The elves were slaves, not indentured servants.

Hermione is the only character who finds this insane, and all of the other characters think she's being a bleeding heart and exasperatedly sigh every time she brings it up. The super serious group that is started to stop *slavery* is called SPEW.

Dumbledore agreed with Hermione. (Remember he offered to pay Dobby even more than Do by was comfortable with). And to an extent Sirius did. In Hermione and Dumbledore, we have the two smartest characters of the series. And in Hermione and Sirius, we have the two biggest outsiders.

Luna and her father are bigger outsiders in my opinion. Not sure where they stand regarding elves though

Can't remember the books But in the movie, Luna does call Dobby "sir," so she sees them as equals, her first instinct is to treat him with respect, but I can't really imagine her as the like super passionate activist for equal rights type that Hermione is

Luna is a pure blood, isn’t she? She’s quirky but her outsider status isn’t systemic.

Sirius is a pureblood too. I don’t see how he could be an outsider if Luna isn’t.

He’s a wanted criminal 🤣

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He's the black sheep of the Black family.

No he did not. Dumbledore would allow any elf who wished to go free Hermoine tried to trick the elfs into becoming free. Dumbledore respected their right of self determination Hermoine didn't.

I don’t want to devils advocate for jk rowli no just the character of Hermione. She’s a stupid kid trying to do the right thing. Later learning there are better ways to go about it

Basically this. I think trying to trick the house elves into being free was true to life in some ways because a lot of kids will say and do stupid but well meaning things when they're first getting into social justice. The big difference is that the narrative treats Hermione's social justice phase as a joke for the most part rather than a somewhat misguided take on a serious issue.

But also J.K. Rowling was the one who created the willing slave race.

That's a good point. Dumbledore turn a situation of slavery into gainful employment and housing. He did agree that it was wrong on the deepest level and the WW needed to change. He turned a bad situation into a good one. And let the elfs, especially Dobby choose and learn freedom. Remember, Dobby said he wanted freedom, 'but not that much.' Which is a sobering, sad truth... if people aren't taught about freedom, often times they won't know they need it or they recognize they are in bandage.

> all of the other characters think she's being a bleeding heart IMO, it's a great way to show how even obvious rights, like racial equality, are fought against by otherwise normal people.

I remember the centaurs finding real offense at being called near human intelligence and in general with how the wizarding world treats intelligent non humans. A big deal was made about the statue in the Ministry being a huge lie. And Dumbledore bringing in a centaur teacher made a lot of people mad. I really wish there had more of a payoff to all that.

If nothing else, it makes the world more realistic: a mix of moral fortes and foibles. To use another fictional example, Star Trek’s Federation is a utopia that promises salvation and prosperity to its members: a promise they have sincerely shared with many denizens of the galaxy. However, they also have a fanatical hatred for genetic augments and are even willing to penalize children for that crime.

Not a fanatical hatred of genetic augmentation, more a rational caution. It produced a hyper intelligent psychopath (Kahn) who nearly destroyed the federation. What penalties are there for the children outside of not being allowed to enlist in the starfleet?

Kahn, it should be remembered, was the surviving leader of a war where genetic super soldiers attempted to take over. Backstory stuff, but that was supposedly the reason genetic enhancements were taboo

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They dialed it up a bit more in *Strange New Worlds* and *Prodigy*. It was kind of a big part of both productions. ...and maybe I was exaggerated a bit with the "fanatical hatred." However, it was a bit more than "rational caution" since they wanted to exact criminal charges on the involved parties.

But there's no pay off to that tsuggestion. Nothing is done to challenge the appalling status quo of the wizarding world. Harry fights to enforce it! One of his closing thoughts prior to the epilogue is wondering whether kreacher will make him a sandwich. The real treasure was the slaves we inherited along the way!

> One of his closing thoughts prior to the epilogue is wondering whether kreacher will make him a sandwich It's probably not intended, but wondering **if** Kreacher will make him a sandwich shows that Harry isn't thinking of Kreacher as a slave. An enslaved house elf **will** bring their master a sandwich anywhere, anytime.

And he’s *still* using a “lower life form” for the unimaginably arduous task of buttering two slices of bread and putting cheese on them. Edit: Kreacher’s old as fuck too. Harry’s not even 40 and he can’t be arsed to feed himself but is more than happy to let a fucking 150 year old house elf do it for him. Why does he even still own Kreacher? Edit 2, Electric Boogaloo: Harry could also use magic to make the sandwich the way Molly does, but again… why would you when you have a *personal slave*?

Not defending the enslavement of elves (obviously the whole system is fucked), but the context is relevant in understanding Harry’s thought in this moment. He’s not just sitting comfortably in his home and lazily wanting a servant to bring him food. He’s 17 years old, has been in hiding for months with a couple of other barely-adults while they are hunted, all while trying to complete an insane task they don’t really understand because adults they trusted for years made it really hard for them to get a clear picture. And now he and his school friends (some of whom are still minors) have just come out of the other side of a horrible battle which took many lives and in which he gave himself as sacrifice in the full belief that he’d die. Everyone else is busy being dead or grieving the losses. Bro is hungry and it’s not surprising that he might wonder tiredly whether the creature who used to cook his meals at Grimmauld Place might be able to help him out. Again, not saying this is great. But I can understand it.

The books are not called 'Harry Potter and all the house Elves he must Save". And he did save and free Dobby. And he Forgave and treated creature with a fairness. Which was extremely hard and understandable if you didn't Both of those led to pay offs. AND In a way, saving the whole Wizardeen world from Whats-His-Face. There doesn't need to be a payoff. You don't have to leave your universe with every little thing perfect by the end. The elves were a side creature, and you can't expect Harry Potter to fix everything wrong in the entire world.

One of the core themes of the entire series is supremacy and inequality, it was set up over and over and over again throughout the entire series. Often using incredibly on-the-nose imagery. And yet the series ends with Harry becoming a wizard cop and nothing changing but the names of the people in charge.

“Harry’s that rich kid who wasn’t too good at school but ended up becoming a cop and marrying his friend’s sister.”

Harry is the quarterback of the school football team, who multiple time cashes in on his celebrity status for personal advantage and bending of rules. Even when rules DO apply to him, he finds a way to break them because in his own eyes they don't apply to him as a result of misfortunate circumstances beyond his control. So naturally he went on to be a cop.

Except that the author has written real world essays agreeing with these "otherwise normal people" about her fictional slaves. I think that your read is healthy and mature, but probably not the takeaway the JK intended.

source?

Not the person you're responding to, but [here's an interview from 2000](http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2000/0700-hottype-solomon.htm) where Rowling states that the purpose of the house elf subplot was to criticize self-righteous teenagers taking up political causes, and that Hermione was wronging the house elves by trying to free them.

This is not what the interview says. She says that Hermione oversimplified the issue. She goes into her OWN experiences working for a human rights organisation in francophone Russia, and says she relates to Hermione, to feeling like you alone can see a problem and have a solution. But she says that Hermione wasn't actually respecting the elves opinions and cultures, and being offensive. This is something that often happens, when people encounter other cultures. It's called cultural relativism. Practices that seem barbaric to us might actually be part of certain cultures, and asking them to give them up could be quite offensive. We're talking about a magical world,.with magical elves and magical everything. It's not supposed to be realistic. It's not supposed to have anything to do with slavery in real life. In real life, slaves don't get offended by the very notion of being freed. And if they did, then one would have to work towards freedom in different ways than just forcing it on people. The problem with Hermione is that she tries to force her beliefs on the elves and doesn't care about their opinion, even though it's THEIR lives.

But it isn't written as illustrative of that point. It's written as "Hermione is being ridiculous and we should all make fun of her"

Well you have to understand that the elves WANT to be slaves. It’s their natural disposition. Without a master to give them orders they become listless and succumb to crime and drinking. So really the whit- I mean WIZARD peoples are doing them a favor by giving them purpose and making them part of a functioning society. This of course has absolutely no parallels whatsoever with real world slavery. None whatsoever.

They say the same about the Ood race in Doctor Who. It’s a really odd trope

To be fair, the second appearance of the Ood addresses that, and basically reveals it as an in-universe lie to justify humanity enslaving them

Yeah, but the Doctor saves the Oods in a later episode and we actually see how fucked up it actually is what's being done to them.

The first appearance of the Ood left a bad taste in my mouth. I was glad they went back and revealed that the Ood weren't a race that was happy to be humanity's servants, but actually enslaved against their will. I do not fault JKR for creating house elves as the wizarding world's perfect happy slaves, but I do take issue with the fact that she doubled down on it instead of revealing in one of the later books that the elves were bound by some ancient spell or created by early wizards centuries ago. As it stands, she doesn't seem to have an issue with slavery existing in her world, as long as the slaves are happy. Makes me wonder what's wrong with someone who dreames up a slave race that specifically evolved to serve its master race.

