The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (a thread for Potterheads)

Which is ironic given that she admits in one of the pottermore entires that wizards were on both sides in the first World War. I bet there were wizards on both sides of the Revolutionary War, and the Not So Coincidentally Never Mentioned Civil War.

So either wizards aren't racist (somehow) or wizards are really racist and deliberately blind to it.

 

That's kind of my point. If she insists there aren't racist wizards, she can't use that as an excuse for why wizards didn't do anything to stop genocide or civil wars that were happening, and if they didn't do anything to stop genocide against a group of people who included other wizards they're allegedly in solidarity with, that... also implies they're racist. (I'm actually slightly more willing to grant her WW2, since she established that that's oh-so-coincidentally when Grindelwald was doing his thing across Europe.)

But seriously, there are so many awesome ideas she's shutting the door on here. Wizard underground railroad operators playing cat-and-mouse games with South-sympathizing wizard law enforcement, come on.

 

Honestly everything becomes more interesting when you consider wizards are allowed to be racist. Like, okay, running back to Magically Somehow The English Colonizers Are Okay With Native Wizards: the smallpox blankets and general winning-against-the-natives-by-virtue-of-being-unwashed deal. Native American healers working desperately to try and figure out what the fuck versus Dark Wizards working to actively wipe out the "heathens". The same can be applied to British Imperialism across the world-- we've already got the clergy killing people in the name of conversion, why couldn't there have been wizards forcing European magical constructs on the magical communities of the world in the same way?

I mean fuck. We had at least two "wizard wars" with Voldemort just chilling in the UK. Picture a global Wizarding War over the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Hell, you could even use that as justification for wizarding communities across the world actually cutting ties with their muggle counterparts, even better than the witch trials in Salem and witch burnings in Europe.

 

You know, considering that the native Americans had a massive plague just before the first colonists arrived, could she have used 'oh yeah a wizard was visiting and was a disease carrier without knowing it's as an excuse.' Like I don't know if that'd make any sense but...

 

Way BETTER than the witch trials/witch burnings, actually, since she'd established in the books that the wizarding establishment (or at least, Professor Binns and Harry's history textbook) thought witch burnings were a joke and not remotely a threat to them.

Re: wizard wars: FOR SERIOUS THOUGH. Let there be magical parallels to real-world conflicts! Or conflicts that were tiny in the real world and huge in the magical world, or caused a war in one but not the other. Maybe in a lot of colonialist conflicts magic was a leveling force on the magical side of things, so wizards from the colonizing power started targeting Muggle civilians to put more pressure on the other wizards indirectly.

(Also, it just occurred to me: part of what's so frustrating about the ~quaint Natives~ cultural monolith thing she's got going with the first HoMiNA post is that there's so much information lost due to cultural imperialism and genocide that there are ways she actually could have made up whatever crap she wanted with impunity without invalidating actual cultural beliefs.)

 

That's something I've always thought was one of HP's biggest flaws, especially from Book 5 on. While it was a cute, charming kids' series, it was easy to dismiss a lot of its plot holes and holes in the setting because relax, realism isn't the point, it's just supposed to be fun. But as it tried to be more serious and still didn't fill those holes, they turned into more and more of a liability. The humor and joy of the early books covered a multitude of sins, so the reduction of that opened the series up to a lot of questions that weren't being asked before.

 

I think that's a large part of the reason why people can look back on, say, GoF (murder olympics for teenagers? murder olympics for teenagers! no it doesn't count as effective oversight if an adult can still put a 14 year old's name in and have it seriously considered) or PoA (which has a pretty upsetting ending if you think about how badly Harry wanted to live with his godfather) with fondness but anything past OotP is interesting for the resolution but not ever really your favorite book.

In fact, I can't actually recall anyone I've talked to who called book 6 or 7 their favorite. And it's not that they were bad books, but they were exhausting books at times (who else remembers Emo!Harry memes from HBP?) because all of the joy had been sucked out of them. Which is a fantastic metaphor for wartimes, but works much better when you have the cool CGI wand effects to really drive it home, because otherwise you're reading about kids being depressed and living in the woods for twelve chapters and wondering why you showed up in the first place.

At least OotP had the rage and triumph of rebelling against a hated and abusive teacher going for it.

 

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if JKR was getting burned out after GoF. The last book in particular struck me as having a bit of an attitude of "Let's do whatever we need to to finish this."

 

I think the most infuriating thing about Deathly Hallows for me was that Draco Redemption Arc that HBP had the setup for... and it went nowhere. Also, somehow the guy with parents known for their luxurious locks is now balding, because Bad People Are Ugly. Was part of it because I was a gleeful Drarry shipper? You bet! Was it still deeply insulting all the same? You bet!

Though I know a lot of people's issues with DH came not just from pacing, but the babies ever after epilogue. It was the funniest thing the first time I ran across the Epilogue What Epilogue tag, and it's probably the one I use the most.

