Yeah, it’s Harry Potter. Social change is the enemy in the book. At no point does anyone try to improve anything in the book. They don’t even oppose evil that much. They just oppose it when the existing evil tries to go too far by the current standards of evil.
They don’t even question systemic problems within the magic world, let alone challenging them. Everyone is extremely content with the social stratification - something emblematic of the British society. In the books everyone is perfectly content with the oppression, just as long as THEY get to be the oppressors.
I was never a fan of the series - noticed these issues right from the first book. Every subsequent book or movie I couldn’t help but noticing how cruel everyone was - even the protagonists.
But can I ask why that would put you off the series? The books are essentially a product of the society the author wrote them in, so it’s not as if they present an unbelievable social narrative, as it’s emblematic of British society as you said. Is it that you want/expect more of an engaged society from the magical world, or is it just boring to read of social attitudes that are so close to our own. Genuinely curious, as I’m not a massive fan of the series myself, but for other reasons :) I’ve never considered your point of view so it’d be good to understand
It is the potrayal of these conditions as acceptable/good. Many children of that generation loved the books and dreamed to be in Hogwarts and this magical world overall. It is given to an uncritical audience in an uncritical way.
The problem is that the first four books are “monster of the week” children’s books. Everything operates on good guy/bad guy because the world building is a shallow pond - which is fine, they’re fun children’s books. Addressing the systemic issues would have required her to actually plan out her universe, and you can really see it start to fall apart by book 5.
Voldemort tried to overthrow the status quo. He was trying to install a viscous fascist state, but that actually wasn’t important to the characters’ motivations. The only thing that changed by the end of the series was the removal of Voldie’s stooges from government. Everything went back to normal. I think they might not have rebuilt the Torture Prison, but unsure.
Almost makes you wonder why he bothered. I mean the society seemed pretty accepting of fascism before he got involved. Casually the racism displayed by random characters not even villains shows through. The man could have probably easily gotten into office. Like everything he accomplished could have probably been done in the daylight with minimal opposition.
At no point does anyone try to improve anything in the book
This just goes to show you how little people care about elves. Even after the revolution you ignore that anything has changed.
Almost nothing changed for house-elves. SPEW existed and literally only one person actually cared about it. The author also made her attempts laughably bad at raising awareness. Coupled this author sabotage with the author creating a race of slaves that want to be enslaved speaks volumes about the fact that there was never going to be real change. In the epilogue only Hermione really cares much still.
I always liked the lens of Harry as a jock
They also have time travel, so they could undo all that shit.
Wrong. In the books Neville knocks over the shelf with all the time travel gadgets and they are all destroyed. I am not joking.
Kinda, not really. You can’t undo anything that’s already been done, and what you decide to do to change things already happened, so there’s not a lot of major change you can do. You’re throwing pebbles into a river and attempting to change its course. Maybe if all the wizards used the time turners at once they might be able to change what a day max? I don’t remember what the limit of the time turners was, but either way, she didn’t implement them well, which is why I think she destroyed all of them in book 5
Just your usual reminder Just Kidding Rowling is a horrible TERF.
And those are the old reasons I alluded to in the title. Fuck her. I hope her bidet transmogrifies so it randomly starts firing staples.
Holy fuck!
Edit: I mean that in a, “That’s extremely specific, and one I haven’t heard before!” kind of way. Just to clarify. Rowling can EABOD.
I love how easily I parsed EABOD, despite not having seen it before
Just to be clear it is supposed to be “consuming out of a container made of cloth (or like material) phallic objects”, right?
Yes
lmfao same
Who on the internet doesn’t know that at this point? It’s like posting about how Lovecraft was a big old racist every time eldritch horror is mentioned!
Well, people are still giving her money so I assume they don’t know.
They just don’t care that much
She’s a billionaire tbh. I wouldn’t invite her to my barbecue, but it’s similar to most people’s opinion on chick fil a.
The only time, I’m inviting a billionaire to a BBQ is when we decide to eat the rich.
Plenty of people don’t know either. Writing it on Lemmy is kind of preaching to the choir, but try asking random people in a Fantastic Beasts screening if they know. Guarantee at least half won’t.
Reminds me of this
Reading the books you realize that there is no OSHA in the Wizarding world
“You three children have detention! Go spend a night in the forest of child-eating spiders!”
That is because injuries trough accident only happens to fat/clumsy people in her universe. Fat/clumsy is written like that because they are directly correlated in her world.
