What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [18:24-23:29]

calmer and striped novels, including an unsympathetically described trans character and a serial killer who crossed dresses to prey on women, the most basic transphobic fear. According to the reinterpretation, this pattern in Joanne's writing suggests a more mean-spirited world view than perhaps even she is aware of, and may explain how she is able to write a story opposing bigotry whilst, in my opinion, failing to identify bigotry within herself. Now, I ought to stress we can't know what's going on in Joanne's head. Apart from the endless writhing of worms, obviously, I'm not claiming to prove anything about Joanne, but I am going to use the word suggests a lot. I'm also not going to go over every argument the reinterpretation has made, because there's a lot of it. You can check that out on your own time. What I'm going to do is make my own case for what I see as their two most common and most compelling interpretations. Let's ruin some childhoods. The main conflict in the Potter series pits our heroes against Voldemort and his death-eaters, an authoritarian group who discriminate based on blood purity. The idea that muggle-born witches and wizards are inherently inferior to those of pure blood. A bigotry ideology which the narrative outright disproves. I mean, the rest of us know it doesn't make any difference at all. Look at Never Long Bottom. He's pure blood, and he can hardly send a cold during the right way up. Now you haven't invented a spell or Hermione can't do? Said Hagrid proudly. So we can sum up the main message of Potter as basic non-essentialism, opposing the idea that people are born with inherent talents and qualities which make them good or bad. It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be. Except when it comes to gender apparently, and, as we've already mentioned, fat people. Potter has long been criticised for the language it uses to describe overweight characters, particularly Dudley Dursley. If you haven't read the books in a while, you may have forgotten quite how egregious it is. The text frequently draws attention to his massive backside, his multiple chins. He's described as waddling. He's literally dehumanized by being likened to a pig or, on one occasion, a young killer whale. Which suggests, Joanne has a particular fixation on, even discussed for overweight people. In response to this criticism, back in 2007, fansite MuggleNet posted a rebuttal, pointing out other overweight characters in Potter, like Hagrid and Molly Weasley, whose weights are treated incidentally. Since none of the outright evil characters are fat, the post argued fatness is not a moral indictment in Potter, and Joanne made a similar statement. Interestingly, the MuggleNet post no longer exists. Perhaps because they realised that's bulls**t. Fatness may not be a moral indictment for Molly, but for Dudley, it is. There's a big difference between describing Molly as plump and calling Dudley a pig in a wig. YouTuber OkayToBeFat argues that Dudley is an example of the fat bully trope, where a bully uses their size to exert power over smaller children. Even though statistics show children are more likely to be bullied for their weight than anything else. The text doesn't just demonize Dudley for being a bully, it demonises him for being fat. In fact, the inconsistent treatment of overweight characters may speak to a broader criticism. In Lauren R. Kamachi's essay, The Face of Evil, she argues Potter's character descriptions frequently involve physiognomy. The debunked pseudoscience popular with eugenicists in the early 20th century, which claims a person's character and morals can be discerned through their facial features. Now, Kamachi isn't suggesting Joanne is a closet eugenicist. She argues that physiognomic ideas live on in what she describes as beauty bias. The tendency to portray good guys as attractive while portraying bad guys as ugly. It's not just fat characters who are dehumanized as animals. Potonia is horsey. Snape is that like. Pansy Parkinson has a pug-like face, and Umbridge is so caricatured as a toad with her broad, flabby face, slack mouth, and bulging eyes that Kamachi argues it's not humanly possible. And if our opinion of a character is supposed to change, so too do their descriptions. Tom Riddle is handsome as a youth, but Lord Voldemort is gaunt, pale, and literally snake-like.