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‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ to make an 18 minute video about jo rowling and TOTALLY REFUSE to mention her RAMPANT and EXTREME transphobia and transmisogyny is BEYOND MESSED UP, since it is BY AN EXTREME MARGIN the worst thing she has ever done, she has REPEATEDLY called for the PUBLIC ON MASS EXECUTION AND GENOCIDE of trans women, and you don't see that worth mentioning apparently, SERIOUSLY DO BETTER
Jk Rowling writes of things that make you go "did she mean it like that??" And then she goes that extra step where you're like "oh that's exactly what she meant..."
@sandraswan9008 Yeah, Rowling tells on herself when she makes the other Black kid with dreads, Lee Jordan, the cool kid who hangs out with Fred & George and cracks jokes during Quidditch commentary.
I find her writing Dolores Umbridge really interesting because in many ways that's who Rowling herself has become. Umbridge is this seemingly harmless white lady who aligns herself with the side of morality, but is really just aligned with maintaining tradition. She talks about 'preserving what ought to be preserved' and 'pruning practices that ought to be prohibited'. She's overly controlling and tries to limit the amount of real world knowledge available to the students, claiming its all for their benefit. It all seems a little familiar...
Funny that Umbridge is more hated by fans than Voldemort as well. Imagine hating women so much you write one to be more unlikable that wizard hitler. Then ironically becoming her in real life
There’s one thing I noticed when I first read the books as a kid that annoyed me even then: in book 6, when Slughorn gathers all the students together who have rich and affluent parents, everyone’s father is the successful one, except one kid whose mother is a beautiful witch who keeps murdering her rich husbands. JK couldn’t even imagine a world where a woman got rich off her own intelligence and hard work 😂
Even with MAGIC existing. Successful career women like McGonagall (who turned down her "true love" and whose latter husband of convenience dies shortly after their marriage) or Madame Maxine are seen as having "sacrificed" family life or, like Tonks - they only had active careers until the right man came along. Tragic, really, to hate her own gender so much.
Umbridge's hyper-femininity would have been a really cool choice -- you don't see frilly pink sadists in most books -- but the fact that every feminine character is either villainized (Umbridge, Rita Skeeter) or mocked (Lavender, Fleur) completely ruins it.
Yeah, it could have been great, the stark contrast between her cutesy exterior and her heinous actions? Golden! But when every other feminine female character is being villains or laughing stocks, it's clear that these feminine traits are part of the issue, not a contrast to them. Even just one or two characters who were traditionally girly but upset at these other girls, and not for "runing their image as girly girls" would have helped a lot. I guess she doesn't believe that cute girly-girls are capable of that much critical thinking? I don't remember if it was before or after reading the books, but I too definitely thought that pretty girls and girly girls were complete airheads with no redeeming traits. When I was a kid. I'm allowed to be dumb as a kid. This adult did nothing to correct this fallacy though. Now as an adult myself, I do actually allow myself to like pink and girly things, but it's a process. You can be cute and smart, kind and/or badass all at the same time. I am still "allergic" to too much strong pink in one place, but it's slowly getting better.
@@PanthereaLeonis I hear this. I definitely went through a "not like other girls" phase in my teens during which I disparaged girliness. I didn't learn until later that this was my own internalized misogyny. But the fact that JK never grew out of that phase is crazy to me. As the kids would say, she's definitely not a "girl's girl."
Rowling also had to make it abundantly clear how ugly Umbridge was every time she was brought up. I kinda wonder if this is a transphobic-adjecent "feigned femininity" type of thing.
@@genericname2747 She's depicted as a frumpy housewife. Even though Draco's descriptions of her to that effect are meant to be cruel, you aren't given the impression they're inaccurate, either.
I remember being pretty upset about how the story treated Hermione's elf rights activism even as a teenager - not to mention how the book ends with Harry still OWNING A SLAVE (but he's nice to him so it's OK!). To make matters worse, JKR says the house elves were based on brownies...but those GO ON STRIKE if you stop leaving food for them!
Right? All the house fairies in the folklore will either leave or retaliate if you mistreat them (and some are insulted by payment because it's their house and you just live there), but she made the conscious decision to change them. My best guess is that a more faithful take would add too much nuance to the power dynamic.
@@pigcatapult They are definately quite interesting and while i dont necessarily knows if they were originally intended as such, they make for an interesting message about coexistence since the relationship with them is purely beneficial, as long as you treat them as equals and give enough of an effort to be aware of their customs and avoid offending them. (especially notable in how they despise the idea of being paid for their housework but love receiving gifts, which is a subtle but very important distinction in how they are supposed to be treated.
@@pigcatapult the part about them getting insulted if you offer them payment for living in their house is funny to me. Seems the Fae folk don't know the concept of rent.
I was researching brownies once for a book and 70% of the sources talking about brownies mentioned of house elves were based on them but like… the house elves don’t seem like the sort to start haunting a house of you leave out spoilt milk 🧐 they don’t seem like they only help industrious folks who need help the most (cough the malfoys cough) 🤨 are we sure she wasn’t lying?
The thing that's so awful about Harry Potter is all these concepts' wasted potential to be something good. What if the house-elves didn't like being enslaved, and Hermione fought for them against the judgement of her peers and made actual change by working with them? What if, by the timeskip, actual changes had been made to the systems running the wizarding world? It could have been so interesting to follow Harry through this world which at first seems filled with wonder to him as he's a child, but as he grows up the the corruption in the wizarding world systems begins to be known to him, all the while there's an evil wizard after his head. Maybe in a different timeline.
We only need to wait until the copyright runs out. So in 75 years... after Rowlins death... Oh let me count all the ways I hate the current copyright system.
I don't even think the house-elves liking to be enslaved as a starting point would be an issue. The entire species being so used to their slavery that nearly all of them think it's right would be a really cool idea to start the story with. Seeing as Dobby wants to be free, Winky is so depressed and Kreacher kinda chaning sides a bit is a great base for going into a full on house elve rebellion where Hermione could have helped Dobby to spread the word to other house elves who wanted to be free or something. And I'll never get why a character like Harry who got treated like a slave would side against the house elves. It makes sense for Ron, it makes sense for Harry to be uniterested and focus on something else, but to straight up be against it is stupid.
I mean...I would say they were something good tbh. I mean she did continue to fight for them and worked on change when she became Minister of Magic. There likely is change though, like how they treat magical creatures for example. I mean we saw that, we see the ministry of magic be corrupt and stuff. DIferent timeline??? Which one did you live in?
@@TemariNaraannaschatz I agree with your first half of your comment. But like...Harry didn't side against the house elves he just knew that Hermoine wasn't doing avery good job really. Except he wasn't against it, you seem to misunderstand.
If you're looking for a new, fun fantasy universe to explore, I highly recommend Discworld by the late Terry Pratchett. Who actually WAS on the side of the oppressed. He wrote a character who didn't confirm to gender norms of her society, and when trans fans told him how much they identified with that character, he admitted he'd never intended her to represent trans issues when he created her, but he was absolutely delighted and proud to be considered an ally.
The love potions as a “joke” was one of my big shocks when rereading as an adult. As a kid, I definitely did NOT put 2:2 together that she had basically made light of ppl being roofied. Also, the lack of sympathy from Dumbledore (supposedly a mature adult) towards Riddle’s father when the love potion element of his story is revealed was horrible. (I don’t blame Riddle Sr. for leaving; none of that was his choice and he probably had a lot of trauma to deal with.) The lack of awareness and compassion in telling stories about SA or possible SA was, in hindsight, appalling.
SA is so badly represented in media as it is. And it’s played off as a joke in most media when it’s the man getting SA’d. The whole Love Potion “joke” kind of went over my head as a kid but is horrifying when I think of it now. It’s so bad :(
Eh...didn't Dumbledore give him sympathy though? I'm pretty sure he did. I mean...there was awareness and compassion about that....but JK Rowling can only do so much in her target age demographic even in the older more mature books.
@@Jdudec367 if she wasn't able to treat the subject matter with the respect and sensitivity it warrants because it was too mature for her age demographic, then why did she include it in the first place??
@@Jdudec367Voldemort being created by a love potion and it being a direct comparison to SA is a main plot point and supposed to be the reason he was unable to love
Lavender was also black in the first few Harry Potter movies but as soon as she became a character we were supposed to be aware of, JK casted her as white
just remembered that time jk claimed that hermoine was always meant to be black,, i know she was lying then but in retrospective that just makes the whole "spew" thing where hermoine campaigns against enslavement and its shown to be stupid and cringe just so much worse
JKR has old drawing she did of Hermione was white, we know she's full of bs. She could have just said that her skin color didn't matter to her and be done with it.
@@TemariNaraannaschatz That is essentially what she said, though. She said she never explicitly specified Hermione's race, which is true. That's not good representation on her part AT ALL, but I don't like seeing these bad faith arguments all the time. There are PLENTY of reasons to hate her, we don't need to misrepresent the facts.
JKR is a horrendous hateful bigot and a bad writer but there’s no need to make statements that are actually untrue. Rowling never said Hermione was always written to be black, she literally just said that she supported the casting in the play and that Hermione *could* be interpreted as black if people wanted to
@@ThatWeirdo04 I mean, she never outright said that Hermione was caucasian, but she wrote about how "Hermione's white face stuck out from behind a tree" in chapter 21 of Prisoner of Azkaban, despite claiming in her tweet that "white skin was never specified"
1. Rowling never ever said that Hermione was always meant to be black. She only said that she never specified what race Hermione is. 2. Spew is in reference to Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW) an early british women's organisation.
Am from Belfast, can confirm that we the northern Irish millennial Potter fans didn’t make that connection either til the films came out and in the films the joke’s laid on a bit thick, so then we eye rolled about it, so we did.
Something thats always made me laugh about seamus Finnegan as a character not in a way that makes jkr look good but the way her possible biases present is that if the movie bit where he says his dads the muggle is book canon, then theres a northern irish dad out there who has to send his kid to a school in london for the better part of the year god that must eat at him given the time period
I really wanted to point out more ways that even the woman JK put in the story get shafted. Hermione is like the only woman who gets any agency. The other “good guy” women are all moms or otherwise motherly. Which isn’t bad on the surface, but being matronly isn’t the only way to be a good woman. Most woman we are meant to dislike on the merit of their personality, beliefs, or actions are described in excruciating detail as being unattractive or masculine looking in ways that almost eclipse their actual characters. I don’t think JK Rowling likes women.
@@tahraethestoryteller6079Aunt Petunia is described as having “horse-like teeth” and “nearly twice the usual amount of neck.” I think she very easily fits the pattern I described even if she is somewhat sympathetic and tragic. Rowling imagined an embittered child abuser and thought she must have conventionally unattractive physical qualities.
This is such a good point and I think Hermoine is even matronly towards Ron and Harry sometimes. Especially in the early books, with the “before you get us killed, or worse, expelled” she is nagging them. When they leave school, if it weren’t for her packing the Mary Poppins bag, what the hell would they have done?
She doesn't like women, she sees them as objects she can use to defend her bigoted, anti-trans agenda and her character by basically being like "see? I care about women because I'm constantly talking about them and saying I care! you can't accuse me of being misogynistic!"
@@lindsey532 it would be forgivable if JK used that as a way to make Ron and Harry grow as people by realising relying on Hermione and other girls and women in their lives for everything isn't right, but alas, she did not
The house elf allegory with slavery made me uncomfortable only because of the fact everyone else in the HP universe thought she was crazy for trying to free the slaves.
I was a little surprised by this take because I remember a lot of the elves not liking their jobs and liking Hermione, yeah some of them didn’t of course. Part of the reason they didn’t like her though I thought was because she was getting in the way or something while they were cooking or trying to do their thing ? I could be wrong. While horcrux hunting though and trying to find the locket there is a scene in the book where harry apologizes to Kretcher for how people had treated him
@@Okaybuddybear14 From what I remember Hermione knitted a bunch of small hats and socks and hid them around the gryffindor common room area so that the house elves stumbled upon them and were freed (since giving a house elve a clothing meant freeing them from their duty). But of course since J.K. portrayed them as wanting to be enslaved, less and less house elves cleaned the common room because they were scared of stumbling upon those clothes.
@@4ng3l_c0rpes8 I don't even think that it's a bad thing, Hermione wanting to help but doing it the wrong way. But it stops there, there is no, maybe ask Dobby what would actually work instead of this white saviour trope she's failing to be, while everyone else tells her to stop (why does even Harry tell her to stop, when he was basically enslaved himself). The entire house elves storyparts from the book would have been perfect set up for a full on house elves rebellion that just never happend.
@@TemariNaraannaschatz Funny you mention Dobby because he is described as having a reaction to that. Except that reaction isn't talking to Hermione about it or something of sorts, but rather he takes all the small clothes other house elves leave untouched, so it leads to a small "comedic moment" where Dobby is found wearing absolute piles of clothing that Hermione made. That's it, thats how they handle it
There's classism in Harry Potter too. Like the hero is rich and comes from a literally legendary family line, the main families are all old and ancient, the main characters (except Hermione) all come from these main families. There is no "new money" in Harry Potter.
That's so entrenched in British culture it's not surprising. After I moved to England I found out a lot of things that I thought were Harry Potter things were just British things lol
so true. the weasleys are the bad guys (poor) and the malfoys are the good guys (rich). classism is never portrayed as a bad thing in the books either. wait a damn second -
Fyi, she has second series of best-selling novels & television movies, perhaps you can get around to critiquing those twenty years after she's done writing them as well.
Cho Chang being a POC disposable love interest for the final white love interest and being shamed for major depression will always make me angry. I tried to speak on this in the 00s just to get a bunch of hate. Glad people are calling her out for being racist and shaming mental illness.
I hated how she was treated. She was so hyped up in the first books and then she is just thrown away because she is in grief over her dead boyfriend? I was so angry.
I hated how Hermione treated Marietta. She was a 16 year old Hermione scars for life over one damn mistake. As if Hermione has never fucked up in HER life 🙄
@@l.n.3372 If a Slytherin girl would have done it she would have been demonized but since Hermione is a Griffindor she is a karma haudini and so are the other Griffindors who do awfull things to other students.
@poppie267 That's what my friend and I call "bully hero in red, bully villain in green". Basically, whenever a Gryff is a bully or does something bad, it tends to get hand waved in series because they're Gryff as JKR is biased to them. Hermione treatment of Marietta, for example. Ron's bullying of Luna. Fred and George nearly killed Montague and they get no punishment. James and Sirius are hand waved by even their fans.
One thing that always rubbed me the wrong way was this scene in the last book, where Harry and Ginny are alone together. The book points out how Ginny seems less emotional than the other girls Harry has known, and chalks it up to her just living with so many boys. They did this to make make her seem more “compatible,” and how Harry loves her because of that. It grossed me out a ton, and I’m surprised more people don’t talk about it (though I'm not in the fandom, so maybe it is and I’m just missing out.)
I haven't read the last book yet what the actual hell, that's crazy. Ginny has reasons to be open about her emotions, I mean she came from a very loving family. So do her brothers, so they should be okay with expressing their emotions as well. Being honest about your emotions is a good thing for everybody, I'll never understand how people twist it into a negative!!
@@pickleBOB405 Exactly!! Emotions are something everyone has. You’re not better for shoving away your emotions, and the fact JK tried to make it seem attractive is just going to set kids up (especially girls) with not being in tune with their emotions, and that isn’t healthy. Especially for Harry Potter's demographic of kids and teens.
@@AverytheBug it's something I've had to learn myself!! Being honest about your emotions makes dealing with things whole lot easier! Glad to see someone who agrees :)
It gets worse when Ginny is actually being emotional and sad over her dead brother at the end and Harry just kinda goes "eh, she'll get over it" and walks away without even acknowledging her
Ursula LeGuin's opinion of Harry Potter got so vindicated by time holy shit. She always was way ahead of her time, from the very beginning of her career right until the end. She was the feminist icon in fantasy and sci-fi that JK wishes she could have been, but her complete inability to see beyond the status quo makes it impossible for her to be an actual feminist, since feminists have always looked at the status quo with suspicion, finding the ways in which it is harmful for women and for everyone else too. That's what LeGuin, conversely, did. She wrote the first non white protagonist in any fantasy novel, and in the sequel she wrote the first female protagonist too (and what a female protagonist: Tenar is easily in my top ten female protagonists in any story from any medium), both in the '70s, a time when that could have easily sunk her career. Earthsea wasn't revolutionary just because of how non white-centric it was, but also because it wasn't a war defined entirely by wars and kings, the main thing wizards did in it was to help the population by controlling the weather and the winds. LeGuin changed my views in so many ways, she was a remarkable woman and a brilliant writer, both things that JK posed as and, for a time, successfully managed to appear as, only to spoil it all by revealing that her soul is filled by bitterness and hate. The signs were always there, but her books were so fun to read growing up that it was easy to give her the benefit of the doubt. But LeGuin saw through it and called Rowling's work "stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean spirited". She hit the bullseye
I agree about Le Guin, but let's not forget authors like Cathrin L. Moore or Leigh Brackett, who had female protagonists in fantasy stories already in the '30s. So Tenar is lovely, but not the first.
And let's all take a look at newer authors like N.K. Jemisin, who smashed records as a Black woman by winning three consecutive (VERY well deserved!) Hugo awards for her Broken Earth trilogy, and then took on H.P. Lovecraft in her Great Cities books by writing the avatar of cosmic horror as the white uber Karen! Her short stories in "How Long Until Black Future Month" are so very worth reading too. And besides having characters that are so diverse that JK's little white head would explode (including trans people being treated like normal humans!), her work is so much deeper and better written on every level than Missy-miss Rowling could ever dream of doing. Her work is what fantasy is all about - asking hard what-ifs and turning the status quo on its head, and it's a beautiful thing!
I mean, she turned around and became better later, but let's not pretend like Ursula LeGuin was always a feminist icon. Her earlier books were filled with some absolutely vicious misogyny and propping up men as the more "sensible" sex. That includes Earthsea, by the way. Earthsea did a good job of introducing more ethnic diversity in fantasy books, but it was also a book that very clearly put forth the message that women are inferior to men. I think in a very similar way to JK Rowling, LeGuin had a "not like other girls" mentality, where she viewed all other women as frivolous and overly emotional while she herself was the exception. The difference is that LeGuin grew out of that mindset in her later years, while JK Rowling is still spewing that bullshit.
...Granted, my GF mostly loved gay HP fanfics 😅 But it would still have broken her heart to see JK supporting fascist p3d0 Matt Walsh & ignoring actual AFAB issues. I'm not worried about a trans woman tinkling in another stall, Joanne; if I get pregnant in Texas, I will literally fucking die.
When I was a kid reading the Harry Potter books I was so confused as to if I should be on the side of Hermionie and SPEW. Because everyone was telling her it was a bad idea, but I knew slavery was wrong, and I was so confused why she was depicted in a bad light. It never registered until I was older that that was wrong and SPEW was a good thing. Also the sorting hat system is so funny to me because 11 year old me is so vastly different to how I am now just a few years older, that being sorted into a mindset you will have for all your life is ridiculous.
As a kid I felt powerless, so I cared most about power(Slytherin), but now that I have more control of my life, learning is one of my favorite things (Ravenclaw).
As a kid I never really noticed when authors tried to make things look bad or good, so I just assumed that she was on Hermione’s side because WHO WOULDN’T BE???? And uh. Imagine my confusion when the plotline was, in my immature eyes, ‘dropped.’ Like it seemed pretty important
I remember when I was reading this for this time I trought "So they call her crazy for wanting to free the slave race now, but by the end of the book more characters gonna agree with her? Like Harry can say something about it, he free a Dobby before after all and he is treated like a slave to by Dursley's so he also know how wrong slavery is from experience"... What a naive 13 years old I was...
I would say most of the sorting hat system's issues come from failing to explain things/represent most houses well. It's shown that sorting isn't just about what you are now, but what you value and what your potential is. Neville wasn't brave at the start, but he had the potential of bravery, so he went to Gryffindor. Peter Pettigrew was a coward (and remained a coward for his whole life basically) but he valued bravery as a trait, so he was also a Gryffindor. Explaining what the hat is actually judging students by better really would have improved things. Also, we rarely get clear, unbiased explanations of each house and what they represent. Hufflepuff is often dismissed with no explanation when it's brought up at all, Slytherin is just explained away as "the evil house" usually, and one could argue Ravenclaw is oversimplified at times. What we would have benefitted from was proper explanations of these houses and their values, as well as more representation of the good and bad of them. Show positive representation of Slytherin traits like cunning and ambition, demonstrate how Gryffindor bravery can become stupidity if you're not careful, show Ravenclaws how you can't just know things but be able to put your knowledge to use, etc. There was potential in the sorting system, but there was a lot of fumbling of execution. There were also some pretty big house divides in the story, and not much on trying to fix that or showing that those house divides are bad, which is a problem. One more practical question I do have with the sorting system : the students always seem to be split pretty evenly between the houses, but that can't be a guarantee to happen every time when they're split up by personality. If you just get a whole bunch more Hufflepuffs than any other house for a few years, that's got to cause some problems (like Hufflepuff having an advantage with earning house points), and yet I can't think of any way they could counteract that imbalance.
I was on Hermions side when it came to SPEW. But it was one of the things that really put me off as a kid( I was not the most critical of readers as a child), like she is supposed to be super smart, yet names her organisation (in translation) farting. And it barely comes up other than to make fun of her. Yet it is about opposing chattel slavery?? Should that not be unambigiously good? (Also, if JK really thinks Hermions could have been black in the book. Making the black girl speak up about slavery and awful treatment of a specific race... be mocked by her white friend about it. OOOOF doesn't even begin to cover it)
If Harry and Ron, two cis boys, hadn’t gone into the girls bathroom to find Hermione she would have been killed by the troll. No one helped Myrtle when she was being bullied everyday and then she died in the bathroom where she’s stuck haunting for eternity (for plot reasons). Oh and as a ghost she has creeped on boys as they bathe but no one does anything about it or even seems to care. There’s spells to keep boys from entering the girl’s dormitories but no protections for the boys. If there were similar protections in place for them, Ginny wouldn’t have been able to take Tom Riddle’s diary back from Harry. All the female characters who were mothers or outgoing and strongly independent jocks were depicted as heroic and intelligent. But gawd forbid Cho is depressed from her boyfriend’s murder and a little upset that her best friend’s face was mutilated. 🙄
And Harry is a ridiculous asshole during all of this, and it only makes sense that they end on bad terms because Harry's being a dick to her and her friend- yet she's still depicted wanting back in his good graces by offering to guide Harry to the entrance to the Ravenclaw dormitory and being frustrated when Ginny sends Luna with him instead. I wonder what JK meant by all of that...
+1 for everything but also i must add that according to the lore of the world, the dorm room spells are specifically so because "boys will inherently want to peep on girls but girls would never do anything like that". awfully in line with joanne's current views!
You sure there aren't similar protections like that? Nah she can feel that way but Harry had every right to question her judgement at least a little by then
@@Axolautism Eh...no he wasn't being a asshole or a dick tbh, like her friend screwed them over majorly, are you just gonna ignore that? Her trying to be nice after all of that is fair and is trying to make it up to them.
