I’ve spent years making post after post trying to pinpoint the exact thing that Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) did differently than J.K. Rowling, which caused him to somehow turn Olaf into an amazingvillain while Snape is still causing hatred and controversy in the fandom a decade later.
And after mentioning something in passing in another post, it suddenly hit me what that difference was.
J.K. Rowling approached her character with the mentality that a person can be redeemed if its revealed that they couldhave been a good person but circumstance and tragedy got in the way. She sees the fact that you could be forced into being a horrible person as a huge tragedy and tries to emphasize what could have been. She doesn’t just do it with Snape (Dumbledore’s another great contender) but Snape’s arguably her biggestvictim when it comes to this. She shows you what his life was like and lets you know what couldhave been if only this had changed or that had changed. And she does so in a way that makes you feel sympathetic towards Snape, enough so that you’re supposed to totally agree with Harry when he names his childafter him. Because sure he wasn’t that great but he couldhave been had the situation been different.
And Daniel Handler begins doing the same thing with Olaf. After books upon books of building him up to be this evil guy, he abruptly releases one of the most tragic backstories in villain history, making you realize that Olaf‘s life could have been a lot different had he not been forced into certain situations due to tragedy and circumstance. And like Rowling, Handler also presents this as something that’s tragic. But here’s where he differs.
Because Rowling’s stance is: “This character could have been this instead and can you imagine how wonderful that would have been, had it not been for these circumstances?”
Whereas Handler’s stance is, “Well yeah, this is what the character could have been but this is what he ended up becoming and like it or not, this is who he is and this is who he’ll be remembered for.”
Rowling wants you to know that doing horrible things doesn’t make you a horrible person because there could be a rhyme or reason to your actions. A solid grey morality.
Handler wants you to know that doing horrible things doesmake you a horrible person because no matter what the motif is, you’re still doing horrible things and will be remembered for said horrible things.
Which is infinitely more tragic, infinitely more morally ambiguous, and infinitely more interesting.
J.K. Rowling tried to redeem Snape.
But Handler? Handler managed to redeem Olaf and not redeem him at the same time. Handler made his backstory tragic and he showed the reader exactly how things could have ended up, causing you to sympathize with the villain. But he also showed the reader exactly how things didend up, reminding you that no matter what could have been, it’s not what happened; instead we have this evil man who has done horrible things that are far too heinous to take back, no matter how much he may want to.
And while Rowling and many other YA authors took the approach that it’s never too late to redeem yourself and become the good person you should have been all along, Handler straight up took the, “Nope, for some people it’s far too late and no matter how much they may want to redeem themselves, they never will and they’ll have to die knowing that they are hated.”
And I don’t care how much you love Harry Potter, Handler’s approach to this character and the overall bleak philosophy and moral implications is on a whole other level of writing! I think the only other piece of fiction I’ve ever seen that approaches this philosophy of un-redemption is Bojack Horseman and you can still argue that Handler does it better because he’s able to scale it down so that kids can understand it, even if they don’t want to.
And yet, at the end of the day, Handler’s entire philsophy of how you might not be able to redeem yourself can really be summarized in one gif:
I feel like this stems fundamentally from Handler’s Jewishness as opposed to Rownling’s Christianity. Christians believe we’re all sinners, but we can be saved at any time in life through Jesus (details vary by sect). On the other hand, Jews believe that there ARE things that cannot be forgiven, evil deeds that you cannot be redeemed from after they’ve happened…
Because forgiveness involves being forgiven, and you can’t forgive someone for murdering you (because you’re dead)
Equally important is that Christianity tends to think that not being forgiven is the worst possible thing that can happen, since it results in eternal torture. Judaism doesn’t have eternal damnation, so it doesn’t have the same need for everything to be forgiven.
I was just a little bit too old to really get into it by the US release of the first Harry Potter book, so I never read those books until quite recently (2016) and I was really surprised when I finally read them. I thought Harry Potter was supposed to be like, this model for nerds and outcasts, but instead he’s a dumb jock who’s famous for being famous. And he wants to be a cop (which is at least consistent).
There’s something really off-putting and mean about it. It’s “ethically mean spirited” as Ursula Le Guin remarked when asked her impressions of the series, and a better writer might have been able to take that and Say Something about the hierarchy of life as teenage, but JKR is just not able to think through the implications of anything she writes whether that’s the antisemitic implications of goblin bankers, why Dumbledore sent Harry back to his horrible family instead of placing an anonymous tip to muggle child protective services, or why Harry Potter’s shit for brains attitude is always, always rewarded and what that tells her more impressionable audience.