 

I'm not sure how much of an outlier I am in this, but the thing that annoys me most about the epilogue is that after she spent the entire series showing how Voldemort was just the crest of the wave and came about and got most of his power from preexisting prejudice and inequality in wizard society, the "happy ending" is that everything goes back to normal. You can't spend that long establishing that this system is sick and then expect me to be satisfied with an ending that leaves it totally intact. The epilogue could at a minimum have dropped mentions of social reforms and rebuilding and stuff, but instead it's nothing but a list of who got straight-married and what they named their 2.5 kids, and I'm left thinking that five years later the goblins finished their preparations to destroy the wizarding economy in retaliation for the trio's offenses against them in Book 7, and another Dark Wizard showed up with a variant on the same platform Voldy had but better planning skills and everything turned awful again.

 

Nah, that's been a pretty big complaint from a lot of people as far as I can tell. At least in the fanfic scene, a large portion of the EWE fics deal with the Hogwarts kids having PTSD, Hogwarts kids working reforms, Hogwarts kids grimly being dragged through the same shit that allowed for Voldemort to happen and saying, "Not on our watch."

Though now that I'm thinking about it, what is it with authors who are perfectly capable of naming a ton of characters well who just... slap two names of previous characters together and go, "Yeah, that's about right for a baby." I mean, Albus Severus? Reneesme? Come on guys, you literally have multigenerational families in both of your series already, how are you this bad at naming your babies-ever-after babies.

 

I can't speak for Twilight, but in HP's case it's JKR using the kid as a prop to say things about one of his parents and his namesakes. The kid's got basically no traits aside from the name; he's not a character, he's a plot device to say something about the ACTUAL characters.

 

True enough. Still exasperating, just in a slightly different way.

 

Yeah. The epilogue is basically just a bad fluff kidfic. (Maybe I can tie this into my Grand FFX Fanfic Theory. In another 'verse, the HP epilogue is all about political infighting in the Ministry of Magic and isn't 100% positive and never mentions where anyone's romantic entanglements went and many people who wanted a cute happy ending were unsatisfied. And in our 'verse canon got swapped with a mediocre fixit fic. :::PPP )

 

I'm sorry, I laughed my ass off as soon as I read the first sentence of that post because I have a word replace app that changes "millennial" into "snake person." Snake people DEFINITELY have reasons to be offended by HP, SO much negative stereotyping of innocent snakes. :::')))

HP is generally pretty bad about the "you know they're a bad person because they're described as not conventionally attractive" thing. There are some exceptions, but if the text draws attention to some feature that's seen as unattractive it'll probably be in some way indicative of a personal failing or weakness. Especially if they're fat.

 

For me it was partially, like... okay, so you want this to be a ~serious~ series now, so can you maybe explain where wizards get their food from? Or why nobody's decrying the incredible prejudice against Muggles and Squibs?

#i will never understand what went through JKR's head when she made filch side with the bad guys #even if he hates the students he's got every reason to believe the death eaters will turn on him because of what he is

 

For that matter, I think the "tried to make it grow up and failed" is behind a lot of the stuff that makes people hate Dumbledore. When he was the kindly old slightly kooky Big Good you could file away the fact that he hired Lockhart and lets Snape bully and abuse students and Hogwarts' really questionable policies and leaving Harry with an abusive family every year and not helping Hagrid or Lupin more and keeping Professor Binns employed and hiring Filch and so on as him not being able to do anything about it because he's under pressure from outside groups that we just don't hear about or something. But when we're told he's a morally ambiguous manipulator all those sorts of things start turning into strikes against him, and we end up with a picture of him as a complete douchenozzle who doesn't give a damn about the student body. Which probably isn't what JKR intended, but it's a pretty obvious extrapolation from what she wrote.

 

I'm not sure it's necessarily the reveal itself that's the problem (I'm sure she was planning it from the start), it's the lack of acknowledgement of all the things that make such good fodder for those Dumbledore comics. Just a scene or two in HBP or something where he regrets not being able to make Hogwarts a better place than it was would have helped. Or a scene where Harry's going to his office and overhears him complaining to McGonnagal about how he tried to request budget for new teachers and the BoG refused him. (Bonus points if it's a replacement for Binns and Dumbles is complaining that he hasn't updated his curriculum in a century, but the BoG doesn't care because he works for free.) Or maybe Hagrid mentioning that Dumbles tried to let him take classes to make up for his missed schooling, but the outcry was too great and the only way they could do anything was on the down-low. Like, establish that he really does have his hands tied when it comes to good stuff he wanted to do.

...Actually, you know what would really help the series? Actual character development for Snape. Not just "look at his tragic backstory," but like, throughout Books 5 and 6 he's slowly becoming less of a dickhead. And Harry's like "HE MUST HAVE SOME ULTERIOR MOTIVE" and Ron's like "okay seriously who hid the real Snape" and Hermione's like "well OBVIOUSLY he really is becoming a better person because [logical reasoning that turns out not to be the correct reasoning]." Which would give it a bit more emotional weight when he kills Dumbledore, because Harry's almost decided that maybe Snape is less of an absolute douchewaffle than he thought, when bam.

 

I'll admit, even as a kid I couldn't bring myself to care about Snape or his backstory except in how much it told me about Lily (and how the Marauders actually acted as kids) and I remain deeply tired by how much focus was on him. Chessmaster Dumbledore + The Repenter (no really we swear even though he keeps doing the terrible things he need to repent for) Snape was a large part of what soured me on most of the revelations through DH.