, but it’s not the main focus of the story. And the two of them get along and work together really well.

But theirs is not a typical romance, for a fantasy novel, for an action couple, or… anything really. Sybil Ramkin is described as looking like a valkyrie. Not a stick-thin figure you see in art sometimes, but a massive woman, the kind who plays a valkyrie in the opera. And a large part of that is muscle; after all, she breeds dragons, and even if they’re small creatures on the Discworld, they’re still very dangerous. And it’s not as if Vimes is ever described as being particularly handsome either; the artist Paul Kidby’s depictions show him as something like a more grizzled and wiry version of Dirty Harry.

Neither of which are meant to be, at first glance, conventionally attractive. 

[glares pointedly at the upcoming BBC adaptation]

Which is part of the point. The people who stand up and get things done don’t necessarily look glamorous. They don’t look like supermodels, or actors playing superheroes. They’re just people, but mind you, Sybil is tough as nails and is one of the few who gets to call the Patrician by his first name, and Vimes is stubborn enough to control a demon trying to possess him by shouting the words of his son’s favorite book.

And yes, there is this sort of romantic notion to them as a couple; after all, she’s one of the wealthiest nobles in the Discworld, with a notable family tree, and he’s a guy who grew up on the wrong side of town and conquered his own alcoholism to become a good man. But it’s downplayed in the narrative itself, especially because Vimes doesn’t act like a noble or particularly play up becoming a Duke.

I haven’t read every Discworld book, but the ones that I have read in which they’re featured there’s not really a lot of grand romantic gestures. I cannot recall any kind of storyline where Vimes is scrambling to do something big for an anniversary, or desperately looking for a big gift or anything like that. But at the same time, their marriage isn’t in the background either. It’s not as if there are heavy makeout scenes, but there are things that come up. Nightwatch has a subplot of Vimes trying to be there when Sybil gives birth to their son. There are mentions of the lunches she packs and how she wants to eat healthy. 

Maybe that’s not really capital-R Romance; not a lot of big set pieces. Yeah, there’s a rescue, I suppose, but it’s not like there are the hallmarks of big-name love stories, like loud passionate fights or paragraphs describing their kisses. But I think, upon reflection, that what Pratchett wrote is infinitely better. It’s lacking the cheesiness, but it replaces it with something better:

Here is a marriage that works because the two people love each other, and they’re working together to support each other. 

That’s it, and that’s all.

This is no small thing; especially in fiction. Fictional relationships, especially those that last a long time, are often defined by how overwrought they are with unnecessary drama. Epic fights, epic breakups, epic get-togethers, epic kisses and dates and all of that. A lot of this is because many writers admit they don’t know what to do with characters once they’re in relationships; they decide it’s boring. This is part of why Marvel decided to break up Peter and MJ’s marriage in the controversial One More Day comic: they thought that a married Peter Parker was too boring of a character. I suspect that’s why Tom King and DC didn’t go through with Batman’s wedding storyline.

It’s an unhealthy view of relationships to think that because they’re boring, at least to the people not in them, that they’re not really worth reading or seeing. Terry Pratchett didn’t care; he just wrote a healthy relationship, included it in all of the books featuring Vimes. He even goes so far as to suggest (in a discussion about alternate realities) that a version of Vimes that committed violence against his wife, wouldn’t really be Vimes, it would be someone so far removed from him that it wouldn’t be the same character.

So I was a bit off when I said that Pratchett didn’t write romance well; he doesn’t write Grand Romance because, well, he doesn’t care. And I can’t blame him for that. But it’s not that he doesn’t care about depicting relationships, because he does. Vimes and Sybil are a happy, lasting couple. They’re not [insert name of dramatic couple here] but they’re not meant to be. That’s not what interests Pratchett. 

They’re two people who make it work in a weird, hectic world, supporting each other without question through love, work, and bacon sandwiches.

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Samurai Jack and Dialogue

‘Sup peeps. Both Uncharted and Journey are free on the PlayStation store, which is cool I guess. I’ve mentioned watching Samurai Jack, I think, but lately I’ve been getting really into Community too, and I’m thinking of rewatching the first season of The Clone Wars since I have those DVDs (got them from Blockbuster when they went under years ago!).

I was considering doing another Rick Riordan Note, but I think I’m going to try making that for ImpishIdea? Something about responding to fan criticism, or Percy’s fatal flaw, or something like that.

Now, let’s talk about Samurai Jack!

[Also a lot of what I’m talking about here applies to the original Star Wars: Clone Wars 2D animated series too, because it’s also created by the same animator, Genndy Tartakovsky, and has a lot of stylistic similarities.]

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Samurai Jack and Dialogue

Since I’m going about two episodes a day with this show, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. One of the things that sticks out pretty early on is how light on dialogue several episodes are. There aren’t any with no dialogue, at least that I can think of off the top of my head. But there are many that don’t have that much.

