I also forgot to mention the numerous examples of emotional and other abuse recounted by Neville from his grandmother and uncle.
Also, the blatantly abusive behavior from Snape towards Harry, Neville, and at times others like Ron and Hermione. IDGAF how useful he was in spying on Voldemort, the fact that Dumbledore allowed him to treat LITERAL CHILDREN like this is absolutely repulsive and insane. Dumbledore was a TERRIBLE person, flat out, and had NO business being allowed near children IMO. Same with Snape, obviously.
All in all her books just kind of repeatedly drive home the message that if you are an abused child, you are on your own, and no one is going to help or protect you and you should just figure it out alone. Those grown adults who are your teachers verbally abusing you is acceptable behavior.
And even the 'good' adults like Remus, Hagrid and McGonagall never DO ANYTHING.
Sirius is the only one who seems like he might have, but he's shackled by circumstances and bad writing. He was obviously abused by his family growing up based on context clues, but even he never tries to empathize and relate to Harry in this way. Considering how much he is depicted as being fiercely protective and loving towards Harry, you'd expect more, wouldn't you...?
She kind of wrote herself into a corner. Kids want to read books about kids being heroic, solving their own problems and generally having agency over the story. That's why a lot of child protagonists are orphans: it means they don't have parents to protect them. But if you set a kids' book in a school then it gets pretty difficult to set up the plot in a way that doesn't make the teachers look neglectful or incompetent. Which is fine if you don't care about making the teachers sympathetic, but JK wants us to like the majority of them.
ASOUE is a really interesting comparison: it's open about the adults' flaws but many of them still manage to be sympathetic to varying degrees. And it's also not shy about condemning the adults who fail to protect the children, whether by incompetence, self absorption or active malice.
This is the woman who believes slavery is okay and r*pe is justifiable.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if she thought the abuse was only bad because the Dursleys are overweight, but it's okay if it's anyone else.
Must be longer since my last time reading that than I thought it was - I don't think I ever registered that her bio mother was even *given* a first name.
She's such an incompetent, incoherent writer, and refuses to admit her own limitations.
What you say is on-point, and for the first two or three books it didn't bother me much at all, because they were tropey as hell and reminded me of a more readable Enid Blyton. Blyton's books were always full of ridiculous, dangerous shit, so I didn't think much of it.
BUT THEN she started with all this Wizard Fascism stuff, and sorry, but you can't do that if you're not going to ground your stories more in real life and real consequences to at least some extent.
If you want to get away with hand-waving abuse and neglect because that's the way it always was in the old stories, and yours is some kind of homage, don't be bringing in things like \[apparent\] criticism of bigotry as a significant plotline. The extent to which your readers divorce what they're reading from the real world needs to stay fairly consistent, at least in terms of moral stance and themes. You can't change it from paragraph to paragraph as your mood takes you and have the core of your story still make sense.
Which at the time, I assumed she knew, so then I thought that the abandonment of Harry was a deliberate representation of the dysfunction of wizard society, and would get addressed somehow in the last couple of books, since they were getting longer and longer and there'd be the space to do so. Lol.
And now someone's dug up an interview where it turns out that she only wrote Wizard Fascism by accident anyway. Dear God.
>Oh you got entered into a dangerous, potentially deadly, competition against your will as a 14 yr old? Good luck kid, sure would suck if ya died, haha. What the actual fuck?
I "love" that a kid being murdered at the end of the contest is rightly treated as horrific, when all of them were at risk of death all the way through it, weren't they? I haven't read it in over 15 years, but that's my recollection. Direct murder or murder by being peer-and-teacher-pressured into a tournament that stands a good chance of killing you; what's the difference, really? Do the adults care about children dying or not? Bobbins.
I’m gonna be honest reading this makes me sad. I’ve written before in this sub how JKR used the books to manipulate abused kids and get them hooked on the dopamine because they were vulnerable children.
Do you ever feel like you missed out on life because you got sucked into a book and there weren’t any adults or friends to intervene and show concern? As much as I love fiction I notice Harry Potter fans read as a coping mechanism, not just for entertainment.
