#hhhhhoooo boy this is uh

[moltengoldveins]

so it’s a random Friday evening, I’m hanging out with my sister, when she asks me something, and I feel the bottom drop out of my perception of reality:

“hey, did you ever notice that there were other rooms in that chain of challenge rooms before the Philosophers Stone? Like, other than the three that corresponded directly to the golden trio? And that said rooms corresponded pretty directly to Neville and Draco?”

I sat there in shock for a second. She’s right btw, there are two other big challenges and they DO correspond weirdly well with Draco and Neville: the magical plant right at the beginning and the potions that they have to identify. I have a moment where I wonder “huh. I wonder if Dumbledore maybe put those there just in case the Golden Trio picked up some extra friends-“ before she starts going on about how the story would have changed if Neville and Draco were friends. I will absolutely elaborate on this (Fantastic) AU fic premise in a bit but the important thing is what I realized while she was describing this story to me.

I have struggled with explaining to people why I dislike Harry Potter for a really long time. Problems with the author’s behavior aside, I found myself just…. Soured to the books. I grew up loving them and one day they just lost appeal, and as I thought more and more about them I liked them less and less. And I’ve used a ton of different reasons to explain why I don’t like them over the years, but until this conversation I couldn’t really articulate it, not fully. There was Something Wrong, and I couldn’t find the root of it. But I figured it out:

Harry changes nothing. That’s what it is. That’s what bothers me. And it’s deeper than that: the story changes nothing. The story is lukewarm at best in its defense of the good and the true and it rewards wrongdoing and punishes and mocks those who do what is right.

Now, I’m not saying that every story needs to give good things to characters who do good things: that’s not how real life works, it’s not how fiction needs to work. But there is a difference between watching a fictional character try and fail to do good and receive nothing but punishment for it, and then a story that deliberately portrays the efforts of a character to affect positive change as stupid or wrong.

Ostensibly, the ‘point’ of Harry Potter is that discrimination is wrong and people shouldn’t make assumptions based on someone’s upbringing. Hermione’s status as a muggleborn is defended as ‘just as worthy’ as everyone else’s, and discrimination against muggles and muggleborns is the main form Voldemort’s evil takes. The main evil of the story is this insistence on one specific social system in which the pure bloods are valued above all else and everyone else falls into pariah or servile statuses beneath them. THIS IS WRONG. We establish that this is wrong!

BUT. From literally day one, Harry is making assumptions about Draco based on his birth and upbringing, and the story is making assumptions about Hagrid (well, a lot of characters but Hagrid is the most obvious) because of HIS birth and upbringing. And none of these assumptions are ever proven false!

like, how does this actually go down? Draco is rude to Harry in a robe shop - unideal, but he is a stressed child in a wealthy environment, this behavior isn’t out of place. It’s Hagrid who tells Harry about the Malfoy’s, tells him they’re the ‘wrong sort.’ Draco introduces himself later on, apologizing for the interaction at the robe shop: it’s Ron who laughs at Draco’s name first. Draco claps back with the insult about Ron’s name after his name has already been insulted.

My sister pointed something really interesting out to me: Draco and Hermione don’t have beef for a While. It only starts in the second book, when he calls her a Mudblood. But Hermione starts that fight. Hermione insults his blood status, saying that he had to buy him way onto the team because it’s the only thing he has: his family’s wealth. Draco insults her back IN THE WAY HE WAS INSULTED. This is legitimately fascinating to me, I NEVER noticed this.

so that’s already interesting: Harry is all for bridging differences and forgiveness when it comes to people in a ‘lower’ social or moral class than he is, as a Griffindor pureblood. He’s nice to half-giants, house elves, and muggleborns, and those demographics are portrayed by the story as morally good. But anyone above Harry? Anyone in Slytherin? Anyone who is pureblood and rich? They’re not just biased and affected by their cultural upbringing: the STORY ITSELF portrays them as evil and untrustworthy, and Harry never makes an effort to change that. In fact, he actively encourages it with his relationship with Draco. The divide between pure blood Slytherins and the rest of wizard kind is never breached: Harry never changes anything. Voldemort dies, and everything else returns to exactly the same as it was before him. Harry does exactly nothing to the status who.