So the story of Samurai Jack goes something like this: an ancient evil being called Aku threatens imperial Japan. The Emperor’s son, our titular samurai, manages to fight him using a magic sword, but before he can fully defeat Aku, the monster chucks him in a time portal and he lands in the far future. The samurai finds himself in a futuristic world with robots, aliens and mutants alongside magic and swords, and it’s all ruled by Aku. So he’s trying to go back to the past so that he can stop this dystopia before it happens, helping random people being oppressed by Aku’s reign as he does so.

In the first four seasons, while there are some episodes that lead into each other, for the most part, each episode is something of a standalone adventure. Aside from flashbacks and such, there are very few recurring characters--the only human that shows up between seasons often is the Scotsman. A couple of the gods appear in more than one episode, but it isn’t like they have direct interactions with Jack.

And from the introductory movie (or three-part episode, depending on what format you watch it in), the series has huge chunks of story that don’t have dialogue. Jack’s training montage, for instance, shows him going around the world and learning different skillz. There’s not a word of dialogue from when little Jack leaves Japan until he gets back as an adult, where he happens upon one of Aku’s minions whipping his father.

This made me think about dialogue, and how much dialogue gets put into screen stories these days, especially in bits that don’t really need them? Samurai Jack has fight scenes in which there’s not a word spoken, unless it’s with someone like Aku who just never shuts up. It’s in-character, so it makes sense. But considering that he’s fighting robots and monsters for most of the series, of course there isn’t a lot of dialogue in those sequences.

But there are other sequences that don’t have dialogue, nor is there much reason for it. “The Blind Archers,” aside from the bit that he’s being shot at, has an extended sequence where after Jack blindfolds himself, takes in his surroundings by listening to what’s going on around him, and showing us what he hears as he hears it. After a brief word to explain what he’s doing, there’s not another word in the episode until he defeats the archers.

Then there’s the episode showing the origins of Aku, and a huge chunk of the first part doesn’t have dialogue at all; it just shows you what happened. And considering that it starts before human history began, of course it can’t have that much dialogue.

Yes, there are episodes that have a huge chunk of dialogue. But so much of the actual action takes place without it. It sounds dumb when I put it like that; of course there’s not a lot of conversation going on during a fight. But sit and think about the animated shows that you watched as a kid. How many of them have absolutely no dialogue during the fight scenes. Usually there are quips, or explanations of what someone’s doing, or side characters watching saying something.

There’s so little of that in Samurai Jack. And there are non-action scenes that tell you so much without saying a word, and it’s beautiful.

Now I’m thinking of Samurai Jack as the polar opposite of the 90’s Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Have you ever watched it? There are rarely a few seconds that aren’t spent by someone (usually Peter) talking. 

Film and television are visual mediums. That’s something that sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often it’s forgotten. Yes, there are times where you need dialogue, and I’m not saying that every story can be composed the same way that Samurai Jack is; and it doesn’t need to be. But it’s a good reminder of how much story you can tell without having to directly say anything. You can great stories with sound and sights alone. The audience can pick up quite a lot by what you show them.

You don’t need for Jack to tell the audience that he’s pissed; you can convey it through his frustrated expression, and how he fights with much more aggression and starts screaming in incoherent rage. You don’t need to tell us that the archers are blind; you can just show us how Jack discovers they are, when he waves his hat out as a target and they don’t shoot at anything until they hear a noise. You don’t need to have Jack wail and moan about how much he misses home; you see it as he wanders around the ruins and has wordless recollections about growing up there in its glory days.

This works well by virtue of the story’s format, I know; some of this wouldn’t work as well if you’re juggling several main characters, and want to give all of them some development. But because this show only has the one lead, and it’s not too worried about inter-episode continuity, it can afford to not rely heavily on dialogue and still tell powerful stories that carry the series. And it works extremely well because of it.

Samurai Jack is one of the best animated series I’ve ever seen (at least, so far; I haven’t gotten to the final revival finale season, so who knows?). It’s easily the one that takes advantage of the medium it’s in the most--by showing instead of telling, as a good animated series should.

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Harry, A History and Fandom

I am watching… a LOT, actually. Just finished season six of Buffy, and I’m almost done with Locke & Key and the second season of The Expanse. And I’m streaming Samurai Jack because that’s free right now and that show is awesome.

Anyhow I reread this book by the webmistress of the HP fansite, The Leaky Cauldron. This Note’s going up on the Blogger site and also on a photo on my Facebook, to see if I’ll continue this book thing.

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Harry, A History and Fandom

Harry, A History by Melissa Anelli is a sort-of memoir that details one Harry Potter fan’s journey through the HP fandom and its various movements and drama. And I remember when I first read it, I really liked the book. And upon rereading, I still really like it. But I feel different about it, and it seems as if I picked up an artifact of a different age. Fandom culture has changed so much since this book’s release in 2008.

In a way, it’s a bit like reading Ready Player One except without as much of the cringe in the dark turns gamer culture took. That makes this book sound bad, so I’ll try to explain with more detail.

