humble bundle at one point sold a bundle with the works of U K Le Guin, and since i’ve been meaning to read those, i bought it

all were under amazon DRM

i’m a big fan of being able to do whatever the hell i want with the things i buy so naturally, i got mad and looked for a way to un-DRM them, and i’m happy to say there’s a calibre plugin for that. i’m currently enjoying Wizard of Earthsea on my reMarkable

absolutely! the One Ring is much better developed than horcruxes, i was being reductive on purpose there. The Ring is presented as integral to the story from the very beginning and acts like it, serving as a driving force for both the plot and character development for everyone involved. Horcruxes mimic similar characteristics as a literary device but fail to reach the same level of development

anyway this seems like a natural end to the topic, so let me just say thank you for the conversation :) i always appreciate a nice nerd out and analysis of media. hope you have a nice day!

hm i feel like the distinction comes down to vibes here. if i were to be reductive i could describe the One Ring in a similar way “it corrupts gollum, gives Frodo a quest, makes Boromir crave power and turn on his companions in a moment of weakness, and (from Sauron’s POV) hobbits destroying it is a deus ex machina”. imo horcruxes as an idea were not that bad but,

to me, the main difference here is how they’re used in the story. The One Ring is the driving force from the beginning, it’s already well established in the lore of the world, and the only surprise to the universe’s scholars is how it suddenly found itself in a hobbit’s hands. Where horcruxes appear suddenly in the second to last book (obviously not counting the diary because it’s clearly been deemed a horcrux when JKR came up with them and thought the diary fit the vibe well enough). First 4 Harry Potter books are bascially episodic, an overaching plot only emerges by the end of book 4. And LOTR is one cohesive story with a clear goal from the beginning, which allows it to unravel in a satisfying and effective way

not to compre whole books to whatever JK Rowling is doing on her tweeter this week (probably transphobia but who knows) but would it be any better if she twote one day “all magic in Harry Potter comes from the divine tree, at the beginning the tree blessed few people with its world bending power of imagination, this is how wizardry began, the tree spoke latin btw.”

Besides, the story is more or less a POV of Harry’s, a pre-teen to young adult boy who is way more excited to play sports than attend his lessons. Which to me is a good enough reason why we end up knowing fuck all about the magic of his world. If the POV was Hermione’s, i’d expect there to be an indepth 3-chapter long research project about her work on a “Origins of Magic” essay for her History of Magic class. But because of the characterisation of Harry and also the tension in the story by the end, it makes sense to me why Harry doesn’t really care about how things work, but how effective they can be. The question wasn’t “wow a horcrux? incredibly rare black magic, i must study it to understand how and why it works to one day maybe be able to undo it”, the question was “horcrux huh? and it makes voldie immortal-ish? alright lads, let’s find a way to smash it”

and to answer your question - horcruxes of all things are pretty well elaborated on. Voldemort splits his soul and attaches it to objects/people. The price? A part of his soul and another person’s life. The purpose? Ability to be recreated from each of those pieces, achieving immortality-ish, as long as he has someone living to do the ritual, and his father’s skeleton still has some bones left ig. The limitation seems to be that he looks evil after being reborn? and i think there was some implication that the process is incredibly painful on the spiritual level

i think a better example would be the sorting hat because wtf is that. is that a person turned into a hat? is it an enchanted object? it can talk in your mind, can read your soul to then sort you into a house, a sword can come out of it when it feels you’re in need and worthy of it? No explanation, no described limitations, a power to read one’s mind in later books is attributed mostly to voldemort & looking at how Harry handles it it’s incredibly emotionally exhausting. how can that hat be more powerful than the most powerful evil wizard?

i wasn’t really thinking of star wars, moreso LOTR if anything, the magic there is the textbook definition of “a wizard did it” and yet despite that it’s a beloved series and very few call for Gandalf’s powers to have an understandable magical system behind them. but that’s a gourmet meal of a book & the trilogy movie series, harry potter is junk food, enjoyable as long as you don’t think too hard about what the ingredients are

ur whalecum <3

<3

yeah that’s fair. don’t get me wrong i wasn’t trying to convince you to like Harry Potter’s magic system, but you quoted “lack of rules” as a something you disliked about it so i gave a short explanation as to why that specific thing isn’t what makes HP’s magic feel shallow

look again

Harry Potter has a soft magic system - a system where pretty much everything can be explained by “a wizard did it”, worlds like that are mystical and lawless (see also Lord of the Rings)

it seems you enjoy more hard magic systems like you described above, where the rules are explained, and you can more or less understand why things work the way they do (see also Earthsea by U.K. Le Guin or ATLA)

the hard/soft scale is not perfect, but it gives you a rough gist of what to expect

writers aren’t limited to just one either! Percy Jackson has a soft magic system, a lot of “a wizard god did it!”, where Kane Chronicles has a strict magic system bound by understandable rules (with only gods and divine interventions going above the rules)

you can absolutely steal data stored by banks

it’s teal, it’s both

i have 1200h in skyrim, 1000 of which i clocked in because as pre-teen who was yet to learn that being trans is a thing i unknowingly used it to escape dysphoria. can’t feel bad if i’m spending most of my days as male cat, the chosen one at that!

i also lived a mile from my uni and took the bus sometimes, in my defence, the uni was on a steep ass hill and i lived at the bottom of it

all philosophy will sound bad if you imagine the worst possible case scenario it could apply to

the therapist’s name? Albert Camus

well they couldn’t have named it subnatica 2: below zero. 2 is bigger than 0 smh my head

most goblins can be found in their nests where they sit wishing that a perfect partner (handler) will spontaneously appear in front of them

occasionally they can be seen outside trying to abide by human norms but failing in various ways

to be fair, watching someone passionate enough about the topic to make a 4h video is the best way to learn about new things

yeah that’s the problem, when people (myself included) see a game label itself as “RPG” we kind of expect the world to be living, a world that feels like you could go anywhere and find amazing treasures, friends, enemies, anything and everything on your journey! A world where talking to any character could send you on a quest you’ll never forget

in avowed NPCs are static, there’s like 2 non-hostile animals, if something doesn’t have a healthbar your attacks phase through them, every chest has the same 4 ingredients in it, you can’t interact with the enviornment unless it’s a box, an urn, or specific vines, you can’t tell your companions to fuck off ever, if an NPC has a quest for you they’ll have an exclamation mark above their heads - which completely takes away the reason to talk with anyone else but them and vendors, and just sigh it doesn’t feel like an RPG at all to me

after i got a plot breaking bug (plot dialogue wouldn’t progress) i uninstalled it and downloaded skyrim again, which though flawed, at least it’s an RPG