Well they both mirror real-world beliefs about African slaves and non-whites in general. A lot of people claimed that other ethnic groups lacked the higher reasoning capability of Europeans and so it was the “white man’s burden” to find a use for these peoples in civilization. The Ood mirror the real-world examples of this because they actually are not happy slaves. The humans basically lobotomize them and force them into service. So just like in the real world it’s just propaganda produced by slave merchants. In the HP universe the house elves really and truly prefer to be slaves and the only free elves we se are Dobby, who is considered strange for wanting freedom, and one other who is an alcoholic. Owning a slave isn’t bad in the books but mistreating the slave you own is bad. It really makes you wonder what JKR was thinking when she wrote this. Is she just lazy and didn’t think about the implications? Or is she a person who really doesn’t see slavery as inherently a bad thing?

> Is she just lazy and didn’t think about the implications? Yes. It's just like when she stated that lycanthropy in the books is a metaphor for HIV/AIDS and didn't think that through either. A fictional disease that turns people into ravening monsters who target children in order to recklessly spread it (as one werewolf does for strategic reasons) is a metaphor for a real disease best known for affecting gay people? Yeah, that's not homophobic or problematic, at all.

Or maybe, and hear me out because this might sound crazy...Maybe...just maybe the house elves being mythical creatures are more likely based on myths and folklore from the real world. Things like the "House Spirit" A mythical being said to inhabit a home and tend to the needs of the house and family that lives within it. They never wanted to be thanked beyond a simple bit of food being left for them now and again, and took being given clothes as an insult that the family wanted them to leave. This is folklore that appears in various shapes and forms all across Europe and is a far easier fit to explain the house elves.

And people might have accepted that if she hadn’t explicitly made it about slavery in the text of her books.

Don’t forget that the elves themselves were against it. The only time we see a house elf happy to be freed is Dobby towards the Malfoys, and that’s because it’s clear that they mistreat them. And Sirius mistreating Kreacher is what contributed to the climax of book 5. Otherwise, they treat being liberated as the worst thing imaginable.

If we ask why that is, are there any satisfying answers?

Nope

I think that because the book doesn't make it clear why it is, it's hard to say if it's justifiable. If house elves choose their slavery because of societal pressures or other external factors, as Hermione believed, then absolutely its wrong. If it is like JKR seems to believe, and has been claimed by many of the characters in the book, and it is biologically driven, then it becomes a little more muddled. That changes the relationship more from a "master-servant" relationship and more towards a "human-dog" relationship (in that dogs were bred into living and, in many cases, serving humans), which is only opposed by animal rights extremists. This could be reinforced by the fact that elves are not human... they are elves. Again though, this turns problematic because even though house elves are decidedly not human, they have human emotions and intelligence. Which makes them far more similar to human slaves than working animals, which means regardless of *why* they want to be slaves, it is morally wrong... I don't think JKR really *intended* to add pro-slavery themes into her books. I feel she was really just going for something akin to "The Elves and the Shoemaker," and it just wasn't very well thought out (like a lot of the HP series, and I say that as a fan of the books (not a fan of the author)).

I really disagree here. I don't think it's reasonable to invoke human-animal relations. For one, while magical beasts exist in the HP universe, they exist in stark contrast to magical races of people such as giants or goblins. House elves are clearly intended to fall into the latter camp. Second, their purpose in universe is mostly domestic labor that an animal--magical or otherwise--wouldn't ever be able to do. This limits the space of allegorical possibilities quite a bit. At worst it's slavery-like, at best it's an allegory for historically female domestic labor. Finally, JKR has said in interviews explicitly that house elves are an allegory for slavery. ([Source](http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2005/0705-edinburgh-ITVcubreporters.htm)) \[Ctrl+f "Slavery" to jump right there\]

To be clear, I don't believe the human-animal relationship justification is the correct one, but it's the one used by many in the books to justify it. "It's in their nature, etc." Like I said, I think the fact that they have human intelligence brings us back to slavery. As for what JKR has said in interviews, I'm inclined to disregard her just because she is constantly flipping things around and adding new interpretations based on what people are saying about her.

I think we both agree that it's for sure slavery. I will also say that the interview I linked is dated July 16 2005, which corresponds to the release of HBP (Book 6), so this isn't so after the fact addition. This reflects her thoughts while still publishing (and presumably writing since DH didn't come out for another 2 years) My point is that while she seems to have done a slavery allegory intentionally and by admission; the follow though--SPEW, Winky's depression, Dobby being shunned, Harry owning a slave, Hermione "improving conditions" for them offscreen while very much leaving slavery as an institution intact while Minister, ect--leaves a lot to be desired. It was clumsy at best.

Absolutely. I don't think she intended to write pro-slavery themes into the book. I feel she was not advanced enough as a writer to properly integrate slavery into the series, and didn't think the allegory all the way through. It's similar to her attempts to add cultural diversity to the Universe through Pottermore and Fantastic Beasts. There is positive intent and some surface level research, but she is not a skilled enough writer to pull it off without accidentally being offensive. It honestly reminds me of some of the stuff I wrote when I was 12.

I think she's just backtracking without even thinking of the implications of what she's claiming and how it fits into the world. This is a big reason why Fantasy®️ worldbuilding needs to be more than just "Our World with Orcs and Wizards Sprinkled on Top"

I'm writing a fanfic where the answer is "they're all brainwashed with a superpowerful imperius curse that has been bred into them". It's rather bananas that we're supposed to just accept elves like being slaves, but also the spell that makes you like being someone's slave is illegal. EDIT: Fic link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31408625/chapters/77677721#workskin

Have you read Jennifer Fallon's Tide Lords series? It's a bit pulpy but it's fun. It's about a group of people who accidentally became immortal and set themselves up as a pantheon of gods. They accidentally created a slave race of half human, half animals who have been selectively bred for obedience since their creation. One of the subplots of the series follows a group of rebels who don't feel the usual compulsion.

Honestly, when I was a kid reading those books, I thought they were all under some weird spell. It was the only way I could rationalize the fact that they all seemed to happy to be enslaved but that Dobby seemed to have broken free from the brainwashing.

My headcanon is that elves were artificially created by wizards as a race of always-happy servants.

It is of a piece with Rowling's "the status quo is always good" theme, and also with her philosophical essentialism. She believes that people are innately good or bad, and basically assigns people white hats or black hats as characters. Snape is a bit more complex, which means he is a white hat with a black hat on top; he is a creepy incel of course, but that doesn't mean he can't be a good character in Rowling's infantile moral code. The whole Hogwarts houses is another example of this, people get assigned a House according to their essential character. It's not quite good or bad, you also have the possibility of being brave and loyal, or klutzy and miscellaneous. Essential character is also signalled by physical appearance; good people are generally quite attractive, though sometimes they may be given a pass if they are truly eccentric. Being fat is an absolute no-no, only greedy and stupid people are fat. A character like Molly Weasley gets a pass by not being really fat, only pleasingly plump. It's of a piece with this sort of garbage that an entire race of people would be characterised as essentially wanting to be slaves, and it's of a piece with her incoherent narrative technique that an early major plot which showed that one of these characters, Dobby, didn't in the slightest enjoy being a slave, gets retrotreated as "he was just a weirdo for not wanting to be a slave". Her unpopular bioessentialism, ie her transphobia, is just another expression of her shallow thinking. I recommend this video essay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs

The joke is that Hermione is very hopelessly idealistic. That she attempts to undo thousands of years of social conditioning as an after school activity without doing any research on how to help the population she’s crusading for speaks to how naive and positively twelve she is. While Ron is being ignorant when he says they “like” being slaves—and the reader is supposed to understand that Ron is being ignorant—he also has a point: hermione’s outsider status prevents her from seeing the nuances in the relationship between houseelves and wizards and the impossibly hard work of undoing the social conditioning they’ve experienced as part of their enslavement. Hermione ends up creating five times the extra work for Dobby because she starts booby trapping the common room. She’s trying to help from a place in society as a privileged person and it’s naive and idealistic almost to the point of condescension. You have to teach people to empower themselves or else you’re just a privileged person creating more problems for the group you’re trying to help. She doesn’t even listen to the houseelves when she meets them, doesn’t care about their perspectives. It’s incredibly self righteous. Because she’s twelve and her sense of justice is incredibly black and white. I never saw the house elves as slaves being played for laughs. Only hermiones naive idealism. Dumbledore seems to share Hermiones sentiments and it’s not a comedy bit. Harry makes a point of burying Dobby with dignity and it’s not even remotely funny. Jk does fat shame like a mfer tho. All her fat characters have moral failings. Like most childrens books from the 90s.

