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Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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What I don't get is, how did Dobby get so much love in the Harry Potter fandom while Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars got so much hate? They were both insufferably annoying characters.
I get that Dobby has fans; what I don't get is why the same wasn't extended to Jar-Jar.
Jar-Jar didn't die, I guess, but I feel like even if he did, fans would glaze him over decades later. They'd say "good riddance" and that would be that.
Dobby was a pitiful creature enslaved by a bad guy who dies saving the main characters
Jar Jar was a stupid alien added to the prequel for comedic relief
Jar Jar was the big bad until they dialed up the obfuscating stupidity too high and the backlash made George Lucas chicken out.
Darth Jar Jar has always been canon and nothing will convince me otherwise
I don't really buy Darth Jar Jar, but I can see him being an exiled Jedi. None of his "accidents" worked against the goals of the heroes and he was always where he needed to be. He felt like the drunken fool who would be revealed to a kungfu master by the end. Gin's dismissive lines to him in episode 1 was setting up for something. The whole prequel trilogy was about the corruption of the Jedi and Jar Jar might have been exile or left because of his opposition to it.
Well yeah, he was still in the "gain their trust" phase. The betrayal/reveal was going to happen in the second or third movie.
Jar Jar causing the corruption of Anakin, more like.
None of his actions worked against the sith plot either. Remember that they weren't on the side of the droid army, that was just a bad guy whose presence allowed them to manipulate the senate and jedi and set them up for their takeover/downfall. The first thing Palatine does after he's won is orders Anakin to cut off the head of that bad guy, now that they were no longer needed.
And even though it appeared that the good guys won episode 1, in hindsight I'd call it almost a complete victory for the sith. Palpatine was chancellor, Qui Gon (who might have had the wisdom to help Anakin avoid the dark side) was dead, Anakin (who Palpatine and Plagius caused to come into existence with some force fuckery 8 years prior to ep 1) was in the jedi and was already contentious and being trained by a jedi who was not equipped to handle someone as tempermental as Anakin, and the trade federation was on the radar as a threat to the Republic. The only loss to them was their enforcer, Maul.
The outcome of the battle for Naboo didn't matter to them. Though it was also Anakin that won that battle, despite Jar Jar's chaotic effectiveness for their side. Without Anakin's surprise victory, they didn't really have a path to victory and IIRC they were pretty much surrendering when the droids suddenly went dead, so it wasn't like Jar Jar was even winning the conflict for them.
That's just a fan theory made up by prequel fans trying to save face.
You can watch the behind the scenes documentaries. Jar jar was always meant to be a comedic character.
I watched the original trilogy in the 90s but after seeing the jar jar movie in theaters, didn't watch anything in the franchise until Andor.
Meesa not laugh laugh
I watched Episode One when it was released and I was completely bored through the whole thing. I enjoyed the first three movies in theaters well enough, so I was surprised at how bored I was.
I watched Episode One again with my spouse who had never seen Star Wars, as a “we should watch the first three movies for Spaceballs context” like a decade ago, then watched the fourth because I remembered it being shit. The only good part in that movie is when Jarjar says “DAT SMEL STINKAWIFF”, one of the fucking worst lines ever written. We quote it often now.
Also explains why we love Anakin/Vader.
Do we, though?
It's definitely the most popular character in the franchise.
Is it, though?
I think one major difference is that Dobby is a character that was introduced quite early in the main run of the books/movies, where as Jar Jar was kind of just shoe-horned into an already bad prequel.
But I don't want to imagine a world were Jar Jar was part of the OT.
Had Lucas not chickened out and go with the "Darth Jar-Jar" storyline maybe now Jar-Jar would be a good character for everyone.
Meesa sad now.
As someone who read 4 HP books back in 2001-2 and only saw the first 2 movies, I was deeply annoyed by that goblin. Maybe I didn't see "the good part" of the character?
My wife cried when Dobby died. I couldn't have cared less, thing showed up for like 10 seconds, pulled a Deus Ex Machina and died. Congrats, you served your purpose random Red Shirt.
