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Adult here who was an adult when the books came out and recognized all the awful racist and sexist imagery. I have nothing new to add to the conversation, I'm just gonna vent. There were quite a few of us here and there who spoke up when the books were published, but we were significantly outnumbered and immediately drowned out by the "shut up and stop complaining" crowd. Yes, all this talk of "problematic" issues in the Potter books are old observations we've been rehashing for two decades...the goblins who run the banks are a horrifyingly obvious Jewish caricature, Chinese character Cho Chang's first name is actually a Korean last name, the one black guy in the whole fuckin series is named "Shacklebolt" (seriously wtf), the one Irish character goes by "Seamus Finnegan," the main female character Hermione is constantly referred to as "bossy"...just to name a few. JFC, what a shitshow.
Ok, one more example that got a lot of attention years back but sort of faded away from public consciousness: in the first movie there's a bigass six-pointed star on the fuckin floor of Gringotts, of all places. You know, Gringotts. The bank......where the undeniably Jew-like goblins work. No fuckin shit, it's right there, plain as day. That one still boggles my mind. I mean, what the fuck, man. https://i.postimg.cc/Jzx2hr31/happry-potter-1-star-of-david-gringotts.png
EDIT: Hey everyone, it's been abuot an hour now and I just want to apologize for all this negativity. I've given this a lot of thought, and I've come to realize all the anti-this and anti-that complaints are really unfair and show only one side of JK Rowling. So I feel compelled to balance this out and remind everyone that she is also pro-slavery. Especially the kind of slavery that forces its slaves to work completely naked, and no one in the book has a problem with it except for the bossy lib girl that everyone hates.
Me as a 13yo reading the first book: Holy shit, Dumbledore is so badass he just magics up a feast for everyone!
Me reading the later books: Oh, the feast is cooked by elves. Slave elves. Elves that are slaves... Cool cool cool...
Holy. Shit. That Star of David is blowing my mind.
I love being wrong about stuff like this!
As someone who devoured the books as a kid, I've been very disappointed in finding out JK Rowlings is a a TERF. Your post sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole and I've read up on some of the issues that people pointed out in the books. To me, some are valid, some seem to be a bit far-fetched..? For example, I'm not sure why she is labeled pro-slavery? Just because she writes that people in her fantasy world don't seem to have a problem with it?
Not defending Rowling btw, just trying to understand some of the points better.
Because it’s brushed off by the good guys and the narrative. I wouldn’t say she’s pro slavery, but what I will say is that the way she wrote house elves does ring some bells to shit that people who support the American confederacy say about black people.
She's the one that chose to make the fantasy world she made up the way it is. And she chose to make it one where a literal slave class of people enjoy being slaves and thinks slavery is great, so long as their slave masters treat them well. And the one person trying to free them is treated as a hyperbolic hippie type for even making such an attempt.
That is the made up world Rowling chose to make.
From this argument you could derive that every author, who builds a world with anything negative in it which is not opposed by the inhabitors of said world, automatically supports this in real life. As a bit of a crude example, in Warhammer 40k, criminal humans are lobotomized and are used as "Servitors". Almost no other human in this fantasy universe bats an eye at this. Nobody is accusing the authors of supporting slavery?
I can see where people take issue with the topic and how Rowling chose to write about it. But to accuse her of being pro-slavery because of that..?
Because the theme and overall storyline of 40k is meant to showcase how evil that is. In a way, the evilness is parody in how over the top it is, particularly with the use of Nazi-esque imagery.
Where in the setting of Harry Potter does it present house elves and their enslavement as a parody, joke, or otherwise not meant to be a serious take on the subject?
For me, it is not relevant for the argument if it is presented as a parody or not.
Believe me, I get the gist of your point and I understand that even if you look at it in good faith, problems arise with her writing of the house elves slavery.
However, I have a problem with the statement that just because an author implements something in their world building and does not immediately make it very obvious, in whatever way, that this is a bad bad thing, makes them a supporter of said thing. Of course we never know the true intentions of the author but just assuming they wrote it so they support it is a bit of a stretch.
What do you suggest is the way to determine if an author is using a specific setting or plot device in a serious and purposeful manner then? How do you tell if they're actually just a terrible person supporting terrible ideas?
