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

i'm such a sucker for all the reprises of Hogwarts

(back to spells and enchantments and potions and friends!
To Gryffindor! Hufflepuff! Ravenclaw! Slytherin!
Back to the place where our stories began at Hogwarts, Hogwarts!
Man I'm glad I came back!)

 

You know, it's a lot better than the official school song, but that's not exactly difficult: Hogwarts, Hogwarts, hoggy warty Hogwarts, teach us something, please, whether we be old and bald or young with scabby knees! Our heads could do with filling with some interesting stuff; we'll do our best, you do the rest, and learn until our brains all rot!

 

I swear, I am pretty sure that's not even actually the official school song. That's a song Dumbledore made up to see how many of the students would go along with it. Which would fit with the whole "pick the tune you like best and go with it" part.

 

Well, of all people, he certainly was the one with the authority to make it the official school song and I think that's why "Harry noticed that the other teachers' smiles had become rather fixed". Either he'd pulled that stunt before and they knew the words, or he'd pulled that stunt before and they all knew very bloody well that there were no fucking words and it would just be whatever mishegaas spouted from his wand this time.

 

I woke up and this was on the dining table for some reason


Mysterious

 

I went to the Harry Potter world at Universal in Los Angeles for my birthday and, my dudes, god. I felt my entire adolescence lighting up behind me. There's a part on the half real/half digital-screen based hogwarts ride where Hermione tries to guide you out of danger in the forbidden forest by saying "follow my voice" and that was a culmination of so much I had wanted as a kid.

Also I got a Hufflepuff scarf, a Head Girl pin (not a girl, but there's none for Head Person and I present pretty feminine so assumptions are made...) and a pair of Hufflepuff knee socks. Very happy.

Anyway time to think about how Harry Potter has more queer characters than just Dumbledore and how ridiculous it is to think there might be only one person in four generations, strong look at J.K.

 

*waves magic wand, causing sparkly letters to appear in the air that say "WIZARDS ARE SUPER GAY"*

 

CORRECT. CORRECT!

I CAN TALK FOR SEVEN YEARS ABOUT HOW YOU CAN'T TAKE REMUS LUPIN AWAY FROM ME. And also how he got forcibly paired off after people thought of him as gay or bi with the most queercoded woman character, as if to say no, no gay here! I might talk about this.

Also big issues with J.K.'s obvious but likely unintentional antisemitism, which is... super obvious as a Jewish fan.

 

I used the term obvious twice. But that's probably because it's. Very obvious. It's absolutely not ON PURPOSE, I don't think J.K. Rowling is trying to secretly spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories through her highly popular children's series, it's more that she likely internalized popular antisemitic concepts that have spread into broader culture and then used them without meaning to.

For instance, the Gringotts Goblins. The goblins that run the banks and count the money. The bank that is run by solely goblins, completely unrelated to the super popular, STILL PREVALENT Nazi/white supremacist conspiracy that Jewish people are secretly controlling all the banks and all the money- which, for the record, is still prominent despite the fact that it was also part of Hitler's explanation for what he did.

Next bit is under a spoiler because I'm inserting some antisemitic images and they can be upsetting. Nothing graphic! Just like comparisons between the goblins and some really base level common old Jewish caricatures and propaganda, the like of which used in WWII.

Spoiler

Harry Potter goblin:


Antisemitic propaganda, literally found by googling "antisemitic propaganda":


Harry Potter bank goblin:


And, whoops, more antisemitic propaganda!:



I had some pretty major issues with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them too; there are two Jewish in name only characters, Tina and Queenie Goldstein who I like, but who I do have some problems with the portrayal of

(and Goldstein is SUCH a Jewish name, basically anything starting with Gold or ending in stein is a Jewish name), who have the same last name as the SUPPOSED ONLY Jewish Hogwarts student, because J.K. doesn't know more than one name I guess:


Neither of these supposedly Jewish characters are played by Jewish actresses. There is, however, one Jewish actor in the movie.

He plays the untrustworthy money-grabbing gangster goblin that makes them bribe him for information and then immediately sells them out.

Guess what he looks like:



Nice.

And that concludes my... very sourced Jewish anger at J.K. Rowling, who I know didn't mean it, but STILL, JK, STILL. I have lots of gay angry thoughts also.

 

Oh, boooy, the goblins. And the narrative treatment of them is awful even if you completely put aside the antisemitism thing, and worse if you don't. Our heroic protagonists, one of whom has a whole thing about wanting to fight for the rights of sentient magical nonhumans, have this sentient magical nonhuman who has agreed to meet with them. They never even contemplate acting in good faith or trying to get any of the goblins as allies, and go in planning to cheat him.

