What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [70:47-75:48]

That doesn't mean we can simply ignore the contradictions. The specific ways Potter contradicts itself could still be attributed to a skill issue on Joanne's part. Nevertheless, the fact it has these contradictions doesn't necessarily mean we have to interpret the active message as insincere. It's not one ideology or the other, it's both. It's all of them. Still, the concern holendale expresses, which some critics of Potter have echoed, is that young readers won't have the critical skills to decipher and separate passive ideologies. Radical ideas may not be persuasive, impassive ideology, but traditional ideas may be reinforced. Children might absorb them unconsciously, considering the popularity of Potter, the worry is this could happen on a large scale. But after nearly 30 years of Potter, it's pretty self-evident that hasn't happened. Millennials, the Harry Potter generation, are statistically more socially liberal, pro-diversity and anti-capitalist than older generations. And there's some evidence to suggest the popularity of Potter might have something to do with that. In 2009, the University of Vermont conducted a nationwide survey of millennial college students. Participants who had read some or all of the Potter books, about two-thirds of them, were more likely to support tolerance and equality to oppose authoritarianism and to be more politically active. And a 2014 study, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, found that reading Potter to children and teenagers, particularly passages concerning prejudice and discrimination towards fantasy creatures and muggle-borns, resulted in more positive attitudes toward marginalized people in real life, such as immigrants and refugees. Of course, correlation does not imply causation. Hollandale takes care to mention that young people are not empty vessels. They bring their own ideologies to a text. And the 2014 study also found the effect relied on participants identifying with Harry as a character and disidentifying with Voldemort. I'm sure it's true Potomania impacted us in some significant ways, but it may also be true that Potter appealed to millennial ideologies just as much as it informed them. Who can say? The reason I bring up these surveys is because they demonstrate to me that the interpretation of Potter children usually make and the one the fandom has built itself around is one which prioritizes the active ideology. Potter's core message of anti-essentialism and anti-bigotry are assumed to be the intent. Therefore, any contradictions to that message must not be the intent. Looking back at Potter fan communities of the time, at least the ones that still exist, fans often discussed Potter's contradictions, making a lot of the same arguments, academics, and reinterpreters do. Although the fat phobia was often defended just like MuggleNet did with a list of other overweight characters, and we've already gone over why that's not an excuse. Often fans acknowledged they overlooked the book's problems as children, and it's only by revisiting the stories as adults that they've begun to question them. Potter's enduring popularity and its decade-long release schedule meant there was a lot of time to develop these critical skills, and as the fandom aged, the way they resolved these contradictions was to sort of overrule them. Sometimes this is done unconsciously. For instance, a lot of people appear to misremember Hermione and S.P.E.W. as being framed more sympathetically than it was, but even when people identify that House Elves were not liberated and Hermione's activism was largely played for a joke, they decide that Hermione was right actually. House Elves should be liberated, and that is what she went on to do in her career. Similarly, with the fandom's practice of self-sorting into Hogwarts houses, many decided that, no, Slytherin is not the evil House. It's just that cunning, ambition, and loyalty happen to be traits which death eaters value. So they deconstruct the essentialist nature of the sorting, at least partially, in a way the text doesn't. And I know we already criticized people for making interpretations not based on the actual text, but I wouldn't call this a misreading. It's another negotiated reading. Fans correctly identify the core message and reject those other parts of the text which contradict it. Instead of interpreting what Joanne meant to say, they're more like, hmm, I think I know what you meant to say. And you may think this is being generous to the text, but before we had a reason to doubt the series message, nobody could really say these interpretations were wrong. Well, that's great, but now we do have a reason to doubt the series message. Now we can be sure that isn't what Joanne meant to say. Can we be sure?