Five years ago, I couldn’t figure it, but with what we’ve learned about JKR’s politics in the mean time, it makes perfect sense.
It’s not just that Harry isn’t particularly bright that’s troubling, but the fact that he treats his friend who isn’t a dullard as a pain in the ass, except for when he needs to exploit her book smarts for something because he didn’t fucking study.
He’s the kid who doesn’t do the reading, acts disengaged through most of the class, but then when the big test comes around he’s cribbing off whatever sap is willing to put up with his shit, whether due to insecurity or pity or some combination of the two.
For all the faults in her writing on a structural level, JKR has a very specific world view that comes across very clearly without making it superliminal a la Ayn Rand.
Fundamentally, her world view is shaped by being a lower middle class Briton who resented the class system while also idolizing it. It’s the Chris Hitchens disease (not the one that killed him, the other one). She hates power and is fascinated by power. A very fraught relationship.
So instead of making Harry this special boy who upsets the order of the Wizarding World with his otherness, his arrival is actually celebrated and makes him an instant sensation because it represents a return of normality and order. She wants to make him a rebel, but she can’t actually have him challenge power in any way because power is constantly valorized in these books. His biggest ally is the headmaster of his exclusive private school (or would it be a public school in British vernacular?). So instead she makes him a cut-up and a delinquent who’s misbehavior is constantly hand-waved by everyone, except the one hard-ass professor who absolutely has Harry pegged except that professor happens to be a former Nazi so we can’t really sympathize with him, no can we?
The whole thing is a fantasy for suffering lower middle class British kids who dream of secretly having a peerage even as they resent the class system for all the opportunities it’s denied them and doors its slammed in their face. It’s an extremely British point of view and it’s not really surprising most American readers are oblivious to it, but at the same time it’s weird that more critics haven’t pointed it out.
This point of view perfectly unites the three main political causes Rowling has taken up: empire fetishism, austerity politics, and TERFism, all hallmarks of middle class British social climbers. Rowling has of course made it long ago, made it far further up the ladder than Hitchens ever did, and is fantastically wealthy beyond the dreams of many of the peers she once might have envied (and maybe still does). Still, the basic grubby insecurity of the class position she lived in for years before her big break remains, which explains a lot about how she sees higher taxes as some kind of personal affront, above and beyond what even many rich people born into money would see them as.
quick question, have I gone insane? are people actually taking this seriously? the effort it took to twist the message of the books into one of pro-status quo conservatism when all the text is about fighting classism and racism and intolerance…
but to be fair this post does have genuinely funny moments, like how op seems to base some of their argument for JK Rowling being pro-status quo on how she writes Harry getting help from his smart friend for homework, disengaged in class sometimes, interested in sports…. basically just for being an average student LMFAO WHAT
(I apologize for the length of this post. I tried to put it under the cut but wasn’t given the option).
Harry Potter as a text is more complex than OP gives it credit for (to be fair, they stopped halfway through Goblet of Fire so they didn’t get exposed to some of the really weird stuff). Specifically, there are serious tensions among different themes in the series. So yes, Harry Potter has a strong theme that racism and intolerance are bad. That is absolutely an element in the text. But the text also has a strong theme that the society it depicts is basically good .
Something that happens frequently in literature is that the author will incorporate a strong theme or element into their work without realizing it. That’s one of the reasons Tolkien rejected allegory in favor of applicability. And an extremely strong theme in Harry Potter is that the system is broken, but given how the series ends (more on that below), I don’t think JKR realized she created a broken society.
(I need to stress that the following analysis relies on the assumption that one of the purposes of Harry Potter is to depict a society–the British wizarding world–in order to critique an actual one–modern Britain. There are legitimate reasons to reject such a reading, and while I think my assumption is correct, I’m not interested in defending it here.)
As I noted in my earlier addition to this post “Again and again throughout the middle books of the series, the society of British wizards is shown to have clear, gaping, structural flaws.” But while the text repeatedly points to those flaws, it consistently addresses them superficially. As a fundamentally liberal text, Harry Potter tends to depict racism in the wizarding world as a matter of individual people subscribing to incorrect beliefs, rather than the “reality” of a society in which bigotry actively serves the interests of the ruling class.
For example, there is never any sense that pure-bloods significantly benefit from the marginalization of muggle-borns; this is in part because there is never any sense that muggle-borns are significantly marginalized. Pure-blood supremacy is limited to Slytherins and everyone else thinks it’s stupid. That’s not how racism works on a societal level.