Unironically relieved one of my favorite creators agrees on this lmao, amazing video!!!!!! One thing I'd add is the frankly scary implication of lycanthropy as a metaphor for having AIDS and the uncontrollable urge to pass it on to (young male) "pure" students, at the height of the AIDS epidemic at that. Like goddamn
I have the theory that Ginny is just JKR's idea of the perfect girl with the perfect life. She's not like the other girls, her parents don't mind that she is a girl and are even happy about it because she is their only daughter after a bunch of sons, she gets rewarded for being the perfect girl who isn't like the other girls by ending up with the hero and having three babies with stupid names with him. Not much a point to this, it's just my observation.
It bothered me so much that all their kids had horrible names clearly picked by Harry, besides Lily Luna which sounds like it was made up by chat gpt. Like Ginny didn’t have a say and allowed Harry name their innocent child after the man who was training him to be a sacrificial offering and his mother’s incel stalker 🤦🏻♀️
kind of reminds me of Bella swan from the twilight series. Especially with the "not like other girls" and naming her kids something stupid. Also gets me thinking about how she was a self insert of the author, stephanie meyer who, (maybe less) is problematic as well. especially in the way she treats the POC in her books. Maybe JKR is the same, self inserting her as Ginny. It wouldn't be shocking since the coolest thing a woman can do according to her is be a mother or reject femininity, and apparently she does both. (Also Ginny ends up with the main character, something common with self inserts... just a bit gross to me considering the ages of the characters in contrast to rowling )
A decade ago, I was a 13 yr old girl who was being told I’d be the next J.K rowling because I liked to write stories. Today, I’m a 23 trans man and it’s like watching Santa call you a slur to see every tweet or article from J.K saying something insane about trans people. It just puts this knot in your stomach. It’s dehumanizing. I’ll never forgive J.K for putting her ignorance above the community that formed around her odd books. She won the lottery for fiction writers: world-wide commercial success with lasting cultural impact. And she obliterated it, for what? To get sued by Imane for defamation? To give people another excuse to police women’s appearances? What a waste.
Man, I feel this so hard. You really hit the nail on the head. I'll have to remember that for the next time someone gives me a bad faith "but what does it matter, why do you even care, why can't you just continue to uncritically enjoy her books like me (etc)?" ...because when I read her words now, all I see is Santa calling me a slur. That pedestal's so broken it's practically vaporized.
I 100000% feel this as a 24yo trans woman who has always loved reading and writing, partially inspired by Urban Fantasy authors like Derek Landy, Eoin Colfer and JK Rowling, as well as about a dozen other Fantasy authors and Mangaka. I haven't heard much about the other two authors, but "gravely betrayed" is the most concise way to describe how Joanne has made myself and everyone I know feel. Even now there's undeniable nostalgia I feel when I see anything related to Harry Potter, they were some of the first books I read and some of the first live-action movies I ever watched, some of the earliest games I played and some of the earliest toys I played with, but every grain of nostalgia is accompanied with pangs of the most bitter disgust and hottest rage.
Holy wow. You went the complete opposite lol. As for me I was told I'd be a, preacher man. . Fast forward. I'm a trans woman lol. Two months on hrt so far XD and an athiest. I love writing as well!
The idea that Black people loved working as slaves and that most slave owners were alright people was legit the premise of Song of the South. Yknow, the racist movie that Disney refuses to even acknowledge cause the idea was so horrific and dated
I truly expected there to be some sort of Slytherin redemption in the last book, paying off the Sorting Hat’s call for unity and showing us that the whole “Slytherin is evil” stereotype was prejudice and/or a child’s misunderstanding. And I don’t mean “oh, Draco didn’t actually feel comfortable helping his literally insane aunt who reveled in cruelty” or “well Snape loved Lily and didn’t technically betray Dumbledore, no matter what he treated his students like for years” or “well Mrs Malfoy loves her son more than she hates good people” - I meant an actual Slytherin redemption, proof they weren’t, as a group, on the side of evil. I was so confused when the house as a whole was treated as the enemy when preparing for battle at Hogwarts…and no one questioned it…and then they lived up to it… and it was just played straight. I kept expecting the Slytherin prefects to lead the 6th and 7th years back to the castle to help save the day but they didn’t and it was like oh…oh she really just meant that, didn’t she, she actually meant that Slytherin was the evil kids 🤦🏼♀️
You're so right. That moment is horrendous, with all Slytherin kids being shoved in the dungeon just because. Talk about having an overly simplistic, black and white, prejudiced view of the world!
Ha bookcat great coment 👍I always find it hilarious about obsessive Potterheads bringing in what you said about Draco Snap Mrs Malfoy. But the reason Rowling wrote the Slytherins that way is already known. Because she is a cry baby who created them out of petty revenge of her bullies. And the most hilarious part is her obsessive stans really think they can defend how stupid Slytherin in by bringing in Regulas Black and Slughorn LOL.
When I first took the quiz ages ago and got Slytherin I was so distraught at being dubbed evil that I just pretended I was a Ravenclaw. Because she just wants us to believe this is where the kids go and that is so harmful. SO HARMFUL. What kind of school would just put all the “innately evil kids” in one house? No school, that’s what.
Yeah, this fascinated me as well. It was absolutely a situation she could've evolved and redeemed and it could well have been a far more satisfying piece of closure. but instead she was happier to throw away 25% of the population to maintain the status quo. Even if Slytherin was created to explain bullies and bad people, 25%?? There's times we all throw our hands up and go "ugh, humanity sucks" but to say 25% of us are always irredeemably evil... there's something specific and rotten about that
@@BearBeatzu That's another angle that's deeply upsetting when you think about it. Due to the topic of LGBT issues being "inappropriate" for children I grew up believing that I could not control the monster I would become as a dangerous adult. I bet every Slytherin kid self harmed like absolute fiends. Some of those kids walked into that school with optimism and joy, no idea they were going to be deemed "people who would turn out evil." Some of those kids would have done anything to stop that from happening, and even in the wizarding world there's not too many ways to ensure you don't get any older.
"i'm doing this for the women!" and then all of the female characters in the books are in some way inferior to men, shallow and rarely have any agency outside of being a quick plot device. awesome feminism here
As a trans person the term "cis women" is more appropriate than "biological females". This is because it can be used to attach labels to trans people that don't match their gender, while also giving more validity to cis people than trans people. "I'm a biological woman, unlike trans women who are biologically male." I just wanted to share this with you as a trans person
@@lunanyx8592I think it may have been appropriate here though, because even if the conversation started with the possibility of a tr@ns athlete, it quickly devolved into a conversation about chromosomes and that only XX people can be considered women, so it's more about intersex people or hormonal and other conditions affecting cis women. I may be wrong though, not trying to offend anyone.
@@bluester7177 as a cis woman and a writer, cis is both correct and appropriate. Even if Khelif were intersex, which we have no reason to believe, and is frankly none of our business, intersex people are still assigned one gender at birth and almost always raised as either male or female. There is nothing to be gained by appealing to "biology" here because "biology" doesn't care about fitting into neat little boxes.
I feel like one aspect of Harry Potter that gets ignored that is problematic but probably largely gets ignored because she "made Dumbledore gay on twitter" is the homophobia. Like sure she made Dumbledore gay on twitter but Dumbledore isn't exactly Nico di Angelo, OR like the gay men in the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane who are explicitly in love in the text, he's an old man who dated one man (who was evil) and upon the point of the man's death IMMEDIATELY spent his entire life celibate and never trying to find a second love. Added to this is the fact that he is not explicitly gay in the text, but you know what was? Remus Lupin being made a werewolf by an adult man who enjoyed targetting children. And then she goes "Lycanthropy is a metaphor for AIDs" but Remus (who was majorly headcanoned by the fandom to be a gay man himself, and is also the victim of said werewolf) turns out to be straight and gets married to a woman who was like... heavily headcanoned as a lesbian herself. Then they get killed off. The Lycanthropy shit is a mess. Also other than Dumbledore all the characters that fans thought were gay coded ended up getting killed off as well. If you buy into the gay coded Colin Creevey theory he is also not exactly treated the best by other characters. It kind of reads as JK Rowling accepting one type of gay man (celibate, not having sex, monogamous) and not being okay with any others. But this is just a half cocked analysis sorry.
I completely agree! Deeper into the Dumbledore/Grindelwald relationship, they are explicitly characterized as naive, misguided teenagers with pipe dreams to ruin the precious status quo, and one regretted his youthful foolishness and never had another gay relationship while the other was further seduced by sin and tried to take over the world. I don’t know, I think that’s pretty homophobic.
JK said Dumbledore was gay in an interview in 07 shortly after dh was released and Dumbledore defeated & imprisoned Grindelwald he didn't kill him and it's made pretty clear that Grindelwald was manipulating Dumbledore from the start
Honestly, the reveal that Nico's hero worship of Percy was actually him crushing on the guy was so good cuz how many of us think "Do I wanna be this person or date them?"
The one that most weirded me out as a teen was when Hagrid's brother Grawp was chained up in the woods and the book just treated that as chill. Grawp read as like an analogy for a mentally disabled person to me, so that seemed really fucked up, especially since he is Hagrid's blood brother and not just a "magical beast".
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 Still problematic as the original commenter said. That's effectively just sticking someone in a prison or psych ward without giving them the therapy/medication they need in addition.
@@Phoenix_Left if they're in a psych ward they're GOING to receive medication and therapy and in any case grawp isn't an "analogy for a mentally disabled person" he's a full blooded giant who HAS to be chained up so he doesn't hurt anyone or run off umbridge had it out for hagrid simply for being a half giant and close to Dumbledore and tried to arrest him just for that what do you think she/the ministry would do if grawp actually hurt anybody or ran off and was spotted by muggles trust me there's enough evidence of JK being a scumbag without y'all making things up
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 "It had to be done so they wouldn't hurt themselves or anyone else" is also an argument people make to excuse mistreatment of intellectually disabled children. And which, notably, does not make said mistreatment right. He might not have been written as an analogy for disabled people, but the comparisons are still there for people to read and criticize and say "hey, this is kinda messed up". What people put in their fiction does quite often reflect their feelings about reality even when it's not a conscious choice.
i think one thing that causes people to feel protective of harry potter is the depictions in the films. for example, snape is an unambiguously atrocious character both in terms of behaviour and motivation, but alan rickman's performance was so nuanced and effective that people loved him anyway
@@inezketchuphow's the SPEW storyline problematic? In which way is it better in the movies where Hermione ignores the topic of elves slavery completely?
@@meciociobecause everyone treats Hermione like a soapbox sally, like she’s silly and stupid for trying. What’s better? Completely ignoring the fantasy slavery or writing an arc about how slavery is awesome and cool and you’re wrong if you try to stop it? The movies couldn’t do a ton for the SPEW or house elf storylines without bumping into how fucked up they are, and because Rowling is Rowling they wouldn’t have been able to change it, so ignoring it was the best they could do
@@CreoTan you mean to tell me Jk Rowling thinks slavery is awesome and people who put a stop to it were in the wrong? Like do you hear yourself talking?
I actually liked Snape in the books more - as a character, not a person. What I find laughable is that JKR tried to make him more heroic and likable at the end, which didn't translate very well and then Harry is like: Let's name my son after this horrendous teacher that bullied me and my friends in highschool. 😂
Theres a really good video by Lily Simpson that breaks down the inherant bigotry of the world of harry potter (the history, the wizard politics, and the social system of wizards are just some of the things she talks about). Its 10 hrs long, but there are chapters if you want to jump to specific parts. Its a genuinely good leftist deep dive into how the harry potter world is so obviously flawed in just about every way.
I’ll definitely watch this when I’m done making my videos. I don’t want to accidentally copy her ideas. I’m going to break down each of the 28 female characters in the next HP video.
@@carolineeasomyou said in the video that aurors determine who's a dark witch or wizard which is incorrect a dark witch or wizard by definition is a person who practices the dark arts also moody was an auror and even after the ministry authorized aurors to use the unforgivable curses on death eaters without warning in the first wizarding war moody still refused to do so and only ever killed one person Evan Rosier a death eater who decided he'd rather die than be arrested and FORCED moody to kill him he's also the reason moodys missing a chunk of his nose
Maybe it's not as serious as her racism, misogyny, and antisemitism, but does anyone else think that JKR really does not like cats? I remember reading the books as a kid and feeling sort of unsettled by the portrayals of cats. In book 2 you have Crookshanks, who is depicted as a menace to Ron's beloved pet. He is ugly and unkempt, and Hermione's affection for him is treated like another one of her silly quirky passions that we're not meant to take seriously and that we expect her to drop once she realizes that she's being silly and hurting Ron, whose feelings are of course more important than hers. Then there's Umbridge's love of cats, which made me especially uncomfortable as a kid. As a cat lover, I don't particularly care how a random person feels about cats, but putting those unceasingly negative portrayals in books for kids just feels irresponsible.
that’s one of the things I always disliked, iirc we never see a positive cat interaction besides sirius and crookshanks walking together, and even then it’s while we distrust crookshanks because of the attack on scabbers and possibly while we still think sirius is a grim before finding out the animagus thing
I agree! And I think the way she depicts animals at large is actually somewhat disturbing. They're all just used for magic, in the triwizard tournament etc with no regard given to the fact they're living, feeling beings. The amount of times it's played for laugh that an animal or a magical creature is hurt is genuinely unsettling to me.
@@vamp_bat_chomp I had forgotten about them entirely lol i had to look it up, they’re argus filch and mrs. norris. they are indeed another good example of jkr’s weird cat hatred, I really wanna know what baggage caused all that lmao no shot this was all coincidence
is the misoginy :/ there may be more serious works on it, but i always remember this post that was like "not liking cats is a symptom (i dont speak english) of misoginy, as cats tend to be portrayed as a symbol of femininity"
The bit about the sorting hat and your personality/life path being set in stone at 11 is also kind of true of HP's character writing in general imo. I think you'd be hard pressed to point to moments of character growth for the main cast. These books are set during the period of peoples' lives where they're most likely to change, grow, and develop as people, yet you could take the cast of book one, plop them down in book 7, and they'd more than likely make all the same choices. Sure, they experience a bit more trauma during that time, but about all they really learn is how to be better at magic. I can certainly say that any decisions I made as an 11 year old aren't the ones I would have made as a 17-18 year old, and /definitely/ not the ones I'd make as an adult. Characters don't have to come out the other end of the series as completely different people, but the books are focused on solving mysteries and stopping bad guys, and I think it's a missed opportunity to have three main characters who rarely if ever seem to take anything away from any of those experiences that goes deeper than "wow, magic sure is cool" or "that evil guy sure was evil" Of course, letting the characters develop would also require questioning the ethics of the wizarding world, and that would mean Harry couldn't become a Wizard Cop at the end of the series and maintain the status quo that let the problem happen in the first place, so.
I mean..there are moments of character growth, even in Book 1 there is how Ron and Hermoine help each other out in the end and grow to be actual friends. Eh...not really, Harry in book 7 for example wouldn't be as naive and blindly trust people like he would in Book 1. No they learn how to be better people too, hell even Draco changes in the future too. I mean no they take away stuff from those experiences that go deeper then that like for example seeing what the world is really like and not to blindly trust authority and that even your idols aren't perfect. Nah they can question the ethics of the wizarding world and have Harry become a cop at the end I mean aurors are semi independent so he can investigate corruption really, he didn't maintain the status quo that let the problem happen in the first place.
@@Jdudec367Ron and Hermione fight during every book, not one of the three admits the wizarding world is systematicly bigoted (just claim it's because of a few specific people), and continue to act ridiculously childish until there's a literal war going on
@@abithefallenhuman921 I mean no they all know that it's clearly a flawed world (No when do they ever say it's because of a few specific people? They never say that), not really they act mature at times before that really.
@@Jdudec367 Harry joins the government as a literal magic policeman, the same organisation that harmed him almost as much as Voldemort, when the government itself has not changed, apart from the removal of a few people Harry personally didn't like
@@abithefallenhuman921Removing corrupt people and starting to treat magical creatures better IS change though and many people didn't like the people they removed from the ministry of magic. Also as a auror he still has at least some freedom.
Maybe having only European schools come to the Triwizard Tournament was a blessing because otherwise we’d have to read JK’s batshit descriptions of Asian or African schools
Not to mention, just the fact that continents other than Europe only have one school each? There's going to be severe language barriers for a lot of them. Not to mention in the case of Mahoutokoro specifically, that clearly was not thought through considering the history between those three countries. Plus, I feel like considering that different cultures have different ways of handling or looking at many things, I feel like it doesn't even make that much sense for wizards worldwide to only learn magic at boarding schools. I figure it'd make more sense for there to be established different wizarding traditions regarding magical instruction within different cultural groups, and for the popularization of wizard boarding school to be a more recent development in some parts of the world. As opposed to boarding schools apparently being the only right way to learn magic, like the Pottermore section on the history of Ilvermorny seemed to imply.
@@Deadpool4presidentThat world school map is... fascinating. Put the entire Middle East in the same school, ALL of Africa in the same school, South America all in the same school... I bet they're all running perfectly fine and nobody hates each other at all :). Especially with both North and South Korea going to the Japanese school.
@@snz530I think Native Americans had a diffrent "spiritual" way of doing magic. I think they didn't even have wands, or they refused the education of wizards or something. It was on her web page when I was a kid. But other than that, everyone was the same.
@@earthaforester3141 lack of ‘being emotional’ WILL be brought up in such a thing. seriously, Ron was brought up in a loving family but he doesn’t feel comfortable showing affection to his girlfriends?
This is a tangent, but I've always felt Hargid was done a tremendous injustice in terms of the wand-snapping life-long magic ban. He's a magical being; so his very existence was literally made illegal. Supposedly, he was expelled because he was responsible for a creature killing someone, but then rather than banning him from working with dangerous animals, he's taken up as an underage labourer to work with animals (not to mention the shame and bullying that undoubtedly ensued by remaining amongst his peer group in this capacity) and banned from doing magic that had nothing to do with any of it. Later, when the entire basis for his expulsion was eventually proven erroneous, this was still not rectified. Let's not start on how it would be in everyone's best interest to teach him how to control his magic and "reform him" if that's really what they were worried about when, like any other witch/wizard, he's going to do magic regardless. Plus, frankly dangerous courses like Quickspell are out there for "squibs" and enrollment at/graduating from Hogwarts was never a legal requirement to practice magic before Voldy took over, so the legal repercussions were outside the scope in the first place. Socially, as you point out, even maternal-stand-in McG is forever "I know, but..." towards him and he's eventually demonised by nearly the entire WW for being "half-human" to the point that he becomes reclusive and considers... things that require the help of a mental health practitioner, to which his idol basically responds with "walk it off". No, Hagrid deserved a lot more love than he saw shown. _ This got long. Sry
@rhonwenbaker2448 To be fair, wasn’t that the point? The Ministry was always meant to be bad. But we never see much being actively changed, which is an issue.
@@TeresaKalinka Actually most of the fat characters are good. Molly, Neville, Sprout, Slughorn, Hagrid, they just aren't called "fat", also half of the Weasly kids are described as stout. Most death eaters are described as think or even skeletal. JKR does use physical apperence in both ways for evil and good people where if you're a good person you're described as round and soft if you're good, but fat if you're evil or think if you're good, but skeletal if you're evil. That's very typical 90s writing. Doesn't make it good.
@@TemariNaraannaschatz It's subtler than that, Theresa's comment was definitely an over simplification. Fat was often associated with dumpy-ness, being blundering, or greedy. Neville, Sprout, Umbridge, Dudley, Vernon, Slughorn, Molly, Hagrid etc. She seemed to use weight as an indicator of some character flaw, even when they were good characters. And for some characters, like Dudley, she almost couldn't mention them without describing their weight. It was actually tedious at times.
The only major Irish character, Seamus, has one defining trait: He blows things up. JK was fully alive during the Northern Ireland conflict which was ONGOING during the initial publication of the first book since it ended in 1998 and the first book was published in 1997.
@@meciocio It's kind of funny that Rowling has developed such a strong reputation for writing her characters as stereotypes that everyone believes the "Seamus blows stuff up" gag originated in the books rather than being a film-exclusive thing
@@meciocio While it's true the detail didn't originate in the books, the films were heavily overseen by JK Rowling. She had to approve the script, which means she read the detail and saw it fit to be included. So no, she's not an innocent bystander in the Seamus case, even if it isn't her original idea
@@RafaelGarcia022 They weren't heavily overseen by Rowling. Also you can't just make this big case of this problematic stereotyping in the books of Seamus by making his "defining trait" the student always blewing things up when i repeat it's factually not a thing part of the books. That's very disingenuous.
I’m in the same camp of having grown up as a big fan and now revisiting the books both in the light of JKR’s craziness becoming more open and just looking with adult eyes, there are so many red flags.
THIS! I have been saying this so much about all of her retroactive inclusiveness! "I never stated Hermione's race." Ok, but anybody non-white was Thoroughly described as such every time they showed up. Or they displayed some stereotype. 7:337:37
Honestly the fact that she doesn't feel the need to state anyone's race when they're meant to be assumed white is not the win for diversity JK thinks it is lol. Just another example of "white as default, poc as other"
@@Flameclaw123 Exactly! Like the joke they made in the Starkid musical, when Cho Chang comes out and Harry automatically starts talking to the Asian girl and they all yell at him because Cho is the blonde girl behind her. Yeah, the books make it too obvious that people are default white.
Not defending JKR but books are a written media, not visual. If she doesn't describe that a character is black or Asian, then the reader won't know. She kinda had to say when Dean or Parvati isn't white. But if she doesn't say it, then isn't it safe to assume their race isn't important enough to the character to mention? That's not exactly default white BUT it shows that it would get mentioned if they weren't white. And that's logical for a written media
@@marissastambol3609 true. But some covers predict Harry as being darker skinned, but that probably was because of the backlash. I think Cho Chang is interesting since we only see her a few times within the book, and we don't see her again. Also there are not a lot POC people with bigger roles other than being side characters, the movies only added them for inclusion.
@@l.n.3372why is race only important enough to mention for POC, though? also i could’ve guessed someone named parvati patil wasn’t white. also she does describe white characters as obviously white fairly often (ie having pale/white skin or red/blond hair or blue/green/grey eyes).
@@vamp_bat_chompYeah, it’s still not my favorite, and there are some shades I don’t care for (you’ll have this with any color, even your favorite color has that one shade that makes you go ick), but as a former #/notlikeothergirls pink hater, I grew up and made peace with pink. It’s a much nicer color than people give it credit for just because of its (relatively recent, all things considered) feminine connotation, and I look cute in it. I’m not afraid to dress cute and feminine some days and more androgynous-ish other days.
Warm pink? Amazing, beautiful, stunning, gorgeous! 2nd fav color (behind warm greens) Cool pink..? Worst color. I cannot think of any color I slightly dislike more than cool pink. Even magenta is slightly better.
I’m so entrenched in fandom that I genuinely forgot Harry is canonically white in the series because majority of people nowadays headcanon Harry as half Indian in both fanfiction and fanart.
As someone from a fandom where the protagonist is also commonly depicted as British Indian with green eyes, glasses and scars, the amount of times i had to explain to confused commenters that this *isn't* Harry Potter is staggering
Can we talk about Voldemort's mom?? In the narrative we're clearly supposed to feel sorry for her when Tom Riddle Sr "abandons" her, but what she actually did is kidnap and SA him?? Like she used a love potion to SA him. And it's never confronted by the story.
