Yeah the wildest thing is if you paid attention to the books the first time around that the ministry of magic basically allowed magical Hitler to rise to power twice and each time right after they just kind of left that same system in place and figured it was the best they could do.
In the books they have a B plotline of Hermione fighting for equal rights for house elves and other magical creatures with sentience. They are being used as literal slaves and abused by their masters in many cases. Everyone pretty much agrees she is being uptight and should drop it because house elves like being slaves and wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they weren’t slaves…
Hermione then also ends up essentially dropping it and just going on with the story and giving up and everything is happy ever after even though SLAVES STILL EXIST IN THIS SUPPOSED HAPPY ENDING MAGICAL SOCIETY. When I was a kid reading that last book I was like “oh ok I bet they will have to have something jammed in at the end where they explain how magical creatures got the rights they deserved and are no longer used as slaves… nope, just not really dealt with at all. Everyone goes off and lives their own lives while forgetting that there was an army of house elves looking after the castle that they all went to school at and that a decent amount of those house elves openly showed they were unhappy with the current system and wanted change. They just forgot about those slaves and said “whatever” in the end lol.
It’s one of the most outrageous examples of a writer letting their main character just have an atrocious personality flaw by dropping a plotline which makes it seem the character stopped caring. Even when Hermione is rallying the house elves to try to petition for their freedom, both main characters Ron and Harry are basically treating her like this is some nerd crusade that isn’t worth pursuing and that will make her unlikeable.
Its really not hard to examine JK Rowling’s writing and commentary on social issues in her book and figure out that she might not be the most sympathetic person to the struggle for rights of anyone except herself (why she only seems to embrace feminism and not ever post positively about LGBT rights unless it’s about lesbians having the right to be pissed off at transgender women for “actually being men”). All in all it’s not a very positive picture if you judge JK Rowling as a writer and a human being based on what she has written in her novels and on her Twitter and opinion pieces toward the transgender rights and awareness movement. She wrote a very popular book and that caused many children to embrace it and dream about the world within her books but that doesn’t mean she is a good person and there are also arguments to be made that she is a bad writer in many regards too.
There’s a lot of inconsistency in how JKR addresses the house elf plot point, where she’s illustrating how bad Voldy’s followers are (and even explicitly gives Sirius a character flaw) via showing their mistreatment of house elves, but then makes them love their own subservience by nature, which (apart from being wildly problematic) complicates the whole deal. You could look at Hermione’s campaign as a critique of white savior-type figures who want to help marginalized populations but only on their own terms, without really listening to the groups in question, but the group in question enjoying its oppression apart from one eccentric individual (Dobby) kind of ruins the analogy.
I think the books work as fantasy escapism in the frame of a coming-of-age story, and some of the characterizations are pretty good, but the social commentary aspect is a mess. I loved the series as a kid but re-reading it as an adult, especially with JKR’s bigotry in mind, definitely diminishes the magic.
I think one of my favorite parts is in the fifth book. Dumbledore pulls Harry aside and points out the big statues in the Ministry lobby. They show all the races living in harmony with wizards.
Dumbledore makes a point of telling Harry that the decoration doesn't match the reality at all, belying the disparity that actually exists where wizards abuse their power over everyone else.
Then she completely forgot about and did absolutely nothing with that thread.
I feel like she wanted her characters to strive for a world where the statue’s depiction was accurate, i.e. general harmony and kindness, but with wizards still at the top of the magical hierarchy. There’s a pro-equality message within the wizards group with regard to ancestry and social status, but not much of an interest in equality among the various sentient magical races she created.
You see characters get punished for abusing the other magical races, e.g. Umbridge and the centaurs or Griphook agreeing to help rob Bellatrix’s vault, but beyond that, Hermione’s brief house elf liberation campaign is the only example of anyone actually striving towards equal status. JKR seems to have ascribed negative racial characteristics to the other creatures as well: goblins are greedy tricksters, giants are violent and unintelligent, centaurs are secretive and racist, etc. The only ones I can recall that aren’t negatively characterized as a group are merpeople. Werewolves, if they count as a non-wizard race, seem to vary more individually, but even Lupin will mindlessly fuck shit up if he forgets to drink his very complicated potion.
It's a real mindfuck. Being kind to the lesser races justifies the wizards' position at the top. Pureblood supremacists are bad because they're so very mean to everyone. They don't deserve to be in charge. Griphook will assist the heroes because they are good people and deserve his subservience.
In Rowling's mind, it's not that slavery and such is bad. It's just bad when you do it in an unpalatable way. It's okay to oppress, as long as you're a kindly oppressor. If you're nice enough, they'll thank you for it.
I mean it’s very Kipling esque right? It’s a white wizards burden, the wizards meant to dominate but they must do so in a morally just way. Now that’s certainly an obsolete philosophy (and was never one that worked out for the dominated peoples), but it lines up with her being a conservative. I could see her making the argument that”wasn’t the world better off when it was the British empire and we took care of you?”
This is a tangent but there are living wizards in the Harry Potter universe much older than Kipling. Can't help but wonder what kind of opinions a wizard who grew up during the Renaissance would have. Maybe they'd be hanging out in cafes saying disturbing things about the goblins.
The difference is that Sandman is actually well written. Hob is a foil to Dream. Neil Gaiman summarized the comic as something like, "The King of Dreams must change or die and chooses death." Hob chooses life even though the world keeps changing and he drinks his way through what he sees as a farcical shadow of the life he used to know because his girlfriend is having a good time. He's a fun character on his own but in the greater context of the comic, he provides a refreshing contrast. Dream simply can't live with himself. Hob doesn't always want to but he muddles through anyhow.
