Harry Potter

hello everyone today i'd like to talk about harry potter now i could do the standard video essay introduction for harry potter you know it's a series of books a series of films video games a stage play a whole bunch of merchandise and all that but we all know who harry potter is right it'd be better if i started by explaining why i want to talk about harry potter today and there's a few reasons firstly there was recently another round of discussion about jk rowling's goblins in recent years there's a few different types of discourse relating to harry potter that come and go on social media people talk about rowling's goblins being possibly similar to anti-semitic stereotypes people talk about the problematic natural slave race who like their slavery the queerbaiting with characters who were stated by rowling to be gay but never explicitly depicted as gay her attempts to retroactively add more diversity to the harry potter world than she initially depicted and a whole host of other topics this drive to re-examine and criticize harry potter is undoubtedly fueled to some extent by the actions of the author in recent years jk rowling is a committed and very vocal opponent of trans rights and well i'm not going to rehash all that here there are several videos on youtube which thoroughly cover jk rowling's transphobia and i'll link some of those below but for our purposes today all we need to know is that jk rowling's statements on trans rights have put air at odds with a lot of people who previously enjoyed her work and people naturally want to work that out right how could a children's book author who wrote such a beloved series go on to be such a bigot perhaps the signs were there all along now whenever it comes time to re-examine the harry potter series i confess i feel very left out i read the first three maybe four books as a young lad but then i guess i got too old for them or maybe they just got too long she really got away from the editors at some point those later books can be a real slog but still i wanted to know how fair are these criticisms of harry potter do they hold water now it wouldn't be exactly fair for me to start offering opinions having not read the books so i went and read the harry potter books i watched the movies i watched the fantastic beasts movies which were rubbish and weird i read a whole bunch of pottermore articles the short stories from hogwarts the script of the stage play i even read the casual vacancy in a few bits here and there of rowling's detective series what all this means is i am now a certified harry potter expert and i can get involved in the discourse entirely guilt-free so i'm going to do my own harry potter discourse retrospective today there's a lot to talk about and i think it's only fitting that we begin at the beginning so at the beginning of the first harry potter novel the philosopher's stone we are introduced to harry's aunt and uncle the darsleys and we follow his uncle vernon dursley as he goes about his day noticing various magical folks celebrating the apparent demise of series antagonist lord voldemort now what do we learn about fern and dursley in the opening chapters of the first harry potter book well he's quick to anger he is narrow-minded he dislikes anything out of the ordinary or improper and he's bigoted towards people he sees as being different from himself he's a conservative basically he and his wife are rowling's liberal skewering of typical conservatives she even has vernon reading the daily mail in a later book vernon is verbally and physically abusive to harry because harry is a little magical lad and vernon hates magic he wants the magical and non-magical worlds to stay far apart and he's willing to go to extremes to keep them that way we're also introduced to harry's cousin dudley who is a spoiled bully who is also abusive to harry dudley is going to a fancy private school smeltings whereas harry is going to stonewall high the local comprehensive which totally implies it's rough and full of bullies now do i think it was intentional that rowling called the scary school for pause that harry is worried about attending stonewall probably not but it is funny now now harry's first contact with the wizarding world once he's older than a baby that is is hagrid who turns up to deliver harry's invitation to attend hogwarts now as he's introduced to us here hagrid is in many regards exactly the same as fern and dursley now if any harry potter fans are listening i'm sure you just raised an eyebrow at me comparing lovable old hagrid to harry's uncle vernon but if we examine their actions and their beliefs they are in many ways a mirror of each other hagrid is quick to anger he threatens van and physically after he insults albus dumbledore hagrid is physically abusive he uses magic to disfigure a child because he's having an argument with his father he gives dudley a pig's tail which has to be removed with surgery hagrid doesn't like people who are different from him muggles he uses the word muggle not just as a descriptor but as an insult it means mundane dull and unspecial hagrid wants the magical and non-magical worlds to stay far apart and he's willing to support extremes to keep it that way when harry asks why the ministry of magic works to keep the existence of magic a secret hagrid responds blimey harry everyone would be wanting magic solutions to their problems no we're best left alone one of hagrid's functions in his introduction to harry here is to serve as comeuppance for the dursleys to give them a taste of their own medicine hagrid and his magic are divine retribution dudley likes to bully people so he gets bullied by hagrid dudley was going to a fancier school than harry now harry is going to a fancier school than him vernon likes to other those different to him and so he gets othered by hagrid made into a muggle now while it might be satisfying from the audience's perspective to watch dudley who they know is a bully be treated the way he treats others from hagrid's perspective he's just disfiguring a child he just met you know a similar scene happens in the fourth book when fred and george weasley poison dudley with a sweep that makes his tongue grow to be a foot long and then the next chapter opens with harry and the weasleys all laughing at dudley now this is strange firstly the weasley twins have never met dudley before so they poison him off second-hand information basically but also it's strange because rowling forgets to have dudley do anything bad in the opening of the fourth book he doesn't do anything to harry or anyone else rowling's just coasting off his previous bad behavior in the earlier books well actually i tell a lie dudley does do one thing that jk rowling considers to be very bad and worthy of punishment and that is be overweight justin goblet of fire for instance were treated to descriptions of dudley being as big as a young killer whale being wider than he is tall too fat to hide behind his parents we hear about his porky hands his piggy eyes his massive backside and the comic relief of the opening chapters is that dudley is struggling to stay on a diet harry even mocks him about this before sneaking off to eat some cakes that he's concealed this is all why it's funny that dudley later eats a poisoned sweet i suppose this is one of the things that really jumped out at me reading the harry potter books just how much time is devoted early on in each story to making fun of dudley for being overweight rowling just rarely seems to have it in for fat people and she gets worse in the casual vacancy published after the harry potter books when one unsympathetic character is introduced in the following way he was an extravagantly obese man of 64. a great apron of stomach fell so far down in front of his thighs that most people fought instantly of his penis when they first clapped eyes on him wondering when he had last seen it how he washed it how he managed to perform any of the acts for which a penis is designed now i think it's very telling that rowling would write that most people think things like this when well i can only speak for myself here but if i see an obese guy i don't immediately start thinking about him washing his penis but jk rowling does so we know that now rowling has defended her presentation of fat characters by pointing to characters like molly weasley who is overweight but this is rubbish honestly there's a big difference between presenting a disgusting fat character greedily stuffing their piggy face like dudley and presenting a jolly plump character which is what molly is molly is described as plump one of the things i much preferred about the way the movies tell the harry potter story is that they cut out a lot of the general meanness and cruelty that exist in the books rowling doesn't just mock overweight characters if a character is supposed to be unsympathetic in the books the gloves come off with regards to physical descriptions for instance consider the slithering girl who quotes reminded harry of a picture he'd seen in holidays with hags she was large and square and her heavy jaw jutted aggressively reporter rita skeeter also has hair that contrasts oddly with her heavy jawed face and we elsewhere here about her large mannish hands vernon's sister marge is quote large beefy purple-faced and even had a moustache if a character is supposed to be bad then rowling usually presents them as being physically ugly and for women the way she makes them ugly is to make them large and masculine and if this all sounds misogynistic it's because it is even beyond physical descriptions the characters themselves even harry and his friends have a real mean streak in the books that was largely excised in the movies and let's look at one example of this there's a scene in the order of the phoenix where the evil dolores umbridge fires the hogwarts divination teacher professor trelawny and tries to have her evicted from the school this scene is depicted rather differently in the book than in the movie in the movie trelloni is more of a sympathetic figure she's supposed to come across as helpless and frail someone who it would be especially cruel to bully to highlight just how awful umbridge is being in this scene in the books trelawney is ranting drunk and waving a sherry bottle around her head because in the books she's an alcoholic because that's funny isn't it alcoholism the movie has harry and hermione looking on all sad at this obvious injustice whereas in the books they don't really care they don't like trelawney hermione even outright states i don't care if she throws out trelawny but she's not taking hagrid the movies take the approach that while trelloni might be annoying and a bit of a fraud she isn't evil she isn't a bad person she doesn't actually deserve to be humiliated she's still part of hogwarts right the movies understand that the audience will still have sympathy for her if she's treated unfairly even if she happens to be annoying in the books however trelawney mostly just pops up whenever jk rowling wants to make fun of alcoholism rowling does not expect the audience to have sympathy for trelawny she's annoying and a bit of a fraud so it's open season to be as cruel as you like movie hermione looks like she's about to cry when she sees trelawney get fired book hermione could watch professor trelawney be slowly beaten to death by a bludger and she wouldn't feel a single thing anyway let's move on by asking a question is it wrong in the harry potter series to make fun of someone for being overweight now the obvious answer you might think is no because harry makes fun of dudley for being overweight hagrid makes fun of dudley for being overweight the narration makes fun of dudley for being overweight and this is all played for laughs it's not presented as the same type of bullying as dudley's bullying it's not considered deserving of retribution however we also see both draco malfoy and vern and darsley make fun of molly weasley for being overweight something which outrages harry and his friends it's understood that it's wrong to make fun of molly for being overweight when draco insults molly's weight it isn't played for laughs it's used to illustrate how rude and insulting draco is so is it wrong to make fun of someone for being overweight and the answer is it depends on if you're a good or a bad person and whether your target is a good or a bad person but whether you're a good or a bad person is totally divorced from whether or not you mock people for their weight now this is just one example obviously but this disconnect is typical for most actions in the harry potter stories what is done isn't so important compared to who is doing it outside of extreme examples like murdering a bunch of people there aren't really good or bad actions in the harry potter universe there are only good and bad teams sometimes literal good and bad teams characters are assigned good or bad as labels and whether their actions are considered good or bad follows from that as another example we could ask is owning slaves wrong as it's presented to us in the harry potter stories which again we have to answer with it depends are you a good slave owner or a bad slave owner now just to head off a potential criticism here you might say sean what are you expecting here morality wise from the children's book series written for little babies aren't you taking this a little bit too seriously and the answer to that is that i don't really like the assumption that stories are unable to be criticized because they're for children after all you can have stories for children that are executed very well and stories for children that are executed very poorly also while the first stories are written for little babies the later harry potter novels are intended for increasingly older audiences rowling tried to increase the target reading age of the novels along with the main characters and she did this in a few ways firstly the novels get more complicated they get much longer much longer than they have to be i'd add they get much more violent miners start getting killed that's miners with an o not like miners uh beloved characters like sirius and dumbledore start getting murdered spoiler warning the main character's cute pet owl gets murdered and then it explodes it's rough the stories also get more sexualized as the characters age through their teens and start experiencing all of those teenage hormones and it also gets increasingly political in the early novels politics is something that children occasionally glimpse adults doing but it's largely