Lilly simpson has a 10 hour video about the series. And it's actually a repeated theme in Harry Potter that men are the only ones capable of "bade rape" and women just do "lonely bad actions".
I feel like I read somewhere that Voldemort became so evil because what she did was without love. For wizards, sex and romance are magical, and corrupting them can have extremely negative consequences, both for all parties involved, and for any children born from it. Magic is not moral. There are simply fixed laws, and sometimes even the innocent suffer when those laws are broken. By defiling love through the use of this potion to conceive a child, she cursed herself and her child, and possibly Tom Sr too, given what happens to him down the road. As wicked as what she did is, I do feel sorry for her. She was a desperate woman from an extraordinarily abusive home. All she wanted was happiness and love, and she went about it in all the wrong ways- ways her society openly tolerates when done by women (I don't think a boy giving a girl a love potion would be quite as tolerated). If I'm not mistaken, she even stopped using the potion, hoping the love had become real. It didn't. She lived a wretched life and died a pathetic death of despair, and her son also went on to suffer in ways beyond measure, while inflicting his pain on the world.
@detritusofseattle while a fair point its still abhorrent that wizard society on borrows the worst social values from muggle culture while maintaining the individual power to do much more harm. Like every wizard is a walking nuke with no societal focus on morality.
@@pearcehubbart3767Yeah, I think the reason that love potions seemed to be female only is because she KNEW EXACTLY what that would instantly be clocked as if the genders were reversed. But unfortunately for her… yeah it’s still pretty horrible. There’s a reason Aladdin and Bruce Almighty and types of films always have ‘no making anyone fall in love’ as a rule
Two things 1) remember when people were mad about black Hermione? imagine if Hermione was black and then JK spent the whole 4th book making fun of her for wanting to free the slaves 2) Why the fuck did Harry become a cop when Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher was literally right there on the table! The whole series was spent talking about how the position had been cursed, and in book 5 Harry was a really good teacher to his peers like??? It still wouldn’t have been very satisfying because there wasn’t any systemic change but at least it would have made sense!!!! Gah
@berkleypearl2363 So true, even when I read the ending as a kid, I remember being surprised & disappointed that Harry grew up to become an Auror, & not a Hogwarts teacher. Dark Arts Defence would have been so perfect, way more wholesome & satisfying than magical FBI agent 🤨
And after trying to dismantle the house elf system of slavery, Hermione ends up being head of the problematic wizarding system. Can't make it better, might has well be in charge?! What?!
@@Jdudec367the issue is the whole system is corrupt, change must be brought through full rebuilding of the governing body. You can’t pass a few laws and “fix” entrenched policy built on corruption. If you fix the shit policies via executive order or whatever that sets dangerous precedent for swinging wildly back the other direction at the next head of state, fully based on individual opinions on morality. Bad idea. If you try to fix corruption, you will only make them sneakier. Those guys spent years building up their little connections together, they know how to just skirt a new regulation. You’ll find some yeah, but it’s like a tree rooted deeply under a house, you will never get all of it without first taking down the entire house and digging up the foundations. At that point, it is worth the effort to redesign a system suited to the current needs, as society changes over the decades while outdated policy based on disproven “facts” only grows and grows.
Especially after multiple books that basically pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that any position Harry took at the Ministry would inevitably be politicized in ways that would make him uncomfortable. Umbridge made it clear he wouldn't be allowed to become an Auror, as long as he publicly spoke against the Ministry. Scrimgeour made it clear that they would use any position he held at the Ministry to legitimize their worst behavior at his reputation's expense. These people weren't forced to make those choices by Voldemort, but supposedly Voldemort's death solved all political issues with Harry working at the Ministry. Sounds boring though, peaking your whole career before your first day on the job.
With the way JK Rowling talks about femininity I'm not surprised there's so few women. She talks about being born as a woman as if it's a curse she wishes she could get rid of.
@@autobotyscorner6404 Oh, JKR's DEFINITELY an egg. I give it ten years before The Big Announcement. (Seriously?! All of the protagonists of JKR's series are male?! Come on!!)
She talks about that in her piece she wrote in an attempt to justify her bigotry and said flat out if she were born later than she was she probably would've transitioned solely to escape the reality of living life as a woman😅
after like 6:00 it just sounds like the 12 days of Chirstmas 2 black men🎶 1 indian women 🎵3 animal characters 1 chinese lady🎶 And 93 white human characters!🎶
UK here. Yes some areas of the country are super white, some areas are not. SO, if Hogwarts is the only magical school in the UK it takes area demographics out of the equations because kids are coming from across the UK right? Houses exist in some schools too, usually posher schools. Also book 5 is totally just an OFSTED inspection...
I had a look at the 1991 census data, 95% of people identified as white - so all things considered the race ratios at Hogwarts are fairly accurate tbh.
@@lizard3755 Not a dumb question! It stands for Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills. The government body that comes in and inspects / regulates schools in the UK.
@@lizard3755 There's a nice song about OFSTED and it's erm influence on teaching in the UK. Fascinating Aïda - OFSTED ua-cam.com/video/CnfE0lArq6Y/v-deo.html
God forbid Ron would have a black girlfriend which is also sensitive and hyper feminine. The only somewhat memorable black girl from the movies is Angelina, which is, surprise surprise, an athlete
Yeah, but would you really want Ron's girlfriend who obsesses over him and whom he never really likes to be black? Did we really need to see that. She dies in DH as well, without doing anything notable or cool. I'm with Princess Weekes on that one, we didn't need to see that.
Did you really read the books tho and assume Lavender wasn't white? I'm seriously asking cuz I thought she was a white ditz in the books. I never saw her as black and I don't understand why people did. Just cuz her surname?
@abithefallenhuman921 That doesn't address my above comment at all. Did you read the books and think hmmm Lavender sounds non white? Or did you read her as a white ditz a la Karen from Mean Girls? She didn't matter to the films. They cast a nobody who never spoke once in movie 1-5. Idk why people act like THAT is good casting they should pat themselves on the back for. Lol
As a trans person, it broke my heart when all that shit came out. Specifically because i felt so attached to harry. I felt like his story of "coming out" as a wizard into this magical, colorful, beautiful secret world of people just like him was much of my experience as a trans man. His initials are the same initials as my deadname. As he did, i had an older mentor who took me out and got me all the "supplies" i needed to feel more comfortable in this new world, introduced me to people, and helped me understand myself through this new world. Broke. My. Heart. When everything came out about JK.
there's so many things that feel like some sort of allegory when you really look into it and its so annoying that JK just completely shuts that down as fast as possible. tonks is queer change my mind. she's like the only female character that actually DOES anything in the books that isn't like hermione, and she isn't a member of staff or a mother (for most of the series). she can shapeshift, she doesn't like going by her birth name. her HAIR is colourful if the rest wasn't enough for you. but then she goes and marries lupin and has kids and dies because the greatest women are martyred mothers and she got tired of writing a cool woman that doesn't die for a man i guess
@@reallifezuzuthey wouldnt be the first queer people to get so deep into a protective marriage they end up having kids. i don't know why that would stop any theories, especially in a society as agressively heteronormative as that of HP
@@stevqtalent Yeah but it's HEAVILY implied that Tonks feelings for Lupin are genuine. So much so that her patronus changes into a wolf for him. Guess she could still be Bi though.
Jk Rowling is simply not a nuanced enough writer to handle things like wars, racism, slavery, etc. She was good enough at character building ig… but when it came to big issues like slavery, her solution was literally just *replace the mean slave owners with nice slave owners* so, there’s that. JK Rowling fails to recognize systemic issues that she herself set up. She sees being evil as something individuals choose to participate in rather than it often being a systemic issue that can’t be solved by killing one bad guy. While obviously some people can be stereotypically evil, most people do not just wake up one day and decide to do the bad.
As a parent I could not believe that nobody noticed that the entire series is 7 books of a young man's struggle to survive years of abuse, his life being constantly threatened and a load of of powerful adults waiting around for him to be old enough to sort it all out.... But nobody did...
My favorite mind bender about JK was that she's so anti trans. But she used her initials so people would think she was male. Then took the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. So she can portray as another gender when it suits her.
Look up who Robert Galbraith Heath was. He was a conversion therapy 'psychiatrist'. No doubt the reason why JK Rowling chose to use his name as a pseudonym.
Let's not forget Fleur Delacour, whose entire personality consists of: "Shallow, hot, makes boys go crazy", to the point that even the moment when she proves herself by sticking with whichever Weasley she was dating after he gets mauled by the werewolf is entirely based on looks. That's all traditional femininity is about, right? And of course the most traditionally feminine of all the girls in HP ends up last in the Triwizard Tournament, she's just like the other girls, not special like J.K.!
Also Fleur only gets her "redemption" and gets portrayed in a favourable light after she swears her loyalty to a man and says she'll marry him. And the very first thing she does after that is snatch the wipe from Mrs Weasley's hand and take over dabbing at Bill's wounds with it. Literally supplanting his mother and becoming a matronly nurse-like figure. We're only allowed to like women if they're not like other girls or if they're mothers, after all.
Can we also talk about how JK said Lupin being a wearwolf was supposed to represent the stigma of HIV/AIDS. The way he got it was when a grown man attacked him as a child. So take that as you will, but also, he is the only good wearwolf in the entire series. The rest are evil. So, there is another terrible attempt at showing real acceptance. The same could be said for the giants. The only really good ones we see are half giant. And Hagrid's brother.
I always view that as death of the author tbh. JKR has it as an AIDS metaphor but she simultaneously treats it as a rape metaphor in canon given that child Remus is "turned" werewolf by adult Grey back.
Yes, because her message of it is not loud and clear enough, we have do analize a story that is clearly not meant hold up to that. The plot holes (the money, Quidditch, that people cannot improve their clothes with magic) are there, so analizing it like you are doing will never really lead to anything substancial. But the messages are clear enough for children to get them.
The house elf slavery thing is crazy, cuz it's not just that they weren't paid. They're beaten , living in rags, they're bodies are used as decorations after death. Like, ????????
Luna Lovegood is autistic (and so is her father Xenophilius, probably). She's described as being ostracized for being "weird" and "loony" and Ginny is the only person depicted being genuinely, completely nice to her. Even Harry finds her weird and offputting and the only time he drops this is, iirc, when he sees her bedroom mural with the main DA members with "friends" written in a circle around it I love Luna's character (I am autistic as well) but I'm fairly certain that she was written with a latent dislike of autistic people, who we know JK does not see as being people who have agency, rather as bludgeons she can use against trans people.
Oooh, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm autistic as well, diagnosed at 42, severely bullied in highschool for being "weird". I read the books almost 20 years ago and I can barely remember how Luna was described, but I know she definitely feels autistic to me in the movies (and I find her delightful). Considering how JK Rowling sees us (incapable of knowing who we are and making our own decisions), I don't know if she meant for Luna to be really autistic. But it feels like the "oh, yeah, Dumbledore is gay" or "Hermione could totally be black" situation again. In the end, it's racism, homophobia, misogyny and ableism in everything that woman does and says.
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 She's hopped on the trend as many terfs have of saying that trans people are "actually just autistic people [usually girls in their faux-feminist rhetoric] who are being taken advantage of by gender ideology" They don't view autistic people, boys or girls, as autonomous human beings capable of our own thoughts and feelings and identities. They don't even care about our well being outside of using us against trans people (and as an autistic nonbinary individual I'm upset on several fronts at that behavior)
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 In her detective series, you know the series where the protagonists threatens a trans woman with rape? Anyhow, the premise of one book is that a cult of polyamorous leftists has been brainwashing autistic people and forcing them into having sex. Which is a thing autistic people supposedly do not do on their own volition.
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 I'm assuming it's the general terf talking point about autistic people being victims of gender whatever (considering that a lot of us are actually non binary) without recognising that neurodivergent folks have agency (or awareness or intelligence). It's another way terfs position their ideology as "protecting vulnerable people" or some shit.
The most upsetting thing (besides the transphobia, antisemitism, sexism, racism, etc) is that she really could have gone down as one of the most legendary people, or authors at the very least, of all time. The impact these books and films have had on the world is insane and almost unheard of with books in the last few decades. She got kids to read again and actually be excited about reading, even if they never read any other books. That is insanely impressive and it truly sucks so much that she can’t let go of her hatred and biases to have let her legendary status remain. Granted, with the points Caroline and others have brought up about the character arches and such, it may have been inevitably tainted later on, but still.
I think about this all the time, like do you know how many queer kids grew up reading your books? Maia Kobabe even describes in eir novel (Genderqueer) how e learned to read because of Harry Potter. Despite never really engaging with the series myself, I am very familiar with the crushing feeling of a childhood idol turning out to be a terrible person.
This actually made me sick for a long time and as the other commenter pointed out, JK threw all her queer and transgender readers under the bus. Some of them were inspired to become writers themselves because of the Harry Potter books. And to basically have JK say, “Thanks for making me disgusting wealthy. I will now spend my free time trying to destroy your very existence.” is completely heartbreaking
@@clairebradbury2890 agreed. Of course the problems with the series go deeper than her shit takes on Twitter, but I genuinely believe that if she hadn't gone full terf we wouldn't have seen this degree of backlash until long after her death. She would've gotten a historical reappraisal in the same vein as Tolkien, and people a hundred years from now would've been like "well you can't hold this long-dead author accountable by 22nd century standards, it was a different time!" Instead, I'd argue she's this century's Lovecraft.
@@deliah3003 It really is...even as a HP fan and defender JK herself is a pretty bad person and it's saddening to me what she really thinks of us queer fans of the series.
bad people become worse over time. good people do not turn bad overnight. Anyone who thought that she already was not bigoted even before she became an author was totally delusional.
I don't think JKR was radical the way she is today when she wrote them. When you grew up with HP and watched her old interviews vs her new stuff there is a huge difference in person. But she definitly was bigoted back then, just not nearly as much as she was back then. Like going from your aunt who has slightly outdated views, but means well to becoming someone who gives money to politicians to fund them.
i was watching this vid of Bryony Claire the other day and in it she said sth about mysogynistic men don’t want obedient women but they want to like “tame” independent women instead, and it’s kinda scary how it aligns with how jk wrote her women characters (tonks for an example, but there’re like a ton of them). Also how she kinda treats women’s personality and self-expression as a phase, how Jessie Genders pointed it out, before settling them into mothers role anyways. Not that that’s a bad thing ofc, but she doesn’t give them any other options, except for villanous female charactes.
I just realized another problematic detail in the Harry Potter world that no one really talks about: Squibs (offspring of Wizards/Witches with no magic) are treated as second-class citizens by even the "good" wizards! Neville's extended family was so worried that he didn't have magic that one of his family members DROPPED HIM OUT OF THE WINDOW to make him use magic! And this wasn't even the first life-threatening attempt to make him use magic! And Molly Weasley has a Squib relative working a muggle job that the family (which I'm presuming includes muggle-loving Arthur Weasley) is embarrassed about! And this is the attitude of the so-called "good" characters! The most prominent Squib in the series is Filch, who is 1: unlikable, 2: a glorified janitor. You'd think that they'd give his job to someone who can do magic to make the job easier, but no! They make the minority perform manual labor! So in the Wizarding World, if, through no fault of your own, you can't do magic, you cannot earn a prominent place in society.
Arabella Figg lived on the same street as Harry, was a "crazy cat lady", and, in her own words, "“Dumbledore’s orders. I was to keep an eye on you but not say anything, you were too young. I’m sorry I gave you such a miserable time, but the Dursleys would never have let you come if they’d thought you enjoyed it." So basically she was one of the people who absolutely knew of the abuse, and gave a small child MORE of it (though not as blatantly as a frying pan to the head) because she was more or less enslaved to Dumbledore as a squib who couldn't get anything else. Arthur was just as bigoted as the Malfoys, it just don't appear so on first glance because the Weasleys're the "good guys", and his bigotry is cute and quirky instead of "let's kill or enslave them all!"-y A lot of artists (Picasso comes to mind, but I know there were others) would collect things of meaning to other cultures because look at these cute little things the little savages made! Isn't this adorable! Then we see Arthur collecting plugs. We also see him taking Hermione's parents to the Leaky Cauldron in (book 2???) one of the books to grill them on muggle culture, and though he loves them so much, he can't pronounce things that are normal in the muggle world like electricity or telephone, and he just sort of shrugs it off because he can't be bothered instead of trying to get better at it.
Even Muggleborn witches/wizards aren't really celebrated by the "good" guys. They're dropped into wizard society with seemingly minimal onboarding/education, taken to boarding school where they seem to have pretty minimal contact with their parents, they're openly mocked for not knowing the things "everyone" knows, and all seem to immediately assimilate to the dominant culture. The only mention of Muggle sports I remember is when they first move into dorms and Ron doesn't understand Dean Thomas' soccer/football poster. In my high school there were always kids everyone knew was a hardcore fan of this team or that, and you knew when they were in the playoffs or won/lost a game against a rival. As far as I remember, no one talks about tv shows/movies/Muggle music/novels. "Bookworm" Hermione only seems to read non fiction magical theory. They even pick up the wizarding world curse words ("Merlin!"). At best, it's shallow writing. But it honestly reminds me of the "kill the Indian to save the child" idea behind residential schools in Canada and elsewhere. Those were a concerted effort at genocide, just by destroying a culture instead of mass murder. There doesn't seem to be any space in wizarding culture for people to be both magical and culturally Muggle.
I think Lavender is a more glaring example than Umbridge, honestly. I think the point of Umbridge is the juxtaposition between a traditional, ultrafeminine and "motherly" impression and how cruel she is revealed to be. Fleur is a character that could have been used so much more for showing femininity in an ultimately positive example, but she really only gets a few lines that shows this specifically. Earlier, it's also of course shown as a negative trait. As with many other things, it's difficult to take actual numbers to books when it comes to representation - for example the non-white population in England was (as you pointed out) very small in the early 90s. However, the *vibe* of a book and how it's written, while difficult to show concrete examples of, tells one so much more. And the *vibe* of Harry Potter was certainly "boys are pretty cool, look here is a couple of the POCs let's make it very important to just mention they look like this, let's name this only asian character a name that will sound stereotypical for my young readers, etc etc etc" I don't know what I wanna get out of writing this. I agree with your video and I'm trying to procrastinate, I guess.
I think you're giving JKR more credit than she deserves for Umbridge. The juxtaposition of her aesthetic and her cruelty could have genuinely challenged stereotypes around what an abuser looks and acts like in ways that would be understandable and useful to young readers, but JKR just went with "pink bad, girly bad."
@@fionamclary7631 I think they give her enough credit for Umbridge and that's something I agree with their comment on. Nah the juxaposition was clearly intentional especially when you look at Umbridge in the films really. It doesn't say "pink bad, girly bad", if that was the case why have Luna be good? Why have Hermoine wear a dress at the ball and be the center of attention? Why have Molly be wrong about Fleur? Etc. The narrative doesn't prove what you think at all really.
I agree that Umbridge's overly feminine nature was meant as a juxtaposition to her cruelty. However, being that basically all the female protagonists are low-maintenance, tomboy, or NLOG types (Hermione, Luna, every female quidditch player, Ginny, Tonks, even Molly Weasley is dowdy and low maintenance), it's probably safe to say JK despises typical femininity. I'm sure we can find small exceptions throughout the books, but the overwhelming majority of positive female representation is NLOG, and stereotypical girly traits (like crushes and crying and beauty and frills) are mocked or vilified. Even Fleur's beauty is written as a criticism and used against her. The more I think about it, the more obvious it is to me that JK suffers from internalized misogyny. The stereotypes of "Boys will be boys" and "Women are emotional, silly, or nags" are everywhere; female characters' emotions and intuition are often highly mocked and disrespected (Cho, Trelawny), and their labor exploited (Hermione, Molly). The only redeemable "female trait" in the books is motherhood, and JK puts it on a really weird pedestal (Narcissa, Molly, Petunia); she even turns Tonks into a mother for like no discernible reason except she was old enough to be one, I guess.... End rant.
@@earthaforester3141 Nah ones like Luna and Molly are more girly really. So no JK clearly doesn't despise typical feminity, I mean hell Fleur ended up proving Molly wrong in the end too. Wrong stereotypical girly traits like those things aren't mocked or villified. Except in the end it's proven that that is wrong and that Molly was wrong about Fleur so even using Fleur as an example doesn't work. She really doesn't suffer from that though. She doesn't stereotype them all like that though but that they can be like that, so no it isn't everywhere. They aren't mocked or disrespected (that didn't happen with either of them though wdym? like how did it?), and their labor isn't exploited (when did that happen with them either?). Eh no all of them are fine really, I mean I guess she just wanted to do that with Tonks really.
@@Jdudec367 I don't see anyone mentioning this, but Umbridge is CLEARLY JKR's take on Margaret Thatcher just by description alone except made hyperfeminine, so not sure how much credit she deserves for the character. Thatcher was even the Secretary of Education! Thatcher was also actually pretty conventionally feminine for a politician, had children and a husband, but she didn't wear pink all the time or doilies or love kitties. JKR basically was like "let me do a riff on Thatcher but make her a spinster cat lady." 🙄 JKR hate hate HATED Margaret Thatcher, and it is no coincidence that HP and much of the events of Voldemort's first attempt at a Wizarding War are set under her tenure. That tells you JKR thought Britain under Thatcher was apparently as bad or worse as the Wizarding War with Grindelwald, which coincides with WWII. Now, I don't like Margaret Thatcher or agree with her politics, nor am I British, but I'm pretty sure that the 1970s-1980s were not as bad in Britain as they were during the Blitz. I do also think it's an interesting choice for JKR to caricature the U.K.'s first female Prime Minister in such a gendered way.
About the feminine girls being looked down upon thing- and then there's the Percy Jackson series, where Rachel Dare bonks the main villain (freakin Chronos) in the face with a sparkly hairbrush.
Rick Rordian also struggles with writing female characters, but what made his books age better is the fact that Percy actively challenged the flawed systems within his world, especially the part of the gods being absent parents. HP maintain the corrupt status quo while Percy Jackson actually does something about it.
@@MysticOceanDolliesfully agree, aswell as his more recent books seem to have a lot of improvements to the rep and general character writing over all. he always seems open to learn and better his books which is great!
in addition to what you said about jkr rejecting feminity vs many trans women in the public eye embracing it: I've also seen it argued that trans women LIKE being women, which infuriates terfs who define womanhood solely via sex based oppression.
I'm willing to give a pass on the many boys in the Weasley family because I always believed it to be a nod to the myth that a 7th son of a 7th son among non-magical people would be a wizard or mage. That being said, Molly Weasley telling a light-hearted story to Ginny and Hermione about the time Molly gave Arthur a love potion to initiate their relationship was always gross, Hermione and Ginny giggled.
For some reason I too remember this minor detail because it was told from Harry's POV and it was written off as "oh typical girls talking about girly things".
@@VulpineNinja Because it is apparently more feminine to drug your crush with a mood and mind altering substance than it is to just ask them out yourself.
She never specifically said she gave it to anyone let alone Arthur the text says "she was telling them about a love potion she made while she was at school" it doesn't even say if she made it correctly
@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 Okay, but the fact that she made it AT ALL is already highly questionable, like even if she didn't make it right she still made it with the intention to use it right ??? She was still trying to drug somebody (likely a child given she was school) up so that they'd fall in love with her right ??? Even if she didn't succeed her intentions were clear and it is still HIGHLY disturbing, and the fact that it is seemingly played off for laughs, as if attempting to magically roofie somebody, especially a child isn't extremely fucked up is also disturbing
ok, as a person from the UK, lets maybe for a second consider that the reason there aren't a lot of POC characters in Harry Potter is because there aren't many people of colour in the UK (which is blatantly untrue, we have a large immigrant population and almost 20% of our population is non-white), so if the reasoning is the demographic of the location, then why does a school in Scotland have only like 3 Scottish people in it?