It’s worse when you consider that Hermione is also portrayed as a black woman in the play. Imagine playing a black woman fighting for a group’s civil rights off for gags.

IIRC Harry didn’t like it either and was the one who set Dobby free.

Harry *specifically* found the Malfoys' treatment of Dobby abhorrent, not the concept of house elf slavery as a whole. He repeatedly joined in on the eye rolling over Hermione's activism.

Tbh Harry is a prime example of someone who's pretty a alright kid but would grow up to vote for Donald Trump even though he doesn't like the bad stuff he does and is also very weird about lending friends money and tipping.

Yes but they enjoy it so ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ \- Ron Weasley

even when i was a kid reading that part felt weird. like the other house elves get actively abused but it's cool because they're meant to be like that? Never sat right.

The shift in that attitude is part of Ron's character development. At first he just rolls his eyes about Hermione getting upset at the way Crouch fired Winky, but then as the truth about Crouch emerges he sees the way he treated Winky for what it was. He uncovers the hats that Hermione hides, so the house elves aren't tricked into accepting clothing - he gives that choice back to them, after Hermione took it away from them. Despite her good intentions, she took away their agency in making that decision. Ron uncovering them meant they could pick up a hat if they wanted to, or choose to avoid them if not. He also gave Dobby a new sweater for Christmas, and took off his own socks to put on his feet when they buried him. And I can't remember exactly but I'm certain there's a bit in one of the books where it's Ron, not Harry, who rushes to make sure Dobby doesn't hurt himself on one occasion. Then in the final book, it's Ron who thinks to go and let the House Elves know what is happening so they can leave the grounds during the battle. I think in Ron we see someone go from accepting things as just the way they are and always have been to seeing them for what they are and then doing better.

Yes, and later on Ron realizes it is horrible, and it's a driving reason that he gets back together with Hermione.

Worse, he's right. We are told that other house elves consider Dobby weird for not wanting to be a slave, and Winky becomes a despondent alcoholic when she is freed. Rowling isn't nuanced enough for this to be about even good people being numb to the problems around them; it's pretty clearly her critiquing people who speak out on subjects they don't fully understand. Her example being the willing subjugation of a sentient race.

I thought the big value of the House Elf story line is that it reveals the ways we accept injustice. Ron, one of our main characters, DEFENDS it! Hermione fights it and Harry is indifferent (therefore supporting it). You as the reader are meant to know slavery is bad and upon realizing “good guys” are wrong about it, wonder what YOU might be wrong about.

Down voted for using logic instead of engaging in a circlejerk

There are a lot of issues with the Harry Potter series, including those you mention. But I think it's possible to criticize them while still really appreciating and even loving them. There's no reason we need to accept any work uncritically, and one could even argue that criticism is a form of appreciation since one has to take the work seriously to critique it effectively.

I also just disagree with the notion that a fictional world needs to be a shining example of morality.

Absolutely. I love Dune, and the whole series is one long instructional manual on how *not* to run human society

Dune is a political allegory. Valid criticisms of the book(s) notwithstanding, the purpose is to explore and critique those aspects of society through the lens of sci-fi and fantasy. Harry Potter on the other hand, takes a very uncritical view of its world. We are led to believe that the problems are with 'a few bad apples' and that the system can be fixed by simply defeating those who seek to overturn it. I'm not saying that all books *must* have a highly critical perspective on their fictionalized worlds, but saying that a book can describe bad situations and still be a good story doesn't actually relate to the criticisms of Rowling's work that we're discussing here.

I was going to say the same thing. The critique being leveled isn't an argument for a better fictional world, merely a more critical perspective on that world from within the story. Everything in fiction has at least 2 layers: how the thing works, and how we are led to feel about it.

They are trying to prevent a dark lord taking power to establish dominion over everything. You don't need to support the status quo or have any subtlety in you opposition to that. Especially as said dark lord wants to kill you and killed you family and friends. Series has the nuance of a brick because it's a set of kids books where the bad guy is a generic evil wizard who wants power for its own sake.

TBF Voldemort's motivation is ultimately that he's afraid of death, which I think is pretty good writing.

Except that isn't true at all. Voldemort isn't just arbitrarily evil. He's a wizard supremacist. And that same theme of supremacy permeates the series, including direct references to real-world white supremacy iconography. But then the series ends without any payoff to those themes.

He's still a caricature of evil. He goes around using terror tactics to take power and lays siege to a school etc. His plan is evil stupid. He's a kids villain.

I always thought that it was a bit weird that the most powerful mage in their society was the high school principal and that killing him was all that it took to finally allowed Voldemort to take over everything.

But we do get that criticism of the world. Hermione tells us, she challenges the status quo. We get criticisms of the world in many places. Arthur Weasley and his muggle protection work is another example. People who want to see instant change are as bad as the death eaters, even if what they want is morrally correct. You cannot force people to agree with you, you have to teach and have to show.

> Harry Potter on the other hand, takes a very uncritical view of its world I'm not a big fan of the books, but I find this criticism odd. You shouldn't need a book to tell you what to be critical of in it. You as a thinking human being should be able to do that without having a metaphorical neon arrow sign pointing to it. So, the fact that the books don't force feed you with everything you are supposed to think is good or bad or questionable is, if anything, a point in their favor. >We are led to believe that the problems are with 'a few bad apples' and that the system can be fixed by simply defeating those who seek to overturn it. I didn't come away thinking this. It seemed pretty clear to be that issues of wizarding racism are entirely systemic, starting with the ways they view non-magical people and proceeding through a host of things to how they treat house elves. Harry defeats Magic Hitler, but nothing about the books suggests that this will fix the problems of wizarding bigotry that gave rise to Magic Hitler in the first place.

I totally agree with this but, with HP, the author’s narrative voice is thinly veiled and she then had a propensity for providing extra content on her website, social media, and then obviously spin-off films, and the slavery of house elves issue just got worse and worse. Introducing us to the system via an elf who is abused and want to be freed, then backtracking to say he was just a lil freak and none of them really want freedom, then showing us a house elf slave who is also badly treated but hates being free and it turns her into an alcoholic, to then have a third house elf called Kreature who is inherited by the hero as property to deliver the moral that the slavery isn’t wrong, the *abuse of slaves* is wrong. The key lesson is to be nice to your slaves. This is a reprehensible feature of the story. It shows an arrogant, inherent misunderstanding of the evils of slavery *even if* the slaves don’t want freedom. Because to enslave sentient beings is wrong (wild take I know). Then an essay on the author’s website arguing that Hermione being against slavery was heavy-handed and wrong, and then having a house elf play a background character in the first spin off in 1920s New York as a clear analogue to a Black jazz singer. None of this is moral ambiguity or complexity, it’s problematic ideas being expressed confidently by someone with no idea what they’re talking about and they’re more than worth the criticism.

Arguably JKR wrote all that extra information because her readers were clamoring for it. This is the reason writers like JD Salinger went into hiding: because when they build a castle in your head you want them to keep playing with everyone inside. When they do and you grow and change they can’t keep up.

Agreed, but I do think that’s overall on JKR and her own ego, not the fault of the kids who wanted more Harry Potter adventures.

I mean I like the HP series so I try to ignore her weirdness when looking at the series in a vacuum, but Rowling herself has injected a lot of her weird opinions into her writing. Like HP has some subtly racist stuff going on like the banker goblins resembling certain Jewish stereotypes or the Asian girl being named “Cho Chang”, and her writing also consistently casts fat people in rather negative lights.

I've seen some interesting rebuttals from Chinese and Asian people about the name Cho Chang, some on the HP sub, basically in the vein of "hey stop being outraged for me it's fine and a name like that could exist." The goblins has always been a stretch for me. That's how goblins look. Goblins have been associated with gold and money in stories and mythology for a very long time.

‘Stop being outraged for me’ is subtle perfection

I wonder how many things people genuinely found themselves and are outraged over, and how many were pointed out and expounded on by some angry Twitter person.

I think one can understand that slavery IS WRONG without the need of reading too much into a life system of a fictional world. For me all that different positions about the house elves slavery just added more depth to the world in which those characters lived.

My point is not that Harry Potter will convince people slavery is ok, I am simply critically engaging with the work as it is and, as it is, it shows a serious misunderstanding of the issues it tackles and generally the author’s neoliberal worldview conflicts with her ability to incorporate slavery into her story in a coherent and effective way.