Don’t forget how women you’re supposed to dislike naturally have masculine features about them, too. If I have to read about a high school girl’s “mannish hands” or square jawline one more time, I think I might blow a blood vessel…
Some comments complaining about the house elves status don’t see how well it spills into real life.
Society didn’t care in the books, society doesn’t care in real life. Change was slow in the books, change is slow in real life.
Rowling was accurate as fuck in this regard.That isn’t how real life works and the fact that Rowling contributed that perception to millions of children is unironically worse than the TERF shit.
Do you think it’s because more people seem to defend or put stock in the elf slave stuff as being ok?
What is “It” in the question?
oh whoops, the audience or readers of harry potter. slavery is sorta a normal thing (as in, people are aware it is and was a thing) where as nose-less magic villain is more novel
This might be true, but Rowling also makes choices in regards to how she thinks we should perceive individuals who do want to change the world for the better. Hermione wants to free the house elves and is depicted as being a busybody and white knight more interested in her own sense of self-righteousness than actually improving the world. In art, just as in real life, the particular contains the universal, and we can make the logical conclusion that this is how Rowling broadly perceives people in the real world that advocate for social change.
Now you’re reminding me of those literary analysis classes. “The author used the colour blue to express their hidden and deep sadness over the loss of a burrito to a seagull…”
While we might be able to extract her point of view at the time of writing and we might assume its evolution based on her later public interactions, logic only suggests a probable conclusion based on those components, not a definite one.
Rowling also integrated parts of her own experiences into her stories. How do we know Hermione wasn’t a jab at herself or some other girl she knew? Must it absolutely be a broad perception of real life? Why can’t it be a particular and individual event to have given it inspiration to grow into something bigger?
Logic is only sound when it covers all the angles, not just the ones favorable to a set conclusion.
JK Rowling literally wrote a slave caste that loves being in servitude. Even putting aside the transphobia of her most recent past, the Harry Potter books are not leftist friendly.
Ok, I hate that you are putting me in a position where I have to defend her TERFy ass but this is not a valid criticism.
The House Elves(the eponymous slaves you were referring to) were not in any way framed as a good thing. She went out of her way to make it abundantly clear that to any modern sensibility such a class system is abhorrent. You can have unsavory elements in your work of fiction as a vehicle for your characters’ story arc and not be a piece of shit for it.
However, if you’re a fucking TERF shitstain on Twitter, that’s an entirely different kettle if fish and absolutely feel free to light her ass up on that. That and being coy about Dumbledore being gay. Should have been in the books and not implied only to be confirmed online. Absolute bullshit.
The less said about the bank goblins, the better.
This actually is a valid critique of the books and especially the films but honestly I don’t think she was consciously targeting anyone intentionally. Though whether or not there was a subconscious component to her decision to describe the bank goblins the way she did is very worth debating.
I have half past four.
Ron literally makes fun of Hermione for wanting to free the slaves. But it’s all good cause the slaves like being slaves. Imagine writing this into your children’s book.
Because systemic slavery isn’t reinforced by societal norms at all. And it’s not like Ron came around and realized how wrong he was in thinking that way at the end in some crucial moment or anything. 😒
Could have guessed that from the “isn’t the traditional British schooling system just the best?” overarching plot line.
I think it’s closer to an fbi type but yeah
So he’s worse than a cop, he’s a fucking fed
FBI is just the ultimate cop
Harry was billed in early books as this “Anti-Voldemort”, who’d lead Wizardy to a gilded age and do great things… But JK Is a Status Quo loving Neo Liberal and can’t imagine a better world. In all of her works the system is corrupt, but it’s fine because the only thing that would make it go wrong is one bad faith actor (In this case Voldemort), who will stumble upon some obscure rule that undoes him. (In this case, killing Harry who was at that time the last horcrux)
Harry becomes a cop and doesn’t change the status quo because the world as it is is the best JK can imagine it.
It’s kind of like how no one did anything about Trump, they kept waiting for him to trip over some rule that sends the system crashing down on him, but it never happened.
It never happened because the system is powerless to punish anyone, because the system is just an idea, it is immaterial.
The Electoral College isn’t going to magically vote for Hillary because it recognizes Trump’s evil. People have to recognize his corruption and change the system to combat it…
The Democrats never learned they couldn’t just wait for the System to punish the Republicans after they accumulated enough good/bad boy points
JK Is a Liberal and can’t imagine a better world
Wtf do you people think “liberal” means? Some people think it means communist, some think it means socialist, some somehow think it means fascist. I’d love to what you actually mean when you use a word that has a specific meaning of “anti-authoritarian”.
