Dismissing someone's opinion because that someone dislikes Rowling has more to do with differing priorities rather then standards. The person in question disparged Rowling's "self-insertion" into her own stories, which told me that their preferences as regards to storytelling are so far removed from my own as to be utterly inconsequential to my mind.
Keep in mind that this person never explained why he had a problem with self-insertion, or what made him believe that Rowling was guilty of it (I personally don't believe she is, as her central character may be a noble, self-sacrificing heroic ideal, but he is not a projection of her own personal fantasy self.) She was guilty of many things, like the gross overuse of Deux Ex Machina devices, but I don't think self-insertion was one of them. That someone would assert otherwise, without support, as though it was common knowledge, sparks off my skepticism and leads me to the conclusion that the party in question is, shall we say, full of it.
Agreed. However, the key word here is "constructive." Someone asserting that MSN cannot be mentioned by name because it destroys some fantasy, or that (most alarming of all in my own opinion) that comedy, drama, and horror cannot be mixed the way Yahtzee tries to is advocating the destruction of the very things that I most enjoy about his writing.
As a writer, he's very ambitious. It'd be easy for someone like him to just string jokes together and call it a story, but he actually seems to aspire to take us somewhere, and use comedy, wit, drama, and horror to do it. If his execution falls a bit short of the mark it's only because he's aiming so damn high.
Agreed.
I don't really see how I can do anything else. Still, it's easier to operate on the assumption that "I'm Right" then the opposite.
It was not the situation that was humorous, there was nothing really funny in the story itself. The comedy came from the narrator's voice; his wit and dry aggravation at the predicament he found himself in.
That's the tricky thing about first-person narrators. If they react to their situation with humor, then that's what we see, if they react with soul-killing despair, that's what we see. If the character is generally ambivalent, concerned but more for themselves then anything else, that sets the tone for the entire story.