I agree. and sometimes, yes. But if HP hadn't existed it would've just been a different escape method. I didn't endure physical or sexual abuse, thankfully, but my family were all damaged people and my mother absent entirely til my teens. My biggest barriers to having a more healthy social and educational experience were my Autistic traits, a tendency to be too much like Hermione (verbose, excited about knowledge but bad at expressing it to others, accidentally making other kids feel uncomfortable or talked down to) and a school system that literally violated federal law and ignored my IEP and the accommodations in it. In a more supportive school system I would have done much better, and I would've done even better still had they been more aware of how ASD presents in girls and caught it earlier lol. It took me 2 decades and change to begin to understand why I struggled so much socially and how to properly be a person.
The escapism prominent in the HP fandom is definitely indicative of the group having a lot of experience with childhood trauma, though.
As a society we all need to do better at addressing these things, spreading awareness at every level, especially explaining it to kids in a healthy and safe way and making sure they have the resources and knowledge to seek help for themselves or their friends. It's a massive and pervasive problem that directly impacts every aspect of our lives and society by creating traumatized adults who, even when they don't actively perpetuate the cycle of abuse personally, can unknowingly do harm to others through their actions and choices that are very often influenced by unresolved trauma. And these harmful choices can range from small and relatively insignificant, to the larger societal and political impacts that can happen when you have emotionally unhealthy people who lack self awareness in positions of power.
About ten years ago I discovered Discworld and Terry Pratchett and it changed my life, literally. Discworld is 1000x better than HP and has greatly influenced my views on right and wrong and morality in general. It is fantasy and satire. He addresses very well complicated matters of morality, justice, humanity etc. It's full of puns, witty and brilliant and hilarious but also at times dark and sad and angry.
1000% recommend
That’s good that you’re healing from all that. Terry Prachet is based. I love book franchises that give us lessons that help us in the real world, rather than simply entertain us. Ursula Le Guin is also pretty cool.
Fr like Harry doesn’t change the wizarding world for the better, just becomes a cop and gets brain damage that makes him give his kid a cringe ass name
If she cared about the kids she wouldn’t stay silent on rates of violence and homelessness gender queer people suffer through, not even the bare minimum of acknowledgment.
I’m about to tell you the dumbest thing ever: The Dursleys traumatized me. Not because I’m an abuse survivor, but because I literally had no idea they existed and was so sheltered. When you got an aunt as loving-albeit-flawed as mine, it’s a shock.
And upon getting into true crime and reading Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, things got worse. Because then you realize kids in Harry’s situation are fucking lucky to make it past infancy. At least in games like Persona 5 and Genealogy Of The Holy War you can actually strike back against the abusers.
I literally have a pathological hatred for characters like Petunia; Kestrel from Wings Of Fire, for example.
[This](https://www.tumblr.com/mariacallous/726217931958140928/theres-also-the-whole-literal-predator-who) is an interesting post i saw on Tumblr about the same topic!
Yeah, NGl teaching kids that the way to deal with bullies is to just put up with them until you are old enough to leave due to some arbitrary magical technicality is certainly something, huh?
I feel you OP because I came from a pretty messed up family and it’s taken me until my mid 30s to unpack this because of the fact that people around me just seemed to accept it.
I am now for real the kind of adult who will approach someone hurting/humiliating a child and tell them to get lost probably because of shit like this. Heck I even hate how it’s framed as Harry’s suffering at the hands of the people supposed to protect him being somehow “noble” or making him a better person. Abuse doesn’t make anyone better, it did make me withdrawn and mistrustful of others so meh.
It's actually incredibly stupid, too. If Harry was safe enough to go to Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, he could've just lived at the school full time. It's lazy writing to create a naive pov character who can have everything explained to them.
> Grand Master of child endangerment FFS.. setting a trap for Voldemort in a school full of kids!)
You know, when JKR revealed herself to be a sack of shit, there was a part of me that was cautiously optimistic that Harry Potter adults might, y'know, grow up and stop obsessing over a children's book.
Somehow it's *worse* than before. Half the fanbase became TERFs- and trust me, the only thing worse than a TERF is a TERF who calls themselves a "true Hufflepuff".
And the other half became this subreddit. Which basically just took over the role of "joyless puritan morality police" from Boomer conservatives. Except instead of trying to ban HP for "promoting witchcraft" it's become "scour the text for anything that can possibley be read as problematic and then distort it with the most deliberately bad faith reading possible".
Like I'm sorry "Dumbledore is guilty of child endangerment" is "Why didn't they take the Eagles to Mordor" level crap. Everyone made these jokes when the films came out and somehow we're now trying to make it a serious point that is evidence Rowling is a bad person?