There are characters that are Indian, black and Chinese. There are other minorities, there is someone with "AIDS"I, a teacher who is very small, a person who is very large.And more representation. I understand that she did not depict all of those perfectly, but can't you guys turn your attention to other stories that have much less and worse representation. I get that we should improve all of that, but HP has been criticized enough for anything and everything and it is disproportionate to how problematic it is in reality. You guys just love to hate it and it is getting super boring and repetitive and it has become a sport to see something problematic in anything HP related. And not more than Scottish people: My gooood, because not everything in HP has to be taken literally. It falls apart when you question the logic. But that does not automatically make it problematic. It is just not intended to be super realistic and logical. The messages are very clear though. Individuality should not be mocked (Luna), prejudice is not good (Lupin), discrimination sucks (Malfoy). So don't overcomplicate it. We can do all of the diversity and all of the representation in our generation so MOVE THE F*CK ON and leave it be. (But don't let ROwling get away with her anti trans tweets- because that is actually problematic, not like the straw grasping you are doing here)
ive always known that J.K. is a horrible human being but loved her books. i think we all gravitated towards them because of the magic. i never realized how misogynistic and racist the books are, it completely slipped past me. wow. eyes opened. thanks Caroline! (not sarcastic).
honestly most of the fans were kids when they got into it so I don't blame them for taking a popular fantasy book/movie at face value. I never got into the series and hearing from it as an adult I could pick up on the bigotry but, I don't know if I would have as a kid. Its definitely a hard subject because I know so many people that like it because it meant a lot to them in their childhood, but it doesn't take away from the damage the author made and the bigotry in the books. As a trans person I try to avoid the subject as much as possible haha but its nice when others criticise it openly, even ex fans, it makes you feel like they have your back yk
@@antbandd Im maybe under the trans umbrella, idk honestly but in any case I completely agree with you as someone who was a HUGE hp fan as a kid. the fictional world itself still means a lot to me even now and Im just lucky I was young enough to be able to take the books at face value, but Im selling my copies second hand (less money to JK if someone buys them from me instead, too) because I just cant get into them without being slapped in the face by some kind of crazy take every 3 seconds. I might try to read the series again before I sell it just because it may be the last time I can but it is soo hard to not just flip to the parts I do like
After you are done with Harry Potter maybe you can read the Amari series to her. It got the same themes as HP only better done. And the characters are not as shallow.
If you’re looking for another series with magical elements, I recommend the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, as well as the “sequel” series the Heroes of Olympus and Trials of Apollo. There are five books in each series, so hopefully that will last her a while! :)
I love pulling out the fact that one of the only black people in the plot is named SHACKLEBOLT. You put SHACKLE in this African man’s name. If I have to explain why that is so horribly racist then I don’t need to talk to you.
As an nb person who was afab, I see trans women finding joy in things that made me feel viscerally uncomfortable as a teen (like makeup, 'girly' clothes, being called she, etc) amazing. I love that they can find joy in every aspect of femininity and womanhood. It feels like giving away something that no longer fits me to someone who will love it better and more deeply than I ever could. I had a not like other girls phase as a teenager, but it turns out I'm just not a girl. Girls and women-- cis, trans, and those who don't want either label-- are wonderful, and I couldn't imagine anything but secondhand joy as they express their gender identities.
If one of my friends had done this for me I would have had to come out much sooner than I did, because that girl friend would have instantly become girlfriend. 🥹
I'd love doing this for, or getting this from a friend. That being said if it's books they actually want to read. Otherwise it's kind of a guilt trip lol. No judgment, I pulled all sorts of stuff to get friends to read my fav books as a kid, when they were def not interested.
Next time I see someone say "Separate the art from the artist" I'm sending them this and asking if this is the "art" they're referring to. We've known these things for a while, I get HP meant a lot to a bunch of kids 30 years ago, but like, how can you know this and still like the material? It's so gross to me even if she wasn't doing actual harm to actual people currently. Excellent video.
separating art from artist only works when the artist didn't put their bigotry into their art. like you can separate fnaf from scott cawthon's queerphobia because fnaf isn't laced with queerphobia, but you can't separate hp because rowling wrote all of her bigotry into it
"If we're meant to like a female character in the Harry Potter universe, she will be not like other girls." ... or a mom. A Molly Weasley who has so much love to give that she practically adopts Harry. A Narcissa Malfoy whose only redeeming quality is her love for her child (same goes for Aunt Petunia). A Lily Potter who sacrifices herself for her child and whose love protects it even after her death. A Minerva McGonagall as a stern, but fair and protective motherly figure. A Poppy Pomfrey who nurses sick and injured students back to health. On the other hand, the only female character who openly declares that she doesn't like children is Dolores Umbridge. Rita Skeeter creeps on teenagers. Bellatrix Lestrange is a lunatic. Sybil Trelawney is treated like a child by her colleagues and never taken seriously by either female or male lead characters. Need I say more?
yeah, she did a video about female characters in HP in particular where she address it. Usually when they are young, they are not like other girls, then they marry and have children and are in the traditional role of a mother.
I also don't love her 'not like other girls vibe'. But I express that as my personal taste of her depiction and do not put it on the 'JK Rowling is super problematic on this one issue, so that means she is problematic on all issues' list of things , because that is really immature.
7:56 making a school that caters to the wizards of ALL of Britain and having that few be POC is ridiculous, England has a massive ammount of asian and eastern European immigrants, lots of black people with generations of family living in Britain, even in the 1990s the only way you could not make that someones experience is to be rich enough to not have to be in places with lots of different people. Edit: id like to add, even though a 1991 census only declared england to be 7% POC and the rest white, it is considered unreliable and did not consider much margin of error, and white eastern european immigrants were not taken into account, who in my opinion are also not well represented in english media (but thats a different conversation) even then, the first book was published in 1997, there easily could have been more variety of characters of colour by the point she was writing the other books. However, she, during her life, was middle class, belonged to a country club, studied classics, etc, and she also grew up in the South west, which isnt as diverse. i would not be surprised if she didn't have much exposure to diverse backgrounds, which could explain the lack and her lack of tack surrounding descriptions of people of colour
I can confirm many eastern Europeans have moved to the UK as a whole, I even know plenty of them personally as a lot of Polish people also moved there or worked there at some point, hell even my own family has gone there to work lol
@arsena5209 Haha yeah I am a Polish and Persian (strange mix I know) person living in England - the UK is a tiny place with lots of people, absolute definition of a melting pot, as are most of the schools, any works of fiction should really reflect that
Nothing is more satisfying to me than ex-fans who have thought more about Harry potter than jkrowling ripping her a new one. It's just something special to see people you know understand the material inside and out point to eeeevery glaring or minor issue and go "the fuck is this bullshit?"
A 1990s UK census reported that 95% of population was white and only 5% identified as Poc. So i don't really see how the characters diversity distribution is problematic based on this fact?
@@meciocio That's a good point. But I guess what we have to think about is: Are 7 canon students of color (3 Asian and 4 black) out of maybe 1000 total students a good representation of population dynamics of Britain in 90s? Perhaps 7 out of the 50 ish known named students is way better tho cuz that's a better %
5:06 the irony of the statement for me is that I never ready Harry Potter because I only wanted to read “girl stories”. American girl carried me through till Twilight and Hunger Games came out 🥲
Sally Lockhart mysteries and the Golden compass books are really cool & they both have cool female main characters, I loved them when I was a kid (disclaimer: haven't read them since I was a kid which was a while ago so idk if they hold up)
I just want to say that my dad read the harry potter books to me when I was a child and they first came out and when we came to the 6th book there is an entire chapter about some weird prime minister or something and my dad closed the book then and there and refused to continue reading because he new from that moment that jk had some problematic views. I was completely ok with this since I had lost interest in the books when Sirius died. I just think it's hilarious how my dad looked right through her. He also knew right from the beginning that Snape would get redeemed at some point. Even though we never got to that point in the story.
i'm really curious if you/he can remember what part put him off? in the 6th book there's the npc muggle pm and rufus, but they never struck me as problematic
@@uncreativename6210, Rufus wrongfully imprisons people for the PR of "caught Death Eaters"... This Rufus man was doing everything he could to strong arm Harry into agreeing with his policies, for "unity".
I was so excited to read these books to my son. Then I had him and started thinking about the books, the characters, storylines. Then she started tweeting. And I said I’d never read it to him. If he makes the choice when he’s older we have SO MUCH to talk about. Smdh I gave this woman so much damn money 😢
The bathroom argument is so stupid. If someone wants to attack you in a public restroom, a little figure that crudely represents a man or a woman isn't going to magically stop them from opening that door. The door opens for anyone. You just push on it.
“Laws against stealing are so stupid. If someone wants to steal something, they’re going to do it. A law that says ‘no stealing’ isn’t going to magically stop them from stealing.”
@@jncon8013there are laws against rape. a law against stealing isn’t pointless. a law against wearing the color purple to prevent stealing because “no one can steal if they’re not wearing purple” would be stupid as hell.
Seeing all this displayed in such a thorough manner is really eye opening. The lack of diversity gender and race wise is appalling and I completely missed that until it was so blatantly explained.
The whole trans bathroom issue is so fricking ridiculous to me. Let's look at statistics in UK/US, as to who is a convicted sex offender or a murderer. Oh, it's mostly cis white straight males. By far the majority. I'm white, from a white English family, and we just gloss over these things on society. As a cis woman, I am not afraid of a man dressing as a female, coming into the toilets. How often does this happen? I'm afraid of a man, appearing as a male coming into the toilets. A white cis straight male is most likely to S/A or unalive me. And as I was S/A as a child by someone fitting this description, I feel confident mentioning this. However, he got off in court, interesting that 8 out of 12 jurors were male and white.
@@magicalcatbean I think she meant she's not afraid of cis men wearing dresses to get into womens bathrooms because that's not a thing cis men do in the first place. If a cis man is going to go into womens bathrooms to assault women, he's not going to bother "dressing up for the part" at all. That's not a thing that happens, it's a scaremongering rumor from the far right.
@@magicalcatbean I read purplepixie's comment as referring to the non-existent "boogeyman" of a straight cis male who crossdresses just to get entry into women's restrooms.
the existence of trans men also throws their argument into the toilet. they want me, a man, to use the women's toilet bc of my chromosomes. like uhhh you REALLY want a grown man with facial hair to use the women's bathroom? really? id be kicked out....at best. the men's bathroom is safer for me to use, since, yknow...im man and look like one.
The one quote that ever resonated with me was when somebody (I think Dumbledore) said “You know, sometimes I think we sort too soon…” and I think it’s because the rest of the time the books are trying to tell you that once you’re one thing you can’t change at all
That line from Albus is so fucking awful tho. It implied if you have any courage at all, you must ONLY be a Gryff. What about brave Slyth who are daring and ambitious? Or brave Raven who are daring and intelligent? JKR is so pro Gryff it's absurd. She refuses to acknowledge that people can have more than 1 trait and that bravery exists in many forms in every house too.
@@l.n.3372 Yes, very true! It only resonated with me because my brain twisted it to be “people are so quick to judge other people without really knowing them” haha
@@legendary.was.momentary it hits harder cuz as a kid, I saw myself/self sorted into Slyth so in book 7 when I read Albus, JKR's author avatar saying we sort too soon it screamed out to me that JKR legit thinks only evil people can be Slyth cuz the MOMENT they show ANY bravery ... they're mis sorted Gryff instead -_____- like what about Narcissa bravely defying Voldy to save her son? Slughorn bravely dueling Voldy? all mis sorted too ??!! lmao
@@l.n.3372 That makes a lot of sense, actually. I never saw it in the context of the book when I read it, though I think I read them for the first time when I was 10
11:30ish- and more than half the books fail the Bechdel test. And in each of the ones that do pass, the line that makes it pass is something so inconsequential, coincidental, passing on a technicality. And technicality is not really the point of the test of course, it’s more a proxy for whether or not the female characters are real characters with genuine interiority. The Bechdel test deliberately places the bar underground, and Rowling still manages to fail. In books!! It’s crazy that she could write entire huge books with ostensibly a female main character, 1 of 3, where at no point does a female character speak to another female character about literally anything under the sun except the male characters. Can you imagine how far and wide one would have to search, if we did a reverse Bechdel test, to find a book or film that fails?? Anyway in conclusion she’s the worst lol
The worst part about the sorting hat is that the in universe discourse bleeds into real life. Sure, most people will be able to say “It’s just fiction. You aren’t actually evil” but I’ve encountered people ashamed for being in Slytherin because it’s the “evil” house or Hufflepuff because it’s the “useless” house. And I’ve had people in other houses thanking the gods that they weren’t placed in Slytherin because it’s the “evil” house. I feel bad for those people because Slytherin shouldn’t be the “evil” house. We forget that their house is for ambitious leaders or that Hufflepuff is for the kind and loyal and trusted. We ALSO forget that each house has its draw backs and flaws. But because Slytherin is the “green evil snake house” that house’s flaws are put on the forefront, positive attributes be damned. Imo the sorting hat/four houses should have been abolished near the end of the series. How the hell can you make a story about anti-segregation when there’s segregation in your own magic school??
I've never seen a fan upset by that. Most Slyth fans post series sorted themselves cuz they understand JKR is trash and they reclaimed the house for themselves cuz they liked the house of ambition
Great video :) I read the books when I was 14 and recognised the misogyny but that was in every piece of media so I just accepted it for what it was. I especially disliked the house elves entire plot and how it was treated as a joke, it was actually disturbing at times that Hermione was the weird one for wanting a species of intelligent elves to have basic rights, not just that they be paid for labor. I wasn't surprised that J.K turned out this way but surely she has better things she could be doing with her time.
the thing is is that I grew up reading these books and I related to Hermione because people also made fun of me for caring about important issues like that. I was literally an sjw before that was a word and I got made fun of by my classmates. JK Rowling is absolutely disgusting and she's completely ruined her legacy and I can never enjoy these books and movies again. but it was one of the biggest ...things in my life. I was obsessed. and it's important to note that when an author makes something seem like a joke it doesn't mean that they think it's a joke it means that they're saying that the people around them think it's a joke, which is I believe was accurate. it's kind of like saying that when an author writes terrible people doing terrible things that they condone and agree with those actions which is ridiculous because of course they're going to have antagonists and villains who do and say terrible things it doesn't mean that they agree with any of those things. just because other people saw s p e w as a joke, I believe that was the acronym for her organization, doesn't mean that JK thought it was a joke. in fact if we look at the text of the books the scene when Hermione and Ron finally kissed for the first time at the end is when he finally acknowledges the house elves and says that they should go save them and so she is like oh my God you've actually listened to me and you actually care about the same things I do and you just displayed that you have the same values as me and that becomes their romantic moment because he's displaying that he actually cares... I was so upset at the time when they changed that in the movie because it was such a big deal to me but it made sense because they had never set up that organization she'd made for house elves in the movies so they just reworked it. but if you remember that moment was a big deal to her because he was finally acknowledging that she was right about caring about the house elves rights and Harry agrees after Ron points it out. again, JKR is a terrible human being who is spreading tons of hate and no one should support her monetarily or otherwise but I don't think it makes sense to try and poke holes in Harry Potter that aren't necessarily even there like actually engage with the work of fiction completely or just toss it aside and say it doesn't matter either way because she's already tarnished it. former cast members of the movie have spoken out against her and she's denounced them. thankfully they did the right thing. I don't think it makes sense to look back at the books with these JKR as a transphobe glasses and just over analyze every little piece and say that these pieces are obviously signs of red flags of her being a bad person or doing bad things when that doesn't even really line up with what the book itself is saying. I agree there's a lot of stuff in there that's sucks that I didn't notice when I was a child, but i don't necessarily buy into this idea that because other people saw her organization as a joke that JKR wasn't saying that Hermione one of the main characters whose beloved and smart and known for being super intelligent wasn't always in the right for caring about the house elves and when Ron and Harry finally admit that she is right it's a huge deal for her and we're supposed to care and like her right? I just don't understand this perspective... anyway, doesn't really matter. i just wish jkr had never opened her mouht andruined harry Potter for millions of queer people.
- The antisemitic depictions of the goblins in Gringotts bank shook me to my core when i first made the connection, it's so easy to see that theyre literally walking racial stereotypes, disgusting. - what made me uncomfortable even as a child was how "Love potions" were always portrayed in a light hearted way and not as what they really are, date rape drugs.
I revisited HP, twilight and hunger games back in 2020, two years after i'd graduated uni. i went through uni referencing HP as my fav books, mostly bc they were the first thing i could think of under pressure in those stupid ice breaker games at the start of each semester. in year 7 in 2008, when my besties class got assigned philosopher's stone as their text in first term (and my class got something else)...... i offered to write EVERYONE's essays for them, bc i LOVED HP that much. but for some reason, in my besties class, no one wanted to read it. hell, i even wrote an essay on epistemic injustice in one of my philosophy subjects in uni in 2016, using the courtroom scene of harry's hearing in order of the phoenix. but my god, i realised how problematic it was, particularly the plot points with Umbridge, but also the bit of professor moody/barty crouch jr in goblet of fire..... where moody was trapped in his own magical suitcase for an entire year. i thought that was writing GOLD at 10 years old in 2005. at 24/25 back in 2020, not so much. plus the point of how they treated moody's tough view (hyper-vigilance) on life as being "insane" after being an auror for too long.... not a traumatised front-line worker with very discernible untreated mental health issues caused by his job. which, very much in hindsight, is gross. god, he was even more considerably wary of people once he was imprisoned in his own suitcase for a year! anyone would be! but he was still referred to as "crazy", if not MORE so after that, until his death in deathly hallows. like ok, i know everyone is going to go the "fuck cops!" route on this argument. but still. i think moody shouldn't've been painted as "off his rocker" (probably used in the books- let's be real), but someone with obvious mental health issues that were directly caused by his job. and yes also, it's a kids series. and it was the mid2000s. so no one really (presumably) took an issue with it. but it should be discussed now. moreover, obvs as kids, the fan base was WAY more concerned with pointless shit in the movies vs the text. for example, the inaccuracies of the colour of hermione's yule ball dress in goblet of fire- pink [movie] vs periwinkle blue [book]. harry's vs lily's eye colour in the flashbacks in DH part 2 (and harry's/daniel's eye colour in general throughout the films) and other dumb shit that barely affected the plot or required deep thought.... but are still apparently hotly debated today, when i get the occasional HP post on my fb feed. like drop it. it's LITERALLY BEEN 20 YEARS and close to 20 years for the later films. the main thing wrong, still to this day, though, is the "said calmly" line delivery in the book being SCREAMED in the goblet of fire movie, for dramatic effect imo. let the other small shit die along with voldemort and our respect for JKR.
In Book 6... Arthur Weasley was a cop... However, the biggest thing about Aurors is... they don't go after the petty criminals. They go after the worst of the worst... the murderers, the torturers, etc. They are the equivalent of a modern day SWAT. Yet, Moody lived through one of the worst _insurgencies/campaigns of terrorism_ the UK based Wizards experienced. The people in the forefront would be the Aurors... and that made them, and their families, primary targets for assassination. It's one thing to know that a wizard will do their best to kill you if you try to apprehend them... it's another to know that there are wizards hunting you down who have no problem of using charms on your friends/family to force them to kill you in their stead. That's assuming they don't use transfiguration magic to modify their appearance nor the easily accessible polyjuice potion to pretend to be your friend/family member. Only the lucky, the skilled, or paranoid survived that insurgency, which only ended when the leader disappeared. Even then, usually just one of them wasn't enough. As depicted by the fates of the Original Order of the Phoenix. Now, it's perfectly normal for dumb-butt kids to secretly mock Moody for his PTSD... they mock people all the time, especially those who are strange and/or different. Now, the adults on the other hand... they should be stepping in to tell the children they are behaving poorly...
The real world fandom seems to dislike anything auror nowadays. I get that people are projecting their hatred of real cops onto fiction, but I feel like auror in canon weren't inherently bad. I don't think that Harry should have been an auror tho. He should have been DADA teacher
I didn’t read the Harry Potter books until after I graduated college. As I read them, I was shocked by so many of the things that you mentioned here. I don’t think I would have picked them up if I had read the books as a child, but as a young adult with a shiny new degree in sociology, they jumped off the page. The house elves thing especially made me deeply uncomfortable.
It's so ironic how there are all of these actually problematic things in HP, yet the conservatives all freaked out and burned the books because they contain witchcraft (not even real witchcraft, either) 😒
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You're a queen for this
Trans ally!!
Fair call
Exactly
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to make an 18 minute video about jo rowling and TOTALLY REFUSE to mention her RAMPANT and EXTREME transphobia and transmisogyny is BEYOND MESSED UP,
since it is BY AN EXTREME MARGIN the worst thing she has ever done,
she has REPEATEDLY called for the PUBLIC ON MASS EXECUTION AND GENOCIDE of trans women,
and you don't see that worth mentioning apparently,
SERIOUSLY DO BETTER
"One animal character... who is white, Hedwig" took me out 😂
Swept my legs with that one 😂
Complete forgot about Nagini who is an Asian woman stricken with a genetic blood curse forcing her to permanently turn into a snake.
But are we counting Hedwig towards the number of female characters? /lh
SAME
@@skyesmith5683 wait what? huh???
Jk Rowling writes of things that make you go "did she mean it like that??" And then she goes that extra step where you're like "oh that's exactly what she meant..."
Comparing Angelina Johnson’s braids to worms was certainly a choice
@@Honeydoyoukeep in mind who said it a bully who meant it to offend and hurt the targets feelings
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 Well knowing Rowling herself is a bully who love to hurt people it is not surprising.
Me about SPEW… I always thought it was super weird place to take that subplot but now I’m like “Oh she *meant* the racism”
@sandraswan9008 Yeah, Rowling tells on herself when she makes the other Black kid with dreads, Lee Jordan, the cool kid who hangs out with Fred & George and cracks jokes during Quidditch commentary.
I find her writing Dolores Umbridge really interesting because in many ways that's who Rowling herself has become. Umbridge is this seemingly harmless white lady who aligns herself with the side of morality, but is really just aligned with maintaining tradition. She talks about 'preserving what ought to be preserved' and 'pruning practices that ought to be prohibited'. She's overly controlling and tries to limit the amount of real world knowledge available to the students, claiming its all for their benefit. It all seems a little familiar...
💀
Damn… 😅
Underrated comment
She shooted to be Albus but it landed on Delores
Funny that Umbridge is more hated by fans than Voldemort as well. Imagine hating women so much you write one to be more unlikable that wizard hitler. Then ironically becoming her in real life
There’s one thing I noticed when I first read the books as a kid that annoyed me even then: in book 6, when Slughorn gathers all the students together who have rich and affluent parents, everyone’s father is the successful one, except one kid whose mother is a beautiful witch who keeps murdering her rich husbands. JK couldn’t even imagine a world where a woman got rich off her own intelligence and hard work 😂
Even with MAGIC existing. Successful career women like McGonagall (who turned down her "true love" and whose latter husband of convenience dies shortly after their marriage) or Madame Maxine are seen as having "sacrificed" family life or, like Tonks - they only had active careers until the right man came along.
