Also, don’t forget the entire story is about fighting racists who want power to wizards, but only pure bloods.
But Rowling is racist as fuck.
Why write these books? When you clearly are on Voldermort his side in real life?
But the books completely fail to present racism as something that needs to be stopped.
I mean, why is Slytherin still a House? They’re explicitly evil and bigoted, and everyone is like, oh well, that’s just how they are.
Rowling could have made it make sense. She could have said that because Slytherin’s trait is ambition, and people often take that too far, dark wizards tend to be Slytherin, but they can come from anywhere. And also, most Slytherins are actually good, even though that’s where the bad wizards tend to come from.
But no, every dark wizard is Slytherin, and every Slytherin is bad.
Snape isn’t an example of a heroic Slytherin so much as he’s an unbalanced stalker who sides with Dumbledore while still being a terrible person. I could overlook that if even one other Slytherin was good, but they’re just not.
Draco Malfoy’s redemption arc was the opportunity to redeem Slytherin. Instead it ends without him ever actually doing anything right. His evil plan fails because he sucks, then he gets saved by Harry and everyone’s just cool with it.
After all the death and destruction, everyone just goes back to school alongside the wizard Nazis. Because the bigotry and all the things that led to Voldemort just aren’t a big deal as long as they stop short of full-on war.
I personally suspect that she may have been better back in the 90s and 00s, remember she has been chumming it up with brain rotten rich profligates who are fueled by suffering for decades at this point. While she most likely still had shit opinions they probably got amplified over time combine that with the internet and you have a rather toxic concoction. Also on average notable rich people tend to not be the quiet types who keep to themselves funding weird little projects, they tend to go insane like Howard Hughes.
My great grandfather wasn’t worth a fraction of that type of wealth and started going through it, though he combated that type of insanity by traveling around the world. Somehow made friends with someone in the upper elements of the Soviet Communist party during that time.
Yeah, when she was poor she had no problems with others, now she’s rich she doesn’t want peasants living too close to her castle.
Why do I get the feeling she is one of those English clasists that is also a racists who doesn’t like people that have the “Wrong accent” or name?
Yeah that’s what I mean. They used to be her neighbors, her equals, as she came from being really poor. But now she sits in a very high white throne and people of colour are beneath her.
Oh no I meant she’d be racist to Scots and Irish, but I’m not familiar with English racism particularly well. But I guess she would also be racist against people of color.
Fun fact: I was once called a mutt by an English woman in the high desert here in California. I don’t know if it was my bastardized accent or my looks but regardless I flipped her off.
I believe her castle is in Scotland, so she would have a hard time then haha
Hasn’t stopped some folks before.
It’s wild to me how progressive HP felt compared to the underlying “conservatism good, actually” message underlying it. How the hell did a whole generation of kids miss that? Poor reading comprehension? Or is it that the US is so regressive that English conservatism feels progressive?
I mean when you look at Harry Potter through a magnifying glass it’s actually very pro status quo with a lot of issues breaking down to “the wrong people in charge” a lot of gestures made towards the sort of social problems of the society… Like look at house elves. We meet Dobby and everyone agrees that slave holding situation isn’t ideal but once we meet more house elves we learn that Dobby is kind of a weirdo and that they are effectively a sentient slave race with only exceptions like Dobby taking issue with being bound. Hermione sees this as a legitimate issue as any potential elf could be a Dobby but then great detail is placed about how annoying and virtually pointless her advocacy is but the rest of her society and the framing effectively informs the reader - “don’t think about house elves. Dobby is fine. It’s not your problem and shouldn’t be.” It’s framed as a problem to be solved on a small scale interpersonal basis because by and large the system works.
It’s generally difficult for people to critically read a narrative that throws up that many hairpin bends particularly when the set ups are made in the book that these things are social problems… but then never paid off. That it happens a fair amount innthe books is a fairly confusing yarnball. It feels progressive in the same way a company mission statement that is not being enacted in any real way feels progressive.
I mean, I don’t think that framing is out of line for the age range of the protagonists.
Yes they are saving the world, but they’re not exactly politically connected, aware, or savvy to initiate policy change.
So Hermione does what most middle or high school kids do. She advocates and protests.
It’s framed as a problem to be solved on a small scale interpersonal basis because by and large the system works
I dont get this phrase after the because
“By and large” just means “for the most part”.