The word “liberal” is associated with the right everywhere except the US.
I think you meant neo-liberal.
I hear this a lot, so I dug a bit. What do others think?
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_Kingdom
…the derogatory connotation is much weaker in the UK than in the US, and social liberals from both the left and right wing continue to use liberal and illiberal to describe themselves and their opponents, respectively.
Is it possible, that in the rest of the world, many partys call themselves liberal and after ages of conservative governments calling themselves liberal, many people in the UK have not heard “the left” call themselves liberal?
It may also be far too general of a term to be of value.
It may also be far too general of a term to be of value.
This is my main complaint. We humans love putting things in little categories and labels, but if you’re using a word that you think means X and everyone else thinks it means Y or Z then suddenly we’re all taking at cross purposes and everyone thinks everyone else is chatting shit.
The fuck? No
Liberalism is pro-Capitalism, therefore it’s right wing.
Liberalism is also pro social freedom. We should specify economically or socially liberal, depending on the political party it may be a different percentage of each.
Liberal means centre-right to right in most of Europe, and right-wing in much of the rest of the world.
I was already contented with the fact that people here were going to circlejerk themselves into this.
Liberalism is an ideology of freedom. Freedom is a matter of circumstances. Being free to exploit others closes down your world thus it is not to be considered liberal. Neither will you be free if you get a cop on every corner or taking away your possessions in the name of equality.
You only really gain freedom through following the intuition on what would open up the world the most for the most people.
For America, the answer is more socialism. But the Democrats and the Republicans are neo-liberals.
In political party terms, a liberal is someone who supports the economic system of capitalism but wants to give concessions to the general population (free healthcare, cheap public transportation, etc) to placate the people from changing the system. The idea is if people are making a somewhat decent living then they will be less disgusted with the ludicrous amount of money the actual wealthy make and won’t revolt. Messaging from conservative parties has purposely conflated liberals with leftist (socialism/communism) ideology in order to tie it to the Red Scare and convince lower income people that the idea is meant to take more from working class people.
Social Welfare is neither historically nor currently a liberal value.
Generally the idea seems to be social liberalism, e.g. people should laregely do what they want, and since a few decades bastardized with neoliberal economics, which are the opposite of freedom. E.g. ideas like reinstating slavery, selling children, murdering people with impunity all based on an arbitrary freedom of contracts.
American liberals are far right conservative/reactionaries sprinkled with some gay rights by most countries standards.
Isn’t that American “libertarians”?
Firstly, thanks for actually giving me an answer! Secondly, that sounds insane, I’ve never heard any definition of “liberal” that means that, though I have heard that the USA just has their own completely different definition of the word. For instance in Britain the term “liberal democracy” is used to mean “not a dictatorship”. Language is about communication, assuming everyone uses your own pejorative definition of a word is not good for discussion!
Hey OP, just in case you didn’t gather this from the various other comments, in political science, Liberalism refers to a specific movement (think John Locke, social contract theory, abolishing various aristocratic privilaeges, etc) but can be applied to modern political philosophies too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Liberalism in media terms often means something quite different depending where you are in the world. But, it typically refers to something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism. Pro-market, pro-welfare (to a limited degree), somewhat focused on individual freedoms, etc. It’s a wide-ranging term and can cover anything from as far right as America’s gov’t to as far left as something like Sweden’s.
Here it means “Someone who is loyal to the status quo”
That sounds like the definition of “conservative”
open to new ideas
So the exact opposite of “loyal to the status quo”?
As far as I can tell, it seems to be a catch all for “people I don’t like”. There’s no real meaning and often times the same commentor describes conflicting idealogies as liberal.
Most hinged !comicstrips user
I only watched the first three movies and didn’t read the books. Why do people say harry was a cop? I didn’t get that impression from the movies I watched.
He is not a cop, he becomes a cop after he graduates, despite a heavily recurring theme of the books being how corrupt, incompetent, and unjust the Wizarding government and judicial system is.
Rowling never really seems to connect the dots and think, “Hmm, maybe the Aurors are part of the problem,” very much a “cops good no notes” mindset for some reason.
If you want to give her the benefit of the doubt you can assume she thinks Harry will be a reformer, but, also, in the books she never really seems to think anything but the status quo is good so probably not.