Tragic, really, to hate her own gender so much.
Damn lmao
also she's likely black (we never see her but her son is black so it's fair to assume she is too)
Not really, look at Narcissa Malfoy for example who even before marrying was pretty rich really.
@@Jdudec367 but narcissa's wealth would come from her parents, probably her father, as opposed to her earning it through her talents or working a job
Umbridge's hyper-femininity would have been a really cool choice -- you don't see frilly pink sadists in most books -- but the fact that every feminine character is either villainized (Umbridge, Rita Skeeter) or mocked (Lavender, Fleur) completely ruins it.
Yeah, it could have been great, the stark contrast between her cutesy exterior and her heinous actions? Golden! But when every other feminine female character is being villains or laughing stocks, it's clear that these feminine traits are part of the issue, not a contrast to them. Even just one or two characters who were traditionally girly but upset at these other girls, and not for "runing their image as girly girls" would have helped a lot. I guess she doesn't believe that cute girly-girls are capable of that much critical thinking? I don't remember if it was before or after reading the books, but I too definitely thought that pretty girls and girly girls were complete airheads with no redeeming traits. When I was a kid. I'm allowed to be dumb as a kid. This adult did nothing to correct this fallacy though. Now as an adult myself, I do actually allow myself to like pink and girly things, but it's a process. You can be cute and smart, kind and/or badass all at the same time. I am still "allergic" to too much strong pink in one place, but it's slowly getting better.
@@PanthereaLeonis I hear this. I definitely went through a "not like other girls" phase in my teens during which I disparaged girliness. I didn't learn until later that this was my own internalized misogyny. But the fact that JK never grew out of that phase is crazy to me. As the kids would say, she's definitely not a "girl's girl."
Does Molly Weasley count?
Rowling also had to make it abundantly clear how ugly Umbridge was every time she was brought up. I kinda wonder if this is a transphobic-adjecent "feigned femininity" type of thing.
@@genericname2747 She's depicted as a frumpy housewife. Even though Draco's descriptions of her to that effect are meant to be cruel, you aren't given the impression they're inaccurate, either.
I remember being pretty upset about how the story treated Hermione's elf rights activism even as a teenager - not to mention how the book ends with Harry still OWNING A SLAVE (but he's nice to him so it's OK!). To make matters worse, JKR says the house elves were based on brownies...but those GO ON STRIKE if you stop leaving food for them!
Right? All the house fairies in the folklore will either leave or retaliate if you mistreat them (and some are insulted by payment because it's their house and you just live there), but she made the conscious decision to change them. My best guess is that a more faithful take would add too much nuance to the power dynamic.
@@pigcatapult They are definately quite interesting and while i dont necessarily knows if they were originally intended as such, they make for an interesting message about coexistence since the relationship with them is purely beneficial, as long as you treat them as equals and give enough of an effort to be aware of their customs and avoid offending them. (especially notable in how they despise the idea of being paid for their housework but love receiving gifts, which is a subtle but very important distinction in how they are supposed to be treated.
@@blackbloom8552 I agree!
@@pigcatapult the part about them getting insulted if you offer them payment for living in their house is funny to me. Seems the Fae folk don't know the concept of rent.
I was researching brownies once for a book and 70% of the sources talking about brownies mentioned of house elves were based on them but like… the house elves don’t seem like the sort to start haunting a house of you leave out spoilt milk 🧐 they don’t seem like they only help industrious folks who need help the most (cough the malfoys cough) 🤨 are we sure she wasn’t lying?
The thing that's so awful about Harry Potter is all these concepts' wasted potential to be something good. What if the house-elves didn't like being enslaved, and Hermione fought for them against the judgement of her peers and made actual change by working with them? What if, by the timeskip, actual changes had been made to the systems running the wizarding world? It could have been so interesting to follow Harry through this world which at first seems filled with wonder to him as he's a child, but as he grows up the the corruption in the wizarding world systems begins to be known to him, all the while there's an evil wizard after his head. Maybe in a different timeline.
We only need to wait until the copyright runs out.
So in 75 years... after Rowlins death...
Oh let me count all the ways I hate the current copyright system.
I don't even think the house-elves liking to be enslaved as a starting point would be an issue. The entire species being so used to their slavery that nearly all of them think it's right would be a really cool idea to start the story with. Seeing as Dobby wants to be free, Winky is so depressed and Kreacher kinda chaning sides a bit is a great base for going into a full on house elve rebellion where Hermione could have helped Dobby to spread the word to other house elves who wanted to be free or something. And I'll never get why a character like Harry who got treated like a slave would side against the house elves. It makes sense for Ron, it makes sense for Harry to be uniterested and focus on something else, but to straight up be against it is stupid.
I mean...I would say they were something good tbh. I mean she did continue to fight for them and worked on change when she became Minister of Magic. There likely is change though, like how they treat magical creatures for example. I mean we saw that, we see the ministry of magic be corrupt and stuff. DIferent timeline??? Which one did you live in?
@@TemariNaraannaschatz I agree with your first half of your comment. But like...Harry didn't side against the house elves he just knew that Hermoine wasn't doing avery good job really. Except he wasn't against it, you seem to misunderstand.
You should read babel
If you're looking for a new, fun fantasy universe to explore, I highly recommend Discworld by the late Terry Pratchett. Who actually WAS on the side of the oppressed. He wrote a character who didn't confirm to gender norms of her society, and when trans fans told him how much they identified with that character, he admitted he'd never intended her to represent trans issues when he created her, but he was absolutely delighted and proud to be considered an ally.
I second that! Pratchett's works are fantastic and I love the way he plays with stereotypes.
i also recommend Deltora Quest c: its just GOOD
Then he wrote a character who is indeed trans: Sargeant Jack Jackrum.
TP and Neil Gaiman are goated.
GNU Sir Pterry
The love potions as a “joke” was one of my big shocks when rereading as an adult. As a kid, I definitely did NOT put 2:2 together that she had basically made light of ppl being roofied.
Also, the lack of sympathy from Dumbledore (supposedly a mature adult) towards Riddle’s father when the love potion element of his story is revealed was horrible. (I don’t blame Riddle Sr. for leaving; none of that was his choice and he probably had a lot of trauma to deal with.)
The lack of awareness and compassion in telling stories about SA or possible SA was, in hindsight, appalling.
SA is so badly represented in media as it is. And it’s played off as a joke in most media when it’s the man getting SA’d.
The whole Love Potion “joke” kind of went over my head as a kid but is horrifying when I think of it now. It’s so bad :(
Eh...didn't Dumbledore give him sympathy though? I'm pretty sure he did.
I mean...there was awareness and compassion about that....but JK Rowling can only do so much in her target age demographic even in the older more mature books.
@@Jdudec367 if she wasn't able to treat the subject matter with the respect and sensitivity it warrants because it was too mature for her age demographic, then why did she include it in the first place??
@@oeurydice She can and did treat it with respect and sensitivity though which is why it's mainly just alluded to really.
@@Jdudec367Voldemort being created by a love potion and it being a direct comparison to SA is a main plot point and supposed to be the reason he was unable to love
Lavender was also black in the first few Harry Potter movies but as soon as she became a character we were supposed to be aware of, JK casted her as white
thats insane. genuinely, i pictured lavender as a black girl when i was reading the books 😭
@@cheedabear2564I think it’s more about consistency or the lack thereof
With JKR's naming convention, I'm actually surprised Lavender *Brown* is *not* dark skinned.
@@elsa_g Sirona Ryan type beat😭😭😭
@@Al_xS_cks me too😭like she literally did not have to recast her, that was a deliberate choice that she made
just remembered that time jk claimed that hermoine was always meant to be black,, i know she was lying then but in retrospective that just makes the whole "spew" thing where hermoine campaigns against enslavement and its shown to be stupid and cringe just so much worse
JKR has old drawing she did of Hermione was white, we know she's full of bs. She could have just said that her skin color didn't matter to her and be done with it.
@@TemariNaraannaschatz That is essentially what she said, though. She said she never explicitly specified Hermione's race, which is true. That's not good representation on her part AT ALL, but I don't like seeing these bad faith arguments all the time. There are PLENTY of reasons to hate her, we don't need to misrepresent the facts.
JKR is a horrendous hateful bigot and a bad writer but there’s no need to make statements that are actually untrue. Rowling never said Hermione was always written to be black, she literally just said that she supported the casting in the play and that Hermione *could* be interpreted as black if people wanted to
@@ThatWeirdo04 I mean, she never outright said that Hermione was caucasian, but she wrote about how "Hermione's white face stuck out from behind a tree" in chapter 21 of Prisoner of Azkaban, despite claiming in her tweet that "white skin was never specified"
1. Rowling never ever said that Hermione was always meant to be black. She only said that she never specified what race Hermione is.
2. Spew is in reference to Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW) an early british women's organisation.
Irish Seamus Finnigan whose hobby was blowing things up, in the 90s❤️❤️❤️
oooh...that's...not tasteful. i never made that connection
Am from Belfast, can confirm that we the northern Irish millennial Potter fans didn’t make that connection either til the films came out and in the films the joke’s laid on a bit thick, so then we eye rolled about it, so we did.
To be fair, that is a movie-only detail. It wasn't in the books. I wouldn't be surprised if JKR was bigoted against the Irish, though.
Something thats always made me laugh about seamus Finnegan as a character not in a way that makes jkr look good but the way her possible biases present is that if the movie bit where he says his dads the muggle is book canon, then theres a northern irish dad out there who has to send his kid to a school in london for the better part of the year god that must eat at him given the time period
@@loganalvarez2985 Hogwarts is in Scotland
I really wanted to point out more ways that even the woman JK put in the story get shafted. Hermione is like the only woman who gets any agency. The other “good guy” women are all moms or otherwise motherly. Which isn’t bad on the surface, but being matronly isn’t the only way to be a good woman. Most woman we are meant to dislike on the merit of their personality, beliefs, or actions are described in excruciating detail as being unattractive or masculine looking in ways that almost eclipse their actual characters. I don’t think JK Rowling likes women.
Except for Petunia Dursley and their next door neighbor who used to watch Harry who was secretly a squib
@@tahraethestoryteller6079Aunt Petunia is described as having “horse-like teeth” and “nearly twice the usual amount of neck.” I think she very easily fits the pattern I described even if she is somewhat sympathetic and tragic. Rowling imagined an embittered child abuser and thought she must have conventionally unattractive physical qualities.
This is such a good point and I think Hermoine is even matronly towards Ron and Harry sometimes. Especially in the early books, with the “before you get us killed, or worse, expelled” she is nagging them. When they leave school, if it weren’t for her packing the Mary Poppins bag, what the hell would they have done?
She doesn't like women, she sees them as objects she can use to defend her bigoted, anti-trans agenda and her character by basically being like "see? I care about women because I'm constantly talking about them and saying I care! you can't accuse me of being misogynistic!"
@@lindsey532 it would be forgivable if JK used that as a way to make Ron and Harry grow as people by realising relying on Hermione and other girls and women in their lives for everything isn't right, but alas, she did not
The house elf allegory with slavery made me uncomfortable only because of the fact everyone else in the HP universe thought she was crazy for trying to free the slaves.
It didn’t make you uncomfortable because of the fact that an allegory about SLAVERY was written by a WHITE person?
I was a little surprised by this take because I remember a lot of the elves not liking their jobs and liking Hermione, yeah some of them didn’t of course. Part of the reason they didn’t like her though I thought was because she was getting in the way or something while they were cooking or trying to do their thing ? I could be wrong. While horcrux hunting though and trying to find the locket there is a scene in the book where harry apologizes to Kretcher for how people had treated him
@@Okaybuddybear14 From what I remember Hermione knitted a bunch of small hats and socks and hid them around the gryffindor common room area so that the house elves stumbled upon them and were freed (since giving a house elve a clothing meant freeing them from their duty). But of course since J.K. portrayed them as wanting to be enslaved, less and less house elves cleaned the common room because they were scared of stumbling upon those clothes.
@@4ng3l_c0rpes8 I don't even think that it's a bad thing, Hermione wanting to help but doing it the wrong way. But it stops there, there is no, maybe ask Dobby what would actually work instead of this white saviour trope she's failing to be, while everyone else tells her to stop (why does even Harry tell her to stop, when he was basically enslaved himself). The entire house elves storyparts from the book would have been perfect set up for a full on house elves rebellion that just never happend.
@@TemariNaraannaschatz Funny you mention Dobby because he is described as having a reaction to that. Except that reaction isn't talking to Hermione about it or something of sorts, but rather he takes all the small clothes other house elves leave untouched, so it leads to a small "comedic moment" where Dobby is found wearing absolute piles of clothing that Hermione made.
That's it, thats how they handle it
There's classism in Harry Potter too. Like the hero is rich and comes from a literally legendary family line, the main families are all old and ancient, the main characters (except Hermione) all come from these main families. There is no "new money" in Harry Potter.
That's so entrenched in British culture it's not surprising. After I moved to England I found out a lot of things that I thought were Harry Potter things were just British things lol
so true. the weasleys are the bad guys (poor) and the malfoys are the good guys (rich). classism is never portrayed as a bad thing in the books either.
wait a damn second -
Fyi, she has second series of best-selling novels & television movies, perhaps you can get around to critiquing those twenty years after she's done writing them as well.
@@unowen-nh9ovNever in a million years did I think I would find a J.K. Rowling supporter
@@inezketchupsame 😂
Cho Chang being a POC disposable love interest for the final white love interest and being shamed for major depression will always make me angry. I tried to speak on this in the 00s just to get a bunch of hate. Glad people are calling her out for being racist and shaming mental illness.
I hated how she was treated. She was so hyped up in the first books and then she is just thrown away because she is in grief over her dead boyfriend? I was so angry.
I hated how Hermione treated Marietta. She was a 16 year old Hermione scars for life over one damn mistake. As if Hermione has never fucked up in HER life 🙄
@@l.n.3372 If a Slytherin girl would have done it she would have been demonized but since Hermione is a Griffindor she is a karma haudini and so are the other Griffindors who do awfull things to other students.
@poppie267
That's what my friend and I call "bully hero in red, bully villain in green". Basically, whenever a Gryff is a bully or does something bad, it tends to get hand waved in series because they're Gryff as JKR is biased to them.
Hermione treatment of Marietta, for example. Ron's bullying of Luna. Fred and George nearly killed Montague and they get no punishment. James and Sirius are hand waved by even their fans.
@@l.n.3372 Hermione's a psychopath the series portrays as a badass.
One thing that always rubbed me the wrong way was this scene in the last book, where Harry and Ginny are alone together. The book points out how Ginny seems less emotional than the other girls Harry has known, and chalks it up to her just living with so many boys. They did this to make make her seem more “compatible,” and how Harry loves her because of that. It grossed me out a ton, and I’m surprised more people don’t talk about it (though I'm not in the fandom, so maybe it is and I’m just missing out.)
I haven't read the last book yet what the actual hell, that's crazy. Ginny has reasons to be open about her emotions, I mean she came from a very loving family. So do her brothers, so they should be okay with expressing their emotions as well. Being honest about your emotions is a good thing for everybody, I'll never understand how people twist it into a negative!!
@@pickleBOB405 Exactly!! Emotions are something everyone has. You’re not better for shoving away your emotions, and the fact JK tried to make it seem attractive is just going to set kids up (especially girls) with not being in tune with their emotions, and that isn’t healthy. Especially for Harry Potter's demographic of kids and teens.
@@AverytheBug it's something I've had to learn myself!! Being honest about your emotions makes dealing with things whole lot easier! Glad to see someone who agrees :)
It gets worse when Ginny is actually being emotional and sad over her dead brother at the end and Harry just kinda goes "eh, she'll get over it" and walks away without even acknowledging her
@@Priorrr SERIOUSLY?? Didn’t remember THAT but oh my gosh 😭😭
Ursula LeGuin's opinion of Harry Potter got so vindicated by time holy shit. She always was way ahead of her time, from the very beginning of her career right until the end.
She was the feminist icon in fantasy and sci-fi that JK wishes she could have been, but her complete inability to see beyond the status quo makes it impossible for her to be an actual feminist, since feminists have always looked at the status quo with suspicion, finding the ways in which it is harmful for women and for everyone else too.
That's what LeGuin, conversely, did. She wrote the first non white protagonist in any fantasy novel, and in the sequel she wrote the first female protagonist too (and what a female protagonist: Tenar is easily in my top ten female protagonists in any story from any medium), both in the '70s, a time when that could have easily sunk her career. Earthsea wasn't revolutionary just because of how non white-centric it was, but also because it wasn't a war defined entirely by wars and kings, the main thing wizards did in it was to help the population by controlling the weather and the winds.
LeGuin changed my views in so many ways, she was a remarkable woman and a brilliant writer, both things that JK posed as and, for a time, successfully managed to appear as, only to spoil it all by revealing that her soul is filled by bitterness and hate. The signs were always there, but her books were so fun to read growing up that it was easy to give her the benefit of the doubt. But LeGuin saw through it and called Rowling's work "stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean spirited". She hit the bullseye
I mean most progressives and left wing activists arw suspicious of the status quo.
She is a genius, I want to read her books because everytime I learn something about her I realize how awesome she is. In the 70s?? 😭 unbelievable!!
I agree about Le Guin, but let's not forget authors like Cathrin L. Moore or Leigh Brackett, who had female protagonists in fantasy stories already in the '30s.
So Tenar is lovely, but not the first.
And let's all take a look at newer authors like N.K. Jemisin, who smashed records as a Black woman by winning three consecutive (VERY well deserved!) Hugo awards for her Broken Earth trilogy, and then took on H.P. Lovecraft in her Great Cities books by writing the avatar of cosmic horror as the white uber Karen! Her short stories in "How Long Until Black Future Month" are so very worth reading too. And besides having characters that are so diverse that JK's little white head would explode (including trans people being treated like normal humans!), her work is so much deeper and better written on every level than Missy-miss Rowling could ever dream of doing. Her work is what fantasy is all about - asking hard what-ifs and turning the status quo on its head, and it's a beautiful thing!
I mean, she turned around and became better later, but let's not pretend like Ursula LeGuin was always a feminist icon. Her earlier books were filled with some absolutely vicious misogyny and propping up men as the more "sensible" sex. That includes Earthsea, by the way. Earthsea did a good job of introducing more ethnic diversity in fantasy books, but it was also a book that very clearly put forth the message that women are inferior to men. I think in a very similar way to JK Rowling, LeGuin had a "not like other girls" mentality, where she viewed all other women as frivolous and overly emotional while she herself was the exception. The difference is that LeGuin grew out of that mindset in her later years, while JK Rowling is still spewing that bullshit.
My GF died at age 27. The only bright side is that she never had to see JK fall so far into hatred. She loved those books.
...Granted, my GF mostly loved gay HP fanfics 😅 But it would still have broken her heart to see JK supporting fascist p3d0 Matt Walsh & ignoring actual AFAB issues. I'm not worried about a trans woman tinkling in another stall, Joanne; if I get pregnant in Texas, I will literally fucking die.
Sheesh that was tough to read I am so sorry for your loss i hope you’re healing from it
May your girlfriend rest in peace
I hope you're okay
J. K. Rowling is a hero
@@lodz8666 ?
When I was a kid reading the Harry Potter books I was so confused as to if I should be on the side of Hermionie and SPEW. Because everyone was telling her it was a bad idea, but I knew slavery was wrong, and I was so confused why she was depicted in a bad light. It never registered until I was older that that was wrong and SPEW was a good thing. Also the sorting hat system is so funny to me because 11 year old me is so vastly different to how I am now just a few years older, that being sorted into a mindset you will have for all your life is ridiculous.
As a kid I felt powerless, so I cared most about power(Slytherin), but now that I have more control of my life, learning is one of my favorite things (Ravenclaw).
As a kid I never really noticed when authors tried to make things look bad or good, so I just assumed that she was on Hermione’s side because WHO WOULDN’T BE???? And uh. Imagine my confusion when the plotline was, in my immature eyes, ‘dropped.’ Like it seemed pretty important
I remember when I was reading this for this time I trought "So they call her crazy for wanting to free the slave race now, but by the end of the book more characters gonna agree with her? Like Harry can say something about it, he free a Dobby before after all and he is treated like a slave to by Dursley's so he also know how wrong slavery is from experience"...
What a naive 13 years old I was...
I would say most of the sorting hat system's issues come from failing to explain things/represent most houses well. It's shown that sorting isn't just about what you are now, but what you value and what your potential is. Neville wasn't brave at the start, but he had the potential of bravery, so he went to Gryffindor. Peter Pettigrew was a coward (and remained a coward for his whole life basically) but he valued bravery as a trait, so he was also a Gryffindor. Explaining what the hat is actually judging students by better really would have improved things. Also, we rarely get clear, unbiased explanations of each house and what they represent. Hufflepuff is often dismissed with no explanation when it's brought up at all, Slytherin is just explained away as "the evil house" usually, and one could argue Ravenclaw is oversimplified at times.
What we would have benefitted from was proper explanations of these houses and their values, as well as more representation of the good and bad of them. Show positive representation of Slytherin traits like cunning and ambition, demonstrate how Gryffindor bravery can become stupidity if you're not careful, show Ravenclaws how you can't just know things but be able to put your knowledge to use, etc. There was potential in the sorting system, but there was a lot of fumbling of execution.
There were also some pretty big house divides in the story, and not much on trying to fix that or showing that those house divides are bad, which is a problem.
One more practical question I do have with the sorting system : the students always seem to be split pretty evenly between the houses, but that can't be a guarantee to happen every time when they're split up by personality. If you just get a whole bunch more Hufflepuffs than any other house for a few years, that's got to cause some problems (like Hufflepuff having an advantage with earning house points), and yet I can't think of any way they could counteract that imbalance.
I was on Hermions side when it came to SPEW. But it was one of the things that really put me off as a kid( I was not the most critical of readers as a child), like she is supposed to be super smart, yet names her organisation (in translation) farting. And it barely comes up other than to make fun of her. Yet it is about opposing chattel slavery?? Should that not be unambigiously good?
(Also, if JK really thinks Hermions could have been black in the book. Making the black girl speak up about slavery and awful treatment of a specific race... be mocked by her white friend about it. OOOOF doesn't even begin to cover it)
If Harry and Ron, two cis boys, hadn’t gone into the girls bathroom to find Hermione she would have been killed by the troll.
No one helped Myrtle when she was being bullied everyday and then she died in the bathroom where she’s stuck haunting for eternity (for plot reasons). Oh and as a ghost she has creeped on boys as they bathe but no one does anything about it or even seems to care.
There’s spells to keep boys from entering the girl’s dormitories but no protections for the boys. If there were similar protections in place for them, Ginny wouldn’t have been able to take Tom Riddle’s diary back from Harry.
All the female characters who were mothers or outgoing and strongly independent jocks were depicted as heroic and intelligent. But gawd forbid Cho is depressed from her boyfriend’s murder and a little upset that her best friend’s face was mutilated. 🙄
And Harry is a ridiculous asshole during all of this, and it only makes sense that they end on bad terms because Harry's being a dick to her and her friend- yet she's still depicted wanting back in his good graces by offering to guide Harry to the entrance to the Ravenclaw dormitory and being frustrated when Ginny sends Luna with him instead.