When I was reading reviews of Harry, A History on Goodreads in preparation for this Note, I kept seeing a lot of the same idea repeated by many readers: this claims to be a sort of biography of the Harry Potter phenomenon, but it’s not really reflective of the average fan’s experience. Anelli’s telling the story of someone who became a superfan; someone who had reading parties with her friends after waiting in line for the next book to come out; someone who went to conventions that hosted shipping debates; someone who went on tour with a band that based their entire image and musical career on the HP books. Yeah, maybe the average fan had some involvement with some of this, but not all of it by a long shot. And especially now over ten years after the release of Deathly Hallows, so much of this has become obscure fanlore.

The book spends quite some time detailing the formation and exploits of a band called Harry and the Potters, and all the spin-off bands that it spawned. But I had never heard of any of these bands before reading this book, and I don’t think most HP fans today have a passing familiarity with the bands at all.

There’s also quite a lot the book leaves out. Admittedly, there are some big fandom moments like A Very Potter Musical (which is FANTASTIC, by the way) which couldn’t make it because they weren’t released yet. But Potter Puppet Pals? That was a massive part of Internet culture, even outside of the hardcore Potter fandom, for years, and it’s not mentioned at all in this book. Things like college Quidditch teams, or unofficial guide books, or that weird Snape cult (YA RLY) never get mentioned. Sure, I don’t expect the book to cover every single aspect of the fandom ever, and maybe I’m only speaking from my experiences and I’m wrong, but I figured some of these were huge parts of the fandom and deserved at least a mention. Everyone I knew could quote “Mysterious Ticking Noise” and yet it’s not mentioned at all, but Harry and the Potters get a whole chapter?

I was also struck by the chapter on shipping, appropriately titled “The High Seas.” For those not in the know, “shipping” generally refers to fan preferences in relationships. So for the HP fandom, the big Ship War (which to my frustration, some people still argue about) is between Harry/Hermione and Ron/Hermione. And people care a lot about this; there were debates at conventions. When Half-Blood Prince came out and made it pretty obvious where this series was going, people received death threats and a man in his thirties wrote to Rowling about how disappointed he was that she wasn’t a better writer. A thing that certainly didn’t help was that the screenwriter for the films admitted to thinking Harry and Hermione should get together, which kind of shows in the movies if you watch them.

What got to me most was that this book more or less presents the fandom of Harry Potter as one big happy family, aside from the shipping wars. And I’m glad that Anelli felt that way, that she was able to make lifelong friends and connections which have made life better for a lot of people. But fandom is hardly always so beneficent. Cassandra Clare, now famous for her Mortal Instruments series, got her start in the HP fandom as the author of the fandom-defining novel-length fanfiction series the Draco Trilogy (many bits of which she cannibalized and reused in her original fiction). And that fanfiction also got her into a messy plagiarism scandal that haunts her to this day, and a history of cyber-bullying to boot. And hey, let’s not downplay that there were fans who sent death threats to the author, other fans, and actors from the films over the romantic relationships of fictional characters.

I mean, heck, I learned through Wikipedia that the author herself was cyber-stalked by someone banned from the site.

It’s also a bit funny because the impression Anelli gives of Rowling is of a humble Everyday Jo who’s just glad that people gain enjoyment from her books. If people read deeper into her books, then alright. And that’s the way I tend to read Harry Potter. But over the past few years, it seems like Rowling bought into her own hype, and tries to paint the books as a woke political commentary which… doesn’t work if you do more than broad thematic ideas, because if we read Harry Potter as political tract, we’d have to say it’s calling almost all government corrupt and useless and asking us to arm our children with weapons the government is trying to regulate. And that’s without getting into House Elves. Or goblins. I suspect none of that is the message Rowling was trying to convey, and that she was writing something of a modern fairy tale fantasy, but she won’t say that now, she’ll act as if somehow Voldemort represents Donald Trump or something.

So it’s a little uncomfortable reading this image of Rowling as a humble but brilliant author that is seemingly surprised by her own cultural importance because these days it feels as if she’s embraced that cultural importance, perhaps a bit too much. 

Still, it’s a very good book; Anelli puts much more detail than I would in covering several fan movements, and you do feel a sort of palpable excitement when she recounts her own anxiety and anticipation for the books as they’re coming out. It feels a bit like a time capsule from the early 2000’s, or a slice of the past that I’d almost forgotten. Maybe it’s because I’ve become a bitter and cynical raisin of an individual, but I don’t feel that sort of excitement for movies or books anymore.

And while I am miffed about a lot of what’s left out, I’m amazed at the level of detail of most of what’s in the book. There’s an entire chapter about an interview Anelli did with Laura Malory, the soccer mom from Georgia who famously tried to get the Harry Potter books banned from schools and one of the leaders of the Christian movements against the series. And Anelli doesn’t seem to like her, but she portrays this woman a lot more sympathetically than I would have expected; certainly more than most of the fandom would. There are sections about how the books got published in the first place, how seriously the spoilers for the final book were guarded, how Warner Brothers reacted to all the fan content being produced, and just how big this freaking series got. This was worldwide news, guys.

Maybe Harry, A History isn’t completely reflective of everyone’s experiences, and maybe it leaves out quite a lot. But it’s a celebration of a book series and a fandom that brought people together, and I can’t exactly fault it for that.

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