So what about Hagrid? Hagrid, and by extension giants, are implied by the story to be full people with cultures and feelings, and yet none of Harry’s interactions with Hagrid or Hagrids efforts are rewarded with positive change: the giants join Voldemort in the end, proving people like Umbridge correct about them. Hermione’s efforts with the house elves lead nowhere: Harry dismisses them as foolish from the get-go, and never takes the extra step to viewing Kreacher like a friend and fellow person.

Harry Potter is a deeply allegorical story: this kind of stuff MATTERS. What the story says about one person is what the story is saying about People Like This Person. So, what is it saying?

The story is saying that people like Hagrid, whether you read him as an allegory for kids with Down’s syndrome or autism or a learning disability or they’re mixed-race or whatever? Are exactly as useless and stupid and flawed and burdensome as you think they’d be. It doesn’t say “oh, they have their flaws but we accommodate and love them anyway and they can with accommodation be full contributing members of society with relationships that are just as deep and meaningful and worthy of respect as those of the people around them” no. It says “these people are easy to trick. They’re loud and inappropriate in social settings. They can’t keep secrets and they cause problems without ever fixing them. Their love is comedic, or futile, or both. They are a burden on the people who tolerate their company.”

None of Hagrid’s efforts ever come to fruition. None of his traits that are originally assumed to be bad turn out to be useful. His relationship with his giant brother never goes anywhere: the giants still follow Voldemort, even though his brother does support him in the end. His affection for madam Maxime is played as a joke. He never gets justice for being unfairly expelled or given a chance to take classes again, even though dumbledore KNEW that Hagrid was falsely accused and had EVIDENCE of it after the third book. He gets to teach, yeah, but the gap in his knowledge is never addressed; it’s just mocked and belittled as he fumbles and struggles to be an effective and safe teacher.

This is not an isolated case. This is EVERYWHERE in this story. You just have to look.

The story says that people like Sirius, people who lost everything when falsely accused and put in prison, don’t deserve second chances when they get out. They don’t deserve to reconnect with the kid they should have raised and build the parental relationship they should have had. They don’t get second chances like their oldest friend making them the godfather of his new baby: no, instead that honor goes to Harry, who gets little to no narrative meaning from that decision. They don’t get second chances, but people like Peter Pettigrew do. People like Sirius die soon after they’re released, having regained none of what they lost. The best people like Sirius can do is die for someone fit for decent society.

Molly says, in one of her nastiest moments, that Harry isn’t Sirius’s son: she’s right. But the hatred and disrespect towards Sirius in that comment is never addressed by the story, which really does make it feel like the story is implicitly supporting her.

The story says that people like Remus are sad unreliable and ultimately tragic lost causes. That people who were horribly wounded at a young age in a place they should have been safe (wow. I wonder what that could possibly be an allegory for.), or people who are disabled, or people with ptsd and survivor’s guilt, or people who have lost every person they’ve ever loved, don’t get absolution. They don’t get a second chance, or a place in society, or a future. They’re discriminated against, and nothing changes. They don’t rebuild their relationship with their surviving friends. They die, and their children aren’t even taken in by the person they asked to take them. Remus’s kid isn’t raised by Harry: he’s raised by Molly.

Nothing changes at the end of this story. Harry has not changed anything about the world these people lived and struggled in other than removing Voldemort from it. Werewolves still can’t get jobs. The few people related to the original Marauders are still scattered and unrelated. The giants and half giants are still on the margins of the wilderness. The house elves are still oppressed, and no solution has been offered to them. The purebloods haven’t been brought into the fold: they still think the same things they always have, because none of them have been taught differently. Slytherins are still the ‘evil’ house. No camaraderie has been built: no walls destroyed, no relationships developed, no prejudice dispelled.