I wonder what JK meant by all of that...
Also Cho was drugged by Umbridge to reveal the DA, and she gets outcasted by everyone, and when its revealed she was drugged no one even says sorry
+1 for everything but also i must add that according to the lore of the world, the dorm room spells are specifically so because "boys will inherently want to peep on girls but girls would never do anything like that". awfully in line with joanne's current views!
You sure there aren't similar protections like that?
Nah she can feel that way but Harry had every right to question her judgement at least a little by then
@@Axolautism Eh...no he wasn't being a asshole or a dick tbh, like her friend screwed them over majorly, are you just gonna ignore that? Her trying to be nice after all of that is fair and is trying to make it up to them.
Unironically relieved one of my favorite creators agrees on this lmao, amazing video!!!!!! One thing I'd add is the frankly scary implication of lycanthropy as a metaphor for having AIDS and the uncontrollable urge to pass it on to (young male) "pure" students, at the height of the AIDS epidemic at that. Like goddamn
I have the theory that Ginny is just JKR's idea of the perfect girl with the perfect life. She's not like the other girls, her parents don't mind that she is a girl and are even happy about it because she is their only daughter after a bunch of sons, she gets rewarded for being the perfect girl who isn't like the other girls by ending up with the hero and having three babies with stupid names with him. Not much a point to this, it's just my observation.
@@katc.3400 I too think Rowling was giving us female role models to look up to. That’s what my daughters took from it.
It bothered me so much that all their kids had horrible names clearly picked by Harry, besides Lily Luna which sounds like it was made up by chat gpt. Like Ginny didn’t have a say and allowed Harry name their innocent child after the man who was training him to be a sacrificial offering and his mother’s incel stalker 🤦🏻♀️
kind of reminds me of Bella swan from the twilight series. Especially with the "not like other girls" and naming her kids something stupid. Also gets me thinking about how she was a self insert of the author, stephanie meyer who, (maybe less) is problematic as well. especially in the way she treats the POC in her books. Maybe JKR is the same, self inserting her as Ginny. It wouldn't be shocking since the coolest thing a woman can do according to her is be a mother or reject femininity, and apparently she does both. (Also Ginny ends up with the main character, something common with self inserts... just a bit gross to me considering the ages of the characters in contrast to rowling )
@@punkercd Rowling or Meyer? JK Rowling has 3 kids
@@punkercdJK Rowling was a single mother for a while while writing the series
A decade ago, I was a 13 yr old girl who was being told I’d be the next J.K rowling because I liked to write stories. Today, I’m a 23 trans man and it’s like watching Santa call you a slur to see every tweet or article from J.K saying something insane about trans people. It just puts this knot in your stomach. It’s dehumanizing. I’ll never forgive J.K for putting her ignorance above the community that formed around her odd books. She won the lottery for fiction writers: world-wide commercial success with lasting cultural impact. And she obliterated it, for what? To get sued by Imane for defamation? To give people another excuse to police women’s appearances? What a waste.
Man, I feel this so hard. You really hit the nail on the head. I'll have to remember that for the next time someone gives me a bad faith "but what does it matter, why do you even care, why can't you just continue to uncritically enjoy her books like me (etc)?"
...because when I read her words now, all I see is Santa calling me a slur.
That pedestal's so broken it's practically vaporized.
@@somelurker6115❤️ good to know this feeling is not just me
I 100000% feel this as a 24yo trans woman who has always loved reading and writing, partially inspired by Urban Fantasy authors like Derek Landy, Eoin Colfer and JK Rowling, as well as about a dozen other Fantasy authors and Mangaka.
I haven't heard much about the other two authors, but "gravely betrayed" is the most concise way to describe how Joanne has made myself and everyone I know feel.
Even now there's undeniable nostalgia I feel when I see anything related to Harry Potter, they were some of the first books I read and some of the first live-action movies I ever watched, some of the earliest games I played and some of the earliest toys I played with, but every grain of nostalgia is accompanied with pangs of the most bitter disgust and hottest rage.
Holy wow. You went the complete opposite lol. As for me I was told I'd be a, preacher man. . Fast forward. I'm a trans woman lol. Two months on hrt so far XD and an athiest. I love writing as well!
@@kamikage9420 do yourself a favor sis. Read The Poppy War trilogy. It's brilliant!!
“One of them was a painting.” killed me so bad. Both comedically and emotionally.
does that make sense
@@dani_drawzz perfect sense
A painting called the FAT lady
That and "and one animal character...who is white - Hedwig" 😂
And a painting with no name other than "The Fat Lady"
The idea that Black people loved working as slaves and that most slave owners were alright people was legit the premise of Song of the South. Yknow, the racist movie that Disney refuses to even acknowledge cause the idea was so horrific and dated
I truly expected there to be some sort of Slytherin redemption in the last book, paying off the Sorting Hat’s call for unity and showing us that the whole “Slytherin is evil” stereotype was prejudice and/or a child’s misunderstanding. And I don’t mean “oh, Draco didn’t actually feel comfortable helping his literally insane aunt who reveled in cruelty” or “well Snape loved Lily and didn’t technically betray Dumbledore, no matter what he treated his students like for years” or “well Mrs Malfoy loves her son more than she hates good people” - I meant an actual Slytherin redemption, proof they weren’t, as a group, on the side of evil. I was so confused when the house as a whole was treated as the enemy when preparing for battle at Hogwarts…and no one questioned it…and then they lived up to it… and it was just played straight. I kept expecting the Slytherin prefects to lead the 6th and 7th years back to the castle to help save the day but they didn’t and it was like oh…oh she really just meant that, didn’t she, she actually meant that Slytherin was the evil kids 🤦🏼♀️
You're so right. That moment is horrendous, with all Slytherin kids being shoved in the dungeon just because. Talk about having an overly simplistic, black and white, prejudiced view of the world!
Ha bookcat great coment 👍I always find it hilarious about obsessive Potterheads bringing in what you said about Draco Snap Mrs Malfoy. But the reason Rowling wrote the Slytherins that way is already known. Because she is a cry baby who created them out of petty revenge of her bullies. And the most hilarious part is her obsessive stans really think they can defend how stupid Slytherin in by bringing in Regulas Black and Slughorn LOL.
When I first took the quiz ages ago and got Slytherin I was so distraught at being dubbed evil that I just pretended I was a Ravenclaw. Because she just wants us to believe this is where the kids go and that is so harmful. SO HARMFUL. What kind of school would just put all the “innately evil kids” in one house? No school, that’s what.
Yeah, this fascinated me as well. It was absolutely a situation she could've evolved and redeemed and it could well have been a far more satisfying piece of closure. but instead she was happier to throw away 25% of the population to maintain the status quo. Even if Slytherin was created to explain bullies and bad people, 25%?? There's times we all throw our hands up and go "ugh, humanity sucks" but to say 25% of us are always irredeemably evil... there's something specific and rotten about that
@@BearBeatzu That's another angle that's deeply upsetting when you think about it. Due to the topic of LGBT issues being "inappropriate" for children I grew up believing that I could not control the monster I would become as a dangerous adult. I bet every Slytherin kid self harmed like absolute fiends. Some of those kids walked into that school with optimism and joy, no idea they were going to be deemed "people who would turn out evil." Some of those kids would have done anything to stop that from happening, and even in the wizarding world there's not too many ways to ensure you don't get any older.
J.K.Rowling: “I’m doing this for the women!”
Also her: *calls biological females olympians “males”*
Literally, I got so much second hand embarrassment from that. She could've literally Googled it😭
"i'm doing this for the women!" and then all of the female characters in the books are in some way inferior to men, shallow and rarely have any agency outside of being a quick plot device. awesome feminism here
As a trans person the term "cis women" is more appropriate than "biological females". This is because it can be used to attach labels to trans people that don't match their gender, while also giving more validity to cis people than trans people. "I'm a biological woman, unlike trans women who are biologically male."
I just wanted to share this with you as a trans person
@@lunanyx8592I think it may have been appropriate here though, because even if the conversation started with the possibility of a tr@ns athlete, it quickly devolved into a conversation about chromosomes and that only XX people can be considered women, so it's more about intersex people or hormonal and other conditions affecting cis women.
I may be wrong though, not trying to offend anyone.
@@bluester7177 as a cis woman and a writer, cis is both correct and appropriate.
Even if Khelif were intersex, which we have no reason to believe, and is frankly none of our business, intersex people are still assigned one gender at birth and almost always raised as either male or female. There is nothing to be gained by appealing to "biology" here because "biology" doesn't care about fitting into neat little boxes.
I feel like one aspect of Harry Potter that gets ignored that is problematic but probably largely gets ignored because she "made Dumbledore gay on twitter" is the homophobia. Like sure she made Dumbledore gay on twitter but Dumbledore isn't exactly Nico di Angelo, OR like the gay men in the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane who are explicitly in love in the text, he's an old man who dated one man (who was evil) and upon the point of the man's death IMMEDIATELY spent his entire life celibate and never trying to find a second love.
Added to this is the fact that he is not explicitly gay in the text, but you know what was? Remus Lupin being made a werewolf by an adult man who enjoyed targetting children. And then she goes "Lycanthropy is a metaphor for AIDs" but Remus (who was majorly headcanoned by the fandom to be a gay man himself, and is also the victim of said werewolf) turns out to be straight and gets married to a woman who was like... heavily headcanoned as a lesbian herself. Then they get killed off. The Lycanthropy shit is a mess.
Also other than Dumbledore all the characters that fans thought were gay coded ended up getting killed off as well. If you buy into the gay coded Colin Creevey theory he is also not exactly treated the best by other characters.
It kind of reads as JK Rowling accepting one type of gay man (celibate, not having sex, monogamous) and not being okay with any others. But this is just a half cocked analysis sorry.
I completely agree! Deeper into the Dumbledore/Grindelwald relationship, they are explicitly characterized as naive, misguided teenagers with pipe dreams to ruin the precious status quo, and one regretted his youthful foolishness and never had another gay relationship while the other was further seduced by sin and tried to take over the world. I don’t know, I think that’s pretty homophobic.
Quintessential "ally" behaviour. You're a lovely person whom I respect and don't judge in the slightest, but keep your depravity out of sight.
JK said Dumbledore was gay in an interview in 07 shortly after dh was released and Dumbledore defeated & imprisoned Grindelwald he didn't kill him and it's made pretty clear that Grindelwald was manipulating Dumbledore from the start
Honestly, the reveal that Nico's hero worship of Percy was actually him crushing on the guy was so good cuz how many of us think "Do I wanna be this person or date them?"
Remember, Dumbledore enabled the literal holocaust.
The one that most weirded me out as a teen was when Hagrid's brother Grawp was chained up in the woods and the book just treated that as chill. Grawp read as like an analogy for a mentally disabled person to me, so that seemed really fucked up, especially since he is Hagrid's blood brother and not just a "magical beast".
Im pretty sure he was chained up tho? He was running around trowing trees, unless the movies changed it
He had to be chained up so he wouldn't hurt anyone or run off
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561
Still problematic as the original commenter said. That's effectively just sticking someone in a prison or psych ward without giving them the therapy/medication they need in addition.
@@Phoenix_Left if they're in a psych ward they're GOING to receive medication and therapy and in any case grawp isn't an "analogy for a mentally disabled person" he's a full blooded giant who HAS to be chained up so he doesn't hurt anyone or run off umbridge had it out for hagrid simply for being a half giant and close to Dumbledore and tried to arrest him just for that what do you think she/the ministry would do if grawp actually hurt anybody or ran off and was spotted by muggles trust me there's enough evidence of JK being a scumbag without y'all making things up
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 "It had to be done so they wouldn't hurt themselves or anyone else" is also an argument people make to excuse mistreatment of intellectually disabled children. And which, notably, does not make said mistreatment right. He might not have been written as an analogy for disabled people, but the comparisons are still there for people to read and criticize and say "hey, this is kinda messed up". What people put in their fiction does quite often reflect their feelings about reality even when it's not a conscious choice.
i think one thing that causes people to feel protective of harry potter is the depictions in the films. for example, snape is an unambiguously atrocious character both in terms of behaviour and motivation, but alan rickman's performance was so nuanced and effective that people loved him anyway
They also cut story lines like SPEW that are problematic
@@inezketchuphow's the SPEW storyline problematic? In which way is it better in the movies where Hermione ignores the topic of elves slavery completely?
@@meciociobecause everyone treats Hermione like a soapbox sally, like she’s silly and stupid for trying. What’s better? Completely ignoring the fantasy slavery or writing an arc about how slavery is awesome and cool and you’re wrong if you try to stop it?
The movies couldn’t do a ton for the SPEW or house elf storylines without bumping into how fucked up they are, and because Rowling is Rowling they wouldn’t have been able to change it, so ignoring it was the best they could do
@@CreoTan you mean to tell me Jk Rowling thinks slavery is awesome and people who put a stop to it were in the wrong? Like do you hear yourself talking?
I actually liked Snape in the books more - as a character, not a person. What I find laughable is that JKR tried to make him more heroic and likable at the end, which didn't translate very well and then Harry is like: Let's name my son after this horrendous teacher that bullied me and my friends in highschool. 😂
Theres a really good video by Lily Simpson that breaks down the inherant bigotry of the world of harry potter (the history, the wizard politics, and the social system of wizards are just some of the things she talks about). Its 10 hrs long, but there are chapters if you want to jump to specific parts. Its a genuinely good leftist deep dive into how the harry potter world is so obviously flawed in just about every way.
I’ll definitely watch this when I’m done making my videos. I don’t want to accidentally copy her ideas. I’m going to break down each of the 28 female characters in the next HP video.
yep.
@@carolineeasomyou said in the video that aurors determine who's a dark witch or wizard which is incorrect a dark witch or wizard by definition is a person who practices the dark arts also moody was an auror and even after the ministry authorized aurors to use the unforgivable curses on death eaters without warning in the first wizarding war moody still refused to do so and only ever killed one person Evan Rosier a death eater who decided he'd rather die than be arrested and FORCED moody to kill him he's also the reason moodys missing a chunk of his nose
Maybe it's not as serious as her racism, misogyny, and antisemitism, but does anyone else think that JKR really does not like cats? I remember reading the books as a kid and feeling sort of unsettled by the portrayals of cats. In book 2 you have Crookshanks, who is depicted as a menace to Ron's beloved pet. He is ugly and unkempt, and Hermione's affection for him is treated like another one of her silly quirky passions that we're not meant to take seriously and that we expect her to drop once she realizes that she's being silly and hurting Ron, whose feelings are of course more important than hers. Then there's Umbridge's love of cats, which made me especially uncomfortable as a kid. As a cat lover, I don't particularly care how a random person feels about cats, but putting those unceasingly negative portrayals in books for kids just feels irresponsible.
that’s one of the things I always disliked, iirc we never see a positive cat interaction besides sirius and crookshanks walking together, and even then it’s while we distrust crookshanks because of the attack on scabbers and possibly while we still think sirius is a grim before finding out the animagus thing
I agree! And I think the way she depicts animals at large is actually somewhat disturbing. They're all just used for magic, in the triwizard tournament etc with no regard given to the fact they're living, feeling beings. The amount of times it's played for laugh that an animal or a magical creature is hurt is genuinely unsettling to me.
Oh and the, what is his role janitor? Night guard? Guy's cat that spies for him, then gets paralyzed.
@@vamp_bat_chomp I had forgotten about them entirely lol i had to look it up, they’re argus filch and mrs. norris. they are indeed another good example of jkr’s weird cat hatred, I really wanna know what baggage caused all that lmao no shot this was all coincidence
is the misoginy :/ there may be more serious works on it, but i always remember this post that was like "not liking cats is a symptom (i dont speak english) of misoginy, as cats tend to be portrayed as a symbol of femininity"
The bit about the sorting hat and your personality/life path being set in stone at 11 is also kind of true of HP's character writing in general imo. I think you'd be hard pressed to point to moments of character growth for the main cast. These books are set during the period of peoples' lives where they're most likely to change, grow, and develop as people, yet you could take the cast of book one, plop them down in book 7, and they'd more than likely make all the same choices. Sure, they experience a bit more trauma during that time, but about all they really learn is how to be better at magic. I can certainly say that any decisions I made as an 11 year old aren't the ones I would have made as a 17-18 year old, and /definitely/ not the ones I'd make as an adult. Characters don't have to come out the other end of the series as completely different people, but the books are focused on solving mysteries and stopping bad guys, and I think it's a missed opportunity to have three main characters who rarely if ever seem to take anything away from any of those experiences that goes deeper than "wow, magic sure is cool" or "that evil guy sure was evil"
Of course, letting the characters develop would also require questioning the ethics of the wizarding world, and that would mean Harry couldn't become a Wizard Cop at the end of the series and maintain the status quo that let the problem happen in the first place, so.
I mean..there are moments of character growth, even in Book 1 there is how Ron and Hermoine help each other out in the end and grow to be actual friends. Eh...not really, Harry in book 7 for example wouldn't be as naive and blindly trust people like he would in Book 1. No they learn how to be better people too, hell even Draco changes in the future too. I mean no they take away stuff from those experiences that go deeper then that like for example seeing what the world is really like and not to blindly trust authority and that even your idols aren't perfect.
Nah they can question the ethics of the wizarding world and have Harry become a cop at the end I mean aurors are semi independent so he can investigate corruption really, he didn't maintain the status quo that let the problem happen in the first place.
@@Jdudec367Ron and Hermione fight during every book, not one of the three admits the wizarding world is systematicly bigoted (just claim it's because of a few specific people), and continue to act ridiculously childish until there's a literal war going on
@@abithefallenhuman921 I mean no they all know that it's clearly a flawed world (No when do they ever say it's because of a few specific people? They never say that), not really they act mature at times before that really.
@@Jdudec367 Harry joins the government as a literal magic policeman, the same organisation that harmed him almost as much as Voldemort, when the government itself has not changed, apart from the removal of a few people Harry personally didn't like
@@abithefallenhuman921Removing corrupt people and starting to treat magical creatures better IS change though and many people didn't like the people they removed from the ministry of magic. Also as a auror he still has at least some freedom.
Maybe having only European schools come to the Triwizard Tournament was a blessing because otherwise we’d have to read JK’s batshit descriptions of Asian or African schools
She posted those on Pottermore at some point. It was really, really bad
Not to mention, just the fact that continents other than Europe only have one school each? There's going to be severe language barriers for a lot of them. Not to mention in the case of Mahoutokoro specifically, that clearly was not thought through considering the history between those three countries.
Plus, I feel like considering that different cultures have different ways of handling or looking at many things, I feel like it doesn't even make that much sense for wizards worldwide to only learn magic at boarding schools. I figure it'd make more sense for there to be established different wizarding traditions regarding magical instruction within different cultural groups, and for the popularization of wizard boarding school to be a more recent development in some parts of the world. As opposed to boarding schools apparently being the only right way to learn magic, like the Pottermore section on the history of Ilvermorny seemed to imply.
@@Deadpool4presidentThat world school map is... fascinating. Put the entire Middle East in the same school, ALL of Africa in the same school, South America all in the same school... I bet they're all running perfectly fine and nobody hates each other at all :). Especially with both North and South Korea going to the Japanese school.
@@snz530I think Native Americans had a diffrent "spiritual" way of doing magic. I think they didn't even have wands, or they refused the education of wizards or something. It was on her web page when I was a kid. But other than that, everyone was the same.
@@Sienisotanative american witches and wizards used wandless magic and focused more on potions animals and plants
JK Rowling portrays Hagrid, the sweetest man, as stupid, illiterate and classless.
I'd be interested in a video about how JK portrays masculinity.
@@earthaforester3141 lack of ‘being emotional’ WILL be brought up in such a thing. seriously, Ron was brought up in a loving family but he doesn’t feel comfortable showing affection to his girlfriends?
This is a tangent, but I've always felt Hargid was done a tremendous injustice in terms of the wand-snapping life-long magic ban. He's a magical being; so his very existence was literally made illegal. Supposedly, he was expelled because he was responsible for a creature killing someone, but then rather than banning him from working with dangerous animals, he's taken up as an underage labourer to work with animals (not to mention the shame and bullying that undoubtedly ensued by remaining amongst his peer group in this capacity) and banned from doing magic that had nothing to do with any of it. Later, when the entire basis for his expulsion was eventually proven erroneous, this was still not rectified. Let's not start on how it would be in everyone's best interest to teach him how to control his magic and "reform him" if that's really what they were worried about when, like any other witch/wizard, he's going to do magic regardless. Plus, frankly dangerous courses like Quickspell are out there for "squibs" and enrollment at/graduating from Hogwarts was never a legal requirement to practice magic before Voldy took over, so the legal repercussions were outside the scope in the first place. Socially, as you point out, even maternal-stand-in McG is forever "I know, but..." towards him and he's eventually demonised by nearly the entire WW for being "half-human" to the point that he becomes reclusive and considers... things that require the help of a mental health practitioner, to which his idol basically responds with "walk it off". No, Hagrid deserved a lot more love than he saw shown.
_
This got long. Sry
It's really rough. :/ I also don't care for how Hagrid was written as a mirror to Vernon, being someone who looks down on muggles.
@rhonwenbaker2448 To be fair, wasn’t that the point? The Ministry was always meant to be bad. But we never see much being actively changed, which is an issue.
Reading it as an adult I was absolutely bowled over by the fatphobia and fat-is-something-to-be-mocked
YES, this is the comment I was looking for! Hardly any 'good' characters are fat, or even not-skinny, but most of the evil ones are.
@@TeresaKalinka Actually most of the fat characters are good. Molly, Neville, Sprout, Slughorn, Hagrid, they just aren't called "fat", also half of the Weasly kids are described as stout. Most death eaters are described as think or even skeletal. JKR does use physical apperence in both ways for evil and good people where if you're a good person you're described as round and soft if you're good, but fat if you're evil or think if you're good, but skeletal if you're evil. That's very typical 90s writing. Doesn't make it good.
Height too
@@TemariNaraannaschatz It's subtler than that, Theresa's comment was definitely an over simplification. Fat was often associated with dumpy-ness, being blundering, or greedy. Neville, Sprout, Umbridge, Dudley, Vernon, Slughorn, Molly, Hagrid etc.
She seemed to use weight as an indicator of some character flaw, even when they were good characters. And for some characters, like Dudley, she almost couldn't mention them without describing their weight. It was actually tedious at times.
@@JoRiver11you are grasping at straws dude just because Rowling is a Terf
The only major Irish character, Seamus, has one defining trait: He blows things up.
JK was fully alive during the Northern Ireland conflict which was ONGOING during the initial publication of the first book since it ended in 1998 and the first book was published in 1997.
but Seamus never blew anything in the books.
@@meciocio It's kind of funny that Rowling has developed such a strong reputation for writing her characters as stereotypes that everyone believes the "Seamus blows stuff up" gag originated in the books rather than being a film-exclusive thing
@@christianwise637 you have no idea how many times I had to say the "that wasn't even in the books" line over the last 2 years or so.
@@meciocio While it's true the detail didn't originate in the books, the films were heavily overseen by JK Rowling. She had to approve the script, which means she read the detail and saw it fit to be included. So no, she's not an innocent bystander in the Seamus case, even if it isn't her original idea
@@RafaelGarcia022 They weren't heavily overseen by Rowling.
