Jessie Gender has a video where she explains gender with Hogwarts houses as a metaphor. She filmed it before JK went crazy and uploaded it much later with an explanation how long ago she filmed it
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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I've never been able too reconcile the writer of HP with the person she has shown herself to be.
The books are still good, the movies are still good, the author will not be remembered.
If the kids ask, she's as good as gone. Might have never existed.
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It's wild to me how progressive HP felt compared to the underlying "conservatism good, actually" message underlying it. How the hell did a whole generation of kids miss that? Poor reading comprehension? Or is it that the US is so regressive that English conservatism feels progressive?
A big problem is that early on it's teased Harry would become this "Anti-Voldemort" figure who renews the Wizarding World and completely restructures it, and then he just becomes a cop and maintains the same status quo that got his friends killed.
So foreshadowing that doesn't pay off because JK sucks at writing mostly
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It didn't skip past me, even as a kid, in the perfect age bracket to grow up with the book series.
...
Oh, fat and ugly people are always also internally, morally, unfixably flawed.
Oh, the super blonde aryan coded people are magic nazis.
Oh, a base level of magic racism is more or less normalized.
Oh, those elves are slaves but its ok because they actually really love being slaves.
Oh, the banking system is run by cariacatures of Jews.
...
I noticed all this shit as a child, and was pestered and guffawed at for pointing it out.
This is before I even knew 'Trans' was a thing that could and does exist, before I even knew that you could be gay or lesbian or bi.
I still was, as recently as a few years ago, poopoo'd for mentioning these problems in Harry Potter... by the ... Potterhead/Disney Princess/Goes to Disneyland once a year people I used to know, who self describe as all over the gender rainbow, but aren't capable of acknowledging that these problems exist, because magical escapism apparently requires full doublethink... and those people would also routinely hypocritically mock my own mild cisgender nonconformity.
...
Yeah, the Overton Window in the US is/was so thoroughly shifted rightward, in so many ways, that 'we can have a story line that involves magic' was considered widly progressive, compared to the baseline of 'Pokemon cards are demonic because they involve evolution' and 'DnD is demonic because roleplaying is impossible and it makes you a Satanist Witch/Warlock'.
EDIT: Well, hey, here's a recent Youtube video from Holy Koolaid that does a decent job explaining the mass satanic panic / religious paranoia of the 80s and 90s in the US:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A8otomGEZCY
American political history is ... remarkably distinct from other democracies in how often its tendency toward conspirsicism and mass paranoia... becomes a driving force in our culture and politics.
So distinct in fact, that we now no longer live in an actual proper democracy, thanks in large part to Q Anon and derived nonsense... which has always been a sort of meta, uber, grand unifiying conapiracy theory, with many overt religious features.
...
Animorphs was more progressive and mature.
Here kids, time to learn about the horrors of war, first hand, as told by a teenage terrorist group!
Things are shitty and messy and unpredictable, and the world revolves around how youand others handle morally gray, fundamentally complex scenarios, not cookie cutter, simplistic good vs evil decisions that are far less difficult to evaluate!
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I mean, when I was reading the books as they came out, I expected “oh yeah obviously he’s gonna overturn the corrupt order and we’re gonna pay off on this whole elf slavery plot, which surely is written comedically just because an unflinching representation would be far too dark for a kids series.” That’s how stories like this usually end, after all.
And then, uh, it didn’t do any of that.
So I think it’s something like “it’s fairly generic, the other stories in this genre skew left, and nobody expected it to have a weird aggressively-centrist swerve a decade later.”
Is not conservatism but peak liberalism, where the problems aren't the power structures but that the people on power are not good enough. This is why at the end of the series no structural changes are done, the only thing that changes is the people in power is the Good Ones(R).
I agree, but liberalism is by nature conservative.
Huh? Maybe at this day and age, sure, but liberal means progressive at the time when its ideas were being formulated. They opposed feudalism and monarchies at the time, which are the conservatives at the time.
What is considered conservative today is considered liberal in the past. And what is considered liberal today is considered unthinkable in the past. It just that the Overton window shifted.