If the answer is going to be their other statements and actions, then Rowling has made her terrible person status pretty clear.
I think the biggest issue is that Rowling depicts the wizarding world and the proragonists as more or less unambiguously good, while brushing off a lot of the actually problematic things with it. They're literally the saviours of the universe and are never seriously questioned in-universe to the point of being labeled as a Mary Sue by many critics, so from that perspective it does tend to give the impression that she endorses all the aspects of it based on the fact that she frames all of it in an extremely positive light, whether or not she actually thinks that to be the case. She even explicitly wrote a passage in to shut down notions of elf slavery being bad in the story itself, which suggests intent in her depictions. In universes like 40k, the factions being depicted are quite a bit more morally grey, and the story actively goes into and confronts the problematic parts. She could have taken a more balanced approach and depicted the wizarding world as still having a lot of problems, and actually delved into the ethical and social implications of the various aspects of her worldbuilding, but she didn't. Even just depicting a small part of the wizarding world being against elf slaves instead of the one person speaking out for them and getting ostracised would have at least been a lot better from story and worldbuilding perspective IMO.
Wait until you hear about X-Men.
It's all bullshit mate.
Harry Potter reached the height of its popularity in the 2000s/early 2010s, in a time when gay was still an extremely popular insult, feminists were the punching bags of the internet, holocaust jokes were a dime a dozen and anyone saying it wasn't funny was an enemy to comedy itself, the biggest internet creators took literal pride in their content specifically being offensive (Smosh was the biggest example of this IMO), and saying you should respect people's gender identities on the mainstream internet will get you labeled as an SJW and actual death threats thrown your way, so I'd also argue that Harry Potter not being seen as problematic was in part because mainstream society (not you obviously, but the broader internet/pop culture in general at the time) genuinely did not view those things as problematic. Like if JK Rowling said all the things she said about transgender rights in 2003, she would probably still end up in controversy but way more people would actually support her, would have probably split the fandom roughly down the middle as opposed to the overwhelmingly negative response she's receiving in the 2020s. Or look at it this way: Harry Potter was most popular in the same time period when Family Guy was most popular.
I gotta say as someone who grew up with the books, I’m glad y’all noticed it because as a kid I sure didn’t.
A lot of fantasy from that era has a lot of issues, but when I compare something like Harry Potter to say Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan may have been getting off on his depiction of magic slavery but he at least wasn’t excusing it.
Depictions she made weren’t ok in the 90s. Her politics aren’t ok now. And there’s better stuff too now. Fantasy has gotten so much better in recent decades.
Wow, I'm just realizing the deeper meaning behind gringotts being run by specifically goblins. I kinda knew the big-nosed people running a bank was rather stereotypical, and not in the just lazy way, but it made sense to me that fantasy goblins would hoard treasure, and never connected the two facts.
I was aware of the high amounts of tokenism, with that one irish character, that one black character, that one vaguely asian character, but that's easier to rationalize away as using stereotypes to communicate things quickly. It's all over fantasy; Lando is the one black guy, Gimli is the one Dwarf, Hagrid is the one (half-)giant. Looking back on it now, these tokens are pretty shallow, but at the time it was fairly standard. It's when you get into the lore of these peoples that things get ugly. Often fantasy races are there for splashes of colour, or a simple analoge for some kind of politics, but the reasoning here is heinous, and everyone is just ok with it.
By the time these flaws surfaced, we were already invested in the decent storytelling, and the deep connections never got made. Then the author detonated and it's only with that context can we see the signs that were right there.
It's too bad that these stories were built on a bed of such horrible ideas. Some of them were nice.
Hey now, there were at least 2 black characters!
And Dean Thomas is the only example in the book of a child whose dad left his mum to raise him alone.
Smashed it JK.
I think she's since tried to walk that back by saying he left to protect them and was eventually murdered by death eaters.
Maybe put that bit in the book eh?
That monologue (from one of the unambiguously "good" characters) about how it would be cruel to set the elves free, because of the joy they get from servitude? Even as a teenager, I recognised that as a messed-up sentiment, but my peers just said I was being too sensitive. Glad that you couldn't let something like that slide nowadays.
Love your comment and especially your Edit. You really had me there at first, heh.