above their ability to influence because they're 12. later however the politics of the wizarding world become a key component of the stories the ministry of magic becomes an important setting the minister of magic an important character the actual non-wizarding prime minister is a point of view character in book six so how does this aging up and complicating of the series relate to the presentation of good and evil well when the series starts things are very simplistic basically all evil in the wizarding world stems from voldemort if someone is bad it's because they're a follower of voldemort or the child of a follower of voldemort everyone in slytherin is bad because they're the bad team things are very black and white now despite attempting to mature other aspects of the series rowling never gets away from this overly simplistic presentation of morality she makes a few attempts but they prove to be false starts she always ends up right back here in the first novel where all evil stems from voldemort who murders people because he's bad and it makes for rather frustrating reading rowling frequently threatens to make the series more interesting introducing several ideas that seem very much like setups for a later payoff but then that payoff just never comes as an example here let's talk about the fountain in the main hall of the ministry of magic this is introduced in the order of the phoenix and described as follows halfway down the hall was a fountain a group of golden statues larger than life-size stood in the middle of a circular pool tallest of them all was a noble looking wizard with his wand pointing straight up in the air grouped around him were a beautiful witch a centaur a goblin and a house elf the last three were all looking adoringly up at the witch and wizard now if you get wizard supremacist vibes from this statue you're supposed to this is all a conscious reference to real world statues that give off white supremacist colonialist vibes featuring usually white men in positions of power lording over their presumed inferiors so in this statue you've got a wizard holding up his wand the symbol of his power above the lesser races who were forbidden by the ministry of magic to use ones themselves that's an idea introduced in book four the house elves are a slave race the centaurs are classified as beasts and restricted to particular territories even the goblins who run the wizard banking system don't have equal rights this statue is important later on as it's the site of the duel between dumbledore and voldemort the statues either get destroyed or are brought to life to participate in the duel and voldemort ends up standing on the statue's plimp and this is the site of the reveal of foldamot's return to wider wizarding society right so this is a very simple metaphor you would think this statue is a literal monument to the hypocrisies and inequalities in the wizarding world and it's here that voldemort is revealed to the world because it's from this inequality and hypocrisy that he draws his power it turns out that not all evil in the world stems from voldemort quite the opposite in fact voldemort's authoritarian violence and desire for control is merely an extension of the systems that already exist in the world the ministry has no argument against voldemort on an ethical level the wizards own slaves they run a torture prison they deny equal rights to non-wizards there are actually repeated worries in the novels that voldemort will draw various races of creatures to his side specifically because he might be able to offer them a better life than what the wizard supremacist ministry is currently imposing upon them we even learn later that voldemort was able to literally get away with the murder he committed by framing a house elf something he knew would not be investigated due to discrimination against house elves so the systemic inequalities and discrimination in the wizarding world enforced by the ministry of magic are providing both the opportunity and ideological groundwork for voldemort to rise to power crucially voldemort's ideal world isn't fundamentally different to the one currently enforced by the ministry he just wants to extend the persecution to also include muggles and non-pure blood wizards he wants to discriminate against certain humans like the wizards as a whole already discriminate against the other races this is seen when voldemort gets to redecorate the ministry in the last novel and he puts his own statue in place which has a witch and a wizard sitting on a throne of muggles unless you think i'm reading into these statues too much dumbledore explicitly states after his duel with voldemort the fountain we destroyed tonight told a lie we wizards have mistreated and abused our fellows for too long and we are now reaping our reward now having set all of this up you might expect rowling to then do something with it you know go on to tell a story in which the various systemic problems in the wizarding world are resolved or at least addressed in some way after the addition of all of these elements the story can't simply be about defeating voldemort anymore defeating voldemort at this point should mean defeating his supremacist ideology which by necessity means defeating the supremacist ideology inherent to the wider wizarding world merely defeating voldemort in a contest of power can't be a satisfying ending anymore because after how horrible the status quo has been made to seem simply beating voldemort in a fight and then returning to the status quo must be seen as a failure anyway spoiler alert none of this gets resolved voldemort defeated despite it all and the final sentence of the novels is all was well all is well but yes we are keeping the slaves we're the good guys so you might be asking why put in all of these elements if they're not going to be utilized you know why attempt to complicate your story beyond a simplistic tale of good versus evil if you're just gonna unceremoniously drop all that to write an ending that contradicts it all you know what is jk rowling doing one of rowling's flaws as a writer relates to her not planning ahead not just with the politics and morality of the series but with everything she often introduces elements to her world with apparently no thought as to the later consequences and for a very fun example of this and let's talk about time turners so time turners are little portable time machines that enable the user to go back in time they're introduced in the prisoner of azkaban and harry and hermione use one at the climax of the story to save and free book beak the hippogriff and harry's godfather sirius black which you know is fine in and of itself however the potential problem with introducing time travel to your fantasy series is that your fantasy series has time travel in it now so going forward you have to account for the fact that characters can travel through time to resolve problems otherwise anytime anything unfortunate happens everyone will be asking why the characters aren't using their time machine to fix it one way to do this is to make time travel difficult to accomplish somehow so thinking ahead you impose limits on the way the time travel mechanism can be used so you have a time machine that only works in certain circumstances or requires a certain object or fuel to function or the discwelt novel night watch for instance features time travel as the result of a magical accident so it's not easily repeatable going forward rowling's time machines on the other hand are small easily portable apparently infinitely usable and they're introduced because one is handed out to a 13 year old so she can do extra homework and you know what if they were just used as a comedic bit that's fine you could say they only work on trivial things like hermione can take extra classes at wizard school say but you couldn't use them to save a life or anything dramatic like that but then the time turner is used in the conclusion of the story to save sirius and bookbeak so now you've got an indeterminate amount of these little time machines in your stories that have no limits on their use they can apparently do anything and they're handing them out to actual children now the next novel in the series the goblet of fire features the death at the end of the book of beloved character cedric diggory i'm assuming he was beloved somebody probably loved him so anyway cedric dies and reedus at the time probably wondered what happened to all of those time machines right just give one of those a twist and prevent cedric from dying but there is no mention of time turners in the goblet of fire it's like rowling just forgot about them and you know what i'm not even gonna criticize that necessarily rowling thought of one story with time machines in it and then she didn't want to deal with them anymore so she didn't and if she left it there i'd actually kind of respect that that's what the movies did after all because ultimately it doesn't really matter does it it's not a fatal flaw if your fun fantasy series isn't that coherently planned out these aren't killer criticisms if rowling just never addressed the time turners again most of her audience wouldn't care too much cinemasins would ding it you'd maybe have a few youtube videos or buzzfeed articles called like the dark side of harry potter why didn't the wizards use the time machine to stop hitler or whatever but again that's just for fun criticism it wouldn't really matter why didn't the eagles fly the ring into mount doom because they didn't you know whatever plus setting your story in a magic school gives you very generous space for literal a wizard did it plot hole explanations right it would be very easy for rowling to say time turners can't undo the killing curse or whatever if you use a time machine to save someone who gets killing cursed they just die anyway so it would be pointless to save cedric there you go simple explanation based on magical rules of which she is the master so there'd be no way to argue with that the problem is jk rowling can't leave well enough alone when it comes to the time turners and she did a series of very strange and funny things now the first funny thing she did was in book five the one after cedric dies in a move that feels very much like a response to people asking about the time turners she destroys all of the time turners so neville longbottom is fighting a defeater in the ministry of magic and they accidentally destroy a cabinet which has all of the time turners in it all of them they're all just on the same shelf and then they all get knocked over and they're gone that's unfortunate isn't it and [Laughter] i love this this is the clumsiest literally the clumsiest most lazy way of getting time travel out of your story you know sorry everyone neville knocked time travel over so we can't do that anymore it's brilliant now the next funny thing she did again in a move that feels very much like a response to people asking about cedric diggory is show us just how horrible the world would be if cedric diggory survived so harry potter and the cursed child is a stage play which is based on a story written by rowling in that play harry potter's son goes back in time using a time turner in order to save the life of cedric diggory and he saves cedric's life by making him lose the triwizard tournament meaning he doesn't touch the pork he at the end and so isn't present at the end of the goblet of fire for voldemort to order his death and as a result of losing the triwizard tournament cedric is so embarrassed that he becomes a defeater really and he fights on voldemort's side in the battle of hogwarts uh he kills neville longbottom which ensures that voldemort wins who then goes on to be the dictator of the wizarding world now this is amazing it's like it's a wonderful life but in reverse you know look how awful it would be if you survived cedric cedric diggory it's a horrible life that's what they should have called it and what this all means is when dumbledore eulogizes cedric in the goblet of fire you know he was a good and loyal friend a hard worker he valued fair play he was good and kind and brave no sorry dumbledore he wasn't he was actually only one bad day away from becoming a fascist murderer and it's good he died jesus christ you see it isn't so much that rowling doesn't plan ahead that is the problem here it's her later attempts to go back and fill plot holes that really damages the story i actually have my own theory about what happened with the time turners and it's called the one book lag theory it's something i noticed with a few other elements in the harry potter novels what happens is rowling will introduce some element to a story that seems like a big deal and that you would expect to still exist in the next novel only it doesn't it just vanishes and this may have led to readers inquiring as to where it went so then in the next novel as a reaction to criticism of the missing element rowling will knock it off the shelf so to speak so we get time travel introduced in book three it vanishes for book four then falls off the shelf in book five and there's another of these in the second book the chamber of secrets in that novel the poverty of the weasley family is a repeated theme we see the weasley children wondering how their parents are going to pay for all of their school things the weasley boys get hand-me-downs but the parents need to buy all new things for their daughter ginny there's a heartbreaking scene where we see molly weasley reaching into the corners of her bank vault looking for more coins and through all this harry feels embarrassed and guilty because not only are the weasley family keeping him as a guest he's rich he's got a huge pile of gold that his parents left for him then to make matters worse ron and harry steal the weasley's car and not only lose it ron's dad gets a huge fine for owning it illegally so on the one hand harry has a guilty conscience about costing the weasleys so much gold and on the other hand he has a giant pile of gold now the repeated mentions of both the poverty of the weasley family and of harry's guilt creates an expectation for the audience that this will be resolved in some way and the payoff to this seeming setup is nothing there just isn't one the weasleys are poor harry is rich and costs them a whole bunch of money and feels bad about it and that's it no conclusion now technically he saves ginny's life at the end of the story so you can see that as a payoff to what harry owes the weasleys if you like but i find that unsatisfying i don't believe