Edit: also “with few exceptions”
Oh darn sorry i could have googled that i guess. I genuinely thought that this was a typo. Thanks.
It helps to read it as “…because, by and large, the system works”
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A big problem is that early on it’s teased Harry would become this “Anti-Voldemort” figure who renews the Wizarding World and completely restructures it, and then he just becomes a cop and maintains the same status quo that got his friends killed.
So foreshadowing that doesn’t pay off because JK sucks at writing mostly
Exactly. It always been witchy Star Wars. If you look too hard, you’ll just find stuff that wasn’t actually there.
It’s been a long time since I read the books or watched the movies. In what way does Harry become a cop?
He literally joins the wizard world equivalent of the police force
As far as i remember, it isn’t mentioned in the first 7 books. It might be mentioned in the curse we don’t like to talk about (the cursed child) and/or in all her ramblings on pottermore or whatever that site was called.
How the hell did a whole generation of kids miss that? Poor reading comprehension?
In my case, probably, but I was like 14 by the time I read the last book so I don’t really blame my younger self because at that age I definitely wasn’t looking for any deeper meaning and just enjoyed the fantasy and escapism.
thinking back about my experience with hp i didnt have the political understanding yet, to notice the injustices that i was not suppose to notice or question and i did not notice that the presented solutions are all kinda non-solutions.
all i saw was that hp fought against injustices like the fantasy nazis and that they liberated this one poor mistreated elf and became friends with the kids who were looked down on, while showing those mean nazi spawn bullies of. in a way hp has the simplistic analysis of good and bad that a child might have. while also being a flawed kid.
There’s a great breakdown on YouTube by Shaun on the Harry Potter books, but one of the things that I like that he points out is that you can basically watch JK’s political stance change in real time as the books progress.
When she started writing them, she was “impoverished” (to some extent she also benefitted from help like living in a place owned by her sister for free), and the story starts out railing against the system and those in power. As the books took off and she began to benefit more from that same system, the plot began to be more about how the system is great and shouldn’t be questioned, but only the right kinds of people should have power. If you’re a Good Guy, you can use the Killing Curse and it’s okay because you’re a Good Guy. If anybody else uses the Killing Curse, then they’re a Bad Guy and that’s horrible. The wizards keeping magic away from the Muggles, a power that could solve many of the world’s problems, is a bad thing at first, but Harry goes on to become a magic cop to enforce that very same ban at the end of the series. There are tons of examples in the story.
Very interesting, thank you!
We probably think the first contact rules in Star Trek makes some sense. Is HP‘s magic disparate?
Interesting that Muggles will never grow to become magical meanwhile a civilization can develop drive on the road. So one day one you would have tons of people trying to marry wizards/witches, and begging the wizarding community not just for help but for advancement and personal gain. I imagine immense resentment. Would be a toughie!
I mean, when I was reading the books as they came out, I expected “oh yeah obviously he’s gonna overturn the corrupt order and we’re gonna pay off on this whole elf slavery plot, which surely is written comedically just because an unflinching representation would be far too dark for a kids series.” That’s how stories like this usually end, after all.
And then, uh, it didn’t do any of that.
So I think it’s something like “it’s fairly generic, the other stories in this genre skew left, and nobody expected it to have a weird aggressively-centrist swerve a decade later.”
Is not conservatism but peak liberalism, where the problems aren’t the power structures but that the people on power are not good enough. This is why at the end of the series no structural changes are done, the only thing that changes is the people in power is the Good Ones®.
I agree, but liberalism is by nature conservative.
Can’t deny that
Huh? Maybe at this day and age, sure, but liberal means progressive at the time when its ideas were being formulated. They opposed feudalism and monarchies at the time, which are the conservatives at the time.
What is considered conservative today is considered liberal in the past. And what is considered liberal today is considered unthinkable in the past. It just that the Overton window shifted.
Uh, sure, I guess I’ll agree it’s less conservative than feudalism, but I’m not sure what that has to do with whether HP is conservative? It’s not as if the story is about overthrowing a monarchy to establish modern capitalism (a different common story structure with its own problems); it’s about removing all the bad people in positions of authority so that the good people can make society work like it should while changing nothing systemically.
Okay, fair. But the way your previous comment make it sound like in broad sense liberals are conservatives, which is not really the case.
They are, though. Liberal is often used in American politics to imply progressive/leftist, but that’s not what it means. Liberalism is pro- status quo and, like the heroes of HP, supports the idea that our current system would work great if not for the Bad People messing it up.