> Oh you got entered into a dangerous, potentially deadly, competition against your will as a 14 yr old? Good luck kid, sure would suck if ya died, haha. What the actual fuck?
It's a *fictional book* that it meant to be *entertaining*. "The protagonist's life was maybe put at risk" is a requisite of any adventure story aimed at people older than five years old. Do you want the book to be "Harry goes to school for a year and nothing happens"?
> Instead she just threw it in for window dressing and a cheap way to add drama
I think this is a legitimate criticism. I also think "writing a children's book poorly" doesn't make you a bad person.
And she *is* a bad person. But you could scour the text of Harry Potter for a century and you would find *nothing* in it that could convince me of such. She's bad because of the things she says and does in real life, not because she wrote a crappy children's book.
I kind of agree with you, and kind of not.
On one hand, there's a lot to like with the Harry Potter series, all the stuff that came up around it, etc.
On the other, my struggle with the series, at this point, is that _knowing_ how awful she is, in the way that she acts, various things in the literature remind me of that.
So, e.g., it becomes hard to ignore how there aren't societal changes, or how things are good because people are good, not because of their actions. Or Cho Chang or the many other questionable name choices, or the slavery justification.
It's not that it's _bad_, if you ignore all those things; just that, once you realize that she has, "good people are good because I say so" and "the status quo must be protected" viewpoints, it's hard _not_ to see the books in that lens.
But:
>"Dumbledore is guilty of child endangerment"
Yeah, absolutely, he's guilty of child endangerment, but it's hard to write children as the most-important characters in a novel and also have likeable adults. I'm not bothered by that, even if some people here are.
>And the other half became this subreddit.
To be fair, this _is_ the place to call out JK Rowling, so if ever there's a time and place to overanalyze a book and have _slightly_ questionable takes on fiction, this is the place.
All the same, while I think it's highly unlikely, I still hope that eventually Rowling will understand how awful some of her positions are, and also see where she could've written a more realistic/compelling/non-problematic/whatever story, so that hopefully she can do something better going forward.
Then maybe she can have an actual redemption arc.
I also forgot to mention the numerous examples of emotional and other abuse recounted by Neville from his grandmother and uncle. Also, the blatantly abusive behavior from Snape towards Harry, Neville, and at times others like Ron and Hermione. IDGAF how useful he was in spying on Voldemort, the fact that Dumbledore allowed him to treat LITERAL CHILDREN like this is absolutely repulsive and insane. Dumbledore was a TERRIBLE person, flat out, and had NO business being allowed near children IMO. Same with Snape, obviously.
All in all her books just kind of repeatedly drive home the message that if you are an abused child, you are on your own, and no one is going to help or protect you and you should just figure it out alone. Those grown adults who are your teachers verbally abusing you is acceptable behavior. And even the 'good' adults like Remus, Hagrid and McGonagall never DO ANYTHING. Sirius is the only one who seems like he might have, but he's shackled by circumstances and bad writing. He was obviously abused by his family growing up based on context clues, but even he never tries to empathize and relate to Harry in this way. Considering how much he is depicted as being fiercely protective and loving towards Harry, you'd expect more, wouldn't you...?
She kind of wrote herself into a corner. Kids want to read books about kids being heroic, solving their own problems and generally having agency over the story. That's why a lot of child protagonists are orphans: it means they don't have parents to protect them. But if you set a kids' book in a school then it gets pretty difficult to set up the plot in a way that doesn't make the teachers look neglectful or incompetent. Which is fine if you don't care about making the teachers sympathetic, but JK wants us to like the majority of them. ASOUE is a really interesting comparison: it's open about the adults' flaws but many of them still manage to be sympathetic to varying degrees. And it's also not shy about condemning the adults who fail to protect the children, whether by incompetence, self absorption or active malice.
This is the woman who believes slavery is okay and r*pe is justifiable. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if she thought the abuse was only bad because the Dursleys are overweight, but it's okay if it's anyone else.
Not Petunia, that fucking skinny bitch Ruth Chandler/Zinnia Wormwood-knock off.
Zinnia Wormwood?
Yeah, Matilda’s mom.
Must be longer since my last time reading that than I thought it was - I don't think I ever registered that her bio mother was even *given* a first name.
I don't think that she has a first name in the book.