that if a different student say neville had been kidnapped by an evil book harry would have been like well i don't owe neville's family any money so i'm not getting involved no he would have saved the day anyway this ending has nothing to do with the poverty theme and i find this all a little frustrating in light of something which happens in the very first novel the first time that harry meets ron in this initial meeting on the train to hogwarts ron can't afford to buy food from the trolley and he's got some horrible sandwiches his mum made for him that he doesn't even like harry can afford to buy food from the trolley and wants to share it with ron so he offers to trade for some of ron's sandwiches now i like this scene it's nice we're learning about our main characters right ron is poor and embarrassed about that harry was poor but then was suddenly made very rich and he's embarrassed about that harry wants to share with ron he values friendship more than money but he's also emotionally intelligent enough to navigate doing so without hurting ron's feelings hence pretending he wants some of ron's horrible sandwiches and if you liked this early instance of the characters managing to overcome their social embarrassment in order to share with each other i hope you got your fill because it's not going to be happening again a case in point here ron's wand in the chamber of secrets ron's wand gets broken early on in the story he needs a new wand but he doesn't want to write home asking for one because he doesn't want his parents to be mad at him for breaking it and it's not like they can afford the expense anyway every time ron's broken wand came up in the story i was thinking why doesn't harry just buy run a new wand you know he can afford it wrong can't and harry's just watching his best friend all year try to use this broken wand that backfires and injures him and he's not doing anything why isn't he doing anything so we can say maybe it's embarrassing to buy your friend a wand but as shown in the previous novel harry is supposed to be emotionally intelligent enough to navigate these sorts of interactions so the sort of thing he could do is give ronna wand on an occasion that it's appropriate to get other people presents right say ron's birthday or christmas hogwarts celebrates christmas you see and the characters give each other presents for instance in the chamber of secrets harry gets a tin of fudge from hagrid hermione gives him a new quill ron gives him a book and harry gives them in return nothing harry doesn't give his friends any christmas presents and this is one paragraph after the dursleys give harry a toothpick for christmas in what is supposed to be a display of scrooge-like miserliness but harry doesn't even manage a toothpick for his friends he even gets a hand-knitted sweater from molly weasley which again makes him feel guilty because he stole her car but not guilty enough to actually do anything though of course the plot reason harry can't get ron a new wand is that rowling wants gilderoy lockhart to later use the broken wand in an attempt to wipe the memories of ron and harry only to have his spell bounce back at him and wipe his memory instead but all this requires is to get the broken wand into lockhart's hands somehow you could write it so that ron had a new wand and his old broken one then he's somehow forced by lockhart to hand over his wand and so ron intentionally hands the broken one over now i think that would be better it would give ron something active to do with the conclusion of the story and it would make defeating lockhart something at least partially intentional oh no look i'm writing harry potter fan fiction while i'm writing fanfiction though i'll say that if jk rowling had asked me for notes on the end of the chamber of secrets i would have told her to have harry find something valuable in the chamber of secrets salazar slytherins lost gems or something and then forced that on the weasleys at the end of the story now they would refuse of course but he could tell them it was repayment for the car he stole that would be a cap to everything in the novel about the weasley's poverty it would assuage harry's guilt over costing them money and also the beginning of the next novel features ron's family going on holiday in egypt which is later an important plot point now how can rowling send the weasleys on holiday when they're so poor well they just win a lottery between the books which feels a bit random and convenient you know wouldn't it be nicer to see the weasleys on holiday at the beginning of the next book because the poverty theme was adequately concluded in the preceding book yes probably anyway ron's broken wand isn't the only example in the chamber of secrets of dramatic tension only existing because harry's too much of a tight get to spend any money on anyone in that novel draco malfoy's father lucius outfits the slytherin quidditch team with a set of fancy new brooms nimbus 2001s that are much better than the brooms used by the gryffindor team and especially better than the older brooms used by fred and george weasley and draco taunts the gryffindors about not being able to afford better brooms so the gryffindor team are set up as the poor underdogs to the rich slytherin team who can afford the best equipment and a despondent harry is later seen wishing he could somehow get seven free nimbus 2001's for their match against slytherin you know if only the gryffindor team also had a rich benefactor with a huge pile of gold and a desire to get them some new brooms alas now reading this i was thinking obviously harry mate you're rich why do you want free brooms just buy some brooms harry didn't even buy his own broom that was gifted to him by professor mcgonagall the head of gryffindor house and that's a point actually when lucius buys new brooms for the slytherins or snape is seen helping the slytherin team out by letting them train when the gryffindors had the field booked or whatever it's presented as a sneaky unfair thing to do but when mcgonagall tips the scales in the favor of her house's quidditch team by anonymously buying their seeker a professional racing broom it's like oh what a lovely gift because remember there are no good or bad actions in harry potter there are only good and bad teams and you can tell the bad team because they're ugly and fat and covered in snakes now the payoff to harry being such a cheap bastard in chamber of secrets comes two books later in goblet of fire where harry gives fred and george weasley a big pile of gold so they can start their joke shop so there we go a couple of books late but harry has finally found a way to give the weasleys some of his vast fortune he got there in the end except not really you see the money that harry gives to fred and george weasley is his winnings from the triwizard tournament and that wasn't really his money was it the tournament was rigged in harry's favor by one of voldemort's followers harry never would have won it by himself now it's still fine for harry to give the money to threaten george but this isn't really him being generous because keeping the money at all would be wrong here and this reminds me of when we see harry giving ginny a set of gilderoy lockhart's books except those were gifted to harry by lockhart as part of a self-serving promotional stunt so they didn't cost him anything either when it comes to harry's money rowling wants it two ways she wants the wish fulfillment cinderella fantasy of the main character being whisked away from poverty to a world in which they're rich and famous and important and she also wants to have dramatic story elements centered around poverty story elements that could be easily solved by harry's wealth and the result of trying to have it both ways here is to just make harry potter look like kind of a selfish jerk now i confess i might be off in assigning these disappointing two books late payoffs to rowling's adversarial relationship with feedback but that's just how it reads to me you know you brats keep asking about the time turners well there you go they've all been destroyed you brats keep asking why harry doesn't give the weasley's gold well there you go he gave fred and george a bag of gold now leave me alone but the worst instance of this at the point where it seems like rowling is most obviously going on the offensive against her own audience is on the issue of slavery which is what we're going to talk about next now if you read the harry potter books as a child and haven't returned to them as an adult or if you've only seen the movies and have never read the books be prepared for an experience because the slavery stuff in the harry potter books gets really weird so rowling introduces slavery in the second book the chamber of secrets we're introduced early on to dobby a house elf who is a slave owned by draco malfoy's family he's treated very poorly and if he disobeys the orders of his master he's forced to physically abuse himself as punishment harry is shocked by all this and responds by sympathizing with dobby using his experience of being treated poorly by the dursleys he wonders why dobby doesn't escape he offers to do something to help this is all a normal reaction to suddenly finding out that slavery exists in the wizarding world now the end of the novel sees harry trick lucius malfoy into releasing dobby and key here is that dobby is happy to be released it was set up that dobby does not like being enslaved and then at the end of the novel the payoff is that harry frees him see rowling can do the setup and pay off sometimes and that's all fine for a single story only like the time turners rowling has now introduced a rather large element into her world that you would expect to feature going forward that being racial slavery but in the next novel the prisoner of azkaban apart from one passing reference the dobby made by malfoy slavery is completely absent from the story and this might lead an audience to wonder what's the deal with all the slaves you know harry freed dobby but dobby isn't the only slave in the world is he so what's going on there can we get a follow-up please jk to the fact that the wizards keep slaves and what rowling decided to do here was to put it lightly ill-advised so in the goblet of fire two books after the chamber of secrets she introduces the positive aspects of slavery you see the house elves actually like being enslaved and it would be bad even cruel to free them we're introduced early on to winky another house elf slave who is again treated very poorly but she doesn't want to be freed and when she is freed as a punishment she falls into a state of depressed listless alcoholism and that's it that's the conclusion to winky's story she was a slave she was freed she becomes a depressed addict and having shown us the evils of ending slavery rowling then takes aim at those who would seek to force this horrible state of freedom upon the slaves you see hermione gets a b in her bonnet about the existence of slavery in the wizard world and she's particularly irked by the fact that hogwarts runs on slave labor the cooking and housekeeping is carried out by a whole bunch of unseen house elf slaves hermione creates an organization to campaign for the freedom of the slaves which is given a silly name spew and for the trouble she's roundly mocked by basically everyone including her friends hermione trying to free the slaves in a very haughty way she's very haughty about slavery is played for laughs it's an ongoing element of supposed comic relief and what comes to mind first here is that tweet from rowling where she tries to [ __ ] that hermione was never canonically white and says rowling loves black hermione can you imagine if hermione was black for this whole subplot you know heartily arguing for the end of slavery and being made fun of by her closest friends for it winky and spew were cut from the movies unsurprisingly it is rather weird for the comic relief in your children's story to be someone attempts to end the slave trade now being charitable we can say that this whole bit with hermione and the slaves is supposed to be a criticism of a particular type of overzealous activism where someone inserts themselves into a political situation unnecessarily and tries to organize action that is actually counter to the wishes of the people they're trying to help right rowling's taking aim at only a particular type of activist we can say but there are many many problems with this firstly is that if this is a criticism of political activism done wrongly there are no examples of what rowling considers political activism done correctly in the harry potter novels so spew reads as a criticism of all political activism not merely one particular type of activism next this is all built on top of the audience's singular previous encounter with slavery prior to the fourth book which is dobby now dobby didn't like being enslaved and he was happy to be freed which becomes confusing once rowling tries to backpedal and say actually the elves like slavery because dobby's an elf and he doesn't like slavery and she deals with this by saying that dobby's just weird and i want to talk about the scene in which we find out that dobby is weird for not wanting to be a slave because it really highlights just how poorly fought out this whole slavery bit is so hermione asks hagrid to join her elf activism group to which hagrid responds it'd be doing them an unkindness hermione it's in their nature to look after humans that's what they like see you'd be making them unhappy to take away the work and insulting them if you tried to pay him but harry set dobby free and he was over the moon about it said hermione and we hear he's asking for wages now yeah well you get weirdos in every breed i'm not saying there isn't the odd elf take freedom but you'll never persuade most of them to do it so this is probably my favorite retcon ever what you thought dobby was happy to be freed because slavery's bad well guess what nerd actually slavery rules and dobby's just weird for not liking it and on the one hand this is funny but on the other it's rather frustrating right this scene is set in hagrid's hut and hagrid ron harry and hermione are present and all of these characters should know what it's like to be discriminated against based on what are assumed to be innate characteristics hagrid is half giant and has been persecuted because he's assumed to therefore be violent and dangerous hermione is muggle-born and is subjected to racial abuse because of that ron's family is pure blood