Liberalism is pro- status quo
No, that’s conservatism. Liberalism is pro individual liberties. Which is today’s status quo, and so today liberals are conservative. But it’s not the definition. Which is what you seem to be implying it is with phrases like “by nature”.
Today, we live in a liberal hegemony. So liberals are conservative. At the time of the French revolution, liberals were fighting against absolute monarchy, and were extremely progressive as a result. If we were living under socialism, liberals would be radicals.
Liberalism is pro- status quo
As people would say, context is king. So it depends. The OG liberals were anti-status quo and open to radical changes. But now since liberalism has become the status quo, liberals are now the conservatives and some prefer moderated approach, which unfortunately enables fascism. But even so, some liberals still believe in radical changes if push comes to shove.
It didn’t skip past me, even as a kid, in the perfect age bracket to grow up with the book series.
…
Oh, fat and ugly people are always also internally, morally, unfixably flawed.
Oh, the super blonde aryan coded people are magic nazis.
Oh, a base level of magic racism is more or less normalized.
Oh, those elves are slaves but its ok because they actually really love being slaves.
Oh, the banking system is run by cariacatures of Jews.
…
I noticed all this shit as a child, and was pestered and guffawed at for pointing it out.
This is before I even knew ‘Trans’ was a thing that could and does exist, before I even knew that you could be gay or lesbian or bi.
I still was, as recently as a few years ago, poopoo’d for mentioning these problems in Harry Potter… by the … Potterhead/Disney Princess/Goes to Disneyland once a year people I used to know, who self describe as all over the gender rainbow, but aren’t capable of acknowledging that these problems exist, because magical escapism apparently requires full doublethink… and those people would also routinely hypocritically mock my own mild cisgender nonconformity.
…
Yeah, the Overton Window in the US is/was so thoroughly shifted rightward, in so many ways, that ‘we can have a story line that involves magic’ was considered widly progressive, compared to the baseline of ‘Pokemon cards are demonic because they involve evolution’ and ‘DnD is demonic because roleplaying is impossible and it makes you a Satanist Witch/Warlock’.
…
Animorphs was more progressive and mature.
Here kids, time to learn about the horrors of war, first hand, as told by a teenage terrorist group!
Things are shitty and messy and unpredictable, and the world revolves around how youand others handle morally gray, fundamentally complex scenarios, not cookie cutter, simplistic good vs evil decisions that are far less difficult to evaluate!
ANIMORPHS WAS MY FUCKIN JAM, HOMIE.
Animorphs is effin A. They should make a TV show out of that. There has never been an Animorphs TV show.
The book covers were ludicrous.
But…
Perhaps one should not judge a book series by its covers.
…
In the event you didn’t know, there does actually exist a rather poorly executed single TV season of an Animorphs TV show… didn’t get good ratings, think it got a DVD release at some point, but it does exist now on I think at least one streaming platform.
Also… I believe these are official: More recently, basically much of the book series has been adapted to graphic novel/comic book form, and has been released that way.
Also also… there is a video game? Actually several?
Can you explain the “conservatism good” message you see?
the bankers in book one are literally a bigoted analog for jews.
an entire swath of story is about “mudbloods” and race mixing and some characters railing against it.
there is actual slavery.
stuff american conservatives are all pushing as ideas in our current world.
The goblins, no argument here. But the rest, it seems like the entire point of the book is fighting against those things?
Against the slavery of the elfs that was a Hermione thing that everyone else laughed about and it was used on the book for comedic bits.
It’s not just comedic bits. It’s all over the place, just hitting the reader over the head that slavery is good because actually they like it and it’s good for them.
It’s really annoying because Hermione does say something like they only like it because that’s the system they’ve been forced into and it’s all they know, but then everyone just rolls their eyes and says that she’s stupid for thinking this. It’s almost like Rowling knows that it should be seen as bad and why, but then can’t actually bring herself to write that because it blames systems, not people.
So, the smartest character in the book fights for their freedom. I’m sure a lot of readers shared the opinion that the slavery was wrong.
Her fight was still presented as a joke, bet half the readers just went “haha silly Hermione, who dosen’t wants free servants??”
Edit: on top of that, Rowling uses the trope of the natural state of the slave is being slaved and is actually good for them, with the other freed house elves that is depressed because she dosen’t have a family to work for.