Don’t forget: Harry was groomed to become an Auror since like book 4 or 5. Old ass men were like “yes, come here 15 year old, let me tell you about my awesome job that you should definitely take once you graduate!” Like, Harry is seen deliberating over the decision and he feels coerced into it, then at the end of book 7 he’s like “okay fuck it I’m an Auror now”. Truly wonderful writing.
TBF I read the books too long ago to remember well what was the state of the depicted society except for an obvious negligence for student safety. In part it’s because I wasn’t old enough to notice that.
I think it did feel “govt bad cops good” at that point and I didn’t think about the government and cops being parts of the same system 😅
I mean the cops are also doing the bidding of the obviously corrupt minister, with the exception of Kingsley Shaklebolt, who is an undercover agent of Dumbledore.
The entire concept of “fighting dark magicians hurr durr” is never put in the context of how subverted or openly on the side of dark magicians the ministry of magic is. Sometimes it is hinted at, like how Arthur Weasley is dissapointed that the department for the missuse of muggle artifacts is chronically underfunded and wizards that like to play harsh pranks and torture muggles aren’t punished properly.
i’m gonna be completely honest with you, almost everything you said after ‘graduates’ went over my head. i have no clue what an auror is, did you mean the aurora like the thing in the sky?
auror = cop but with magic
Because in the epilogue it’s said that Harry ended up joining the Aurors (wizard cops) after Voldemort was defeated.
ah ok thanks for the clarification! wish i read this before replying to DragonTypeWyvern
So the books early on hype up the idea that Harry Potter will grow up, defeat Voldemort, change the Wizarding world for the better, and fix the corruption in the Ministry of Magic that lead to Voldemort’s Return…
In the actual ending, Harry grows up to become an Auror, which is basically the Wizarding World’s version of a cop, and they answer directly to… The Ministry of Magic, which hasn’t changed leadership… and is still ran by the people who didn’t want the masses to know Voldemort existed even whilst literal children were dropping like flies because of his douchebaggery because “That would make us look bad!”
Imagine if George Washington’s story ended up with him, having just won the Revolutionary War, becoming a soldier in the British Navy instead of becoming US Present… It’s that kind of vibe
lame, day-by-day im more satisfied with not reading harry potter (mostly cuz the magic didn’t make sense to me and i kept mixing up the names of the characters…)
It really doesn’t, especially when it’s revealed (Very early on) that magic is literally just saying the right words and waving your wand…
But how can wizards be stronger than other wizards if this is the case? Which the book states that some are…
And there are Wizards said to create new spells all the time as part of their jobs… but… how the fuck does that work if the words and wand movement are all that’s important? In most settings where it’s via some magic essence combined with force of will, it makes sense how you could conjure up spells… but here it’s like somehow being able to create a new console command for a software you can’t update or modify…
Plus the scale of what magic can do changes depending on the scene…
Hagrid, a high school dropout with a broken wand concealed inside an umbrella, can effortlessly turn Dudley into a pigboi… but learning how to take on just one animal shape is super difficult and only a select few called Animgai can do it… Sure…
Oh and an IMPOSTER Mad-Eye Moody casually turning Draco into a full-on ferret despite Animagis being this rare and overly difficult to learn thing is also bullshit… (neither Moody nor the imposter were an Animagi)
And Hogwarts Legacy just has Animagi as a common enemy type despite them being so rare, but… hey there I can forgive it because without them we wouldn’t have good enemy variety (Why are all the creatures in the forbidden forest spiders!!!)
Like, what are the rules? Because if Rowling doesn’t care, why should I?
yeah this was my kinda sense, why do fans tell me it’s simple? i like brandon sandersons system, doubly so because he has like different implementations of the same magic system in different series in the same universe (‘cosmere’)
To be fair aurors seem to be doing the job of detectives/cops/militia/commanding officers/military police/federal agents/CIs/Deputies/Marshals/Troopers/ Dementor management/whatever
It’s not just a cop. Besides the guys seem to be paid decently enough and deal with the most nastiest of the nastiest shit in the magical world. It’s a miracle people decide to do it, given the mortality rates it seems to have and the kind of bullshit they need to deal with
Are we really going to sit here, having this discussion as if Harry Potter is a real man?
Welcome to the internet
He grown up to be Cormorant Snuggle or whatever his name is?
All wizards are bad
I far as I know, Daniel Radcliffe never started in a cop flick but he did portray something close though.
aurors aren’t cops
An Auror was a wizard or witch that worked as a highly trained law enforcement official for a wizarding governing body
Oi! Youse gotta license fer dat wand?
Starts blasting spells indiscriminately
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