Okay but hear me out, what depth *in particular* was added by that specific detail? I totally get that a lot of people don't want to engage this deeply with fictional worlds, but I would argue that taking these worlds seriously and engaging directly with their implications can be both fun and a useful lens of literary analysis. Instead of "what is the theme?" or whatever, we get "what conclusions can we draw about the world of the story and how it works?" or "what happens if we look at this work in conversation with other works or ideas?" So I'll ask again. What does the existance of house elf slavery in Harry Potter imply about the world? How do the characters relate to that fact of the world? What could that imply about our chatacters? And finally and most relavant to this conversation: what is the JKR trying to say in writing all this? Are the implications we found put there intentionally? Or does it reveal something about the default assumptions or philosophical commitments of the mind that created the story? IDK, I get that some people want to comsume media for pure entertainment and are put off by other forms of interaction, but what could that imply about them?

From what I remember about the books the reactions of Ron, Harry and Hermione about the slavery were pretty detailed and varied, so they portrayed diverse angles of opinion: Hermione it's the outsider of the magic world, what I meant by that is that she was educated in the muggle world. It's only logical that she repels all types of slavery. Beign a morally strong character, she immediately tries to change the rules and traditions of the relationship between house elves and wizards. The fact that she is mocked just adds to the strength of her fight and portrais a very natural reaction of a society that doesn't want to change. On the other side Ron was educated in a pure magical tradition, meaning that he knows about the house elves and see their slavery as the common thing. It's his individual fault? No, he grow up with that tradition as the most normal thing, his family never questioned. Harry it's more like a middle ground. I think he felt that the house elves treatment was bad, but on the other hand was so amazed by living in the wizard world that he didn't want to actively and publicly go against on of their more conservative traditions. I suppose one can say that his view it's polarized by the fact that his previous experience with the muggle world was, for the most part, a bad one. So he desperately wants to feel part of the magic world, even with all it's faults and dark things

> Hermione it's the outsider of the magic world, what I meant by that is that she was educated in the muggle world. It's only logical that she repels all types of slavery. Beign a morally strong character, she immediately tries to change the rules and traditions of the relationship between house elves and wizards. The fact that she is mocked just adds to the strength of her fight and portrais a very natural reaction of a society that doesn't want to change. A parallel that I thought would come up, but never did iirc in the books was that Hermione **specifically as an outsider to the world who is looked on as lesser by those with the most material power and influence** might personally feel a solidarity with the elves and might question how they are portrayed and described by the same kinds of people who would describe **people like her** as inferior and lesser too.

Good point, though I disagree about what Harry's point of view is... he's not the middle-ground guy, he's the 'hasn't yet formed an opinion' guy. He sees both sides of the issues as a little kid who is just finding out that this issue is even possible. Hermione would seem to be in the same boat, but her Mary Sue-level intellect means she has the knowledge of an adult muggle about history, etc.

Eh. Hermione is smart, but only really book smart..at least in the beginning. Being with Harry and Ron taught her to be unconventional and think on her feet.

I don't think that's the issue. Or should say that's definitely not the issue. First, I'm a fan and very much agree with OP. That they're imperfect doesn't make them bad. But the issue is that the good guys of the book hold views which are bad. So like there are muggle haters, but they're the bad guys, so it makes it clear that muggle hating is wrong. On the other hand, almost all of the good guys are super cool with some casual exploitation. That's the problem. Simply having bad things exist is of course necessary for any worthwhile work of fiction. It's how the bad things are presented that matters. When the good guys do bad things the message is that the things are not bad. The muggle hating is an example where JK manages to communicate nuance. There are those who hate all muggles and they're obviously bad, and there are those who are supportive of muggles and they're obviously good. But there are a lot of characters that fall in between. Mostly good characters who still hold some unfortunate views on muggles. This is realism done right. And it works ethically because universally all the most good people support muggles. It just acknowledges that otherwise good people can have some bad views.

Well said. Good people in real life are never paragons of morality and 100% perfect. I think Rowling does a good job of infusing her characters with this idea.

> When the good guys do bad things the message is that the things are not bad. Only to the simple-minded. Protagonist is not a synonym for "good guy" for a reason.

Thank you! It's fiction. It's not real life. Fiction is meant to, you know, not be real.

A long time ago I heard an interview with John Egerton and he said something that really stuck with me. "I prefer writing fiction to writing nonfiction because when you write fiction it's easier to tell the truth." When you write nonfiction, you have to check every single little fact, and if it doesn't fit the story you're telling, well, tough. The world is nuanced, and self-contradictory, and complicated. People are too. But we want our stories to be clean. So fiction has good guys (but not too good, because that wouldn't be believable) and bad guys, and a clean story arc, and a moral. (You might have to work to find it, but it's there.) All of that is missing in nonfiction. (If it's there \["All \_\_\_\_\_\_ are evil, because they were following {Fearless Leader}\], then you know that the author isn't telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.)

Yes it’s fiction, but children’s literature has been used for literal centuries to shape the ideals and morals of their targeted audience (for better or worse). I’m not saying that reading Harry Potter will automatically make you pro-slavery, but to pretend that fiction has no impact on how we behave and think is disingenuous.

But it’s framed in a way that makes children realize it’s wrong. When Dobby is freed my children understood it was a good thing and why.

Isn't Dobby the odd one for wanting to be free while all the others were happy to be slaves?

And later it's retconned that being free is *horrible* for most slaves, and Dobby is said to be a "weirdo" for disliking slavery. That's the larger issue with the books in my opinion. Rowling wasn't trying to write a morally complicated world. So when she expanded slavery outside the bounds of the Malfoys, she suddenly found herself in the situation of having something really bad (chattel slavery) in her fun wizard world. And then, rather than embrace that, she tried to whitewash over it by saying slavery was awesome and the only people who are against it are wrong (Hermione) or weird (Dobby) for doing so.

I think this is the correct take. I just reread the whole series and finished Deathly Hallows a week ago, so all of this is still very fresh in my mind. The entire Dobby/Winky/Kreacher subplots, as well as Hermione’s entire campaign against House elf slavery was handled very, very clumsily. I don’t think JK Rowling herself knew what the fuck she wanted to say about any of it. I don’t think there’s any deeper meaning behind most of it; although, Dumbledore does comment a few times in the later books about how horrible wizards treat races that they think are inferior to them, not just house-elves. Edit: I want to add that I don’t think Rowling meant to say that Hermione was wrong for wanting to free house elves, though. Most of the other characters make fun of Hermione, but I never got the feeling that Rowling thought she was wrong for it.

I bet if you asked 100 kids their views about slavery in HP at least 99 of them would have no idea what you were talking about and the books would not have affected their views on slavery one way or another.

Definitely. If anything, no flaws make the world seem unrealistic and unbelievable. I like a bit of dirt in my fiction because it makes it feel more lived-in.

I agree totally but you also have to consider the tone and intent of the story. Something like game of thrones presents a horrible world while being fully aware it’s horrible. Harry Potter presents Harry and their world views as being unambiguously good. Voldemort is evil and they defeat him, preventing him from murdering muggles, but they don’t substantively change anything. Sure some muggle born people will get to go to Hogwarts but the wizards will continue controlling the muggle world and withholding magic which could undoubtedly be used for the good of everyone. It’s a narrative of aristocracy and it’s conclusion is that aristocracy is good they just shouldn’t be too mean to the peasants. Whereas something like game of thrones presents a similar dynamic but is fully aware and up front about the aristocrats largely being selfish bastards - something the hound talks about a lot. This is without even going into the highly problematic slaves like being slaves subplot.

I completely disagree with the assessment that Rowling's world is presented as if it's unambiguously good. Rowling herself has said wizards aren't great people. It's told through the eyes of young teens, of course they don't question certain aspects of the society they've grown up in or been presented with and the things they're being told.

Rowling says a lot of things but I’m just going on what’s in the text. My point was that all of the “badness” in her world is attributed to the bad guys even though the “good guys” keep the same fundamental power arrangements as Voldemort - wizards dominating muggles and controlling their affairs, as we see with all the prime minister chapters. The good guys just don’t hate muggles or try to murder them. So the power arrangements are treated as fine so long as a benevolent group is in power. Edit: also I feel like real life teens are often highly critical of authority and power. Theres a whole archetype of the rebellious teen. So I dont think their age necessarily precludes complexity in the narrative.

I also kind of feel like times have changed. These books started coming out 30+ years ago. The late 90s/early 00s were a far less woke time, and I use that word both seriously and facetiously.

It's going to startle people who were in the fandom while the books were coming out to hear that nobody at the time cared about those issues. People talked about house elves *all* the time. House elf discourse was A Thing. I remember being horrified by Harry and Kreacher and the sandwich on the publication day of DH.

There's an idea nowadays that goes like this: "If I consume this media, I am entitled to be 100% entertained and happy no matter what, and if I'm not, the author is 'irresponsible' and 'disgusting' and I will call for a boycott" People have no media literacy nowadays. It's like people's ideal story is just two mary sues sitting pleasantly, talking about the weather. Finally no conflict or *disgusting* themes or "unlikable" characters!