Yes that edit is a good point that I’d forgotten.
Moved on to Terry Pratchett early on, so much better in every way.
And then she just stopped doing it, I guess, because in the last book’s epilogue literally nothing changed with the system
By then she was one of the “Haves.” Turns out she was selfish all along.
Edit: I mean the author, not Hermione
it is indeed - they are antagonists. I’m just saying these themes are part of the built world.
So no stories can ever have those topics or themes? Shit take.
A big issue is that they still exist in the “happily ever after” situation.
When the horribly flawed government is now horribly flawed with good dictators, there is still massive racism and slavery that everyone approves of.
probably. i was shitting when I posted my take.
But how does that equal “conservativism good”?
well I could make a (thin) case that it’s part of the world she built and the entire population except for a cohort of a small few children and some odd adults are against it.
so the world at large is ok with that shite behavior; and judging by how many kids grew up to “be slytherin” we can see they just didn’t grok the actual story.
Even the kids in the story are mostly fine with it though. It’s good and proper to have slaves, and even the idea of free elves is something to be mocked by everyone.
And they were all antagonists, they werent being portrayed in a good light, they were all portrayed as evil.
At least in the movies I never actually read the books
See Seamus Finnegan, Pavarti ? Cho Chang, fleur de’lacour. If the character isn’t British British they are a full caricature.
Other than the bankers, the other two are clearly painted in an unfavorable light, which is fine. You have to have conflict in order to have a story, of course.
Ironically when I was a kid, Harry Potter was written by the devil and to read it would be practicing demonic witchcraft. My upbringing was definitely not unique in that regard.
it’s a very British conservatism. it’s about blood. the story has people constantly accusing Harry of having bad parentage; as his aunt says “bad blood will out”. a left leaning story would have shown that blood had nothing to do with it. Harry was not raised by his dead parents regardless of how good or bad they are. Harry knew trauma and abuse, then was given his values by Dumbledore and hagrid and lupin and his friends.
but that’s not what happened. in the end it’s not that blood and lineage doesn’t matter. it’s just that his parents were actually high class and wealthy. so Harry won because he had good blood and was the chosen one. he won because of the innate quality he was born with.
Blood is magical. It allows Voldemort to touch Harry.
Harry was never the chosen one except for the fact that Voldemort chose him. It is explained that Longbottom could have fit the prophecy. And prophecies don’t always come true.
They even have a term, mudblood.
Harry has a piece of Voldemort living inside him. That’s why it is always mentioned. He does have an evil piece inside him.
His parents being “high class or wealthy” didn’t matter. His mother’s sacrifice protected Harry, her love.
Harry was an average wizard at best. He won because of friendship and everyone helping out.
I can’t speak for anyone but child me was a dumbass.
Think of the age that these books were meant to be read by.
If you think grade 4-6 children have that large of a world view….
The final book is about 2" thick and contains depictions of torture … what age do you think that was meant to be read by?
And it’s that last book that cements that the only problem with the magical society is that someone bad got to be in charge … Harry gets to be a wizard cop who will send people to a prizon of horrible torture, all the slaves are happy being slaves, the banks are run by greedy little monsters with big noses, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Books presented to young readers can help them to form lasting impressions of how they see the world if, like most people, they don’t think to question it. My Mum thought Enid Blyghton books were just wonderful, for example.
I think media literacy definitely played a role, but I also think theres a lot to unpack here on why this could be the case. I dont think its a simple one dimensional answer at all
Americans aren’t taught to think.
Americans aren’t taught to think.
Your statement is not true. Proof: I think you’re right. But I’m American so I must be wrong because I wasn’t taught to think. If I’m wrong that you’re right, then you must be wrong. QED.
Depends on the area, and community. It’s probably more accurate to say most Americans aren’t taught to think critically of the status quo.
Jessie Gender has a video where she explains gender with Hogwarts houses as a metaphor. She filmed it before JK went crazy and uploaded it much later with an explanation how long ago she filmed it
I’ve never been able too reconcile the writer of HP with the person she has shown herself to be.
The books are still good, the movies are still good, the author will not be remembered.
If the kids ask, she’s as good as gone. Might have never existed.the author will not be remembered
Why? Seems people still know Pol Pot, Hitler, Jimmy Saville, and many many more.
We shouldn’t try and write people out of history, else we are prone to repeat it. We should remember people for the good and the bad.
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Bit of a reach but uhm… sure…