Also you can't just make this big case of this problematic stereotyping in the books of Seamus by making his "defining trait" the student always blewing things up when i repeat it's factually not a thing part of the books. That's very disingenuous.
I’m in the same camp of having grown up as a big fan and now revisiting the books both in the light of JKR’s craziness becoming more open and just looking with adult eyes, there are so many red flags.
THIS! I have been saying this so much about all of her retroactive inclusiveness! "I never stated Hermione's race." Ok, but anybody non-white was Thoroughly described as such every time they showed up. Or they displayed some stereotype. 7:33 7:37
Honestly the fact that she doesn't feel the need to state anyone's race when they're meant to be assumed white is not the win for diversity JK thinks it is lol. Just another example of "white as default, poc as other"
@@Flameclaw123 Exactly! Like the joke they made in the Starkid musical, when Cho Chang comes out and Harry automatically starts talking to the Asian girl and they all yell at him because Cho is the blonde girl behind her. Yeah, the books make it too obvious that people are default white.
Not defending JKR but books are a written media, not visual. If she doesn't describe that a character is black or Asian, then the reader won't know. She kinda had to say when Dean or Parvati isn't white. But if she doesn't say it, then isn't it safe to assume their race isn't important enough to the character to mention?
That's not exactly default white BUT it shows that it would get mentioned if they weren't white. And that's logical for a written media
@@marissastambol3609 true. But some covers predict Harry as being darker skinned, but that probably was because of the backlash. I think Cho Chang is interesting since we only see her a few times within the book, and we don't see her again. Also there are not a lot POC people with bigger roles other than being side characters, the movies only added them for inclusion.
@@l.n.3372why is race only important enough to mention for POC, though?
also i could’ve guessed someone named parvati patil wasn’t white.
also she does describe white characters as obviously white fairly often (ie having pale/white skin or red/blond hair or blue/green/grey eyes).
Is there anything sadder than a woman that still hates pink past 20 years of age
Like it doesn't have to be your favorite color, just stop being like uGH pInK about the people that do like pink! Like c'mon!
Especially ad the science behind the colour is facinating. I am so glad I left that behind and get to enjoy pink things
What's wrong with that
@@vamp_bat_chompYeah, it’s still not my favorite, and there are some shades I don’t care for (you’ll have this with any color, even your favorite color has that one shade that makes you go ick), but as a former #/notlikeothergirls pink hater, I grew up and made peace with pink. It’s a much nicer color than people give it credit for just because of its (relatively recent, all things considered) feminine connotation, and I look cute in it. I’m not afraid to dress cute and feminine some days and more androgynous-ish other days.
Warm pink? Amazing, beautiful, stunning, gorgeous! 2nd fav color (behind warm greens)
Cool pink..? Worst color. I cannot think of any color I slightly dislike more than cool pink. Even magenta is slightly better.
I’m so entrenched in fandom that I genuinely forgot Harry is canonically white in the series because majority of people nowadays headcanon Harry as half Indian in both fanfiction and fanart.
AS THEY SHOULD-
I always saw him as greek with olive skin
a good amount of marauders fandom hc james as desi years ago, not sure the trends now
As someone from a fandom where the protagonist is also commonly depicted as British Indian with green eyes, glasses and scars, the amount of times i had to explain to confused commenters that this *isn't* Harry Potter is staggering
@@irisoftheeyethe magnus archives ?
Can we talk about Voldemort's mom?? In the narrative we're clearly supposed to feel sorry for her when Tom Riddle Sr "abandons" her, but what she actually did is kidnap and SA him?? Like she used a love potion to SA him. And it's never confronted by the story.
Lilly simpson has a 10 hour video about the series. And it's actually a repeated theme in Harry Potter that men are the only ones capable of "bade rape" and women just do "lonely bad actions".
I feel like I read somewhere that Voldemort became so evil because what she did was without love. For wizards, sex and romance are magical, and corrupting them can have extremely negative consequences, both for all parties involved, and for any children born from it.
Magic is not moral. There are simply fixed laws, and sometimes even the innocent suffer when those laws are broken. By defiling love through the use of this potion to conceive a child, she cursed herself and her child, and possibly Tom Sr too, given what happens to him down the road.
As wicked as what she did is, I do feel sorry for her. She was a desperate woman from an extraordinarily abusive home. All she wanted was happiness and love, and she went about it in all the wrong ways- ways her society openly tolerates when done by women (I don't think a boy giving a girl a love potion would be quite as tolerated). If I'm not mistaken, she even stopped using the potion, hoping the love had become real. It didn't. She lived a wretched life and died a pathetic death of despair, and her son also went on to suffer in ways beyond measure, while inflicting his pain on the world.
Sounds just like our society until pretty recently. You'd get mocked if you reported a woman for SAing you until probably the last decade or so.
@detritusofseattle while a fair point its still abhorrent that wizard society on borrows the worst social values from muggle culture while maintaining the individual power to do much more harm. Like every wizard is a walking nuke with no societal focus on morality.
@@pearcehubbart3767Yeah, I think the reason that love potions seemed to be female only is because she KNEW EXACTLY what that would instantly be clocked as if the genders were reversed. But unfortunately for her… yeah it’s still pretty horrible.
There’s a reason Aladdin and Bruce Almighty and types of films always have ‘no making anyone fall in love’ as a rule
Caroline ranting into a camera is my favorite genre of UA-cam content.
Two things
1) remember when people were mad about black Hermione? imagine if Hermione was black and then JK spent the whole 4th book making fun of her for wanting to free the slaves
2) Why the fuck did Harry become a cop when Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher was literally right there on the table! The whole series was spent talking about how the position had been cursed, and in book 5 Harry was a really good teacher to his peers like??? It still wouldn’t have been very satisfying because there wasn’t any systemic change but at least it would have made sense!!!!
Gah
@berkleypearl2363 So true, even when I read the ending as a kid, I remember being surprised & disappointed that Harry grew up to become an Auror, & not a Hogwarts teacher. Dark Arts Defence would have been so perfect, way more wholesome & satisfying than magical FBI agent 🤨
And after trying to dismantle the house elf system of slavery, Hermione ends up being head of the problematic wizarding system. Can't make it better, might has well be in charge?! What?!
@@MinasMagic Huh? Hermoine becoming the minister means she can make more direct change herself though...like how is that a bad thing?
@@Jdudec367the issue is the whole system is corrupt, change must be brought through full rebuilding of the governing body. You can’t pass a few laws and “fix” entrenched policy built on corruption. If you fix the shit policies via executive order or whatever that sets dangerous precedent for swinging wildly back the other direction at the next head of state, fully based on individual opinions on morality. Bad idea. If you try to fix corruption, you will only make them sneakier. Those guys spent years building up their little connections together, they know how to just skirt a new regulation. You’ll find some yeah, but it’s like a tree rooted deeply under a house, you will never get all of it without first taking down the entire house and digging up the foundations. At that point, it is worth the effort to redesign a system suited to the current needs, as society changes over the decades while outdated policy based on disproven “facts” only grows and grows.
Especially after multiple books that basically pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that any position Harry took at the Ministry would inevitably be politicized in ways that would make him uncomfortable. Umbridge made it clear he wouldn't be allowed to become an Auror, as long as he publicly spoke against the Ministry. Scrimgeour made it clear that they would use any position he held at the Ministry to legitimize their worst behavior at his reputation's expense. These people weren't forced to make those choices by Voldemort, but supposedly Voldemort's death solved all political issues with Harry working at the Ministry.
Sounds boring though, peaking your whole career before your first day on the job.
With the way JK Rowling talks about femininity I'm not surprised there's so few women. She talks about being born as a woman as if it's a curse she wishes she could get rid of.
...this almost makes it sound like JKR is (wait for it...) trans and not aware of it. That projection would probably explain a lot of her behavior...
@@autobotyscorner6404 Oh, JKR's DEFINITELY an egg. I give it ten years before The Big Announcement. (Seriously?! All of the protagonists of JKR's series are male?! Come on!!)
I made a meme, where ir was likw JK rowling revealed that JK Rowling is herself trans.
She talks about that in her piece she wrote in an attempt to justify her bigotry and said flat out if she were born later than she was she probably would've transitioned solely to escape the reality of living life as a woman😅
I think she is not the only one. I felt that way most of my life
after like 6:00 it just sounds like the 12 days of Chirstmas
2 black men🎶
1 indian women
🎵3 animal characters
1 chinese lady🎶
And 93 white human characters!🎶
Leave us black and brown people out of this, we are not interested in your spread of Hate against JK
UK here. Yes some areas of the country are super white, some areas are not. SO, if Hogwarts is the only magical school in the UK it takes area demographics out of the equations because kids are coming from across the UK right?
Houses exist in some schools too, usually posher schools.
Also book 5 is totally just an OFSTED inspection...
In a late 1990s census 95% of the people in UK reported as being white and only 5% being POC
I had a look at the 1991 census data, 95% of people identified as white - so all things considered the race ratios at Hogwarts are fairly accurate tbh.
I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but what's OFSTED?
@@lizard3755 Not a dumb question! It stands for Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills. The government body that comes in and inspects / regulates schools in the UK.
@@lizard3755 There's a nice song about OFSTED and it's erm influence on teaching in the UK.
Fascinating Aïda - OFSTED
ua-cam.com/video/CnfE0lArq6Y/v-deo.html
Remember when Lavender was black in the first movie and in the 6th movie she became white because she became an important character?
God forbid Ron would have a black girlfriend which is also sensitive and hyper feminine. The only somewhat memorable black girl from the movies is Angelina, which is, surprise surprise, an athlete
Yeah, but would you really want Ron's girlfriend who obsesses over him and whom he never really likes to be black? Did we really need to see that. She dies in DH as well, without doing anything notable or cool. I'm with Princess Weekes on that one, we didn't need to see that.
Did you really read the books tho and assume Lavender wasn't white? I'm seriously asking cuz I thought she was a white ditz in the books. I never saw her as black and I don't understand why people did. Just cuz her surname?
@@l.n.3372because in the first few films, she was played by a black girl, and was recast for when she became a plot important character
@abithefallenhuman921
That doesn't address my above comment at all.
Did you read the books and think hmmm Lavender sounds non white? Or did you read her as a white ditz a la Karen from Mean Girls?
She didn't matter to the films. They cast a nobody who never spoke once in movie 1-5. Idk why people act like THAT is good casting they should pat themselves on the back for. Lol
As a trans person, it broke my heart when all that shit came out. Specifically because i felt so attached to harry. I felt like his story of "coming out" as a wizard into this magical, colorful, beautiful secret world of people just like him was much of my experience as a trans man. His initials are the same initials as my deadname. As he did, i had an older mentor who took me out and got me all the "supplies" i needed to feel more comfortable in this new world, introduced me to people, and helped me understand myself through this new world. Broke. My. Heart. When everything came out about JK.
there's so many things that feel like some sort of allegory when you really look into it and its so annoying that JK just completely shuts that down as fast as possible. tonks is queer change my mind. she's like the only female character that actually DOES anything in the books that isn't like hermione, and she isn't a member of staff or a mother (for most of the series). she can shapeshift, she doesn't like going by her birth name. her HAIR is colourful if the rest wasn't enough for you. but then she goes and marries lupin and has kids and dies because the greatest women are martyred mothers and she got tired of writing a cool woman that doesn't die for a man i guess
I'm a transmasc too and I sooooo feel for you 😭😭😭
It's heartbreaking to discover all these things about JKR and her books...
@@reallifezuzuthey wouldnt be the first queer people to get so deep into a protective marriage they end up having kids. i don't know why that would stop any theories, especially in a society as agressively heteronormative as that of HP
@@stevqtalent Yeah but it's HEAVILY implied that Tonks feelings for Lupin are genuine. So much so that her patronus changes into a wolf for him. Guess she could still be Bi though.
JK Rowling try not to be weird and problematic challenge: impossible
Your comment might be moving, but perhaps you could consider a more moving eloquence; In suggesting J-K-Rowlinging should die haha
Wow I wrote moving twice I'll die
omg sasha waybright pfp
@@ooliveoill my (b)icon🤭
I love ur pfp
Jk Rowling is simply not a nuanced enough writer to handle things like wars, racism, slavery, etc. She was good enough at character building ig… but when it came to big issues like slavery, her solution was literally just *replace the mean slave owners with nice slave owners* so, there’s that. JK Rowling fails to recognize systemic issues that she herself set up. She sees being evil as something individuals choose to participate in rather than it often being a systemic issue that can’t be solved by killing one bad guy. While obviously some people can be stereotypically evil, most people do not just wake up one day and decide to do the bad.
As a parent I could not believe that nobody noticed that the entire series is 7 books of a young man's struggle to survive years of abuse, his life being constantly threatened and a load of of powerful adults waiting around for him to be old enough to sort it all out.... But nobody did...
Well, ofcourse it is. Children don't get to be hero's when the adults are competent.
My favorite mind bender about JK was that she's so anti trans. But she used her initials so people would think she was male.
Then took the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. So she can portray as another gender when it suits her.
Look up who Robert Galbraith Heath was. He was a conversion therapy 'psychiatrist'. No doubt the reason why JK Rowling chose to use his name as a pseudonym.
Let's not forget Fleur Delacour, whose entire personality consists of: "Shallow, hot, makes boys go crazy", to the point that even the moment when she proves herself by sticking with whichever Weasley she was dating after he gets mauled by the werewolf is entirely based on looks. That's all traditional femininity is about, right?
And of course the most traditionally feminine of all the girls in HP ends up last in the Triwizard Tournament, she's just like the other girls, not special like J.K.!
Also Fleur only gets her "redemption" and gets portrayed in a favourable light after she swears her loyalty to a man and says she'll marry him. And the very first thing she does after that is snatch the wipe from Mrs Weasley's hand and take over dabbing at Bill's wounds with it. Literally supplanting his mother and becoming a matronly nurse-like figure. We're only allowed to like women if they're not like other girls or if they're mothers, after all.
Can we also talk about how JK said Lupin being a wearwolf was supposed to represent the stigma of HIV/AIDS. The way he got it was when a grown man attacked him as a child. So take that as you will, but also, he is the only good wearwolf in the entire series. The rest are evil. So, there is another terrible attempt at showing real acceptance. The same could be said for the giants. The only really good ones we see are half giant. And Hagrid's brother.
I always view that as death of the author tbh. JKR has it as an AIDS metaphor but she simultaneously treats it as a rape metaphor in canon given that child Remus is "turned" werewolf by adult Grey back.
Yes, because her message of it is not loud and clear enough, we have do analize a story that is clearly not meant hold up to that. The plot holes (the money, Quidditch, that people cannot improve their clothes with magic) are there, so analizing it like you are doing will never really lead to anything substancial. But the messages are clear enough for children to get them.
The house elf slavery thing is crazy, cuz it's not just that they weren't paid. They're beaten , living in rags, they're bodies are used as decorations after death. Like, ????????
Never read the books, but I thought I knew how bad the situation for house elves was. . . they do WHAT with their dead bodies ???!!!
@@franziska9260the Black Family house elves had their heads cut off and Sirius Black's mother used them as wall decor
@@AerCloud 😧
@@faristasairuv5143 And the current Black family house elf was excited at the prospect of his head being mounted on the wall.
@@danielcooper3332 😬
Luna Lovegood is autistic (and so is her father Xenophilius, probably). She's described as being ostracized for being "weird" and "loony" and Ginny is the only person depicted being genuinely, completely nice to her. Even Harry finds her weird and offputting and the only time he drops this is, iirc, when he sees her bedroom mural with the main DA members with "friends" written in a circle around it
I love Luna's character (I am autistic as well) but I'm fairly certain that she was written with a latent dislike of autistic people, who we know JK does not see as being people who have agency, rather as bludgeons she can use against trans people.
Oooh, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm autistic as well, diagnosed at 42, severely bullied in highschool for being "weird". I read the books almost 20 years ago and I can barely remember how Luna was described, but I know she definitely feels autistic to me in the movies (and I find her delightful). Considering how JK Rowling sees us (incapable of knowing who we are and making our own decisions), I don't know if she meant for Luna to be really autistic. But it feels like the "oh, yeah, Dumbledore is gay" or "Hermione could totally be black" situation again. In the end, it's racism, homophobia, misogyny and ableism in everything that woman does and says.
What specifically has JK said about autistic people because this is the first I'm hearing about it
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 She's hopped on the trend as many terfs have of saying that trans people are "actually just autistic people [usually girls in their faux-feminist rhetoric] who are being taken advantage of by gender ideology"
They don't view autistic people, boys or girls, as autonomous human beings capable of our own thoughts and feelings and identities. They don't even care about our well being outside of using us against trans people (and as an autistic nonbinary individual I'm upset on several fronts at that behavior)
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 In her detective series, you know the series where the protagonists threatens a trans woman with rape?
Anyhow, the premise of one book is that a cult of polyamorous leftists has been brainwashing autistic people and forcing them into having sex. Which is a thing autistic people supposedly do not do on their own volition.
@@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 I'm assuming it's the general terf talking point about autistic people being victims of gender whatever (considering that a lot of us are actually non binary) without recognising that neurodivergent folks have agency (or awareness or intelligence). It's another way terfs position their ideology as "protecting vulnerable people" or some shit.
The most upsetting thing (besides the transphobia, antisemitism, sexism, racism, etc) is that she really could have gone down as one of the most legendary people, or authors at the very least, of all time. The impact these books and films have had on the world is insane and almost unheard of with books in the last few decades. She got kids to read again and actually be excited about reading, even if they never read any other books. That is insanely impressive and it truly sucks so much that she can’t let go of her hatred and biases to have let her legendary status remain. Granted, with the points Caroline and others have brought up about the character arches and such, it may have been inevitably tainted later on, but still.
I think about this all the time, like do you know how many queer kids grew up reading your books? Maia Kobabe even describes in eir novel (Genderqueer) how e learned to read because of Harry Potter. Despite never really engaging with the series myself, I am very familiar with the crushing feeling of a childhood idol turning out to be a terrible person.
This actually made me sick for a long time and as the other commenter pointed out, JK threw all her queer and transgender readers under the bus. Some of them were inspired to become writers themselves because of the Harry Potter books. And to basically have JK say, “Thanks for making me disgusting wealthy. I will now spend my free time trying to destroy your very existence.” is completely heartbreaking
@@clairebradbury2890 agreed. Of course the problems with the series go deeper than her shit takes on Twitter, but I genuinely believe that if she hadn't gone full terf we wouldn't have seen this degree of backlash until long after her death. She would've gotten a historical reappraisal in the same vein as Tolkien, and people a hundred years from now would've been like "well you can't hold this long-dead author accountable by 22nd century standards, it was a different time!"
Instead, I'd argue she's this century's Lovecraft.
@@deliah3003 It really is...even as a HP fan and defender JK herself is a pretty bad person and it's saddening to me what she really thinks of us queer fans of the series.
It’s tainted right now, babe
bad people become worse over time. good people do not turn bad overnight. Anyone who thought that she already was not bigoted even before she became an author was totally delusional.
No one said she wasn’t 🤦♀️ Kinda hard to know what someone believes unless they show/tell you.
She did that with her books @@RaeLorin
I don't think JKR was radical the way she is today when she wrote them. When you grew up with HP and watched her old interviews vs her new stuff there is a huge difference in person. But she definitly was bigoted back then, just not nearly as much as she was back then. Like going from your aunt who has slightly outdated views, but means well to becoming someone who gives money to politicians to fund them.
I mean..not exactly, she was different back then and people can change and become bad people.
@@Jdudec367 Sadly you where a cry baby no life your whole life poor guy.😔
i was watching this vid of Bryony Claire the other day and in it she said sth about mysogynistic men don’t want obedient women but they want to like “tame” independent women instead, and it’s kinda scary how it aligns with how jk wrote her women characters (tonks for an example, but there’re like a ton of them). Also how she kinda treats women’s personality and self-expression as a phase, how Jessie Genders pointed it out, before settling them into mothers role anyways. Not that that’s a bad thing ofc, but she doesn’t give them any other options, except for villanous female charactes.
I just realized another problematic detail in the Harry Potter world that no one really talks about: Squibs (offspring of Wizards/Witches with no magic) are treated as second-class citizens by even the "good" wizards! Neville's extended family was so worried that he didn't have magic that one of his family members DROPPED HIM OUT OF THE WINDOW to make him use magic! And this wasn't even the first life-threatening attempt to make him use magic! And Molly Weasley has a Squib relative working a muggle job that the family (which I'm presuming includes muggle-loving Arthur Weasley) is embarrassed about! And this is the attitude of the so-called "good" characters!
The most prominent Squib in the series is Filch, who is 1: unlikable, 2: a glorified janitor. You'd think that they'd give his job to someone who can do magic to make the job easier, but no! They make the minority perform manual labor!
So in the Wizarding World, if, through no fault of your own, you can't do magic, you cannot earn a prominent place in society.
Arabella Figg lived on the same street as Harry, was a "crazy cat lady", and, in her own words, "“Dumbledore’s orders. I was to keep an eye on you but not say anything, you were too young. I’m sorry I gave you such a miserable time, but the Dursleys would never have let you come if they’d thought you enjoyed it." So basically she was one of the people who absolutely knew of the abuse, and gave a small child MORE of it (though not as blatantly as a frying pan to the head) because she was more or less enslaved to Dumbledore as a squib who couldn't get anything else.
Arthur was just as bigoted as the Malfoys, it just don't appear so on first glance because the Weasleys're the "good guys", and his bigotry is cute and quirky instead of "let's kill or enslave them all!"-y A lot of artists (Picasso comes to mind, but I know there were others) would collect things of meaning to other cultures because look at these cute little things the little savages made! Isn't this adorable! Then we see Arthur collecting plugs. We also see him taking Hermione's parents to the Leaky Cauldron in (book 2???) one of the books to grill them on muggle culture, and though he loves them so much, he can't pronounce things that are normal in the muggle world like electricity or telephone, and he just sort of shrugs it off because he can't be bothered instead of trying to get better at it.
Even Muggleborn witches/wizards aren't really celebrated by the "good" guys. They're dropped into wizard society with seemingly minimal onboarding/education, taken to boarding school where they seem to have pretty minimal contact with their parents, they're openly mocked for not knowing the things "everyone" knows, and all seem to immediately assimilate to the dominant culture. The only mention of Muggle sports I remember is when they first move into dorms and Ron doesn't understand Dean Thomas' soccer/football poster. In my high school there were always kids everyone knew was a hardcore fan of this team or that, and you knew when they were in the playoffs or won/lost a game against a rival. As far as I remember, no one talks about tv shows/movies/Muggle music/novels. "Bookworm" Hermione only seems to read non fiction magical theory. They even pick up the wizarding world curse words ("Merlin!").
At best, it's shallow writing. But it honestly reminds me of the "kill the Indian to save the child" idea behind residential schools in Canada and elsewhere. Those were a concerted effort at genocide, just by destroying a culture instead of mass murder.
There doesn't seem to be any space in wizarding culture for people to be both magical and culturally Muggle.
I think Lavender is a more glaring example than Umbridge, honestly. I think the point of Umbridge is the juxtaposition between a traditional, ultrafeminine and "motherly" impression and how cruel she is revealed to be.
Fleur is a character that could have been used so much more for showing femininity in an ultimately positive example, but she really only gets a few lines that shows this specifically. Earlier, it's also of course shown as a negative trait.