You didn't read the book
Jar-Jar was introduced at a time when everyone had spent twenty years forming their idea of what a Star Wars movie should be like and he ran totally counter to that. Dobby was introduced in the second instalment of his series.
Because Harry Potter fans, including the adults are children.
I am 58. I've read War and Peace, Ulysses, LOTR and the Harry Potter series and that's fine because I'm not an insecure child.
PS fuck JKR.
And Star Wars fans are not?
Star Wars fans at their worse are more like adult teenagers. The types that made it their whole personality.
When you tell a HP fan that they shouldn't give Rowling money, they whine like a spoiled child having their candy taken away.
Are we talking about all the people who've been Star Wars fans during the nearly 50 years that it's existed, or the people who are still fans in 2026? I'd agree that Star Wars' current fanbase is made up of insecure children, since everyone else checked out long ago.
Different children.
Personally, I am a fan of the Darth Jar-Jar hypothesis. In light of recent real-world history, it has become very plausible.
I never dug too deeply into that one, but from what I've heard, I want it to be true.
Yoda showed us that we didn't hate characters who spoke grammatically differently from the rest. Yoda was never annoying, though. Personally I just felt like Jar Jar was rather pointless.
Dobbie was perceived by kids aging into adults.
JarJar was perceived by adults from the start.
Probably, kids had more capacity for their bullshit?
I was a kid when Jar Jar was new, and I'm still quite fond of the character. To me he's the best thing about the series (I don't hold Star Wars in very high regard), so I think you're on to something.
Jar jar was racist
Harry Potter was mostly kids watching and their families. Phantom Menace had to also cater to adult-shaped children who lost their collective shit after realizing Star Wars is actually a kids movie franchise made to sell toys and merchandising and licensing deals to children and continue on into adult hood.
Jar Jar was too much of a racist caricature.
So was Watto and it doesn't get that much backlash.
Or the trade federation dudes
Watto and Nute Gunray weren't portrayed as buffoons, though. Jar Jar had the double-whammy of not just referencing an ethnicity, but doing so in a gratuitously insulting way.
(Granted, Watto, being a slaveowner, was certainly not a sympathetic character either, but at least he behaved reasonably enough in the context of the story. A shrewd businessman, but not greedy or duplicitous, you know? At least Lucas stopped short of the really offensive antisemitic tropes.)
And Watto didn't get that much screen time, did he? We establish that Ani and his mom are slaves, the racially stereotyped slave owner is a piece of shit, they buy out the slave padawan, and fuck off, right? How much mind space does Watto deserve?
That's because the Gringotts Goblins control the galactic media.
As a european i have no idea what he is supposed to be a caricature of. Vaguely referencing tribal cultures?
Rastafari. Lucas has a bad habit of including a little casual racism in a lot of his works. Less a matter of being hateful and more a matter of being old and out of touch with certain matters.
There's also "Small Round" and the Indian banquet from Temple of Doom and the Jewish stereotype Watto from episode 1.
I also don't buy that as being the difference between the two. Doby was from a slave race and treated as weird for not wanting to be a slave. That's way worse than what Lucas did.
I feel like it was just because he was trying to make them sound exotic/foreign/alien and wasn't imaginative enough to make up accents from scratch.
There's also the hyper-Japanese Nute Gunray from the same movie. Lucas was pretty equal-opportunity in his cultural appropriation, LOL!
Yeah, but that made Dobby a more sympathetic character. There was nothing like that for Jar Jar (especially since the only people that treated him badly were other Gungans, and it was earned). Dobby was oppressed and brainwashed; Jar Jar was just [very convincingly pretending to be] a clumsy oaf with a stereoptyical accent, which basically just makes him an insult to that ethnicity.
Also, keep in mind we're talking about how people feel about the characters themselves, not how people feel about the creators' purpose for writing them that way. So yeah, 100% agree that Rowling was way more problematic than Lucas, but that doesn't mean Dobby was more problematic than Jar Jar.
First time I'm hearing that. Anyway, I hated him way before he was racist!