but is looked down upon for associating with muggleborns like hermione and harry not only has his whole chosen one special destiny thing going on he has a history of being abused by the dursleys on account of being born a wizard right all of the characters should have a point of reference for questioning the logic that the house elves want to be slaves because it's just in their nature but with the exception of hermione they aren't questioning it actually even when it comes to hermione there is nothing in the text that directly states she is so invested in campaigning for the elves because of her own experience of suffering racial discrimination i doubt rowling would have intended or even noticed that possibility hermione is supposed to be functioning here solely as a haughty busybody who is the punchline of a joke so as rowling writes it we're to understand that it's wrong for instance for people to assume hagrid is violent because he is a giant because it's wrong to judge him on the basis of his race rather than his actions but it's okay to assume the house elves on the basis of their race want to be slaves even though some of them demonstrably do not want to be it's in their nature to look after humans and if they say otherwise they're just being weird so time for an obvious statement here this assumption that the elves should be naturally subservient because of their race is racist right i mean that's what racism is isn't it so are the characters who make that argument just racists now the harry potter series has something of a limited understanding of racism and i don't mean intentionally limited in that it's a series aimed at children and teens and therefore isn't going to be that complicated no i mean limited in that the author just doesn't really understand racism now don't get me wrong rowling understands that racism is bad and she often makes her characters who are the bad guys be racists but where she trips up is when she tries to understand and counter that racism and to show you what i mean let's talk through a couple of instances of racism in the books so harry's first encounter with racism in the wizard world is when he meets malfoy in diagon alley in book one and malfoy states that he thinks hogwarts shouldn't admit witches and wizards from muggle families an upset harry tells hagrid about this later and hagrid says you're not from a mughal family you're harry potter everyone knows you belong here hagrid is saying basically don't worry that racist wasn't talking about you now that's not too great of a reply obviously but hagrid has another up his sleeve he says anyway what does he know about it some of the best i ever saw were the only ones with magic in them in a long line of muggles look at your mum look at what she had for a sister and a similar scene takes place in book 2 after hermione is called a mud blood by malfoy ron explaining what mudblood means says there are some wizards like malfoy's family who think they're better than everyone else because they're what people call pure blood the rest of us know it doesn't make any difference at all look at neville longbottom he's pure blood and he can hardly stand the cauldron the right way up and then hagrid chimes in saying and they haven't invented a spell or hermione can't do this is rowling's counter-argument to the racism in her books racists are technically incorrect on the facts which is weak by itself you see when racists say they're better than other people they don't actually mean more skilled they mean fundamentally better they are worth more as people by default to a wizard world racist neville longbottom is worth more than a thousand hermiones because he is pure blood so he is better whatever reasons racists give for their racism and not the actual reasons at all they're the excuses for their racism racism as presented by the harry potter series is a conscious decision people make a character will choose to be racist because they believe in some flawed idea they have an incorrect belief about the world racists say muggleborns are worse at magic but look hermione is really good at magic and neville is rubbish therefore racism is wrong now this is a poor counter-argument because it accepts the logic of the racists it just disagrees with their conclusion and what does this say to hermione exactly you know if you were bad at magic malfoy would be right to be racist about you it's a good job you do your homework hermione and in fact when the good characters do agree with the logic of the racism i.e house elves are naturally subservient and slavery is the best thing for them then it's not considered to be racism at all it's just common sense in jk rowling's writing the real bigotry is not for example believing in a hierarchical worldview with a natural slave race bigotry is more just being rudely incorrect racism is first and foremost a bad attitude and i'd argue that this view of racism in which it's a thing consciously engaged in with intentional rudeness is why rowling is ignorant of her own racism now jk rowling gets to racism not by conscious rude hatred but by way of arrogant laziness she writes about groups of people that she doesn't know anything about she doesn't do any research or talk to anyone who knows more than her and so she gets herself into trouble for instance a few years ago rowling came under fire for writing an article about navajo skinwalkers on the website pottermore which was a site owned by jk rowling that published supplementary material and news related to the harry potter universe before being rebranded to wizardingworld.com in 2019. anyway in this article rowling states that the legend of the skinwalker was made up by native american medicine men in order to demonize real wizards and this is something that she repeated on twitter and rowling was widely criticized for appropriating a real people's cultural and spiritual traditions to use as props in her wizard stories and the way she uses them is basically to say that their historical beliefs were made up by people who were jealous of her real wizards rowling's laziness rarely takes center stage in the series of articles introducing the other schools of the wizarding world for instance the japanese school is called mahuta koro now that might not sound right to you but that is the pronunciation guide given on the website so this name is what you would get if you used google to translate the japanese word for magic and the japanese word for place and then combined them with no regard for grammar and then pronounced it wrong this article starts out this ancient japanese school has the smallest student body of the 11 great wizarding schools but does it because that's weird about twice as many people live in japan than in the uk which also has its own wizard school so why does their school have fewer students are japanese people just genetically less magic than british people in rowling's world the south american wizard school is in brazil and its name is what you would get if you used google to translate the portuguese word for castle and the portuguese word for wizard and then combined them with no regard for grammar the resulting word castle wizard sounds less like it's describing a castle for wizards and more as though the castle itself is a wizard it's also named in portuguese despite the school predating the portuguese colonization of the americas so what happened there all this might seem nitpicky but these are the sorts of questions you need to think about if you want to write about other people's cultures and histories rowling gets herself into trouble here because she just lazily makes it up as she goes along case in point from the harry potter series uh the scottish chinese character cho chang whose name is made up of two asian surnames which depending on how you translate them are possibly from different countries even it'd be like calling a european character lopez schneider or something now there's been a lot of criticism of cho chang and a lot of wondering about how rowling came up with the name exactly but i know i can solve that mystery today you see rowling often names things in her books using word association so she comes up with some words associated with the things she's trying to name and then constructs a name out of those so what do i call this grim old place grim old place where do the goblins keep the ingots in gringotts where do the dursleys live well they're very private and dudley is always whinging so they live in privet drive little whinging right she also names some of her characters this way so what do i call the werewolf well remus raised by wolves lupin from the latin for wolf right this character is always taking umbrage with things so i'll just call her umbridge that one was easy but now here's where it gets awkward what do i call the black guy well what comes to mind when i think of a black guy martin luther king a slave in shackles right kingsley shacklebolt now what do i call the asian character what comes to mind when i think of an asian person and now i don't even want to say what i would bet jk rowling thought of here but she thought a two-word phrase and then just changed it a little bit to get to cho chang that's how she came up with that name she used lazy racist word association probably i mean i can't prove it to rowling though because none of this is consciously aggressive because it isn't intentionally racist it doesn't really count and so it goes in the novels with those who support the slavery of the house elves hagrid for instance can argue in favour of slavery perfectly politely on the other hand it's hermione who is presented as obnoxious and rude she is the one with the bad attitude now in all of the scenes discussing the slavery of the house elves readers might note the lack of opinions held by our own point of view character harry potter the harry potter novels are written from a limited third person perspective that is closely tied to a single point of view character which is usually harry potter although there are a few chapters written from the point of view of other characters what this means is that the narration and therefore the reader has access to harry's inner thoughts and feelings if harry is embarrassed we can just be told he was feeling embarrassed but if ron is embarrassed the narration has to say something like ron looked embarrassed because the narration doesn't have direct access to the other character's thoughts and feelings like it does for harry i mention this here to highlight how after his initial surprised outburst about dobby's slavery in the chamber of secrets harry potter doesn't really have any opinions about slavery in the slavery debates in the books harry is mostly just a passive thoughtless observer hermione obviously opposes slavery very strongly and ron finds this laughable and mocks her for it and claims that slavery is acceptable because the elves like it but harry our point of view character just sits there silently not thinking anything for the most part when he does voice an opinion it's only to wonder when hermione is gonna give up on the activism thing he doesn't appear to have any strong opinions other than hermione should stop talking about it even when harry finds out that professor slughorn has been using a hogwarts house elf to test his drinks for deadly poison this is after one of his drinks was actually poisoned by the way harry's only thought is how outraged hermione would be if she heard about that when our hero harry potter hears that his teacher is testing what is potentially fatal poison on slaves he just thinks wow it's a good job hermione isn't here because she'd probably be really annoying about this now the other major house elf character in the books is creature who harry inherits after the death of sirius black so our main character becomes a slave owner that's nice creature is depicted as miserable and insulting he's horrible to everyone and everyone is horrible to him in return harry also inherits sirius's house 12 grimald place which is decorated with decapitated slave heads and in the novel where this house first appears the order of the phoenix at christmas time our main characters decorate the house for christmas which involves putting little father christmas hats and beards on the slave heads so our heroes decide to decorate their decapitated slave heads with little christmas hats now i'm gonna need to hit pause here next to the christmas slave heads and ask what is happening right now why are the harry potter books like this and we're gonna have to go on a few tangents here but stick with me so say you're an author and you want to put slavery as a theme into your children's fantasy series now how do we do that well there's a few ways to go about it the first is to just make the only slave owners bad people right so only the bad characters like the malfoy's own slaves and all the good characters oppose it maybe there's a political effort to free the slaves but the old racist pure blood families keep using their wealth and power to block it right so you've got a very clear good bad dividing line on the issue of slavery that's the simplistic straightforward way to do it the more complicated way to do it is have slavery be a systemic issue inherent to the whole wizarding society and at first glance it seems that this is what rowling is going for characters who are otherwise presented as good people defend slavery hagrid argues it's in their nature ron says they like being slaves molly wishes she had a slave to do the laundry even though she can do housework by magic and so on and this systemic problem is even explicitly tied to the rise of the main antagonist of the series now you might expect the main character of this story to be an outsider freshly introduced into the wizarding world who can see through the inequalities that they take for granted who can introduce a new perspective but harry is not given that role it's given instead to hermione and only to mark how silly it is now the real issue comes at the end of this story because if you want to have a happy ending where your character's triumph where evil is conquered where all is well then the systemic problem of slavery requires a systemic resolution i.e the slaves have to be freed or all is not well is it but what we need to understand here is that jk rowling can't free the slaves in her story this is the reason she has to backpedal slavery into not being that bad because after she introduces it she can't fundamentally change it and she can't do that because of her real-world political beliefs and to