Think also about the closing words of the series, “All was well.” But what did we see in the epilogue? Harry, Ron, and Hermione as fully-integrated members of a system that the text clearly says needs huge structural reforms. A bunch of people crowded on Platform 9 ¾ sending their kids to an elite private school that has literal slaves to take care of them. A society that continues to treat muggles as toys to play with (I’m thinking here of Ron charming his way through his driver’s test). The basic system has not been changed. And yet, “All was well.”
Because for Harry, Ron, and Hermione, it is. They’ve created a place for themselves within the wizarding world where they can benefit from the “clear, gaping, structural flaws” that the series so carefully points to but never significantly challenges.
The best definition I’ve come across for liberalism is “the belief that problem with the ruling class is that it is insufficiently diverse.” Liberalism is pro-status quo while also being against racism, homophobia, sexism, etc because it sees those as incidental to the status quo rather than essential building blocks of it.
I was just a little bit too old to really get into it by the US release of the first Harry Potter book, so I never read those books until quite recently (2016) and I was really surprised when I finally read them. I thought Harry Potter was supposed to be like, this model for nerds and outcasts, but instead he’s a dumb jock who’s famous for being famous. And he wants to be a cop (which is at least consistent).
There’s something really off-putting and mean about it. It’s “ethically mean spirited” as Ursula Le Guin remarked when asked her impressions of the series, and a better writer might have been able to take that and Say Something about the hierarchy of life as teenage, but JKR is just not able to think through the implications of anything she writes whether that’s the antisemitic implications of goblin bankers, why Dumbledore sent Harry back to his horrible family instead of placing an anonymous tip to muggle child protective services, or why Harry Potter’s shit for brains attitude is always, always rewarded and what that tells her more impressionable audience.
Five years ago, I couldn’t figure it, but with what we’ve learned about JKR’s politics in the mean time, it makes perfect sense.
It’s not just that Harry isn’t particularly bright that’s troubling, but the fact that he treats his friend who isn’t a dullard as a pain in the ass, except for when he needs to exploit her book smarts for something because he didn’t fucking study.
He’s the kid who doesn’t do the reading, acts disengaged through most of the class, but then when the big test comes around he’s cribbing off whatever sap is willing to put up with his shit, whether due to insecurity or pity or some combination of the two.
For all the faults in her writing on a structural level, JKR has a very specific world view that comes across very clearly without making it superliminal a la Ayn Rand.
Fundamentally, her world view is shaped by being a lower middle class Briton who resented the class system while also idolizing it. It’s the Chris Hitchens disease (not the one that killed him, the other one). She hates power and is fascinated by power. A very fraught relationship.
So instead of making Harry this special boy who upsets the order of the Wizarding World with his otherness, his arrival is actually celebrated and makes him an instant sensation because it represents a return of normality and order. She wants to make him a rebel, but she can’t actually have him challenge power in any way because power is constantly valorized in these books. His biggest ally is the headmaster of his exclusive private school (or would it be a public school in British vernacular?). So instead she makes him a cut-up and a delinquent who’s misbehavior is constantly hand-waved by everyone, except the one hard-ass professor who absolutely has Harry pegged except that professor happens to be a former Nazi so we can’t really sympathize with him, no can we?
The whole thing is a fantasy for suffering lower middle class British kids who dream of secretly having a peerage even as they resent the class system for all the opportunities it’s denied them and doors its slammed in their face. It’s an extremely British point of view and it’s not really surprising most American readers are oblivious to it, but at the same time it’s weird that more critics haven’t pointed it out.
This point of view perfectly unites the three main political causes Rowling has taken up: empire fetishism, austerity politics, and TERFism, all hallmarks of middle class British social climbers. Rowling has of course made it long ago, made it far further up the ladder than Hitchens ever did, and is fantastically wealthy beyond the dreams of many of the peers she once might have envied (and maybe still does). Still, the basic grubby insecurity of the class position she lived in for years before her big break remains, which explains a lot about how she sees higher taxes as some kind of personal affront, above and beyond what even many rich people born into money would see them as.
I think it’s also crucial to look at JKR in terms of where she existed fiscally and socially when she wrote Philosopher’s Stove and where she did by Deathly Hallows.Philosopher’s StoneandChamber of Secrets focus far more on Harry’s internal experience of the clash between his Muggle and wizard existences. That clash remains in the other books, but it becomes more and more artificial; Harry’s assimilation into the wizarding world parallels JKR’s assimilation into wealth, fame, and power (not perfectly, obviously).
