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But the books completely fail to present racism as something that needs to be stopped.

I mean, why is Slytherin still a House? They're explicitly evil and bigoted, and everyone is like, oh well, that's just how they are.

Rowling could have made it make sense. She could have said that because Slytherin's trait is ambition, and people often take that too far, dark wizards tend to be Slytherin, but they can come from anywhere. And also, most Slytherins are actually good, even though that's where the bad wizards tend to come from.

But no, every dark wizard is Slytherin, and every Slytherin is bad.

Snape isn't an example of a heroic Slytherin so much as he's an unbalanced stalker who sides with Dumbledore while still being a terrible person. I could overlook that if even one other Slytherin was good, but they're just not.

Draco Malfoy's redemption arc was the opportunity to redeem Slytherin. Instead it ends without him ever actually doing anything right. His evil plan fails because he sucks, then he gets saved by Harry and everyone's just cool with it.

After all the death and destruction, everyone just goes back to school alongside the wizard Nazis. Because the bigotry and all the things that led to Voldemort just aren't a big deal as long as they stop short of full-on war.

I personally suspect that she may have been better back in the 90s and 00s, remember she has been chumming it up with brain rotten rich profligates who are fueled by suffering for decades at this point. While she most likely still had shit opinions they probably got amplified over time combine that with the internet and you have a rather toxic concoction. Also on average notable rich people tend to not be the quiet types who keep to themselves funding weird little projects, they tend to go insane like Howard Hughes.

My great grandfather wasn't worth a fraction of that type of wealth and started going through it, though he combated that type of insanity by traveling around the world. Somehow made friends with someone in the upper elements of the Soviet Communist party during that time.

I mean when you look at Harry Potter through a magnifying glass it's actually very pro status quo with a lot of issues breaking down to "the wrong people in charge" a lot of gestures made towards the sort of social problems of the society... Like look at house elves. We meet Dobby and everyone agrees that slave holding situation isn't ideal but once we meet more house elves we learn that Dobby is kind of a weirdo and that they are effectively a sentient slave race with only exceptions like Dobby taking issue with being bound. Hermione sees this as a legitimate issue as any potential elf could be a Dobby but then great detail is placed about how annoying and virtually pointless her advocacy is but the rest of her society and the framing effectively informs the reader - "don't think about house elves. Dobby is fine. It's not your problem and shouldn't be." It's framed as a problem to be solved on a small scale interpersonal basis because by and large the system works.

It's generally difficult for people to critically read a narrative that throws up that many hairpin bends particularly when the set ups are made in the book that these things are social problems... but then never paid off. That it happens a fair amount innthe books is a fairly confusing yarnball. It feels progressive in the same way a company mission statement that is not being enacted in any real way feels progressive.

A big problem is that early on it's teased Harry would become this "Anti-Voldemort" figure who renews the Wizarding World and completely restructures it, and then he just becomes a cop and maintains the same status quo that got his friends killed.

So foreshadowing that doesn't pay off because JK sucks at writing mostly

How the hell did a whole generation of kids miss that? Poor reading comprehension?

In my case, probably, but I was like 14 by the time I read the last book so I don’t really blame my younger self because at that age I definitely wasn’t looking for any deeper meaning and just enjoyed the fantasy and escapism.

thinking back about my experience with hp i didnt have the political understanding yet, to notice the injustices that i was not suppose to notice or question and i did not notice that the presented solutions are all kinda non-solutions.

all i saw was that hp fought against injustices like the fantasy nazis and that they liberated this one poor mistreated elf and became friends with the kids who were looked down on, while showing those mean nazi spawn bullies of. in a way hp has the simplistic analysis of good and bad that a child might have. while also being a flawed kid.

I mean, when I was reading the books as they came out, I expected “oh yeah obviously he’s gonna overturn the corrupt order and we’re gonna pay off on this whole elf slavery plot, which surely is written comedically just because an unflinching representation would be far too dark for a kids series.” That’s how stories like this usually end, after all.

And then, uh, it didn’t do any of that.

So I think it’s something like “it’s fairly generic, the other stories in this genre skew left, and nobody expected it to have a weird aggressively-centrist swerve a decade later.”

Is not conservatism but peak liberalism, where the problems aren't the power structures but that the people on power are not good enough. This is why at the end of the series no structural changes are done, the only thing that changes is the people in power is the Good Ones(R).

It didn't skip past me, even as a kid, in the perfect age bracket to grow up with the book series.

...

Oh, fat and ugly people are always also internally, morally, unfixably flawed.

Oh, the super blonde aryan coded people are magic nazis.

Oh, a base level of magic racism is more or less normalized.

Oh, those elves are slaves but its ok because they actually really love being slaves.

Oh, the banking system is run by cariacatures of Jews.

...

I noticed all this shit as a child, and was pestered and guffawed at for pointing it out.

This is before I even knew 'Trans' was a thing that could and does exist, before I even knew that you could be gay or lesbian or bi.

I still was, as recently as a few years ago, poopoo'd for mentioning these problems in Harry Potter... by the ... Potterhead/Disney Princess/Goes to Disneyland once a year people I used to know, who self describe as all over the gender rainbow, but aren't capable of acknowledging that these problems exist, because magical escapism apparently requires full doublethink... and those people would also routinely hypocritically mock my own mild cisgender nonconformity.

...

Yeah, the Overton Window in the US is/was so thoroughly shifted rightward, in so many ways, that 'we can have a story line that involves magic' was considered widly progressive, compared to the baseline of 'Pokemon cards are demonic because they involve evolution' and 'DnD is demonic because roleplaying is impossible and it makes you a Satanist Witch/Warlock'.

...

Animorphs was more progressive and mature.

Here kids, time to learn about the horrors of war, first hand, as told by a teenage terrorist group!

Things are shitty and messy and unpredictable, and the world revolves around how youand others handle morally gray, fundamentally complex scenarios, not cookie cutter, simplistic good vs evil decisions that are far less difficult to evaluate!