• TraschcanOfIdeology [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    48·
    23 hours ago

    Ok I’m going to indulge in a little bit of HP overthinking but I swear I have a point so bear with me:

    It’s really fucked how JKR spent a whole book (and the only decent one in the series imo) and a bit of another one laying out how harrowing and dehumanizing Azkaban is, how Hagrid only spent like 30 days in it and was traumatized by the experience, and how unless you’re uniquely mentally strong you will become an empty shell of a human being with no hope of leaving. But then we’re supposed to believe that getting people out of there is bad.

    We are told directly by the characters, and by the narrator, that being sent to Azkaban is BAD, period. This is the whole premise of why setting Sirius up for a crime he did not commit was a horrible thing to do. But later we are also expected to believe that Sirius was the ONLY INNOCENT PERSON in wizard history to ever be wrongfully sentenced, everyone else who is or has been in Azkaban is evil, except for this one (actually very simple) conspiracy to send an innocent man to torture prison. Except they do it again, about 10 years later, to Hagrid. If Harry wasn’t there to reveal that it was someone else who had opened the chamber of secrets, he would’ve rotted out in a cell. So the wizard legal system does jail innocent people, one of them belonging to a marginalized community.

    And JKR in her infinite Blairite, neoliberal wisdom, wants the reader to think that:

    • everyone in Azkaban is guilty and the most evil wizards around. The wizard legal system doesn’t make mistakes

    • Literal forced depersonalization and psychological torture are fitting punishments for anyone the legal system deems guilty.

    So of course breaking people out from there a few books later is bad. It’s a very clear show of neoliberal “tough on crime” brainworms, being presented uncritically to a generation of children

    God, these books were even worse than I remember them being.

      • Future_Honkey [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        22·
        21 hours ago

        Ugh i was really into the books when they came out. I remember reading about the house elves and thinking how heavy-handed hermione’s crusade to save them was and so was trying to skim past those parts and (perhaps cuz of that) being surprised that rowling went to a different place (“they like slavery?? Wtf?”)

        This was probably the first time i looked askance at rowling, started looking harder at the stuff she was pennin. Im pretty sure i noticed the house elves before the gringotts goblins

    • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      13·
      21 hours ago

      For all his many faults, Eleizer Yudkowsky did write a pretty good Harry Potter fanfic wherein Harry decides that Azkaban and all dementors must be destroyed both permanently and immediately.

      Also that house elf slavery is bad actually and that Harry immediately becomes a vegan upon realizing that snakes can talk.

    • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      23 hours ago

      both of them belong to marginalized communities, isnt sirius a werewolf?

      edit: oh wait no, that’s lupin. mixing up THE ONE BOOK, oh no.

  • Hestia [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    24 hours ago

    I’m gonna go off on a weird Harry Potter tangent now.

    What the fuck is the mechanism behind house elves being freed if they’re given a piece of clothing? Is it a charm or a legal regulation in the Wizarding world? Why have clothing be the thing that breaks the spell? What is this clothing centric slavery system all about? Do wizards have to do their own laundry because if they asked their slaves to do it they’d automatically be freed?

    • AntifaSuperWombat [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      23 hours ago

      Alrighty… Did some digging into House-elf stuff and what I found is even more fucked up than I thought:

      While there is Elf Legislation, including guidelines on house-elf welfare (and even an Office for House-Elf Relocation -.-), it seems that this whole slavery thing is self-imposed by an honor-code:

      Quotes from the wiki article

      House-elves were so intensely loyal to their masters that they would not allow themselves to be set free unless their master presented them with clothes and this loyalty, in and of itself, was something akin to a code of honour among their kind…

      To symbolise their enslavement, house-elves usually wore makeshift clothes made with found objects such as pillowcases and rags. These clothes could become quite filthy, and yet the elf would not clean their clothes to further express that they had no needs which were not specifically commanded to them by the master. House-elves would punish, torture, or even maim themselves if they thought it would please the master.

      Despite the seemingly horrid lifestyle that house-elves endured, house-elves seemed to actually enjoy being enslaved. With few exceptions (Dobby being one of them), house-elves would feel insulted if their master attempted to pay them, give them pensions, or reward their service with anything except kindness. In 1995, when Hermione Granger began hiding clothes in Gryffindor Tower in an attempt to free the house-elves of Hogwarts, the house-elves felt rather insulted, and everyone except Dobby refused to clean the Gryffindor common room in protest.

      Winky was absolutely loyal to the Crouch family, and when she was dismissed for failure to keep Crouch Jnr under control, she suffered a mental breakdown, thinking that her release was the ultimate disgrace to her family.

      They were likely treated extremely well by Professor Dumbledore. In 1994, they became angry with Hermione Granger as she made attempts to free them. Dobby and Winky, who came under Hogwarts’s employ at the time, were considered disgraces to the rest of their colleagues due to Dobby being paid and receiving a vacation while Winky got drunk out of self-pity.

      House-elves are freed when their master gives them a piece of clothing, this includes armour, but it seems that jewellery doesn’t count, as Kreacher was not freed when Harry gave him Regulus Black’s locket.

      mystery-emote

      And now for the REALLY fucked up thing:

      [CW: most likely SA]

      It may be possible for elves to breed with humans as one Ravenclaw student stated that the students in the house thought Filius Flitwick was part elf, but had never been rude enough to ask (in fact Flitwick was part goblin). Irma Dugard was also described as a half-elf.

      What the absolute fuck is wrong with Rowling’s brain? lea-breakdown

    • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      24·
      24 hours ago

      Its TERF-Queen’s half-assed memory of a fairy geas. This though implies that House-elves are Sidhe, and are thus deeply scary.

      Now what I want to know is why the person being dunked on here thinks Trump’s pardons feel like the shutting down of the infinite-torture prison.

      • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        18·
        23 hours ago

        i mean, i think they are deeply scary. dont they have way more magic than the humans wizards? they just dont use it to kill every last wizard, for some reason. probably cos they’re more moral creatures than humans, i dunno

        • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          18·
          23 hours ago

          Once again asking all to embrace Marxism-Dobbyism and free the oppressed non-wizarding peoples of this earth from the tyrannical Mageocracy.