understand those we need to talk about neo-liberalism now whenever the politics of harry potter are brought up online someone will post this screencap from an image board where the author of the post delays what they see as the failings of the harry potter story at the feet of jk rowling being quote a liberal centrist blairite who doesn't really believe in anything but is this accurate and what does it mean exactly so very quick in 1979 margaret thatcher came to power in the uk yes sorry we're doing this her government was in power throughout the 80s and enforced and oversaw a national political realignment previously in the period after world war ii the uk instituted various welfare reforms paid for by high taxes a national health care service was established there was wide support for trade unions and various industries and services were nationalized that is brought into public ownership now thatcher's government can be characterized as a total shift away from all of this unions were broken up national industries and services were privatized and sold off there were tax cuts for the rich and there was a whole bunch of financial deregulation this was a philosophy of smaller government of diminishing collective action and a greater emphasis on individual responsibility thatcher even once stated quote there is no such thing as society there are individual men and women and there are families which of course doesn't make any sense now after thatcher came to power there were 18 years of conservative rule in the uk and this led to tony blair rebranding the labour party to new labor and shifting the party to the right to appeal to conservative voters so blair abandoned labour's previous support for renationalization and embraced the free market he moved away from seeking an equality of outcome and towards a supposedly meritocratic equality of opportunity everyone should have the opportunity to succeed he basically said to the conservatives we are not going to fight you on how the economy should fundamentally be organized you win we give up we now have the same aims in that regard we're no longer going to be seeking any serious structural change we're going to keep things organized as they are we're just going to argue that we can run things more competently than you can thatcher is said to have later claimed that the rebranding of labor to new labor was her greatest political accomplishment now i don't know if she actually said that but if she did she was right now if you're from the us and want to understand all this you can swap thatcher out for reagan and blair for bill clinton and you'll have a rough outline so anyway this support for free market capitalism and associated policies of deregulation privatization the reduction of government welfare spending and a greater focus on individualism is known as neo-liberalism neo meaning new because it was a resurgence of economic liberalism so what does all this have to do with jk rowling well jk rowling is an enormous fan of tony blair and new labor she is actually personal friends with blair's successor gordon brown who before becoming prime minister himself served as blair's chancellor of the exchequer for a decade for non-uk folks the chancellor is basically our chief finance minister rowling was present for the birth of gordon brown's son and she donated very large amounts of money to his government and has subsequently sung its praises on her social media accounts she has also been harshly critical of those within labor who would seek to move the party back to the left jk rowling's political philosophy is that of new labour's neoliberalism with its focus on individual instead of collective action its promise of no serious systemic change its push for equality of opportunity over equality of outcome and most importantly for a billionaire its pledge not to raise taxes now with this world view in mind back to harry potter so in the harry potter series while individual actions can be good or bad systemic actions that threaten the status quo are always wrong systemic change is always wrong this is why it can be seen as good for harry to free one slave but bad for hermione to want to free all the slaves because one is an individual change and one is a systemic change from the time harry enters hogwarts to the epilogue two decades after he leaves there are no examples in any of the harry potter novels of a positive systemic change above an individual level nothing changes for the better flawed systems are portrayed but the answer to those flaws is always to replace the individual assumed to be responsible for them the system itself is above being questioned now this attitude can be seen in harry's interactions with the ministers of magic first cornelius fudge and later rufus scrim jaw scrim jaw i have no idea if i'm saying that right fudge is portrayed as an incompetent coward someone too terrified of voldemort to take any action whereas scrimjar is the opposite so keen to be seen to be taking action that he abuses his authority to arrest and imprison the wrong people the authority of the ministry is carried out by their auras who are basically the wizard police force and it's interesting to note what harry sees this authority used to do aside from the more general racial discrimination enforced by the ministry harry sees them falsely imprison his godfather in their torture prison azkaban then later hunt him they falsely imprison his friend hagrid they attack dumbledore in his office in an attempt to arrest him and harry later sees the whole apparatus of the ministry fall under voldemort's control and be used to carry out his bidding but throughout all this harry never at any point questions the ministry's right to rule he never questions whether or not they should have the authority to do what they're doing he only ever questions their competency even after everything he witnesses the ministry do harry's main ambition in life remains to become an aura he wants to be a cop working for this government this is the result of an automatic unthinking respect given to the status quo the political and social systems that currently exist are treated as fundamental forces that are inherent to the world like gravity they can persecute you and your friends they can even try to kill you but they must never be questioned for a very clear example of this in rowling's writing let's briefly talk about the first fantastic beasts movie so these movies are a complete tonal mess they're trying to appeal to the little kids with the fantastic beasts angle you know all the magical animals escaped can you the zookeeper track them down and get them back into his magical suitcase you know that's a nice low stakes kids story right but they're also trying to appeal to the older harry potter fans so the movies are also awkwardly about the conflict between dumbledore and grindelwald so as well as newt scamander trying to catch his mischievous escaped niffler we also get to see a fascist execute an actual baby it's just all over the place with the tone anyway midway through the first movie which keep in mind is supposed to be about a magical zookeeper er treated to a horrific execution scene as newt and his friend the ex oratina are sentenced to death by the american ministry of magic so there's suddenly much higher stakes than you'd expect so they're taken to a place called a death cell they've got a death cell to be summarily executed by being submerged into a death potion which also exists and newt and tina have to stage an escape now notable here is that tina works with these people she's on first name terms with the executioner even and they just take her off to be killed anyway at the end of the film after newt and tina are back on good terms with the american ministry tina thanks newt for putting in a good word for her and getting her her job back and you might be wondering she still wants to work at the ministry they just like just right now tried to actually execute her and she has nothing to say about that you know should the wizards have a death cell should they be able to execute people without a trial doesn't really matter i guess water under the bridge now eh the harry potter stories are sometimes mischaracterized as anti-authority even by rowling herself who has stated that she wants readers to take away the message that they should question authority she even has harry laugh at vernon for wondering why the ministry of magic can't protect them from voldemort it was so very typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the establishment you see harry's laughing at vernon here for not questioning the competency of authority but what harry and rowling do not realize is that harry is not much different from his uncle here because while harry will question the competency of authority he never questions its legitimacy he and the series as a whole are not anti-authority they are anti-the wrong people having authority one fun scene here is in the half-blood prince when a frustrated harry wishes he had the power of the minister of magic to have his secret police follow malfoy around and then harry remembers that he does actually have that power he has the power of slavery and then he orders creature to follow malfoy now written by anyone else this might be a funny commentary on how police serve those in power but no this is just our main character who wishes he was a cop ordering his slave around no harry potter is not anti-authority even when harry breaks the rules like when he sets up a secret organization for learning defense against the dark arts it's in service to the ultimate authority in the wizarding world the status quo harry sets up this club while hogwarts is under the rule of dolores umbridge who insists practical defense against the dark arts is unnecessary umbridge is presented as a strict authoritarian who ruthlessly punishes rule breakers but of course the stealth real problem with umbridge is that she represents change her real evil is that she is changing hogwarts from how it was when harry first encountered it and so harry and his pals have to break the rules in order to do what they were supposed to be doing anyway studying practical defense against the dark arts harry and his friends oppose the authority of umbridge not because they are anti-authority but because they are anti-umbridge and of course the solution to umbridge's abuse of authority is simply to replace her with a good authoritarian swapping a bad individual for a good individual but leaving the system unchanged this is the problem injected into the harry potter series by rowling's political philosophy while she can portray societal problems she cannot even conceive of societal solutions to those problems the problems might be systemic but the solutions must always be individual allow me to go on another tangent within this tangent and talk about the casual vacancy so the casual vacancy is the first novel written by rowling after the publication of the harry potter novels and it's very useful for us here for a couple of reasons firstly it's an explicitly political novel set in the real world it is centered around local council politics secondly it is explicitly a novel for adults it contains depictions of domestic violence sexual assault child abuse and neglect suicide self-harm and so on so if your response to any of my criticisms of rowling's writing in harry potter is that harry potter is for children well that doesn't apply to the casual vacancy which is very much not meant for kids the casual vacancy is set in pagford a fictional stereotypical picturesque english village and the political plot of the novel is concerned with the border between pagford and a nearby larger city there is currently a council estate full of poor people on pagford's side of the border and there's a plot in the local council to change the border so that the estate will fall on the other side this would mean that the council estate will fall outside the catchment area of pragford's school so the poor children will no longer be able to attend and the council also seek to close down a drug rehabilitation clinic in use by the inhabitants of the council estate those seeking this change are presented unsympathetically they are conservative they're small-minded they're cruel and their response to social problems is to sweep them under the rug to make them someone else's responsibility now on the other side of the debate we have the members of the pactfoot council who argue against the border change who want things to remain as they are now principle among these is barry fair brother who himself was born on the council estate before attending packford's fancy school studying hard and becoming a bank manager so he is a living example of the opportunity he's trying to preserve for the other inhabitants of the estate so rowling portrays several serious social problems caused by poverty and inequality but in response to these problems the best hair characters can imagine to do is to perpetuate the status quo the political conflict in the novel is between a side who want to actively change society for the worse and the side who want to keep things as they are there is no one who argues that the system should be changed for the better even if the more sympathetic characters win all they will achieve is a continuation of the current state of affairs along with its rampant poverty and inequality but in rowling's world there can be no systemic solution to poverty because poverty is unchangeable it's simply a fact of life there can only be the individual opportunity to escape it nobody is arguing that the poor residents of the council estates deserve a better life they only deserve the opportunity to prove themselves worthy of a better life we muggles have no sorting hat to simply tell us who is good and bad instead we have meritocracy to sort the deserving from the undeserving will you become a depressed drug addict or will you go to school and work hard and if you work hard enough even the poorest among us can become a bank manager how inspiring you too can ascend the financial system that's causing the poverty you escaped from now i'm not saying stories with social problems necessarily have to fully resolve those social problems by the end because they don't but if you're trying to tell a societal story then your society should be a living thing it should be at least potentially flexible contain at least the possibility for change both good and bad but rowling's worlds are set in stone they're dead the good in rowling's story seeks only to cancel out