What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [60:45-65:46]

Interpretation 3. The Original People have been trying to explain potomania for decades, and I don't claim to know why it happened either. It sure is hell wasn't because Joanne is just that good of a writer, or that potter did something which no other children's books have done before. Probably, it was just the right book, doing the right combination of things, getting the right kind of attention at the right time. YouTuber Verily Bicci argues that a lot of potter success was manufactured by AOL Time Warner, who could use their media empire to relentlessly promote potter directly to impressionable children. And, sure, that definitely fan the flames, but there was still something about potter which started the fire in the first place. I first discovered potter not from advertising, but from my classmates, word of mouth. And, though it may surprise you, I was not a popular kid. I was rarely motivated by peer pressure. Nevertheless, I would stay up late reading those books till the small hours of the morning because I just couldn't put them down. That's not something Joanne or advertising can make children do. I know it's gauche to give Joanne compliments these days, but it would be reductive to claim there weren't some things potter did well. Relatable characters, solid mysteries, rye and imaginative world building, a darkening and maturing narrative. And, when it comes to interpreting meaning, I think these elements, the vibes of a story, count for more than they're often given credit for. A setting's strength is not only logistics, it's also bum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum-pum, and a f***ing owl and it flies in the wands and like the laborious school uniforms. All of that stuff actually has, I would say, a heavier, pragmatic weight on what brings joy to your players. Positive criticism tends to focus more on emotion, whereas negative criticism generally attacks logic. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other. You can blinker yourself to plot holes just as you can logic your way out of the fun. But often, criticisms about internal logic stem from a critics failure to suspend their disbelief, which may have a deeper root cause than the criticism itself. And I think the same principle applies to how we read a story's themes, messaging, and ideology. The reinterpretation basically argues that the surface-level reading of potter is incorrect. But the root cause of this criticism is Joanne. Because of what we now know, we must conclude the core message of love and acceptance is on some level insincere. And the contradictions to its messaging are proof of that. Whereas, the original interpretations had no reason to doubt the surface-level reading. When a text unsutterly claims to oppose bigotry, it's hard to ignore that. So even though many critics identified the same contradictions with just as much clarity, they could still suspend their disbelief about the core message. Thus, the contradictions were generally viewed as missteps in an otherwise well-meaning story. I mean, sometimes critics accused Joanne of hypocrisy, but often these issues were identified as common tropes. As I've said, Joanne wasn't the only person at the time writing stereotypically about other cultures, or doing invisible queer representation. Critics and academics often treated potter as a high-profile case study, a text with a progressive message, which nonetheless falls prey to common assumptions and biases. Okay, but the slavery, the essentialism? Even 20 years ago, critics struggled to explain these things in a story which also allegorizes racism as the ultimate evil. Often, critics who identified these issues couldn't explain them beyond whatever Joanne was trying to say with this, I guess she failed. Suman Gupta did say it was best to consider potters confused analogies as mistakes, but only because the alternative would be far worse. Yeah, no kidding. And I think many critics of the time were a bit too trusting. When Brick and Carey first wrote about the households after Goblet of Fire, he understandably assumed that Joanne would address the issues of their enslavement in later books, only to return to the subject being like, oh, guess not. But there's one essay from this time which does attempt to explain these issues, Elaine Osterie's accepting mudbloods. She identifies many of the same contradictions in potter, but argues these are inherited from fairy tales. For instance, fairy tales generally oppose materialism. These were stories told by peasants, so they tend to be about poor humble folk who value modesty over wealth. Cinderella is a servant who just wants to go to a party.