The author of Chamber of Secrets presents house elf slavery as an unequivocal evil, but by the time she became the author of Goblet of Fire the implications of widespread slavery in wealthy wizard households became far more problematic to who JKR saw herself to be. The author of Goblet of Fire wasn’t able to condemn the various things that house elves symbolize about modern Britain because she was now part of those things. The author of Deathly Hallows couldn’t even bear Kreacher hating Harry; so Kreacher went from being someone who bought into pureblood supremacy to someone whose support of purebloods was nothing more than loyalty to the ideology of those who treated him well.
Again and again throughout the middle books of the series, the society of British wizards is shown to have clear, gaping, structural flaws. But as JKR became increasingly wealthy, she began to profit from the clear, gaping, structural flaws in the real world that her fictitious one paralleled. The injustice in Chamber of Secrets of Hagrid’s expulsion fifty years ago and his imprisonment during the book itself is very different from the injustice Harry faces in Order of the Phoenix, where he is able to escape from being framed unscathed and the consequences he suffers afterward are purely social; he is not treated to the same systemic injustice Hagrid received because JKR could no longer acknowledge those systems in the way she did previously.
This is a really good addition, which I rather missed having lost interest in the series half way through Goblet of Fire (for reasons that are alluded to here).
after the war, ron becomes a community organizer and starts an ally workshop for pureblood wizards who need to get their shit together and actually unpack the centuries worth of blood-purity rhetoric they have accidentally preserved with their language and actions
It seems that Mrs. Hooch is the usual referee for all Hogwarts Quidditch games. You’d think putting a Head of House as referee for a game would be against the rules since they could interfere by favoring one team over the other, even if the teams are none of the Head’s own house. There must have been a good reason for Dumbledore to interfere in the Hufflepuff/Grynffindor match.
I think the broom hexing from Harry’s first game, and the refereeing in his next game are directly related, as one being the consequence of the other, and that Harry was just a proxy between 2 competing Dark Lord servants, Quirrell and Snape (in appearances only).
Gryffindor vs Slytherin
Quirrell hexes the broom, from an earlier order from Voldemort, or on his own initiative to impress his master. Voldemort couldn’t have possessed Quirrell at that moment since Harry didn’t feel scar pain. Snape, which status to the Dark Lord still read as “Double agent working at Hogwarts to spy on Dumbledore”, is supposed to be in the confidence of Dumbledore in order to learn his secrets. Quirrell hexes the broom to trigger a reaction from Snape. If Snape saves Harry it shows that Snape wants to keep Dumbledore confidence by saving his protégé, remaining in Dumbledore’s confidence and everybody else’s. If Snape doesn’t intervene it means Snape really wants Harry dead, since everyone would know that Snape is good in dark arts and would have been able to save Harry.
Gryffindor vs Hufflepuff
Snape refereeing means that he will be away from the school for a while that day, which would give plenty of time to Quirrell to go test the trapdoor and try to get in the maze, undisturbed by his rival, considering that the maze was a setup to trap Quirrell!Mort and pull Voldemort out of Quirrell’s head and save him while catching Vapormort at the same time. If Hermione can trap animagus Rita in an enchanted glass jar that prevent any means of escape, I’m confident that Dumbledore could easily come up with some enchanted glass jar in which to trap Vapormort.
Snape refereeing would also show the whole school that Dumbledore is “doing something” by setting up a referee no one would want to cross in order to prevent further broom hexing and who’s also knowledgeable in the dark arts used in that sort of hexing.
This is how Quirrell!mort interprets Snape refereeing, which shows he didn’t know that the main motive would have been to encourage him to go into the maze with Snape out of the way. Quirrell!mort also goes further in his wrong interpretation of the hexing episode by telling Harry that the teachers thought that Snape was trying to stop Gryffindor from winning. We can suppose that the teachers were playing dumb in front of Quirrell by pretending that Snape is the baddie. Which completely makes no sense, since Snape was refereeing the next game. You don’t put the bad guy in charge of the game when he was he one hexing a player in the previous. But Quirrell!Mort never seemed to have caught that contradiction, which might have given him a hint that there was a major conspiracy against him at school.
When Harry catches the Snitch early, Snape seems to be pretty pissed off about it by spitting on the ground, again not because Gryffindor won, but because he was counting on a good long Quidditch game to give more free time to Quirrell!Mort to check out the maze and hopefully make it through, therefore he’ll have to continue to play the baddie with Quirrell and pretend he also want to steal the stone.
Regarding the Founders’ Artifacts in Harry Potter…
Is the implication literally that Helga Hufflepuff could only contribute a CUP because she’s big and presumably liked eating and drinking?? We know JKR doesn’t like and downplays the capacity of fat people. Hufflepuff takes ‘all the rest’ into her house…because she’s greedy??
