Previous: Goblet of Fire Is Where Harry Potter’s World Opens Up
The life around the main story # Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix follows Harry through his fifth year at Hogwarts after Voldemort’s return. Much of the wizarding world does not want to believe him. The Ministry begins interfering heavily with Hogwarts, Harry becomes increasingly isolated and angry, and the school year turns into a mixture of exams, politics, friendships, rumours, punishment and resistance. At the same time, strange dreams and visions seem to connect him more closely to Voldemort.
Previously on isoul.uk: When Renting a Movie Was an Event — the ritual, artwork and scarcity of rented VHS tapes made individual films matter in a way that streaming has made difficult to remember.
I watched anime before I really knew what anime was.
Like a lot of children growing up in the 1990s, Pokémon was simply a cartoon on television. Sailor Moon was another show. I wasn’t thinking about where they came from, how they were produced or whether they belonged to a separate medium.
Major spoilers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire follow.
Previous: It Only Took Me Twenty-Odd Years to Listen to Harry Potter
I have finished the full-cast audiobook of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and this might be the book where I finally understood how much the films had to leave behind.
I knew the main story, of course. The Triwizard Tournament, the graveyard, Voldemort’s return: none of that was new to me. What surprised me was how much life exists between those events. There are more conversations, more side stories and much more time inside Harry’s head. Hogwarts feels busy in a way it rarely does on screen.
Spoilers for Reacher Season 4 follow.
One criticism I keep seeing about Reacher is that it is formulaic, and that is fair. Reacher turns up somewhere new, realises something is wrong and gets involved with a group of strangers. Before long, he has uncovered something much bigger than anyone expected and has to deal with it through investigation, instinct and the fact that he is considerably larger than almost everyone else.
Major spoilers for Mushoku Tensei Season 3, Part 1 follow.
Mushoku Tensei has trained me to fear two words: Turning Point.
The moment they appear, I know something has changed. The consequences may not arrive immediately, and I may not understand what has shifted until much later, but Rudeus’s life will not continue in quite the same direction.
Season 3’s first part might be the strongest example of that so far, partly because it spends so much time on quieter lives before showing how badly they can be broken.
Previously on isoul.uk: It Only Took Me Twenty-Odd Years to Listen to Harry Potter — a Year 6 recommendation I ignored finally found me through audiobooks more than twenty years later.
There was a time when watching a particular film began with somebody leaving the house.
My brothers would go to Blockbuster or one of the local video shops and return carrying whatever the household would be watching. I was younger and not always part of the choice, but that only made their return more interesting. A film did not simply appear in a menu. It arrived through the front door.
Installing a media server is the easy part.
It may not feel easy the first time. There are unfamiliar settings, folders that refuse to appear and devices that behave differently for no obvious reason. Eventually, though, the application starts. A film plays on the television. An album appears on a phone. The small thrill of having built something useful is real.
For a while, that can feel like the finished project.
Sometime in the late 1990s, my Year 6 teacher recommended that our class read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I ignored her.
It wasn’t a protest against Harry Potter. I wasn’t taking a principled stand against wizards, boarding schools or popular books. I simply wasn’t a reader. A teacher telling the class that a book was worth reading was not enough to make eleven-year-old me pick it up.
More than twenty years later, I have just finished listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Previously on isoul.uk: We grew up in a house where the television was always on — older siblings, wrestling tapes, sci-fi reruns and films brought back from the video shop. Television wasn’t background noise. It was the recommendation engine.
There is a slightly odd thing about my childhood relationship with science fiction: I remember Star Trek far more clearly than I remember Star Wars.
That isn’t because Star Wars was obscure. It obviously wasn’t. It just wasn’t the centre of science fiction in our house.
I grew up in a house where the television always seemed to be on.
There were a lot of us at home: older siblings, a younger brother, my parents, and me somewhere in the middle of all of it. Looking back, that probably explains why so many of my memories are tied to screens. There was nearly always somebody watching something, playing something, recording something or arguing over what was going on next.