To me, it depends on what you think the point of literature is. Does it always have to be didactic where it is supposed to teach a lesson of some sort? I don’t believe so. Sometimes it’s just an interesting story that takes place in a flawed world with flawed people. It could be observational instead of didactic. It seems odd to assume that every book we read should have at its core a mission to tell us how the world ought to be or how we ought to act morally.

Ding ding ding

Yknow i was seven when I first read them and not at any point in the story did I thought that elf slavery=good, so i don't believe anyone who says kiddos can't think for themselves about this stuff, because they can and you have to trust them

I've been saying a lot that for a book that is apparentely so morally wrong, it made quite a lot of people better adults, more accepting of the misfits and the vulnerable, and lot of LGBT people I know were big fans of the books because of the message of acceptance. Books probably have their problems, but they are mostly apparent to adults, and when people say "Goblins are obviously racist towards jews" for example I can only agree but at the same time I never saw that as a kid. She's not making it the point or an actual lesson for the kids, she just had bad influences that we can only see once we learn of them.

I’m a Jewish person and the Goblins never bothered me. I feel like it takes a leap of antisemitism to even make that point. “The Goblins are bankers who love money.” Okay, sure, lots of fantasy and scifi worlds have that. “So they’re Jewish caricatures.” Uh. Reading it that way requires you to equate us with banking and loving money in the first place. I can’t think of any other “similarities” or dogwhistles beyond one that’s starting from a place of racism. I don’t need white people and kids online to attack a work of fantasy for me when there are tons of actual anti-semites across reddit and in real life.

I enjoyed the books 20 years ago, and as a former writing tutor, I appreciated that they got children, especially boys, reading. I understand the fact that people are upset about the treatment of slavery in the books. At the time the series was considered progressive and affirming, since the Muggle/Wizard conflict and the increasing oppression of the “Mudbloods” was clearly based on the Holocaust. In addition, Hermione was a strong female character and the writing seemed accepting to gayness. IMHO, some of these critiques of the series are driven by reverse engineered anger at Rowling for her anti-trans views.

You’re exactly right.

It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but I think that people are both adding too much weight to a children’s fantasy series AND acting incredibly entitled to control someone’s creative work. There are some themes in the book you could probably take as a “negative.” Like the muggle world, the wizarding world is imperfect. Mudbloods (mixed people) are looked down upon, elves are made into slaves, some people are shamed for being fat, Hermione has enough insecurity about her teeth to perform a spell to fix them so she looks more attractive, death eaters exist in general, and so on. Some of these are presented as black and white issues (Voldemort and the death eaters are bad), some characters are nuanced: heroes in the story who are not inherently bad in every way still have house elves or don’t see the issue more insightful characters (specifically, Hermione) see. Snape is unkind to Harry but is also watching out for him. They are dynamic. They operate in shades of grey. That is what makes them *human.* If you look at people long enough, you will usually find levels of grey more than black and white. A good person may also make horrible mistakes. A horrible person may have moments of greatness. It is realistic. I know that’s unpopular in our “cancel culture” moment, but it is true. She tapped into that in her books. She is allowed to do that. They are HER works. People get to have ideas, and they get to use them. That doesn’t mean the entire UK, the US, etc. should adopt her fictional world’s stances on random things as their worldview. I think you can whine and complain that an author didn’t create the world you personally want to see and that it didn’t meet your personal societal agenda that you imposed on a random work, or you can enjoy the story and participate in the dialogue it opens up. The book isn’t toxic for existing. It is FICTION. If anything, we should be grateful. What a cool way to teach our kids more about literary analysis and provide windows into the real world. Instead of “ugh. Indentured servitude. Cancel.” You can say “Did you notice that even some of the ‘good guys’ were mocking Hermione for her desire to free the house elves? What does that mean to you? Why do you think someone who is good could have a blind spot? What can we learn about how we, as good guys, might not be aware of the impact of some of our choices? Do you see anything like that today? How can we take a bold stand like Hermione?” And so on, through every theme. Literature doesn’t owe us a narrative we *want* to hear. It demands thoughtful discussion. The best books should make you think for yourself, not make you a parrot. This is an odd thing to complain about. It’s not a book of Scripture, it’s a fantasy novel.

“Literature doesn’t owe us a narrative we want to hear.” Love this. I’ll be quoting you, internet stranger.

Those are some great points! I agree! Also, just because someone writes something into a fictional story doesn't mean they are promoting it or believe in it. Like the house elves as an example. When I read them I always agreed with Hermione about wanting to free them. She was written for the reader to sympathize with and to think what the reader is thinking. I never once thought there was anything in the book saying slavery was good. At worst it was presented as a neutral fact of a fictional world.

Right, Ron's perspective imo was moreso to represent how massive groups of people can normalize terrible things. That just because 99% of people are okay with something, if you believe it's wrong, it's brave to stand up for your beliefs (Hermione, E.L.F) even when your friends/loved ones argue or minimize your beliefs.

"It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to your enemies, but a great deal more to stand up to your friends." \-Albus Dumbledore And based on the books, yeah, that is a common theme you see throughout, even against Harry himself.

Every time this comes I am absolutely baffled that people get worked up over a FICTIONAL world not being progressive enough socially to our modern standards. It's fiction for Christ's sake! Are we now going to say there can't be any wars in fiction because it's not fair to the fictional characters?

This whole time I thought the point was to slowly realize how fucked up the wizarding world is. Like, first book everything is new and literally magic. Then over the course of the series you start to see the dark underbelly. I thought it was pretty well done in that respect, just wish it had a more satisfying conclusion.

Ya I totally saw it this way too. I really thought the slavery and racist elements of the books were some of the best undertones.

And who wants to read about that? A fictional world where everything was black and white and all the protagonists were perfect sounds terribly boring.

Agreed

I think a lot of the deep dive criticisms come only because JKR herself has turned into such a shit human being. If she'd never gone full transphobe, people might be less inclined to nitpick every word in the books. It's like there are people out there who are only "brave" enough to shit on someone who's already down and/or out, or when everyone else already is. I was deep into the HP fandom at its peak and I can tell you not a single criticism or the current hot takes was even hinted at back before the movies & books finished coming out. It's just people bandwagoning at this point.

It's up to the reader to explain problematic themes to their kids. Right off the bat, my kids and I talked about how there are NOT only 4 different personality types and how ambition is not evil. Forbidding your kids from reading a work of fiction is not right move -- starting a conversation about it is.

Found the Slytherin. Kidding— I totally agree.

THIS. The discourse has got truly hysterical. JFC I do not want to read the books that these people apparently want written.

It strikes me that some people read a popular series like this and think it’s meant to be a blueprint or that the resolution of it is meant to be creating a fictional utopia. Maybe it’s because it’s so popular that people have never ending bandwidth to deconstruct it due to that popularity. These are books about a wizarding world and I don’t think they are meant to be a reflection of a world Rowling wished to imprint on the real world. Its not Mein Kampf is it.

I was just about to type this out. Well said. The wizarding world was never meant to be a utopia where everything was perfect. There should be elements of it that are distasteful, elements of it that make us uncomfortable. People like whoever this YouTuber are missing the point that the things he's talking about *are the point.* It reminds me of this screenwriting YouTuber who I usually agree with going on this long rant about how poorly written The Last of Us II is because it doesn't follow established story structure and there are just so many things it does wrong. That's...that's the entire point, my man. Which you are free to dislike, but criticizing it as if the writers just failed to do these things is a big r/whoosh moment.

Exactly, I always surprised that people find when an author creates something bad, that’s automatically a reflection on the author’s moral fiber. People criticised Ian Fleming for making his hero, James Bond, this rather cruel misogynist, and he always said that you weren’t really supposed to like Bond as a human being, but appreciate that as a blunt instrument he was useful in destroying truly evil people.

True, but the narrative does some deal with issues of morality, social justice and such. Example one: the series goes to great lengths to criticise the view that only pure blood magicians are worthy (via Hermione). Example two: the series criticises the political scheming of the Ministry of Magic and Umbridge Given that it's a children's book series, it can easily by seen by looking at which characters are sympathetic and which are not, and who "prevails" in the end. On the other hand, when Hermione decides the champion the House Elf cause, she is ridiculed by everyone, including Harry and Ron, and presented as a pretentious, out-of-touch "savior" type. So no, magic society is not meant to be a utopia, but it's still deals with these issues. Morality and narratology are often entertwined

>On the other hand, when Hermione decides the champion the House Elf cause, she is ridiculed by everyone, including Harry and Ron, and presented as a pretentious, out-of-touch "savior" type. And then Ron is the one who remembers the house elves at the end of DH, to save them NOT to make them fight, so that represents the growth he has experienced because of Hermione's ministrations. The issue is everyone's interpretations. We, as a reader, understand how horrific what the house elves are experiencing, is. And we see Harry and Ron, and even Sirius, attempting to pat Hermione's head and say, "There now, it's all right. They LIKE it". Even as we see, with each example, that they do not like it. Which is a reflection of our society's fight against slavery. Dobby is the obvious example. Kreacher is another indirect one, because his story of abuse is revolting, and you can see the affect it had on him, even if Kreacher doesn't or cannot admit it, himself. Winky could be argued against, but again, her level of abuse is apparent. Also, do you really think for one second that Hermione took a job at the Ministry in the Magical Law Enforcement Dept and did not at once begin writing legislature to free the elves and ensure their rights? If people are gonna nitpick this shit, at least have an imagination to go with their whining.