evil to undo evil's changes the solution to systemic problems is never to seek systemic change but to be individually nicer to have nicer bank managers to have nicer slave owners which brings us back to the slaveheads in the little christmas hats the solution to the systemic problem of slavery in the harry potter novels is for individuals to be nicer to their slaves i'm not kidding that is the cap to the slavery theme creature betrays sirius because sirius was mean to him but harry and friends learn to be nice to creature after which he serves them loyally this is the payoff here be nice to your slaves this is laid out explicitly in an article about slavery on the pottermore website so this article is titled to spew or not to spew hermione granger and the pitfalls of activism if hogwarts had a debating club what might it say on the subject of elf rights we explored both sides of the argument spurred by hermione and spew so that's right we're going to debate the pros and cons of slavery firstly the article covers hermione's argument against slavery but crucially it gets it wrong after witnessing the mistreatment of winky at the quidditch world cup hermione discovered there were house elves at hogwarts cooking and cleaning for zero pay and yet nobody seemed to care horrified to the point where she couldn't stomach the hogwarts feast she described the situation in two words slave labor while it sounds heavy-handed no it doesn't that's just what it is hermione does have a point no matter how you slice it house elves are unpaid laborers magically bound to serve left at the mercy of their respective owners the system is ripe for abuse now this is where the article really goes wrong because the system is not ripe for abuse it is abuse the problem is not that slave owners might be mean to their slaves it's that they own slaves at all this is one thing rowling and their books don't get about slavery slavery is wrong slavery is wrong regardless of what the slaves think because it's wrong to benefit from slavery at all the article then goes on to list the arguments in favor of slavery and it says miss granger is at best overzealous and her goals are at worst unattainable hermione may have meant well but at the same time did end up dragging a peaceful group into a political battlefield just because she felt that's what they should want was she helping or interfering in a culture she didn't understand oh boy haughty old hermione bringing politics into everything even our peaceful system of slavery on the subject of winky the freed slave who becomes a depressed alcoholic the article says is it right exposing elves to such a fate from here it seems downright irresponsible even if the long-term good outweighs the bad the state of poor winky ought to be a bigger cause for alarm now i don't know what to say here about this article arguing that it's irresponsible to free slaves so i'm just gonna move on the article summarizes its arguments by saying that even when people are well-meaning there's always the risk of doing more harm than good and that hermione ought to be careful tricking elves into freedom is arguably as unethical as enslavement this article doesn't exist anymore by the way they took it down for what i hope are obvious reasons anyway the article concludes with its message about being nice to your slaves before we go let's consider creature think of how he changed when treated with kindness by his new master harry potter previously he'd been bitter and unpleasant not to mention a liability to his previous owner had sirius treated him a little better things might have worked out differently dumbledore was right being kind to creature was in everyone's best interests i think we need a pallet cleanser after that so allow me to briefly tell you a different story so the discworld novel snuff is part of the city watch series which are like fantasy crime novels basically in that book sam vimes the commander of the city watch is on holiday in the countryside when he uncovers evidence of a plot to enslave goblins and force them to work on tobacco plantations so the crime to be solved in this crime novel is the slavery of a sapient magical race now most people on the disc welt think of the goblins more as pests than as people goblins are small and weird and they have cultural and spiritual practices that are difficult for outsiders to understand for instance they store all of their bodily secretions in little pots that they carry around the dominant society of the disc world is undergoing a change akin to our industrial revolution with the advent of technologies like trains and wireless communication and this society does not see goblins as useful it sees them as outsiders as savages and they're treated like vermin so when vimes arrives in the countryside for his holiday and finds that the local pub is called the goblin's head and that there is an actual stuffed goblin head mounted on the wall he doesn't think too much of it after all it's only a goblin isn't it if there's a hierarchy of cultures on the disc world in terms of power they have and respect they receive the goblins are very much on the bottom and intelligently here pratchett shows how the attitude that the goblins are somehow lesser beings has even been accepted to a degree by the goblins themselves notably we're told that when a group of goblins was rounded up to be enslaved they went passively and did not fight back as fimes begins investigating the murder of a goblin and then later the slavery of the goblins however he has cause to interact with them and in the course of these interactions he realizes that rather than being vermin they are thinking and feeling beings just like him he speaks to a goblin who is air quotes civilized she can speak his language and play the harp and on talking to this goblin on coming to the realization that they are people vimes remembers the goblin head mounted on the wall of the pub and he thinks to himself someone is going to burn and then just a few pages later vimes goes to the pub puts the landlord in a headlock and tells him that if he doesn't take the goblin head off the wall then he's going to set the building on fire and i can't tell you how cathartic this was to read after slogging through seven novels of harry potter's passive uninterested acceptance of the world as it is imagine a hero who gets actually angry at injustice and then does something about it what a treat also goblins don't have rights in the disc world there's nothing illegal about rounding up goblins and shipping them off somewhere but that doesn't matter it doesn't matter if it's legal or not and it doesn't matter if the goblins protest or not snuff says slavery is still a crime now snuff ends spoiler alert with goblins being granted rights and protections under the law because obviously if your story is about a systemic injustice and you want your heroes to triumph and have a happy ending then that injustice needs a systemic correction and of course the goblins head comes off the wall of the pub now i don't know if snuff was intended to be a response to rowling's house elves at all but the bit with the stuffed head mounted on the wall certainly makes it read as though it is if rowling had written snuff vimes would save the one goblin he met who could play the harp and the rest of them would still be on the tobacco plantation actually the first fantastic beasts movie has just such an ending in that movie newt scamander makes a muggle friend jacob who works in a canning factory it's the only work he can find and he hates it and it's miserable him and his fellow workers are as he states dying in there working in the factory quotes crushes the life out of you jacob's dream is to open his own bakery but lacks the funds to do so and can't get approved for a loan by the bank then at the end of the movie newt scamander gives jacob a bunch of magical silver eggs which he uses to set up his bakery he also leaves him a note saying he's wasted in a canning factory but i was thinking during these scenes what about these other guys still working at the canning factory don't they have dreams don't they have things they'd rather be doing than toiling away in the canning factory where are their magic eggs exactly i guess it's their fault really for not also making a magical friend who can give them some magical money and ultimately the world still needs things canned doesn't it so back in the factory you lot we've already selected the one special person among you who is worthy of a better life anyway i want now to ask a question the excuses that rowling's characters give for keeping the elves in slavery they like it it's the best thing for them if we set them free they just become troublesome drunks and these are obviously similar to real world excuses for the continued enslavement of groups of humans these were arguments once made about the supposed dangers of freeing enslaved black people in the united states for instance now rowling would argue that the elves in her books are not supposed to be a commentary on any real world instances of slavery but my question is does it matter what the intention was here and i'd argue no it doesn't if the similarities exist they exist regardless of what the author's intent was and with that said i think it's time to talk about rowling's goblins now rowling's goblins have been widely criticized as anti-semitic appearing as they do similar to anti-semitic stereotypes of jewish people they're greedy they're untrustworthy they run the banking system and the harry potter people didn't do themselves any favors in this regard by having a large six-pointed star appear on the floor of gringotts in the first movie that was uh unfortunate wasn't it you didn't want to edit that out no throw a rug over it or something now of course many fantasy stories use fantasy races as stand-ins for groups of real humans i talked in a recent video about the discworld's dwarves for instance being used to both explore lgbt issues and conflicts between the moderately religious and the more hardline religious star trek as another example uses fantasy races to comment on particular real world issues think of the alien race who are half white and half black but still discriminate against one another and are used in a rather heavy-handed way to highlight the absurdity of racism star trek also uses real world cultures as a basis for many of its races the romulans are based on ancient rome for example the klingons in their various incarnations draw from several cultures the mongol empire there's some ancient japan there's some vikings but i want to talk about the ferengi here i want to compare the ferengi to rowling's goblins now the ferengi are portrayed as a culture driven primarily by material wealth profit and exploitation they are capitalists basically they're used to represent and parody us you know humans as we exist now before we became utopian space communists but it's also not hard to imagine the same criticisms aimed at rowling's goblins being also aimed at the ferengi with their oversized facial features and obsessive greed and indeed over the years people have accused the ferengi of being similar to anti-semitic stereotypes so is there a difference here now to start i should say that it's not my place to say whether or not anyone can or cannot get offended by the way the ferengi are depicted that's not up to me but i think we can use the ferengi here to show what i'd argue is a big problem with not only rowling's goblins but her handling of fantasy races in general so in their first few appearances on the next generation the ferengi were used as recurring villains essentially they're a contrast to the humans of the federation in that they're greedy and duplicitous and very misogynistic and if this is how the ferengi remained i'd have nothing more to say here they would be like rowling's goblins what complicates the ferengi is their later appearances particularly on the show deep space nine which introduces several ferengi characters to the main cast principle among these being quark the owner of the space station's bar and what we see in this show are ferengi who grow to differ from their society's expectation of what a good ferengi should be we see quark's nephew nog insisting he wants to join starfleet rather than go into business we see quark's brother rahm organize a labor strike in protest of how he treats his employees even quark himself occasionally passes a profit in favor of doing the right thing and we see that wider ferengi society is also subject to change ferengi women previously forbidden from even wearing clothes are granted rights over the course of the series among other political changes what this all means is that we now know that though the ferengi are typically greedy and selfish and opportunistic and sexist they do not have to be these traits are the cultural and social traits of a particular society a society that is alive and is subject to change over time the ferengi become less arguably a stand-in for any one particular group of humans and more arguably a representation of how people behave under certain societal and cultural conditions after we witness the existence of ferengi who defy societal norms and the flexibility of ferengi society itself these traits can no longer be construed as simply racial traits but jk rowling as we've seen cannot write flexible societies so she cannot give any of this additional characterization to her fantasy races there is none of the depth to rowling's goblins like there comes to be for the ferengi they simply are the way they are because they are goblins their different beliefs and behaviors stem from the fact that they are as bill weasley puts it a different breed of being the traits of rowling's fantasy races are in the main racial traits now there's an ongoing conversation about the presentation of fixed racial traits in fantasy races particularly when it comes to questions of morality of a race being inherently good or evil wizards of the coast recently removed the racial alignments from the fantasy races of dungeons and dragons for instance and i agree with that move i think it's a good one not only does it create the opportunity for more interesting stories a fantasy world having certain races who are just evil by default obviously has some problematic real world parallels but back to rowling's goblins the principal goblin character in the harry potter story is grip hook who is the goblin from book one who takes harry to see his giant pile of gold for the first time and then he returns in the final