Dumbest IOZ post of all time?

Erik Kain 19 Comments

IOZ:

Harry Potter is over, oh god, now I can cum.  I guess it is easy enough to criticize JK Rowling for writing absolutely execrable prose, but I have read C.S. Lewis, and let me tell you, that guy couldn’t write a graceful sentence if his reward were a chaste peck on the lips from JayCee himself.  Tolkein obviously couldn’t write either; I mean, maybe that shit sounded better in the original Elvish, but the GoogleTranslate English version sucks.  Somehow every single sentence in I Snored.  There Were Rings? sounds suspiciously like, "Able was I, ere I saw Elba."  What was my point?  Ah, you know, just that you can criticize JK Rowling for writing ten million pages of clumsily derivative horseshit, but that is effectively the nature of fantasy.  Anyway, I was feeling a bit undertheweather on Monday, so my boyfriend and I went to see Harry Potter 19: The Phantom Penis. I could not actually tell you what happened visually because the entire movie was filmed without any lighting instruments; occasionally a magical CGI squiggle darted across the screen; the aesthetic vision seems to have been something like: Screensaver, Windows 95.  There are some also some CGI magical creatures that look like they were left in the recycling bin outside of the office that created the latest Shartosquidasaur for the [sigh]Fi Channel.  There are a number of British accents, and invariable someone tells Harry Potter, When the Time Comes, You’ll Know What to Do.  Now I understand why this sort of thing is so popular a trope in fantasyland.  It lazily suggests magic and intuition and an un-mundane world of things unseen, but it is exceptionally frustrating to hear and to read.  If your friend just found a really awesome animated .gif tumblr, he doesn’t say, "Kittens with Hitler moustaches eating spaghetti . . . when the time comes . . . you’ll know where to find it . . . your heart will guide you."  No, he sends you the goddamn URL.

Anyway the movie was really long and boring, just like the books, and Ralph Fiennes looks like a cock.  The End.

IOZ is pretty good at pointing out assholes. Even when they happen to be IOZ.

Erik Kain

Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the editor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.

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19 Comments

  1. Sadly, the comments manage to be at least as dumb as the post.

  2. He is entirely correct that J K Rowling writes execrable prose. I gave up only a few pages into the first book, and I’d be happy to supply examples of the passages that made me quit.

    • The first two books are terrible. They get much, much better after that.

    • JKR’s not great (though she improves, as E.D. points out), but compared to Dan Brown, she’s E. B. White.

    • I am not a big fan of her prose, either, but I think it’s an important distinction that JKR writes for kids. Most kids lit I’ve seen of late is execrable, her writing is not remarkably bad compared to her peers at all.

  3. Dumb indeed. First, Lewis had graceful prose; it was a knack for storytelling that he lacked. Rowling beats him there. Second, Tolkien…never mind, I won’t bother.

    • I mean, maybe that shit sounded better in the original Elvish, but the GoogleTranslate English version sucks.

      The (unintentional?) irony is that Tolkien wanted his works to sound somewhat translated from an old, old language with tenses that didn’t see much use in the modern day.

      The man didn’t read Shakespeare, for goodness’ sake, because he was TOO RECENT. (Now *THAT* is a classicist!)

      Swimming in the ocean that is Tolkien’s Bastard Children, it’s easy to look at Tolkien and see him as someone whose prose “sucks”. If one does not know that we are buoyed by him, I imagine it’d be easy as pie.

      • somewhat translated from an old, old language

        Nitpick: a collection of old, old languages. All of which he invented.

  4. IOZ is one of the few people where I enjoy reading posts of his that I think are absolutely insane as much or more than I enjoy reading posts of his where I think he’s completely on-the-mark.

    • Very much this. “Kittens with Hitler moustaches eating spaghetti”? The man can turn a phrase.

      • My favorite: “some CGI magical creatures that look like they were left in the recycling bin outside of the office that created the latest Shartosquidasaur for the [sigh]Fi Channel”

        • “I could not actually tell you what happened visually because the entire movie was filmed without any lighting instruments; occasionally a magical CGI squiggle darted across the screen; the aesthetic vision seems to have been something like: Screensaver, Windows 95. ”

          Wonderful.

      • The man can indeed turn a phrase, but this is not his finest moment.

    • I like Narnia. I tries to read Out of the Silent Planet recently, and had to force myself to finish it. The combination of the glacial pace and the beating-the-reader-over-the-head religious propaganda was almost unbearable.

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