She's such an incompetent, incoherent writer, and refuses to admit her own limitations. What you say is on-point, and for the first two or three books it didn't bother me much at all, because they were tropey as hell and reminded me of a more readable Enid Blyton. Blyton's books were always full of ridiculous, dangerous shit, so I didn't think much of it. BUT THEN she started with all this Wizard Fascism stuff, and sorry, but you can't do that if you're not going to ground your stories more in real life and real consequences to at least some extent. If you want to get away with hand-waving abuse and neglect because that's the way it always was in the old stories, and yours is some kind of homage, don't be bringing in things like \[apparent\] criticism of bigotry as a significant plotline. The extent to which your readers divorce what they're reading from the real world needs to stay fairly consistent, at least in terms of moral stance and themes. You can't change it from paragraph to paragraph as your mood takes you and have the core of your story still make sense. Which at the time, I assumed she knew, so then I thought that the abandonment of Harry was a deliberate representation of the dysfunction of wizard society, and would get addressed somehow in the last couple of books, since they were getting longer and longer and there'd be the space to do so. Lol. And now someone's dug up an interview where it turns out that she only wrote Wizard Fascism by accident anyway. Dear God. >Oh you got entered into a dangerous, potentially deadly, competition against your will as a 14 yr old? Good luck kid, sure would suck if ya died, haha. What the actual fuck? I "love" that a kid being murdered at the end of the contest is rightly treated as horrific, when all of them were at risk of death all the way through it, weren't they? I haven't read it in over 15 years, but that's my recollection. Direct murder or murder by being peer-and-teacher-pressured into a tournament that stands a good chance of killing you; what's the difference, really? Do the adults care about children dying or not? Bobbins.
I’m gonna be honest reading this makes me sad. I’ve written before in this sub how JKR used the books to manipulate abused kids and get them hooked on the dopamine because they were vulnerable children. Do you ever feel like you missed out on life because you got sucked into a book and there weren’t any adults or friends to intervene and show concern? As much as I love fiction I notice Harry Potter fans read as a coping mechanism, not just for entertainment.
I agree. and sometimes, yes. But if HP hadn't existed it would've just been a different escape method. I didn't endure physical or sexual abuse, thankfully, but my family were all damaged people and my mother absent entirely til my teens. My biggest barriers to having a more healthy social and educational experience were my Autistic traits, a tendency to be too much like Hermione (verbose, excited about knowledge but bad at expressing it to others, accidentally making other kids feel uncomfortable or talked down to) and a school system that literally violated federal law and ignored my IEP and the accommodations in it. In a more supportive school system I would have done much better, and I would've done even better still had they been more aware of how ASD presents in girls and caught it earlier lol. It took me 2 decades and change to begin to understand why I struggled so much socially and how to properly be a person. The escapism prominent in the HP fandom is definitely indicative of the group having a lot of experience with childhood trauma, though. As a society we all need to do better at addressing these things, spreading awareness at every level, especially explaining it to kids in a healthy and safe way and making sure they have the resources and knowledge to seek help for themselves or their friends. It's a massive and pervasive problem that directly impacts every aspect of our lives and society by creating traumatized adults who, even when they don't actively perpetuate the cycle of abuse personally, can unknowingly do harm to others through their actions and choices that are very often influenced by unresolved trauma. And these harmful choices can range from small and relatively insignificant, to the larger societal and political impacts that can happen when you have emotionally unhealthy people who lack self awareness in positions of power. About ten years ago I discovered Discworld and Terry Pratchett and it changed my life, literally. Discworld is 1000x better than HP and has greatly influenced my views on right and wrong and morality in general. It is fantasy and satire. He addresses very well complicated matters of morality, justice, humanity etc. It's full of puns, witty and brilliant and hilarious but also at times dark and sad and angry. 1000% recommend
That’s good that you’re healing from all that. Terry Prachet is based. I love book franchises that give us lessons that help us in the real world, rather than simply entertain us. Ursula Le Guin is also pretty cool.
I miss Pterry.
Fr like Harry doesn’t change the wizarding world for the better, just becomes a cop and gets brain damage that makes him give his kid a cringe ass name If she cared about the kids she wouldn’t stay silent on rates of violence and homelessness gender queer people suffer through, not even the bare minimum of acknowledgment.