book to help harry and his friends break into gringotts in order to retrieve one of voldemort's horcruxes potentially troublesome for this alliance is the history of animosity between wizards and goblins goblins are remaining neutral in the conflict with voldemort they see it as a wizard matter for wizards to deal with grip hook and ron have an argument grip hook complains about the fact that wizards treat goblins as second-class citizens and ron counters that the goblins aren't perfect either and have metal working secrets they refuse to share with the wizards or whatever also complicating things is that goblins have a different idea about the concept of ownership than wizards do for goblins whoever first creates an object is the owner and subsequent purchasers are basically rentals meaning the goblins see goblin made objects like the sword of gryffindor as belonging to the goblins so what a tricky situation our heroes find themselves in however are they going to convince grip hook to ally with them considering all their differences and the history of division between goblins and wizards and the answer is they don't harry gets griphook to work with them temporarily by promising to give him the sword of gryffindor but intends to betray him and keep the sword until voldemort is gone grip hook likewise betrays harry and steals the sword midway through the mission before abandoning him and then despite that harry and his friends successfully attained the horcrux and escape anyway so what was the point we might wonder of all that stuff about the division between goblins and wizards you know here's a history of racial conflict some racial differences that prove to be irreconcilable and then it doesn't matter anyway it's set up like harry and his friends are going to have to find some way to navigate this conflict in their world but then they don't they fail at that but then they still succeed at their ultimate goal anyway so it didn't matter it's almost like rowling's in two minds about the politics of the fantasy races in her novels she clearly wants those elements in there otherwise they wouldn't be in there but she doesn't want them to actually mean anything or affect the plot in any significant way what harry potter is really missing is a good old council scene right so there's a big evil threat to the world once fort defeated but recently resurgent and to defeat it is going to take unity and cooperation however the peoples of the world are divided they bicker amongst themselves and their divisions are exploited by the evil antagonist in order to facilitate his return to power now in lord of the rings sauron is defeated in a strictly mechanical sense by throwing the ring into mount doom but that act is only possible after the story resolves those previous divisions that it set up so rohan needs to be saved rohan needs to answer gondor's call for aid legolas and gimli need to become friends the alliance needs to mount a last stand to draw sauron's forces out of mordor only then is it actually possible to defeat sauron in harry potter similar elements are set up in their conflict with voldemort but then they just don't pay off the slaves aren't freed non-human racers aren't given equal rights the goblins remain neutral harry and griphook betray each other nothing changes in the world but then they just win anyway a lot's been said about the disappointing ending of harry potter but like a lot of disappointing endings it's not that the author was writing a good story and then just messed up at the conclusion rather it's the point at which you're forced to realize that you're never getting a payoff to a lot of what was set up it's where you have to realize that you've just been reading a disappointing story there's a scene at the end of the last harry potter book after the defeat of voldemort which is like a peek into an alternate universe where the story was actually good mcgonagall had replaced the house tables but nobody was sitting according to house anymore all were jumbled together teachers and pupils ghosts and parents centaurs and house elves now this could have been a very powerful image if defeating voldemort had meant defeating his supremacist ideology and achieving equality this scene with all the different people and races sitting where they like unsegregated would have been a fitting conclusion but the harry potter series we have never earns this ending none of these themes end up being important at all in harry's final confrontation with voldemort the centaurs join the final battle not because anything has changed for them but because hagrid nags them basically the house elves join the final battle led by creature not because anything has changed for them but because harry is just such a nice slave owner and as for harry and voldemort rowling has them talking primarily about wand mechanics you see voldemort previously couldn't kill harry because their ones share a core or something so he sought out the elder wand the most powerful wand in the world in order to finish harry off for good the problem is the elder wand will only obey its master and that isn't the person who's holding it that's the person who defeated its previous owner voldemort thinks he is the master of the wand because he killed snape who killed dumbledore who was the previous master of the wand harry thinks he is the master of the wand because before dumbledore was killed he was disarmed by draco who was in turn later disarmed by harry at malfoy manor an event for which the elder one was not present so the question is this does the elder wand somehow know that harry took draco's wand from him even though it wasn't there and will the elder wand therefore not work when voldemort uses it to try to cast a killing curse at harry and the answer is of course who cares why is this what harry and voldemort are talking about in their final showdown you know seven novels of conflict and their final fight is decided upon by the inscrutable just introduced mechanics of a sentient magical stick they may as well have flipped a coin to decide who wins the final fight so the stick decides in harry's favor and voldemort's spell bounces back at him and kills him he goes out pretty much the same as gilderoy lockhart trying to use a broken wand that backfires and hits him instead harry has no active part in any of this he's just a prop off which voldemort bounces a spell exactly the same as when he was a baby now not only does the harry potter series not earn the scene with all the hogwarts houses and races sitting wherever they please it actually undermines it in the actual ending of harry potter the epilogue set 19 years in the future which shows harry sending his son off to hogwarts with his son worrying that he'll be sorted into slytherin so they've kept slivering they've still kept slivering there now i know it's an old joke why doesn't hogwarts just get rid of the evil house but they definitely should have after the fall of voldemort when the entirety all of the sliver and student body either fled or joined voldemort but more than just slivering they've kept the segregation of the school children the desegregation was just a one-day affair i guess and i suppose the house elves got a 15-minute break after voldemort was killed and then it was back to work actually the final sentence of the final novel prior to the epilogue is harry wondering if he can get creature his slave to bring him a sandwich anyway this epilogue where all the characters have paired off and had a dozen kids all named after the characters who died in the series is embarrassing to start it's worse than the cringiest fan fiction but it's also depressing because it reveals to us that nothing has changed in this world this is presented by rowling as though it's a good thing but in reality the ending of harry potter is even more dismal and ending than in 1984. slavery was not ended equality was not achieved we're still segregating the school children according to supposedly innate characteristics we learned nothing basically but now it's 19 years later and my scar is not hurting so all is well harry potter is ultimately not the right character for the story he's in harry as a mostly passive audience point of view works in the first few novels but as the series goes on and rowling fully reveals all the problems inherent to the wizarding world harry's passivity becomes an unintentional tragic flaw we learn in the cursed child that an adult harry has become the head of magical law enforcement he is the top cop in the wizarding world it's now his day job to ensure that nothing changes in his society and he's friends with hermione who is now the minister for magic hermione did the most homework which means she gets to be the prime minister because you see the real magic in harry potter is a functional neo-liberal meritocracy harry potter is not just a cinderella fantasy it's a liberal fantasy one in which conservatives get bullied evil defeats itself and societal change is unnecessary because the slaves like it where they are harry potter asks what if a hierarchy of wealth and power but everyone was in their rightful place now before i leave today there's still one very pressing question that we haven't answered why didn't the wizards stop hitler why didn't the wizards use their magic to prevent the various atrocities of world war ii now you might say it doesn't matter it's a joke question there is absolutely no reason we need an actual answer to it but i feel like i know what's been happening inside jk rowling's mind post the main harry potter series you brats keep asking why the wizards didn't stop world war ii well i'll show you so the fantastic beasts movies are set in the decade prior to world war ii and one of antagonist gaelic grindelwald's stated motivations for his actions is to prevent world war ii not cause it but prevent it at a rally he shows prophecies of images from world war ii we see the blitz a nuclear bomb going off and a column of people marching beside a series of train cars so very classy thank you fantastic beasts movies come for the whimsical magical animals stay for the grim portrayals of the holocaust now you might say grindelwald is being disingenuous in his stated desire to prevent world war ii and is just using it as an excuse to attract people to his cause but as an audience watching it today we know that he was right his prophecies were accurate these things did happen and we also know that the wizards didn't stop world war ii and this isn't some dangerous butterfly effect messing about with the time machine stuff these events are future events for the characters in the story there's no reason they shouldn't want to prevent this but the only person who even claims to want to prevent it is the bad guy now what this means is that when dumbledore and newt scamander and their fantastic beasts are fighting against grindelwald they're fighting to save world war ii and make sure that it happens this is the anti-change ideology of the harry potter series taken to its logical end point right the wizards didn't stop hitler because stopping hitler is wrong now i've no idea how close the fantastic beasts movies are actually going to get to world war ii but rowling once stated on twitter that the series is supposed to end in 1945 which would mean that they cover all of it now i'll end with a plea from me to jk rowling today so listen joanne please don't this isn't something we need to see there's no good answer to the question why didn't the wizards stop hitler you can't write your way out of this you're not good enough just accept it the best case scenario here is that this series gets cancelled before we see what you're planning now before i go today i'm going to wrap up with a few clarifications firstly this video is not meant to be an exhaustive list of everything wrong with harry potter there's plenty i didn't mention for instance rowling once stated that her werewolves was supposed to be a metaphor for having hiv and then she made one of their main werewolf characters a predator who attacks children to purposely infect them with werewolfism i didn't mention that well i did right now as an example of something i didn't mention but you know what i mean i'd also like to make clear that harry potter's anti-change problem is by no means unique think of all the hollywood blockbusters in which the good side are those seeking to preserve the status quo and the antagonists are people with legitimate grievances about the world and a desire to change it and then they pull a cheap trick and have the antagonists just murder a baby or something so the audience knows that they're the bad guys this is art produced by the rich people who have done very well under capitalism thank you very much and therefore see all systemic change as inherently evil no matter how reasonable it might seem on the surface next i'd like to clarify that my criticisms of harry potter aren't a moral condemnation of anyone who still finds things to enjoy about the books i've compared harry potter to a bunch of other stories today and i'd like to make clear that i'm not saying harry potter is the wrong way to do things and those other stories are the right way necessarily because it's more complicated than that in the specific instances i compared them to harry potter i believe they are better or more interesting but that obviously doesn't mean they're without problems themselves lord of the rings obviously has issues with its evil fantasy races deep space nine while excellent a lot of the time has also broadcast some of the worst episodes of television ever created and the discworld novel snuff has its own problems now i'd argue it is to a degree aware of some of its problems and does investigate them in the text but at the end of the day it still is a story about a powerful white guy turning up and solving a bunch of other people's problems now while that's still very much more satisfying to read than harry potter's complete refusal to engage with his society's problems that's not a trope that is without its harmful aspects we have had a lot of those stories haven't we so yes if you still like harry potter don't worry i'm not saying you're a slytherin thanks a lot for watching today folks and thank you especially to my supporters over on patreon some of whom should be scrolling by right now patreon backers get early access to all of my videos so if you'd like more videos like this one and also early access to those videos please check out the patreon link below right that's all from me today folks i'll see you next time