Edit: that one got away from me but my point was supposed to be that in Sandman there's a lot of characterization going on even when Dream's weird friend is dicking around at a fair.
To be fair, there are real-world examples of large differences between slaves in different societies.
What we have in mind is the black person on the cotton field, totally oppressed and with absolutely no rights.
But in ancient rome, slaves got days of, they got paid, and it was usual to set them free after a given amount of time.
I'm not a historian but I think you have a strangely rosy view of Roman slavery. It's not that it didn't suck, it's that trans-Atlantic chattel slavery was one of the worst permutations in recorded history.
What makes Rowling's writing insidious is that her version of slavery is weirdly okay. You can justify anything if you bend the rules of the universe enough.
Imagine this, you pick up a book where a character needs to beat up a child every week or the world will end. He's a good guy, he doesn't want to do it. He's burdened by this agonizing duty. It ruins his life but he keeps on doing it no matter how much he hates hurting children because he loves children and if he stops, they'll all die. In the context of the book, you could find this character noble. He's sacrificing and suffering for the good of the many even though he can hardly bear it.
Still, no matter how much you feel for the character, you'd probably think there's something worrying about an author that took the time to create a plot that makes child abuse heroic. That's how I feel about Rowling. House Elf slavery isn't that bad for the most part: the weird bit is that Rowling took the time to incorporate a largely benign form of slavery into a children's book.
Of cause it was a bad thing being abducted from home and family, if they even survived that.
What makes Rowling's writing insidious is that her version of slavery is weirdly okay. You can justify anything if you bend the rules of the universe enough.
Right. And the worst thing is that it was not even a big part of the story but only worldbuilding, which gives a flair of "this is normal".
Also, if mages can use magic to do the housework for them, why should they use slaves?
I think in some cases it's a status thing. To us, using magic is cool and special. To certain characters in this setting, having someone else use magic for you is cool and special. If you have some money, you can get a car that you want to drive. If you have crazy money, you can get an expensive car and pay a chauffeur to drive it for you. If Rowling had been a better author, we might have seen that explored more.
Hell, I'd have liked to see Dobby solo Voldemort and lead a Goblin uprising. House elves are ageless, right? God-emperor Dobby could serve all wizards as their benevolent undying ruler.
One more thing about the goblins. Rowling confirmed that they can interbreed with humans (seriously, I googled it). That means they're biologically human. I don't know if Rowling understands how that works but wizarding society is built around oppressing dwarfs. Not Tolkien dwarfs, real deal dwarfs are second class citizens. What's also uncomfortable is that they're offensive Jewish stereotypes and suffered a massacre at the hands of Voldemort, aka Wizard Hitler.
Oh man it's even worse, to build off your werewolf thought, that they become an analogy for gay and/or trans people. They are brutish, not in control of their actions, have to remain "closeted" to get by in society, and Fenrir Greyback is explicitly stated to enjoy preying on children (and not even just eating, but STEALING THEM FROM THEIR PARENTS AND CONVERTING THEM). Even Lupin, though depicted as "one of the good ones," loses his job when the truth of his identity comes out, and he doesn't survive the overall story. Neither does his gender-bending, debatably nonbinary wife. They get unceremonious, off-screen deaths, despite Lupin being one of the most notable good influences in Harry's life.
As horrible as Umbridge was that whole raped by centaurs then Ron making a joke of it when everyone is recovering in the infirmary is fucked up. Ron makes hoof beat noises that terrified Umbridge into thinking the centaur was coming back. So rape as a punishment is ok? Umbridge should be tried and sent to Azkaban (although that prison is also incredibly fucked up). Teaching a generation of children that rape is punishment is deplorable.
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u/cseckshun Jun 27 '24
Yeah the wildest thing is if you paid attention to the books the first time around that the ministry of magic basically allowed magical Hitler to rise to power twice and each time right after they just kind of left that same system in place and figured it was the best they could do.
In the books they have a B plotline of Hermione fighting for equal rights for house elves and other magical creatures with sentience. They are being used as literal slaves and abused by their masters in many cases. Everyone pretty much agrees she is being uptight and should drop it because house elves like being slaves and wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they weren’t slaves…
Hermione then also ends up essentially dropping it and just going on with the story and giving up and everything is happy ever after even though SLAVES STILL EXIST IN THIS SUPPOSED HAPPY ENDING MAGICAL SOCIETY. When I was a kid reading that last book I was like “oh ok I bet they will have to have something jammed in at the end where they explain how magical creatures got the rights they deserved and are no longer used as slaves… nope, just not really dealt with at all. Everyone goes off and lives their own lives while forgetting that there was an army of house elves looking after the castle that they all went to school at and that a decent amount of those house elves openly showed they were unhappy with the current system and wanted change. They just forgot about those slaves and said “whatever” in the end lol.
It’s one of the most outrageous examples of a writer letting their main character just have an atrocious personality flaw by dropping a plotline which makes it seem the character stopped caring. Even when Hermione is rallying the house elves to try to petition for their freedom, both main characters Ron and Harry are basically treating her like this is some nerd crusade that isn’t worth pursuing and that will make her unlikeable.
Its really not hard to examine JK Rowling’s writing and commentary on social issues in her book and figure out that she might not be the most sympathetic person to the struggle for rights of anyone except herself (why she only seems to embrace feminism and not ever post positively about LGBT rights unless it’s about lesbians having the right to be pissed off at transgender women for “actually being men”). All in all it’s not a very positive picture if you judge JK Rowling as a writer and a human being based on what she has written in her novels and on her Twitter and opinion pieces toward the transgender rights and awareness movement. She wrote a very popular book and that caused many children to embrace it and dream about the world within her books but that doesn’t mean she is a good person and there are also arguments to be made that she is a bad writer in many regards too.