Uh, sure, I guess I'll agree it's less conservative than feudalism, but I'm not sure what that has to do with whether HP is conservative? It's not as if the story is about overthrowing a monarchy to establish modern capitalism (a different common story structure with its own problems); it's about removing all the bad people in positions of authority so that the good people can make society work like it should while changing nothing systemically.
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Can't deny that
Think of the age that these books were meant to be read by.
If you think grade 4-6 children have that large of a world view….
The final book is about 2" thick and contains depictions of torture ... what age do you think that was meant to be read by?
And it's that last book that cements that the only problem with the magical society is that someone bad got to be in charge ... Harry gets to be a wizard cop who will send people to a prizon of horrible torture, all the slaves are happy being slaves, the banks are run by greedy little monsters with big noses, and that's how it's supposed to be.
Books presented to young readers can help them to form lasting impressions of how they see the world if, like most people, they don't think to question it. My Mum thought Enid Blyghton books were just wonderful, for example.
I think media literacy definitely played a role, but I also think theres a lot to unpack here on why this could be the case. I dont think its a simple one dimensional answer at all
Americans aren't taught to think.
Depends on the area, and community. It's probably more accurate to say most Americans aren't taught to think critically of the status quo.
Americans aren’t taught to think.
Your statement is not true. Proof: I think you're right. But I'm American so I must be wrong because I wasn't taught to think. If I'm wrong that you're right, then you must be wrong. QED.
I can't speak for anyone but child me was a dumbass.
thinking back about my experience with hp i didnt have the political understanding yet, to notice the injustices that i was not suppose to notice or question and i did not notice that the presented solutions are all kinda non-solutions.
all i saw was that hp fought against injustices like the fantasy nazis and that they liberated this one poor mistreated elf and became friends with the kids who were looked down on, while showing those mean nazi spawn bullies of. in a way hp has the simplistic analysis of good and bad that a child might have. while also being a flawed kid.
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Can you explain the "conservatism good" message you see?
it's a very British conservatism. it's about blood. the story has people constantly accusing Harry of having bad parentage; as his aunt says "bad blood will out". a left leaning story would have shown that blood had nothing to do with it. Harry was not raised by his dead parents regardless of how good or bad they are. Harry knew trauma and abuse, then was given his values by Dumbledore and hagrid and lupin and his friends.
but that's not what happened. in the end it's not that blood and lineage doesn't matter. it's just that his parents were actually high class and wealthy. so Harry won because he had good blood and was the chosen one. he won because of the innate quality he was born with.
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the bankers in book one are literally a bigoted analog for jews.
an entire swath of story is about “mudbloods” and race mixing and some characters railing against it.
there is actual slavery.
stuff american conservatives are all pushing as ideas in our current world.
See Seamus Finnegan, Pavarti ? Cho Chang, fleur de'lacour. If the character isn't British British they are a full caricature.
Ironically when I was a kid, Harry Potter was written by the devil and to read it would be practicing demonic witchcraft. My upbringing was definitely not unique in that regard.
Other than the bankers, the other two are clearly painted in an unfavorable light, which is fine. You have to have conflict in order to have a story, of course.
The goblins, no argument here. But the rest, it seems like the entire point of the book is fighting against those things?
Against the slavery of the elfs that was a Hermione thing that everyone else laughed about and it was used on the book for comedic bits.
So, the smartest character in the book fights for their freedom. I'm sure a lot of readers shared the opinion that the slavery was wrong.
And then she just stopped doing it, I guess, because in the last book's epilogue literally nothing changed with the system
By then she was one of the "Haves." Turns out she was selfish all along.
Edit: I mean the author, not Hermione
Her fight was still presented as a joke, bet half the readers just went "haha silly Hermione, who dosen't wants free servants??"
Edit: on top of that, Rowling uses the trope of the natural state of the slave is being slaved and is actually good for them, with the other freed house elves that is depressed because she dosen't have a family to work for.
Yes that edit is a good point that I'd forgotten.
Moved on to Terry Pratchett early on, so much better in every way.
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And they were all antagonists, they werent being portrayed in a good light, they were all portrayed as evil.
At least in the movies I never actually read the books
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