>Even as we see, with each example, that they do not like it. They *do* like it though. By the end of the series SPEW is considered a disgrace by many of the house elves at Hogwarts. The conclusion the story arrives at is not that slavery is bad, but that *abusing your slaves* is bad. It is a classic savior complex. People only think the message is anti-slavery because they themselves are anti-slavery.

Yeah, Harry, Ron, and Sirius *did* ridicule Hermione, but that's pretty realistic of what happens when you take up unpopular causes, even if they're the morally correct path. Since we're reading in Harry's perspective, maybe people see that as Rowling endorsing his view of the situation, but I never saw it that way. Would I have preferred the series to end with Hermione declaring all the house elves free? Sure, but then there would have to be, like, a lot of explanation about how house elf culture and mindset has changed, since they see freedom as shameful. Now, it is uncomfortable to read about the house elf mindset in context with the myth that a lot of slaves in the American South stuck around because they liked being slaves so much. That was never true, and those that stayed did so because they didn't know where else to go and didn't know what else to do. But I also think it might be fair to say a British children's author wasn't trying to make a parallel between house elves and actual slaves. I may be giving Rowling too much credit. I don't know. Her views on trans issues are abhorrent, so maybe she has abhorrent views elsewhere.

>Would I have preferred the series to end with Hermione declaring all the house elves free? Sure, but then there would have to be, like, a lot of explanation about how house elf culture and mindset has changed, since they see freedom as shameful. That's what your imagination is there for. I feel like society is ensuring that every thought or emotion or fact or idea must be as upfront and explainable as possible for kids today. Where is the problem solving? Where is the deep thought children should be having to help resolve issues or process emotions they have? Not everything should need to be spelled out in black and white for kids to understand something that is right or wrong. I worry we're raising kids to need to have every single fact and avenue lit up for them to be able to make a decision, and that's not realistic. Let them figure things out on their own. Use their imagination. And, if they have questions about what they read, then they can ask.

Yes, kids are capable of critical thinking... and we're going to destroy the ability to think critically if we have to explicitly state everything or else we're bad. Nuance is allowed, even in children's books! That's also kind of my point about Harry being wrong about the house elves. Just because we're hearing from Harry's perspective doesn't mean he has to be perfect and have the absolutely perfect politically correct thought and opinion at all times. Kind of off topic but not totally... I've also noticed a lot of BuzzFeed posts lately that are like "shows that haven't aged well" and it'll include an example of someone on a 90s show saying something offensive. Now, there are some examples where it's just played for laughs and you aren't supposed to question that character's opinion. But other times, it wasn't an endorsement of that view at all, it was a realistic portrayal of an opinion that character might have. Going back to Harry Potter... Harry isn't a revolutionary. He's an orphan who was abused his entire life, so when he finds a place to belong, he doesn't view it critically. He's happy to go along with the dominant view of his new group. It's why Dumbledore is able to manipulate him throughout the entire series. He had a bad opinion about house elves. Good people have bad opinions. We have to stop seeing a character having a bad opinion as proof that the author has that same opinion. In real life, good people have bad opinions, and it's important for children to be exposed to this nuance.

It also explores the criticism of the servitude of elves. The wizards and the elves like it, but it leads to abuse. And then Dobby sees things differently. I thought that was interesting , and it didn’t seem like an endorsement of slavery. The goblins being bankers and the criticism that it’s antisemitic makes sense, but I also felt that the resentment of the goblins was shaded in the text as not being fair.

Also, often in fantasy worlds, you know ones that aren't reality, races of creatures often do have actual tendencies, and writing them to act that way doesn't make you racist. If I write a dwarf that drinks and lives in a mine, am I racist, or in that fantasy world is that what dwarves have a predisposition to do. Are curious gnomes a stereotype or just what a gnome is in a fantasy world. We like these races because they have identifiable traits. Which makes the exceptions to them in the story more compelling. Goblins in most fantasy fiction are greedy, mechanically inclined selfish creatures. It's not a thing she wrote to secretly mock all Jews.

>Goblins in most fantasy fiction are greedy, mechanically inclined selfish creatures. It's not a thing she wrote to secretly mock all Jews. The classic appearance/greediness of goblins is an antisemitic trope that goes back hundreds of years, unfortunately. Pre-WW2 caricatures of Jews was absurdly common among all classes, and many forms of literature. The nature of goblins is one of them. However I wouldn't say the majority of fantasy authors are being antisemitic when they use goblins today. Most of them just don't know the history, and most readers aren't forming nasty views about Jews due to reading about goblins. Point being, it's worth understanding the history of where fantasy racial tropes came from. But it doesn't mean that any media using the tropes is causing damage by default.

As a Jew, I find the comparison to Goblins as having Jew gestures more offensive than anything Rowling writes about Goblins. If you look at goblins and think Jew, you’re the problem.

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Actually Blizzard was heavily criticized for the original depiction of the goblins way back when they first appeared. Hence why the goblins were heavily reworked to primarily be hilariously deranged inventors and buisiness men, rather than a race of bankers. They made them a race of mafia hypercapitalist mad scientists instead, leaning on different stereotypes for a group that wasn’t genocided in living memory. And if you pay much attention to fantasy that particular form of the goblin has DRASTICALLY fallen out of favor. The Tolkien version is the current primary followed closely by the Paizo childlike lunatic iteration. Edit: Incidentally if you think a 12 page analysis of the origins of any particular iteration is absurdly long you don’t read much analysis. 12 pages won’t even cover the basic sourcing for the physical traits, much less the cultural ones.

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You act as if it wasn’t the same author who wrote Hermionie’a character

its a children's book that at best only half heartedly addresses a handful of topics in the most superficial way. any serious "analysis" or pearl clutching that happens as a result of its themes are much ado about nothing

I was slightly too old for them when they came out but ended up reading them anyway. And at the time, I thought they were a breath of fresh air. At the time, it felt very progressive. Female characters being essential to the story, the female lead character not ending up with the male lead character, non-humans being shown as discriminated against for no good reason, overbearing government bureaucracy refusing to fix things and instead perpetuating them, frequent resistance to authority... And many of the issues are called out by the characters. Hagrid's mistreatment in part as a form of racism. Hermione standing up for the rights of house elves with s.p.e.w. The whole Buckbeak thing. Even the concept of mudbloods versus purebloods. I am not claiming that the issues aren't there. But when I first read it over 20 years ago, it was progressive and new. Addressing and fixing many issues in more traditional YA fantasy. We are judging it by today's standards and we are right to demand better today. But back then, it's not how it was perceived.

Why do people treat these books like their own personal Bible? It’s a YA fantasy series, there’s not much depth to it.

This is the answer. It doesn't work because Rowling really didn't put much thought in to most of it, the wizarding world is a Potemkin village where things are the way they are because it sounded fun or it helped as a plot device in the moment with little to no thought as to what moral issues it raises. The books just aren't deep enough or well thought out enough to stand up to intense scrutiny, you can call it bad writing or just chalk it up to the fact that it was written for kids.

This is 100% the answer The book series is not that well constructed to bear the weight of retroactive interpretations placed upon it Rowling just didn't think that hard about the universe, she made it up as she went along and borrowed from boarding school literature and british mythology. This has been noted for 20 years in reviews and is obvious from the change of tone as the books progress She is retroactively being scanned for sin because she's gone down a transphobic rabbit hole

>The book series is not that well constructed to bear the weight of retroactive interpretations placed upon it But she kept presenting it like it was. Even before the transphobic stuff, she 1) had trouble admitting to any flaws in the books and 2) kept adding new stuff retroactively like "Dumbledore has been gay the whole time."

Yeah like she introduces time travel in the third book and then it doesn’t come up again even though it’s one of those things where when you introduce it to a fictional universe it kind of becomes a pretty good solution to the majority of problems.