Isn’t it interesting that Rowling chooses to let Harry, her star protagonist, commit two out of the three Unforgivable Curses during the course of the story, while still a teenager, and face no punishment?
Wasn’t one of the huge red flags about Voldemort that he tortured others with no remorse, just to satisfy his own curiosity or emotional desires?
Harry Potter, our hero, clearly has a whole lesson about Crucio, Imperio and Avada Kedavra in Goblet of Fire, in which he learns, aged 14, that each curse carries a life sentence. In the same class, he witnesses the cruel impact of each curse used on an animal.
Nonetheless, the very next year is the first time Harry tries to cast Crucio, the torture curse, on another human. At the age of 15.
We know from the great detail that the lesson goes into that the sole purpose of Crucio is to cause pain. Harry does not use Crucio to try and obtain information. He uses it to hurt a woman who he dislikes (albeit for valid reasons).
The very next year, Harry again uses Crucio against an adult he dislikes, deliberately in order to inflict pain. Yes, it’s during combat. But he is knowingly breaking the law of his land. Is he banking on his celebrity status to be above the law?
Finally, in his seventh year, Harry uses Crucio against an adult for the third time. This time, he hurts the adult so much that they become unconscious from the pain. Amycus Carrow had insulted a woman Harry liked in front of him.
In case anyone has forgotten, immediately after finishing school, Harry Potter takes a career in law enforcement. There’s no suggestion he faces any punishment whatsoever for what are essentially war crimes. Is this what JK Rowling intended?
I wonder what Neville thinks about his friend’s actions, given his personal history with Crucio? Isn’t a central theme of Harry Potter “do the ends justify the means?” What does the rule of law mean if members of law enforcement are given carte blanche to commit war crimes with no punishment?
Doesn’t that retroactively excuse Dolores Umbridge’s actions when she herself, representing the law, attempts to bait Harry into committing a crime and threatens him with torture?
Shall we even get into the issues of Hermione committing kidnap and blackmail, Ron stealing, the Weasley twins underage gambling? Maybe Harry Potter isn’t the Good series it makes itself out to be when such morally grey characters are the central protagonists and the legal system rewards them.
Popular Youtuber Shaunhas a video out on the Harry Potter phenomenon, and if you have the time, I recommend giving it a goo.
In a comprehensive overview of J.K. Rowling’s work - taking in the Harry Potter novels, the movies and plays, even the Galbraith books written for adults - Shaun zeroes in on a number of themes. From fatphobia, to moral essentialism (there are no good or bad actions, simply good and evil people who act), as well as the neoliberal moment that the Potter phenomenon was a part of, it’s a fascinating discussion.
I am admittedly one of those painful people who bounced right off the Potter books and had a habit of letting fans of the series know this, an obnoxious behaviour then that threatens to become gloating now given Rowling’s unmasking as a “gender critical” bigot.
That said, I have always been fascinated with the popularity of Harry Potter. Not simply in terms of its commercial success, but the spread of the series across children and adults, from internet chatrooms to professional workspaces - Potter was inescapable. I never quite understood why.
What attracted people to these books? Was it nostalgia for a false British golden age of boarding schools, tuck shops and pranking school masters? Shaun’s analysis suggests something more is at work, particularly in relation to Rowling’s political consciousness and how that influences the plots of the stories, swerving away from resolving issues in the fictional world such as racial equality and slavery.
So are these books about a comforting British/Western status quo being protected and preserved against any force for change, be it dictatorial or progressive? And what does that say about the appeal these books then held - for their adult readership in particular (and the expectations for the future children who were fans of the books then held)?
I’m interested in this aspect of Pottermania, the deeper appeal of the series and its spin-offs, beyond any failings of Rowling as an individual. If anyone can point me to writing or videos on this, I’d welcome suggestions.
The more it seems like she actually did get wrongfooted by fans’ positive response to her queercoded characters Remus Lupin and Tonks and decided as punishment for queer fans to squash any prospect of those characters being queer by hurrying them into a heterosexual marriage, having them have a child and then quickly die offscreen - giving both a book full of angst beforehand.
The fact that they had to get married first before having a kid also speaks volumes…
After watchingShaun’s fascinating video about Harry Potter it really struck me regarding Joanne Rowling being a neoliberal against cultural change…
After Harry frees Dobby from enslavement, making him nominally ‘a free elf’ who can be paid for his labour, supposedly because the concept of someone being enslaved is wrong and horrible… he himself never pays Dobby for any of the tasks he then asks of him!
This pretty much softens the message off the bat from Slavery is Wrong, to Being a Slave to an Abusive Master is wrong, Slaves should be treated politely while they labour for you for free! Jesus Christ Joanne…
