What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [13:19-18:24]

Part one. Should we have known? When so many adult critics were carrying on about the incredible originality of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about and remained somewhat puzzled. It seemed a lively kids fantasy crossed with a school novel. Good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited. Stylistically ordinary, I guess is fair. Imaginatively derivative. Well, Le Guin wrote about a magic school first, but ethically mean-spirited? Is that really true? Unsurprisingly, this quote from 2004 has been doing the rounds again more recently. Le Guin is a juggernaut of children's fantasy, whose work has often been compared to Potter. And some suggest this quote proves Le Guin clocked Joanne as a bigot all the way back then, which I'd say is a generous interpretation of mean-spirited, but clearly Le Guin clocked something the rest of us didn't. The reason Joanne's actions are so often seen as a betrayal is because of how antithetical they are to what we, as fans, interpreted as the core message of her books. We find the use of her influence and privilege to target marginalized people, to be able to step with the message of acceptance and empowerment we find in her books and celebrate it by the Harry Potter community. The central theme of Potter is the power of love and acceptance, conquering hate and persecution. It's a story about thwarting an evil authoritarian rise to power. It's about defeating bigotry. Congratulations, Joanne. You don't understand your own books. I'm constantly told I don't understand my own books. I'm constantly told that I have betrayed my own books. My position is that I am absolutely upholding the positions that I took in Potter. Oops! So Joanne doesn't see any incompatibility with what she believes now and what she wrote then. How do we make sense of that? Well, according to the reinterpretation, it makes perfect sense. There are many things in Potter we might call problematic, for instance. The Green Dot Goblins resemble anti-semitic caricatures. The house elves are a race of slaves who enjoy being enslaved. Dudley-Durzly and other overweight characters are described with fat phobic language. Most non-white or non-ritish characters have stereotypical or cartoonish names. Cho Chang's ethnicity is unclear, and her name is made up. Hermione's campaign for house elf liberation frames her comedically as an ignorant busy body. Dumbledore's homosexuality is not made explicit anywhere in the books and is only confirmed in external sources. Joanne described her werewolves as an allegory for AIDS, whilst also featuring a villainous werewolf who attacks and deliberately infects children. And, seriously Joanne, while you even trying to say with the house elves. Sure, there's a lot here that raises an eyebrow, but it was a different time. Okay, it wasn't that long ago, but Joanne wasn't the only writer back then doing ignorant stuff like this. And one of these things outright suggest transphobia. The subject of trans people never even comes up in the Potter books. That's not what Joanne says. My position is that this activist's movement in the form that it's currently taking echoes the very thing that I was warning against in Harry Potter. God dammit, Joanne! I should mention here that the podcast's PR firm claims Joanne was referring to the trans activist movement, not trans people in general. I don't hate trans people, just the ones who advocate for their own rights is my personal interpretation of that statement. The point is, according to the reinterpretation, these common criticisms reveal a pattern of attitudes connected to, in their opinion, Joanne's bigotry, a pattern which persists and even gets worse in her later work. Despite Dumbledore's romantic relationship with Grindelwald being a key plot point, the fantastic beast films only feature occasional flimsy references to his sexuality. Potter Moore's international expansion of the Wizarding World is even more stereotypical and often downright ignorant of other cultures, accused of being appropriative and colonialist. And we see more fat phobia, most notably in the casual vacancy, in which Joanne writes a passage about how seeing an unsympathetic character's large belly prompts most people to wonder how he's able to use his... Um, um, no Joanne, actually most people don't think about that when they see a fat person. Feels like you're telling on yourself here. And this pattern leads to, in my opinion, overt transphobia in her