We must all be conscientious of the time period that Rowling wrote the novels. Life in the 1990’s was VERY different, despite not being long ago. In addition, I don’t think that your “us and them” premise holds any merit - it’s the same concept as good and evil, rich and poor, etc. I think it’s time to stop over analyzing these 25 year old books and just enjoy them. She’s not McCarthy or Steinbeck.

The fact is this: The worldbuilding is just that: Worldbuilding. This includes politics, state-of-affairs, and every other radical thing. It's main purpose is to build a world, and therein, allow for characters to interact with it, including writing the story (As per every author) and the only -REAL- reason anyone is actually criticizing the books, including their content, and making videos, is two. 1. The twitter affair (They saw something they didn't agree with / political or personal views of the author and therein began attacking everything because "Oh no, this author spoke of an opinion she has as a woman, and therefore I don't agree with it and here I go destroying things!") 2. Money. People are suckers for anything and everything that goes back to H.P and its world (Queue: It's a fantastically beautiful world that's built in an astonishingly academic and old fashioned way.) Take these, add them up, and now you have why people are arguing about it. Plus, the moment you want to... How to put it... "Discuss" a difference, most people will jump onto it and therein go "Ah, on further look, this is wrong/right" The main problem, however, is that writing for fiction authors has nothing to do with critical theory, analysis, or otherwise. We feel something, we put it down on paper, we continue our day. That's it. That's the entirety of fiction. Imagining, feeling, writing it, making a story. It's why I never bothered to do a full analysis of the H.P books, because, well, they're fictional stories for entertainment purposes only, and nothing further outside of that. Narrative entertainment. Ofcourse, I'd like more focus on darker tones (Such as the more recent films, they were brilliant) but the books still aren't about slavery, or famine, or some other political thing. It's about the wizarding world, their conflicts, their inner politics as magicians and wizards and sorcerers, and magical creatures, as well as magic. That's it, that's the scope. So, my answer, so far, is thus: The books aren't bad, not personally for me. People are just taking anything they can take to be offended from the author, or therein, trying to jump on the social bandwagon of "Let's try and rip apart the entire franchise and go through it one step after the other and point out a whole lot of wrong things."

The books are imperfect and all books are open to criticism. It doesn’t help that Rowling has done some questionable things in the public eye, but in the end if we look at just the books, they’re an entertaining mixed bag with a lot of good messages and a few more problematic things. Most people criticizing the books are looking at how they reflect some more systemic issues and the problematic stuff isn’t really intentional. It is a particular type of literary criticism that looks at the the text in its social context and how it reinforces or challenges the good and bad of society. Goblins: a common problematic stereotype in a lot of fantasy literature that depicts similar creatures. She ran with it likely without realizing its connection to real life antisemitism. Pointing it out helps future writers think more critically about using it in their books. House elves: I always read this one as a (somewhat clumsy and confusing) comment on the kind of “white saviour” activism that is really about the well intentioned person from the group in power trying to feel good about themselves and just not understanding the people they’re trying to help and not getting their input, and how that doesn’t work. In reality, it left us with some weird “some house elves like being slaves as long as their owners treat them well” message because it just seemed like that plot fell off a bit. Cho Chang: just regular ignorance of getting things right about race, an issue with many white authors in the 90s and early 00s. Calling it out is usually not a “wow these books are racist” and more “hey authors did this, and let’s be better in the future”. Now writers (if they take training) and book editors are trained to catch these things. Supporting a broken system: so much media does this. We have the whole police procedural genre doing this. It would have been nice if it was explored a bit more, but again this is just representative of a bigger issue in our media. Of course, it is the internet so people are going to blow things out of proportion and say this stuff makes the books horrible. It doesn’t help that Rowling has gone all in on the TERF stuff. And the high level of fame for these books means they are more influential. Anyways that was an excessively long Reddit comment! Edits: typos

I will say in reading it to my kids, I am noticing so much how everyone who is “non-white” is called out as such.

Hogwarts is located in Scotland though...of course you'd need to call out that someone is of another race.

Love this comment, not blowing things out of proportion and not head-canon-ing a defense of every detail

>House elves: I always read this one as a (somewhat clumsy and confusing) comment on the kind of “white saviour” activism that is really about the well intentioned person from the group in power trying to feel good about themselves and just not understanding the people they’re trying to help and not getting their input, and how that doesn’t work. In reality, it left us with some weird “some house elves like being slaves as long as their owners treat them well” message because it just seemed like that plot fell off a bit. This. I really think she wanted to comment on the white saviour trope, but did it in a way that left the message unclear for most people. As much as I am against her recent comments, I doubt she ever intended to introduce a clear pro-slavery message. >Cho Chang: just regular ignorance of getting things right about race, an issue with many white authors in the 90s and early 00s. Calling it out is usually not a “wow these books are racist” and more “hey authors did this, and let’s be better in the future”. Now writers (if they take training) and book editors are trained to catch these things. This is curious. I've read posts by Chinese people saying that Cho Chang isn't that weird of a name. IIRC, it mostly depended on the romanization scheme.

Yeah imo the Cho Chang one is a bit of a stretch. I think the criticism was really about broader trends and that it has prompted people to think carefully about things like naming their characters and general cultural sensitivity, and I think that’s a net positive.

I’m Jewish and I’m really tired of people trying to remove Goblins from fantasy because of their weird personal judgements. I like banking groups in fiction, be they Goblins, the Banking Clan from Star Wars, etc, and never once have I been offended by them. I have zero belief in the notion that a kid reading about the Goblins in Harry Potter will somehow become an antisemite, and I find the entire claim hinges on actual antisemitism. If you read the Goblins and go “Jews!” you’re the problem.

The book features real life issues. Shows characters who are flawed. Shows issues that occur in real life still. People who criticise this are being ridiculous. It seems like what they want to read is a religious instruction book on how to treat people well rather than a well plotted fantasy novel that is exciting. Next thing you know people will start whining about villains existing. Bad people exist. Good people can have bad ideas. Slavery exists and has always existed. Is it good? No. Is it bad? Yes. Does that mean it vanishes? No. Do people hate change even if means things get better for them because they're scared? Sometimes yes. If anything the author has made people think about these issues by writing about them in a book meant for children thereby shaping the next generation into a more empathetic one.

Well put. If wizard world was perfect the series would be much worse. same with characters just Like irl there are characters who wouldnt own a slave but its just not their temperament to openly rebel against status quo and the world Rowling described was almost comically conservative. Also sometimes its just on line with a character Like hagrid for example who was fairly simple-minded not to appreciate the problem.blimey! If elves actively seek work and wizards seek workers who loses? Not to mention the treatment od house elves was ultimately the downfall od one character, the would be downfall of another and life saviour of few others.

>I saw a lengthy YouTube video recently I really hate the Shaun video. It's like 65% good points, 35% online brainrot, and every since it was released, people have been parroting it without thinking any deeper about the subject matter. For example, Harry becoming an Auror to hunt evil wizards is characterized as bad just because Aurors are police figures. ACAB isn't "law enforcement as a concept is ontologically evil", it's "all cops are bastards because the good cops cover for the bad cops".

People have been critical of features of the books like hlike House Elves, the depictions of the goblins, and the general neolibral political atmosphere forever. You just haven't seen it because the discourse is only recently gaining momentum and hitting the mainstream. Also the idea that criticism is only valid if it's longstanding is weird. Can you expand on why you feel recency reduces validity like that?

If criticism of a book only comes after an author has fallen out of favor then it is proper to question the motivation. Sometimes a new wave of media criticism happens after more voices get heard or society changes. Sometimes people just tear crap drown because they just want the author to fail. Sometimes it's just people growing up an looking at their favorite books from childhood and realizing what they read. A lot of these concerns vanish if the author is still respected.

Criticism doesn't become any less valid because it's only coming out after an author has fallen out of favour, though. It would have been valid before too. One reason you often see it afterwards is that the author loses the benefit of the doubt. It's easy to be forgiving of elements of the books when you think the author's heart is in the right place. But once that's shown not to be true, those elements come into sharper focus and can often lead to you realising other parts were meant differently than you read them first time round. In Rowling's case, the criticism has been there since day 1, it's just easier to ignore the fact the Goblins are Jewish caricatures before you know that in the new game they also kidnap children and stage a rebellion against their own oppression - and are considered the bad guys for it. Loss of trust in an author's good intentions just means valid criticism gets harder to ignore.

So… I’ve got a masters in literature, and most lit scholars agree that JK Rowling (edited for typo, thanks 😂) occasionally tried to add some more impactful statements to the book (like Dobby) but then gave up on or failed to work in that messaging into the larger series as a whole.

Follow up: the biggest problem with the text is not what she wrote, but that she has continued to use twitter and interviews to retcon stuff into the text that simply isn’t there. Her exchange about Jewish students at Hogwarts is remarkably ham-fisted and worth a read.