Draco isn’t just a character, he is the representation of the Child of the Regime. The Child of Wealth, of Privilege. If he cannot be taught, then you are saying, implicitly, that kids who have been “corrupted” by their rich parents are beyond saving. You are saying that the world cannot change, that those in power cannot be taught compassion, that anyone born into wealth is inherently evil or cowardly or unfriendly or unreachable.

The world of Harry Potter reenforces Draco’s biases and prejudices all the way through. He’s never shown that he’s wrong, that the good guys are good, that love is the answer, that kindness is the right choice. Instead, the trio assume at every turn that he is worse than he already is, and that motivates him to be worse. Instead, they only character watching out from him is Snape, even as Dumbledore continues to manipulate him. Instead, nobody thinks to wonder how a child might be faring in the house of two known death eaters now that Voldemort has returned, they just assume he’d immediately and enthusiastically joined up because he’s a Malfoy. Instead, every Slytherin is asked to leave before the battle of Hogwarts, because they ‘can’t be trusted.’ Not because theyre children who might come face to face with their parents on the other side of the battlefield, no: they can’t be trusted. They’re inherently evil. And everyone else is inherently good.

and all of these statements are backed up by Harry himself. This is how Harry sees his world, and how the narrative treats its characters. This return to the status quo, this complete lack of growth and reconciliation is what the story treats as the ultimate win condition. This disgusting lack of regard for the allegory of your characters, especially when it comes to those who represent the disabled or neurodivergent or racially diverse is what the story treats as fine and normal. EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER who represents a minority has horrible things happen to them and either dies or ends the story worse than they started. Sirius, Remus, Dobby, Hagrid, Tonks, Mad-Eye, even people like Snape and Draco. This is not a narratively satisfying story of growth and positive change, it is the story of a young child being manipulated by the adults in his life to think in binary black and white about the people around him and long desperately for the ‘good old days’ he never experienced, and then being forced by circumstances outside his control to fight for the return of those good old days, completely ignorant of the fact that those ‘good old days’ weren’t that good for most of the people he knows and loves because they’re members of minorities those ‘good old days’ treated like shit.

How on earth were we surprised by JKR’s political and personal opinions? How were any of us blindsided by this? I’m so confused as to how we all looked at this story and went “yeah that looks like a good old fashioned coming of age ‘discrimination is bad’ story to me.” It’s not. It never was. It actively promotes that mentality at nearly every turn. You don’t get to make your villain cartoonishly hate muggles and your heroes heroic muggleborns and then say your story is about being anti-racist when there are eight or so other demographics your main character discriminates against, mistreats, misunderstands, or ignores entirely without narrative consequences. That’s just a story about discrimination being good with a shoddy Halloween costume on to trick the easily distracted.

The story my sister told me, the one where Draco and Neville were friends? It was a story about change and growth. It was a story about how someone’s dogged insistence on kindness could reveal that even the apparent nastiest of people were actually just as human as everyone else; that they too had fears and flaws and loves and strengths, that they too wanted love and respect and affection. It was a story where the good guys were kind, and it made a difference; it taught the misguided about the truth, brought the fallen into the fold. It made whole what was broken and gave second chances to those who felt discarded by the world.

It was, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely nothing like the books JKR actually wrote.

.

Edit: a commenter mentioned two things I wanna address, the first of which being Harry’s status as a half blood. This is true! I forgot about it :/ I don’t think it changes the point I was making about the story, but it’s good to bring up as I did forget. And second, Remus’s being a werewolf is an allegory for AIDS: I did not know this at all! Thank you for telling me, that’s actually really cool and makes a lot of sense, I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on it. I think that might make things worse though. Like…. That takes the fandom’s confusion over how Remus’s character was treated from ‘frustrated that this allegory doesn’t seem to make sense’ to ‘holy crap you did that on purpose what the heck-‘ so….. yeah. Thank you for telling me op! If anyone knows of any references or information about the different things the characters represent in this story please let me know?