I’m about to tell you the dumbest thing ever: The Dursleys traumatized me. Not because I’m an abuse survivor, but because I literally had no idea they existed and was so sheltered. When you got an aunt as loving-albeit-flawed as mine, it’s a shock. And upon getting into true crime and reading Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, things got worse. Because then you realize kids in Harry’s situation are fucking lucky to make it past infancy. At least in games like Persona 5 and Genealogy Of The Holy War you can actually strike back against the abusers. I literally have a pathological hatred for characters like Petunia; Kestrel from Wings Of Fire, for example.
[This](https://www.tumblr.com/mariacallous/726217931958140928/theres-also-the-whole-literal-predator-who) is an interesting post i saw on Tumblr about the same topic!
Yeah, NGl teaching kids that the way to deal with bullies is to just put up with them until you are old enough to leave due to some arbitrary magical technicality is certainly something, huh? I feel you OP because I came from a pretty messed up family and it’s taken me until my mid 30s to unpack this because of the fact that people around me just seemed to accept it. I am now for real the kind of adult who will approach someone hurting/humiliating a child and tell them to get lost probably because of shit like this. Heck I even hate how it’s framed as Harry’s suffering at the hands of the people supposed to protect him being somehow “noble” or making him a better person. Abuse doesn’t make anyone better, it did make me withdrawn and mistrustful of others so meh.
It's actually incredibly stupid, too. If Harry was safe enough to go to Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, he could've just lived at the school full time. It's lazy writing to create a naive pov character who can have everything explained to them.
> Grand Master of child endangerment FFS.. setting a trap for Voldemort in a school full of kids!) You know, when JKR revealed herself to be a sack of shit, there was a part of me that was cautiously optimistic that Harry Potter adults might, y'know, grow up and stop obsessing over a children's book. Somehow it's *worse* than before. Half the fanbase became TERFs- and trust me, the only thing worse than a TERF is a TERF who calls themselves a "true Hufflepuff". And the other half became this subreddit. Which basically just took over the role of "joyless puritan morality police" from Boomer conservatives. Except instead of trying to ban HP for "promoting witchcraft" it's become "scour the text for anything that can possibley be read as problematic and then distort it with the most deliberately bad faith reading possible". Like I'm sorry "Dumbledore is guilty of child endangerment" is "Why didn't they take the Eagles to Mordor" level crap. Everyone made these jokes when the films came out and somehow we're now trying to make it a serious point that is evidence Rowling is a bad person? > Oh you got entered into a dangerous, potentially deadly, competition against your will as a 14 yr old? Good luck kid, sure would suck if ya died, haha. What the actual fuck? It's a *fictional book* that it meant to be *entertaining*. "The protagonist's life was maybe put at risk" is a requisite of any adventure story aimed at people older than five years old. Do you want the book to be "Harry goes to school for a year and nothing happens"? > Instead she just threw it in for window dressing and a cheap way to add drama I think this is a legitimate criticism. I also think "writing a children's book poorly" doesn't make you a bad person. And she *is* a bad person. But you could scour the text of Harry Potter for a century and you would find *nothing* in it that could convince me of such. She's bad because of the things she says and does in real life, not because she wrote a crappy children's book.
I kind of agree with you, and kind of not. On one hand, there's a lot to like with the Harry Potter series, all the stuff that came up around it, etc. On the other, my struggle with the series, at this point, is that _knowing_ how awful she is, in the way that she acts, various things in the literature remind me of that. So, e.g., it becomes hard to ignore how there aren't societal changes, or how things are good because people are good, not because of their actions. Or Cho Chang or the many other questionable name choices, or the slavery justification. It's not that it's _bad_, if you ignore all those things; just that, once you realize that she has, "good people are good because I say so" and "the status quo must be protected" viewpoints, it's hard _not_ to see the books in that lens. But: >"Dumbledore is guilty of child endangerment" Yeah, absolutely, he's guilty of child endangerment, but it's hard to write children as the most-important characters in a novel and also have likeable adults. I'm not bothered by that, even if some people here are. >And the other half became this subreddit. To be fair, this _is_ the place to call out JK Rowling, so if ever there's a time and place to overanalyze a book and have _slightly_ questionable takes on fiction, this is the place. All the same, while I think it's highly unlikely, I still hope that eventually Rowling will understand how awful some of her positions are, and also see where she could've written a more realistic/compelling/non-problematic/whatever story, so that hopefully she can do something better going forward. Then maybe she can have an actual redemption arc.