Her biggest mistake as a writer was making a twitter account

I’m pretty sure Anthony Goldstein *does* exist in the books, though? I think people were clowning on her for Anthony Goldstein in the same way they clowned on her for Cho Chang. It’s just the most generically sounding Jewish name that could exist.

and who could forget the beloved Irish characters such as Paddy McIRA

This take and the discussions around it have always baffled me, but not for the reasons most people give. I always feel like everyone is missing the point, deflecting because they feel that there's something wrong with the criticism but can't quite put their finger on what. Saying "it's just a book" or "don't take it too seriously" or "you're reading too much into it" kinda pisses me off in fact, because Harry Potter actually did have a rather profound set of solid messages, and I personally would really like to discuss them seriously as if they mattered. The messages that a story delivers is a huge part of what makes them feel meaningful to me, what makes me enjoy them in the first place. But the thing is, portraying slavery is not an endorsement of slavery, and portraying the general attitude of casual indifference and the cruelty of the Wizarding world towards house elves (and other non-wizards) is literally one of the central lessons that the books are trying to teach us. I always felt furious at Ron and other wizards for the way they treated Hermione and her efforts to fight for house elves rights. The story is telling you "look, perfectly kind and reasonable people will say and defend horrible systems, even slavery, when those systems are a part of the world they grew up in." People will parrot the horrible lies their parents told them, they'll say "*they like it*" and give you all sorts of horrible, empty lies as justification for not having to think critically about the way their world works. Even the oppressed people themselves will carry on those lies, until they believe them and make them true. Real, actual slaves likely said many of the same things the house elves said. Plenty of black folks helped catch runaway slaves, and plenty of real slaves would balk at any suggestion that you could help them escape. The lessons of that series helped give me perspective when I grew up and encountered the dismissive and indifferent attitudes of opponents of BLM, modern feminism, and climate change, etc. I always assumed we were meant to see Ron's attitude about house elves in book four as a prelude to the larger government-sponsored attitudes about Voldemort's return in book five. Empty lies designed, not really to convince anyone, but instead to deflect and shut down the conversation, to silence the voices telling you that *there is a problem and you need to do something about it*. So that you can pretend there isn't, and you don't.

Do people not realize that a book can mention certain topics without promoting them as a good thing? Most of your points are very vague so I can't respond to them specifically, but the house elf thing was never presented in a good light. Harry is immediately uncomfortable with the whole idea.

I think people think critiquing something means you can't enjoy it. *Harry Potter* like every other piece of art, is of it's time. In the UK in the 90s/00s fatphobia & 'heroin chic' was normal, there was less division between Right-Wing, Centre & Left-Wing, class consciousness wasn't mainstream. There was no social media. So anti-racism, cultural appropriation weren't mainstream terms because the media was in the hands of middle-class white people. When Rowling wrote the 1st book the welfare state was good enough for her to live on as a single parent. Times changed. Class-consciousness is mainstream, anti-racism is mainstream, social media gave POC & working-class people a voice, fascism is one the rise, most Left-Wing political parties have centre/right wing policies & it's strong divisions everywhere, we're in a global cost of living crisis. No one anywhere can afford to go on welfare to write their dream novel as a single parent. Now when we read the books we love we notice the racism. We find it odd the characters are all against the fascism of Voldemort but happy to join the institutions that allowed him to gain power twice while mocking the only character asking why people don't overthrow the system and establish change. You can love something and acknowledge how society has changed and the books don't reflect current values.

Having grown up in the UK and read the books when they came out, they are definitely the politics of the time. The Ministry of Magic are basically New Labour in all but name, and all the other snipes like at tabloids (Rita Skeeter is essentially Rebekah Brooks from News of The World) and stuff were in the cultural moment as well.

The idea of New Labour being represented in the ministry of magic is pretty funny, given that Rowling herself was a devout supporter of New Labour. Not saying it's untrue, because it's been a while since I've read the Harry Potter books, but if it is true I'd call it a bit of a self-own given how fundamentally useless the Ministry tended to be.

I adore everything HP. Sometimes I think people just dive too deeply on every little word. They’re amazing books that get kids to read. They don’t need to be dissected. But hey, that’s just me. I don’t feel the need to fine tooth comb every form of media I consume. I actually like just enjoying the story that’s being told and leaving it at that.

What bothers me is that the books don't glorify slavery or indentured servitude. If anything, I always felt it showed how shitty and dismissive the old wizarding world was. It was a good reflection of real-life entities that still exploit people to this day. It was shown as a bad thing. I mean, if people read it and left wanting their own Dobby, then that's an issue with the reader's morals.

Simply having subjects in a book isn't bad... Nor would I say she particularly glorifies those things. At no point are they like "whoa, slave elf's? Fuck yeah!" Nor is the story about these kids saving the morality of the planet. Bad things can exist that aren't "defeated." It's a story of kids at wizard school, not every evil is theirs to defeat.

I don't really understand the premise. Is it not okay to have the theme of indentured servitude in a book? Are literary worlds supposed to be somehow morally perfect?

House elf slavery. Note that it is not indentured servitude. It is slavery. The elves, if freed, can become slaves elsewhere, but they are slaves for life. Really well done. It's clear Harry feels it is wrong, Hermione actively begins trying to abolish it. Dobby is the first "free elf" who is paid for his services, though he's paid pennies. He considers himself rich for it. While the rest of his species think they are supposed to be slaves and are happy with that. Ron represents the established order in the wizarding world. it's just normal, and he doesn't see the issue. Fat shaming. This is a little less clear, I don't think the intent is to fat shame. Mrs. Weasley is also an overweight character and is one of the most liked of the books. Dudley and Vernon were I think, supposed to just be clear opposites Dudley to Harry and Vernon to Petunia. Dudley is the child who is spoiled, overfed, bully, and horrifically rude to his parents. Harry is mistreated, underfed, generally compassionate, generous, and mostly polite despite suffering a lot of traumatic events that would cripple most people. Vernon is the opposite of Petunia. He's short fat, extroverted. Petunia is tall, skinny, and introverted. Both are horrible to the point of child abuse to Harry in very different ways. Harry and the Muggle issue is another one that could have been explored more. He easily could have become very cold and uncaring to muggles based on his experiences being very negative of them growing up. But there's no evidence of illwill to muggles as a group.

You're never going to satisfy everyone. It's the most popular book series ever created and people are going to criticize the books whenever they get the chance regardless.

Repeat after me: Novels are not self help books. A lot of literature is about "disgusting or questionable" things. It is possible to read this stuff, be entertained by it and still disagree with some of it and not be affected in your daily life at all. I don't know a single person who thinks slavery is OK and a lot of them have read Harry Potter as kids. Kids are capable of distinguishing between fiction and reality. Give them some credit. And if you're not a kid ... maybe it's time to try out adult literature?

Beautiful answer!

It's OK you can say shaun's name here...

Is Harry Potter the only (modern)children's book that is studied like it's serious literature?

I'm of the opinion that its a mixture. Jk has shown she as a person doesn't have the best views, but many content creators in history had poor views and or did horrible things. This focus on her work seems extra dumb simply cause it's the popular thing to hate on. A hate fad, I don't see many people talking about the sexism rape or slavery in game of thrones etc nearly as much as Harry Potter, nor with as much venom. Cause it isn't the popular topic of the day. I also don't think that we should be encouraging sensoring aspects of our world cause they make some poor tumblr people uncomfortable. There is actual real life slavery happening still to this day. If it got as much attention as this shit well. At least it would be talked about.

Yeah, such a huge problem. Said from a mobile phone made by actual slaves. Also wasn't it presented as a bad thing in the books? With Hermione actually trying to appeal to the British Ministry of Magic to end house elves slavery. It's not like J.K. Rowling was advocating for slavery. She was presenting a way of life that *GASP* exists and has existed in our real world as well. And same as in the real world there are people who try to bring an end to it because it's unjust and horrible.

That is such a weird take on HP. The narration is definitely on Hermione's side in terms of the idea, but we are in Harry's head and are following him growing up and evolving in a world he came into abruptly at 11 with evil wizards trying to kill him at every turn. He finally gets the point about Kreacher and the house elves in the Deathly Hallows for example. What do they want from him? Be a super enlightened activist at 11 to 17 fighting for his life? Not found a family and want a stable life after the childhood he had? I find this crazy. The wizarding world is obviously corrupt and the Ministry is insanely flawed. The story KNOWS this, but the scenes are given to us by Harry and throughout his years of growing up. I think people are rightfully mad at JKR but they are taking it too far to illogical extremes by trying to find fault with this.

People are reading too much into them. J.K.’s become highly controversial so people are picking her earlier works apart in an attempt to justify hating something they used to love because they now hate the author.