Channel: Shaun

Views: 3,012,582

Keywords:

Id: -1iaJWSwUZs

Length: 105min 50sec (6350 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/GrapeJuiceVampire]

If you wanna know how the reddit HP fandom received the slavery article on Pottermore 4 years ago, it doesn't look good for them.

[u/Practicalaviationcat]

Yeesh I obviously heard about the "house elves want to be slaves" thing, but the actual text is so much worse than I imagined.

[u/IShall_Run_Amok]

I'm getting the distinct impression that the movies are better than the books because the people who made the movies knew that the books were a bit rubbish in spots, and wouldn't be film-able if they didn't refine it and make it presentable. If they had delved too deeply into the story, especially the political implications, as Shaun has, we may have been deprived of said film versions, because they might have seen it as too much of a lost cause. Because, you know. Wow. Wooooow. El oh el and roffle mao.

[u/elifreeze]

The House Elf heads being stuffed and displayed on plaques really grosses me out, and the fact that they decorate them in kitsch Christmas decorations takes it to a more heinous level. Especially when there's real world equivalents like the Belgian's in the Congo displaying the body parts of the slain Indigenous population as trophies.

[u/darklightrabbi]

Great video. I had no idea that the books had such a flimsy justification for elf slavery. Even if they were 100% correct and Dobby was truly the ONLY elf that wanted freedom, why is it such an essential part of the elf/wizard relationship that the elf not be paid for their labor? Is simply paying the elves under hogwarts a wage not something that Hermione ever brings up?

[u/zzguy2]

I love Shaun, and this video was great but he said something about "equality of outcome" that irked me the wrong way. Almost implying that it is sorta the ultimate goal of "the left". This is a convenient attack that conservatives use to paint us as nonsensical weirdos that want some 1984-esque dystopian society where everybody is forced to wear gray suits and eat the same food or something. We do want "equality" or at least more of it when it comes to political and economic power, but we can't guarantee outcomes and in lots of cases shouldn't strive for it. "From each according to their ability to each according to their need" says nothing about equal abilities or needs. Everyone naturally differs there. Some people are children, old and/or disabled for instance, and thus, have more needs. Some people might be naturally stronger and thus, can do certain tasks like lifting shit with greater ability. That's ok. The point is to not have the ones with greater ability be given (or really, allowed to take) extreme wealth and power (e.g. by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production). That would move more towards equal opportunity, which is still difficult, but maybe possible under socialism. Conservatives say they want equal opportunity but its impossible in our neoliberal capitalist world. When they say it they just mean "govt can't force me to do shit" and not "poor people should be given an equal shot at a happy life". I'm really just badly regurgitating Marx's "Critiques of the Gothe Program" here. Anyone interested should give it a read. I think it's really important theory to understand.

[u/threerepute]

shaun has done it again. i give no fucks about harry potter but i'm going to watch this because i care about his opinion.

[u/ProudPlatypus]

For context at the time. Harry potter came out when the news was having a whole thing with 'political correctness'. Both in terms of liberals over compensating by switching words out just because they can without really, doing anything to actually make things better. I don't know how many of them where actually true, or manufacture by the news, but an example I remember is switching bah bah black sheep to rainbow sheep.

And the other side of things being, people were just really fucking racist and bigoted, and whining that they might have to stop.

As an example, and one I participated in when I was younger. People would just refer to the Chinese take away as a slur, and people never pointed it out in the same way they would slurs directed at people. I personally didn't even realise the connection until I thought about it again when I was older. I can't say when people stopped, I'm sure many haven't, I just don't personally hear it as much anymore.

The kind of casual racism and meanness in the Harry Potter books isn't entirely out of line with all of that, and it's no surprise people didn't point it out as much for a long time (though it did happen, I was in fan communities at the time and it did used to come up, just less often). It just didn't stand out quite as much. It's like when people look back at some of their childhood movies. Some of them are just way worse than we remember. But there's hardly an excuse because there have always been people who are aware and did do better. Plenty of children books in the uk in the 90's and early 00's where not as bigoted as some of the stuff in Harry Potter.

It's all also feels pretty reminiscent of some of the bigotry in the children's media JK would have grown up around. She has failed at moving away from it.

Also a note on Dumbledore's sexuality and the way JK handles that too. Well it does remind me of section 28, that stopped school from "promoting homosexuality" for a good while there. It didn't end until the early 00's, but it's not like the consequences of it didn't linger for some years past that. It was a Thatcher thing, and Blair was PM when it ended. But this kind of lingering, teachers not talking about their social life to any degree (or without being edited in particular ways), espeshaly when they are gay. Well.

[u/Cmdr-Panda]

Euggh

I love Shaun too much not to watch this... but I'm so so tired of Hogwarts continuing to take up cultural real-estate.