It's been ten years, and I'm still mad about that.

 

also, i hate the entire squib issue
and the house elf issue, where hermione is treated as... some uber liberal person freaking out over nothing because she comes from outside the society "no no, it's fine, it should be like that"???????
admittedly, that's why fanfiction is a thing i guess

 

God the house elf stuff

 

i love wlw and mlm solidarity

 

Honestly I feel like a big part of me loving Harry Potter is being super mad about Harry Potter and things that irk me within it (for instance, the implication we're supposed to forgive Snape for the shit he did? Uh, no. I could write an entire essay about why Snape deserves zero forgiveness, did not deserve Lily, and didn't do the good things he did for the right reasons. And this is a whole separate issue, but I wanted a more resolved and clear redemption for Draco Malfoy, because he was a scared kid with internalized notions taught by his parents who never actually could bring himself to stomach the violence .)

DEAR GOD, HOW COULD I HAVE POSSIBLY BEEN SO BLIND. YOU'RE RIGHT.

 

Oh god, yes. My ex and I had a looooooong talk about Remus and Tonks, and ended up deciding that the only headcanon that makes sense to us is that Molly Weasley's heteronormative meddling, amongst other things, pressured Remus into giving in... he was so clearly unhappy. (If you want to add extra lesbian tragedy rather than just explaining canon to yourself, we also came up with the idea that she was forcing herself to have feelings for Remus because of internalised homophobia, and that she knew on some level that he would be forcing himself too, and that subconsciously she hoped that they could both make things better for themselves by Becoming Straight through sheer willpower.) Molly never considered that their might be Gays In Our Midst, because Dumbledore may be a 'mo but he's also widely understood to be rather strange in all areas of life. She thought she was doing Remus a favour, assumed his objections were "I'm not good enough" as opposed to "no, actually, I don't want a wife, thanks very much".

Yes, same. Although I think it is worth noting that the books don't actually describe goblins as looking that way; I've been rereading, and what it says is that the goblin outside of Gringotts was a head shorter than Harry (idk how tall that would be but Harry was meant to be small for an 11-year-old) and "had a swarthy, clever face, a pointed beard and, Harry noticed, very long fingers and feet."

I'm a very short Jew with long toes (but short fingers) and a darker complexion than my white goyish peers. I know dark complexion is a big deal in antisemitic ideas about our appearance, but I've never heard of long fingers or toes being a stereotype. Are they? As for height, I have my own stereotype of Jews being short (like me!), but I've only really heard Jewish people sharing that stereotype. Is it something antisemitic caricatures emphasise?

 

Interestingly, Sir Walter Scott has attributed goblin stereotypes as originating from the nomadic Sami in Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (if you do go looking, bear in mind the time period - circa 1830 - terminology is not going to be modern). Recent pics of Sami folk tend to have them much paler, but that's likely due to the loss of indigenous culture and assimilation which happened. Recognition of them as an indigenous people is pretty recent (and they're still fighting for it in Finland, I believe.)

 

Interesting! I'll have to read that. :)

Even if there's an origin in anti-Sami stereotypes, though, antisemitism has also definitely contributed to some aspects of mythology regarding humanoid creatures. I have a Jewish friend whose surname literally means "gnome" because of this :P

 

Oh, yeah, absolutely no question that it's influenced popular portrayals of humanoid mythological creatures in the West, at the very least. I just thought that it was interesting that it filtered its way into Celtic mythology by way of Germanic lore (kobold>goblin) and then sort of got rolled into one with bogles.

I actually just love the whole thing of actively hostile mythological beings, like each-uisge and redcaps, along with the more benevolent stereotypes JK chose.

 

I'm pretty sure redcaps are also canon in HP. I think Lupin mentions them in one of his lectures in PoA.

 

Redcaps are canon in HP, yes. As are a number of other creatures mentioned in the books but not in Fantastic Beasts - the original short book, I mean, not the film franchise. The film franchise introduced more creatures that weren't in the original Fantastic Beasts book, right? Which both frustrates my autistic superfan inner child ("but WHY would Newt Scamander not put those in HIS BOOK if he FOUND THEM??") and gets handwaved calmly by my adult self ("she wrote those for charity, it's obviously not meant to be the entirety of the in-universe book's content, like how Quidditch Through the Ages is described in PS as having flying advice") as I try to be reasonable about it. (Sometimes I attempt to calm the baby autie superfan in my head by telling it that the Fantastic Beasts book released for charity however-many-years-ago was an abridged version, but the Trio had that copy for school and wrote in it and there was never any mention of them using an abridged edition...argh. I have to stop trying to solve a problem that literally doesn't exist.)