As with many other things, it's difficult to take actual numbers to books when it comes to representation - for example the non-white population in England was (as you pointed out) very small in the early 90s. However, the *vibe* of a book and how it's written, while difficult to show concrete examples of, tells one so much more.
And the *vibe* of Harry Potter was certainly "boys are pretty cool, look here is a couple of the POCs let's make it very important to just mention they look like this, let's name this only asian character a name that will sound stereotypical for my young readers, etc etc etc"
I don't know what I wanna get out of writing this. I agree with your video and I'm trying to procrastinate, I guess.
I think you're giving JKR more credit than she deserves for Umbridge. The juxtaposition of her aesthetic and her cruelty could have genuinely challenged stereotypes around what an abuser looks and acts like in ways that would be understandable and useful to young readers, but JKR just went with "pink bad, girly bad."
@@fionamclary7631 I think they give her enough credit for Umbridge and that's something I agree with their comment on. Nah the juxaposition was clearly intentional especially when you look at Umbridge in the films really. It doesn't say "pink bad, girly bad", if that was the case why have Luna be good? Why have Hermoine wear a dress at the ball and be the center of attention? Why have Molly be wrong about Fleur? Etc. The narrative doesn't prove what you think at all really.
I agree that Umbridge's overly feminine nature was meant as a juxtaposition to her cruelty. However, being that basically all the female protagonists are low-maintenance, tomboy, or NLOG types (Hermione, Luna, every female quidditch player, Ginny, Tonks, even Molly Weasley is dowdy and low maintenance), it's probably safe to say JK despises typical femininity.
I'm sure we can find small exceptions throughout the books, but the overwhelming majority of positive female representation is NLOG, and stereotypical girly traits (like crushes and crying and beauty and frills) are mocked or vilified. Even Fleur's beauty is written as a criticism and used against her.
The more I think about it, the more obvious it is to me that JK suffers from internalized misogyny. The stereotypes of "Boys will be boys" and "Women are emotional, silly, or nags" are everywhere; female characters' emotions and intuition are often highly mocked and disrespected (Cho, Trelawny), and their labor exploited (Hermione, Molly).
The only redeemable "female trait" in the books is motherhood, and JK puts it on a really weird pedestal (Narcissa, Molly, Petunia); she even turns Tonks into a mother for like no discernible reason except she was old enough to be one, I guess....
End rant.
@@earthaforester3141 Nah ones like Luna and Molly are more girly really. So no JK clearly doesn't despise typical feminity, I mean hell Fleur ended up proving Molly wrong in the end too.
Wrong stereotypical girly traits like those things aren't mocked or villified. Except in the end it's proven that that is wrong and that Molly was wrong about Fleur so even using Fleur as an example doesn't work.
She really doesn't suffer from that though. She doesn't stereotype them all like that though but that they can be like that, so no it isn't everywhere. They aren't mocked or disrespected (that didn't happen with either of them though wdym? like how did it?), and their labor isn't exploited (when did that happen with them either?).
Eh no all of them are fine really, I mean I guess she just wanted to do that with Tonks really.
@@Jdudec367 I don't see anyone mentioning this, but Umbridge is CLEARLY JKR's take on Margaret Thatcher just by description alone except made hyperfeminine, so not sure how much credit she deserves for the character. Thatcher was even the Secretary of Education! Thatcher was also actually pretty conventionally feminine for a politician, had children and a husband, but she didn't wear pink all the time or doilies or love kitties. JKR basically was like "let me do a riff on Thatcher but make her a spinster cat lady." 🙄
JKR hate hate HATED Margaret Thatcher, and it is no coincidence that HP and much of the events of Voldemort's first attempt at a Wizarding War are set under her tenure. That tells you JKR thought Britain under Thatcher was apparently as bad or worse as the Wizarding War with Grindelwald, which coincides with WWII. Now, I don't like Margaret Thatcher or agree with her politics, nor am I British, but I'm pretty sure that the 1970s-1980s were not as bad in Britain as they were during the Blitz.
I do also think it's an interesting choice for JKR to caricature the U.K.'s first female Prime Minister in such a gendered way.
About the feminine girls being looked down upon thing- and then there's the Percy Jackson series, where Rachel Dare bonks the main villain (freakin Chronos) in the face with a sparkly hairbrush.
Rick Rordian also struggles with writing female characters, but what made his books age better is the fact that Percy actively challenged the flawed systems within his world, especially the part of the gods being absent parents. HP maintain the corrupt status quo while Percy Jackson actually does something about it.
@@MysticOceanDolliesfully agree, aswell as his more recent books seem to have a lot of improvements to the rep and general character writing over all. he always seems open to learn and better his books which is great!
@@dyinginside821 absolutely! That’s why so many people still love Rick and his books.
in addition to what you said about jkr rejecting feminity vs many trans women in the public eye embracing it: I've also seen it argued that trans women LIKE being women, which infuriates terfs who define womanhood solely via sex based oppression.
I'm willing to give a pass on the many boys in the Weasley family because I always believed it to be a nod to the myth that a 7th son of a 7th son among non-magical people would be a wizard or mage. That being said, Molly Weasley telling a light-hearted story to Ginny and Hermione about the time Molly gave Arthur a love potion to initiate their relationship was always gross, Hermione and Ginny giggled.
For some reason I too remember this minor detail because it was told from Harry's POV and it was written off as "oh typical girls talking about girly things".
@@VulpineNinja Because it is apparently more feminine to drug your crush with a mood and mind altering substance than it is to just ask them out yourself.
She never specifically said she gave it to anyone let alone Arthur the text says "she was telling them about a love potion she made while she was at school" it doesn't even say if she made it correctly
@mindovermatterbecomingyour1561 Okay, but the fact that she made it AT ALL is already highly questionable, like even if she didn't make it right she still made it with the intention to use it right ??? She was still trying to drug somebody (likely a child given she was school) up so that they'd fall in love with her right ??? Even if she didn't succeed her intentions were clear and it is still HIGHLY disturbing, and the fact that it is seemingly played off for laughs, as if attempting to magically roofie somebody, especially a child isn't extremely fucked up is also disturbing
Seeing as Ron or his siblings aren't heartless wizard-nazis with an obsession with snakes, she probably didn't use it.
ok, as a person from the UK, lets maybe for a second consider that the reason there aren't a lot of POC characters in Harry Potter is because there aren't many people of colour in the UK (which is blatantly untrue, we have a large immigrant population and almost 20% of our population is non-white), so if the reasoning is the demographic of the location, then why does a school in Scotland have only like 3 Scottish people in it?
There are characters that are Indian, black and Chinese. There are other minorities, there is someone with "AIDS"I, a teacher who is very small, a person who is very large.And more representation. I understand that she did not depict all of those perfectly, but can't you guys turn your attention to other stories that have much less and worse representation. I get that we should improve all of that, but HP has been criticized enough for anything and everything and it is disproportionate to how problematic it is in reality. You guys just love to hate it and it is getting super boring and repetitive and it has become a sport to see something problematic in anything HP related.
And not more than Scottish people: My gooood, because not everything in HP has to be taken literally. It falls apart when you question the logic. But that does not automatically make it problematic. It is just not intended to be super realistic and logical.
The messages are very clear though. Individuality should not be mocked (Luna), prejudice is not good (Lupin), discrimination sucks (Malfoy). So don't overcomplicate it.
We can do all of the diversity and all of the representation in our generation so MOVE THE F*CK ON and leave it be.
(But don't let ROwling get away with her anti trans tweets- because that is actually problematic, not like the straw grasping you are doing here)
@@lkm2287 ok bestie, whatever you say
ive always known that J.K. is a horrible human being but loved her books. i think we all gravitated towards them because of the magic. i never realized how misogynistic and racist the books are, it completely slipped past me. wow. eyes opened. thanks Caroline! (not sarcastic).
honestly most of the fans were kids when they got into it so I don't blame them for taking a popular fantasy book/movie at face value. I never got into the series and hearing from it as an adult I could pick up on the bigotry but, I don't know if I would have as a kid. Its definitely a hard subject because I know so many people that like it because it meant a lot to them in their childhood, but it doesn't take away from the damage the author made and the bigotry in the books.
As a trans person I try to avoid the subject as much as possible haha but its nice when others criticise it openly, even ex fans, it makes you feel like they have your back yk
@@antbandd Im maybe under the trans umbrella, idk honestly but in any case I completely agree with you as someone who was a HUGE hp fan as a kid. the fictional world itself still means a lot to me even now and Im just lucky I was young enough to be able to take the books at face value, but Im selling my copies second hand (less money to JK if someone buys them from me instead, too) because I just cant get into them without being slapped in the face by some kind of crazy take every 3 seconds. I might try to read the series again before I sell it just because it may be the last time I can but it is soo hard to not just flip to the parts I do like
I'm reading Harry Potter with my daughter currently. There's a ton of body shaming and lookism that I didn't notice/understand as a kid
After you are done with Harry Potter maybe you can read the Amari series to her. It got the same themes as HP only better done.
And the characters are not as shallow.
@poppie267 thanks for the rec! My daughter goes through books so fast, we're always looking for our next series
If you’re looking for another series with magical elements, I recommend the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, as well as the “sequel” series the Heroes of Olympus and Trials of Apollo. There are five books in each series, so hopefully that will last her a while! :)
I love pulling out the fact that one of the only black people in the plot is named SHACKLEBOLT. You put SHACKLE in this African man’s name. If I have to explain why that is so horribly racist then I don’t need to talk to you.
As an nb person who was afab, I see trans women finding joy in things that made me feel viscerally uncomfortable as a teen (like makeup, 'girly' clothes, being called she, etc) amazing. I love that they can find joy in every aspect of femininity and womanhood. It feels like giving away something that no longer fits me to someone who will love it better and more deeply than I ever could. I had a not like other girls phase as a teenager, but it turns out I'm just not a girl. Girls and women-- cis, trans, and those who don't want either label-- are wonderful, and I couldn't imagine anything but secondhand joy as they express their gender identities.
I think it’s so adorable to read a book to your friend and commit to it.
thisssss. 🥹
If one of my friends had done this for me I would have had to come out much sooner than I did, because that girl friend would have instantly become girlfriend. 🥹
I'd love doing this for, or getting this from a friend. That being said if it's books they actually want to read. Otherwise it's kind of a guilt trip lol. No judgment, I pulled all sorts of stuff to get friends to read my fav books as a kid, when they were def not interested.
Next time I see someone say "Separate the art from the artist" I'm sending them this and asking if this is the "art" they're referring to. We've known these things for a while, I get HP meant a lot to a bunch of kids 30 years ago, but like, how can you know this and still like the material? It's so gross to me even if she wasn't doing actual harm to actual people currently. Excellent video.
separating art from artist only works when the artist didn't put their bigotry into their art. like you can separate fnaf from scott cawthon's queerphobia because fnaf isn't laced with queerphobia, but you can't separate hp because rowling wrote all of her bigotry into it
"If we're meant to like a female character in the Harry Potter universe, she will be not like other girls."
... or a mom. A Molly Weasley who has so much love to give that she practically adopts Harry. A Narcissa Malfoy whose only redeeming quality is her love for her child (same goes for Aunt Petunia). A Lily Potter who sacrifices herself for her child and whose love protects it even after her death. A Minerva McGonagall as a stern, but fair and protective motherly figure. A Poppy Pomfrey who nurses sick and injured students back to health.
On the other hand, the only female character who openly declares that she doesn't like children is Dolores Umbridge. Rita Skeeter creeps on teenagers. Bellatrix Lestrange is a lunatic. Sybil Trelawney is treated like a child by her colleagues and never taken seriously by either female or male lead characters.
Need I say more?
yeah, she did a video about female characters in HP in particular where she address it. Usually when they are young, they are not like other girls, then they marry and have children and are in the traditional role of a mother.
I disagree that Minerva is a mother figure but I agree that JKR is biased to "mother, good" stereotype in this series
I also don't love her 'not like other girls vibe'. But I express that as my personal taste of her depiction and do not put it on the 'JK Rowling is super problematic on this one issue, so that means she is problematic on all issues' list of things , because that is really immature.
Realizing that J.K. Rowling is part of the “not like other girls” was not on my 2024 bingo card but damn does it make so much sense
Exactly
7:56 making a school that caters to the wizards of ALL of Britain and having that few be POC is ridiculous, England has a massive ammount of asian and eastern European immigrants, lots of black people with generations of family living in Britain, even in the 1990s the only way you could not make that someones experience is to be rich enough to not have to be in places with lots of different people.
Edit: id like to add, even though a 1991 census only declared england to be 7% POC and the rest white, it is considered unreliable and did not consider much margin of error, and white eastern european immigrants were not taken into account, who in my opinion are also not well represented in english media (but thats a different conversation) even then, the first book was published in 1997, there easily could have been more variety of characters of colour by the point she was writing the other books. However, she, during her life, was middle class, belonged to a country club, studied classics, etc, and she also grew up in the South west, which isnt as diverse. i would not be surprised if she didn't have much exposure to diverse backgrounds, which could explain the lack and her lack of tack surrounding descriptions of people of colour
I can confirm many eastern Europeans have moved to the UK as a whole, I even know plenty of them personally as a lot of Polish people also moved there or worked there at some point, hell even my own family has gone there to work lol
@arsena5209 Haha yeah I am a Polish and Persian (strange mix I know) person living in England - the UK is a tiny place with lots of people, absolute definition of a melting pot, as are most of the schools, any works of fiction should really reflect that
Nothing is more satisfying to me than ex-fans who have thought more about Harry potter than jkrowling ripping her a new one. It's just something special to see people you know understand the material inside and out point to eeeevery glaring or minor issue and go "the fuck is this bullshit?"
A 1990s UK census reported that 95% of population was white and only 5% identified as Poc. So i don't really see how the characters diversity distribution is problematic based on this fact?
@@meciocio
That's a good point. But I guess what we have to think about is:
Are 7 canon students of color (3 Asian and 4 black) out of maybe 1000 total students a good representation of population dynamics of Britain in 90s?
Perhaps 7 out of the 50 ish known named students is way better tho cuz that's a better %
I swear J.K Rowling is digging her own grave at this point 😂
At this point? She’s been digging her own grave
Hell she’s practically done now
The mold in her house is helping her 😂
Well, as bad as you ❄️ shoot, she has no worries 😂😂😂!
@@TruckerTales-ub3ihThis really is fascinating to watch if you don’t care about this kind of thing. She’s really passionate about this lol
@@TruckerTales-ub3ih ...what
5:06 the irony of the statement for me is that I never ready Harry Potter because I only wanted to read “girl stories”. American girl carried me through till Twilight and Hunger Games came out 🥲
Sally Lockhart mysteries and the Golden compass books are really cool & they both have cool female main characters, I loved them when I was a kid (disclaimer: haven't read them since I was a kid which was a while ago so idk if they hold up)
I am so on board with a Caroline movie reviews
Same!!!
same here! it's fun listening to her talking in detail about all manner of things and her views, I'm all for more of videos like this
I just want to say that my dad read the harry potter books to me when I was a child and they first came out and when we came to the 6th book there is an entire chapter about some weird prime minister or something and my dad closed the book then and there and refused to continue reading because he new from that moment that jk had some problematic views. I was completely ok with this since I had lost interest in the books when Sirius died. I just think it's hilarious how my dad looked right through her. He also knew right from the beginning that Snape would get redeemed at some point. Even though we never got to that point in the story.
i'm really curious if you/he can remember what part put him off? in the 6th book there's the npc muggle pm and rufus, but they never struck me as problematic
@@uncreativename6210I'd like to know too tbh
@@uncreativename6210,
Rufus wrongfully imprisons people for the PR of "caught Death Eaters"... This Rufus man was doing everything he could to strong arm Harry into agreeing with his policies, for "unity".
Yeah no offense but the chapter the other minister isn't very problematic tbh
Even after Umbridge was dragged out into the Forrest and presumably sexually assaulted, we're meant to believe she got her just desserts. Gross.
Woah, that was the implication?
@@HannahKichline-t8n yep, especially if you know anything about Greek mythology
Oh. My. God.
I always thought the implication was they beat her up???
I thought she got lynched 😅
00:50 okay but that is such a thoughtful gift!! 😂
Came to say this. 😂❤
Such a child's version of thoughtful, but the heart is there ❤❤❤
All in good direction.. her friend made her practice vlog speeches even at such early age.
Thats some forethought.
As if it was all prophecy
IDK I think Heather wanted a little something more, hanging out while you read a book to her.
I was so excited to read these books to my son.
Then I had him and started thinking about the books, the characters, storylines.
Then she started tweeting. And I said I’d never read it to him. If he makes the choice when he’s older we have SO MUCH to talk about. Smdh I gave this woman so much damn money 😢
The bathroom argument is so stupid.
If someone wants to attack you in a public restroom, a little figure that crudely represents a man or a woman isn't going to magically stop them from opening that door.
The door opens for anyone. You just push on it.
EXACTLY! i dont understand how dense some ppl are
“Laws against stealing are so stupid. If someone wants to steal something, they’re going to do it. A law that says ‘no stealing’ isn’t going to magically stop them from stealing.”
@@jncon8013there are laws against rape.
a law against stealing isn’t pointless. a law against wearing the color purple to prevent stealing because “no one can steal if they’re not wearing purple” would be stupid as hell.
0:31 that’s actually kinda sweet
That is sweet, I agree :]
Totally feel free to make a part two if you want to! This was fascinating!!
Seeing all this displayed in such a thorough manner is really eye opening. The lack of diversity gender and race wise is appalling and I completely missed that until it was so blatantly explained.
The whole trans bathroom issue is so fricking ridiculous to me. Let's look at statistics in UK/US, as to who is a convicted sex offender or a murderer. Oh, it's mostly cis white straight males. By far the majority. I'm white, from a white English family, and we just gloss over these things on society.
As a cis woman, I am not afraid of a man dressing as a female, coming into the toilets. How often does this happen?
I'm afraid of a man, appearing as a male coming into the toilets. A white cis straight male is most likely to S/A or unalive me.
And as I was S/A as a child by someone fitting this description, I feel confident mentioning this. However, he got off in court, interesting that 8 out of 12 jurors were male and white.
trans women aren't men in dresses, they're women in dresses but for the rest of your point i totally agree, it's absolutely ridiculous
@@magicalcatbean I don't think they were trying to say that, I think they said that bc that's what the bigots say
@@magicalcatbean I think she meant she's not afraid of cis men wearing dresses to get into womens bathrooms because that's not a thing cis men do in the first place. If a cis man is going to go into womens bathrooms to assault women, he's not going to bother "dressing up for the part" at all. That's not a thing that happens, it's a scaremongering rumor from the far right.
@@magicalcatbean I read purplepixie's comment as referring to the non-existent "boogeyman" of a straight cis male who crossdresses just to get entry into women's restrooms.
the existence of trans men also throws their argument into the toilet. they want me, a man, to use the women's toilet bc of my chromosomes. like uhhh you REALLY want a grown man with facial hair to use the women's bathroom? really? id be kicked out....at best. the men's bathroom is safer for me to use, since, yknow...im man and look like one.
The one quote that ever resonated with me was when somebody (I think Dumbledore) said “You know, sometimes I think we sort too soon…”
and I think it’s because the rest of the time the books are trying to tell you that once you’re one thing you can’t change at all
That line from Albus is so fucking awful tho. It implied if you have any courage at all, you must ONLY be a Gryff. What about brave Slyth who are daring and ambitious? Or brave Raven who are daring and intelligent?
JKR is so pro Gryff it's absurd. She refuses to acknowledge that people can have more than 1 trait and that bravery exists in many forms in every house too.
@@l.n.3372 Yes, very true! It only resonated with me because my brain twisted it to be “people are so quick to judge other people without really knowing them” haha
@@legendary.was.momentary
it hits harder cuz as a kid, I saw myself/self sorted into Slyth so in book 7 when I read Albus, JKR's author avatar saying
we sort too soon
it screamed out to me that JKR legit thinks only evil people can be Slyth cuz the MOMENT they show ANY bravery ... they're mis sorted Gryff instead -_____-
like what about Narcissa bravely defying Voldy to save her son? Slughorn bravely dueling Voldy? all mis sorted too ??!! lmao
@@l.n.3372 That makes a lot of sense, actually. I never saw it in the context of the book when I read it, though I think I read them for the first time when I was 10
11:30ish- and more than half the books fail the Bechdel test. And in each of the ones that do pass, the line that makes it pass is something so inconsequential, coincidental, passing on a technicality. And technicality is not really the point of the test of course, it’s more a proxy for whether or not the female characters are real characters with genuine interiority. The Bechdel test deliberately places the bar underground, and Rowling still manages to fail. In books!! It’s crazy that she could write entire huge books with ostensibly a female main character, 1 of 3, where at no point does a female character speak to another female character about literally anything under the sun except the male characters. Can you imagine how far and wide one would have to search, if we did a reverse Bechdel test, to find a book or film that fails?? Anyway in conclusion she’s the worst lol
The worst part about the sorting hat is that the in universe discourse bleeds into real life. Sure, most people will be able to say “It’s just fiction. You aren’t actually evil” but I’ve encountered people ashamed for being in Slytherin because it’s the “evil” house or Hufflepuff because it’s the “useless” house. And I’ve had people in other houses thanking the gods that they weren’t placed in Slytherin because it’s the “evil” house. I feel bad for those people because Slytherin shouldn’t be the “evil” house. We forget that their house is for ambitious leaders or that Hufflepuff is for the kind and loyal and trusted. We ALSO forget that each house has its draw backs and flaws. But because Slytherin is the “green evil snake house” that house’s flaws are put on the forefront, positive attributes be damned.
Imo the sorting hat/four houses should have been abolished near the end of the series. How the hell can you make a story about anti-segregation when there’s segregation in your own magic school??
I've never seen a fan upset by that. Most Slyth fans post series sorted themselves cuz they understand JKR is trash and they reclaimed the house for themselves cuz they liked the house of ambition
Great video :) I read the books when I was 14 and recognised the misogyny but that was in every piece of media so I just accepted it for what it was. I especially disliked the house elves entire plot and how it was treated as a joke, it was actually disturbing at times that Hermione was the weird one for wanting a species of intelligent elves to have basic rights, not just that they be paid for labor. I wasn't surprised that J.K turned out this way but surely she has better things she could be doing with her time.
the thing is is that I grew up reading these books and I related to Hermione because people also made fun of me for caring about important issues like that. I was literally an sjw before that was a word and I got made fun of by my classmates.
JK Rowling is absolutely disgusting and she's completely ruined her legacy and I can never enjoy these books and movies again. but it was one of the biggest ...things in my life. I was obsessed. and it's important to note that when an author makes something seem like a joke it doesn't mean that they think it's a joke it means that they're saying that the people around them think it's a joke, which is I believe was accurate.
it's kind of like saying that when an author writes terrible people doing terrible things that they condone and agree with those actions which is ridiculous because of course they're going to have antagonists and villains who do and say terrible things it doesn't mean that they agree with any of those things.
just because other people saw s p e w as a joke, I believe that was the acronym for her organization, doesn't mean that JK thought it was a joke.
in fact if we look at the text of the books the scene when Hermione and Ron finally kissed for the first time at the end is when he finally acknowledges the house elves and says that they should go save them and so she is like oh my God you've actually listened to me and you actually care about the same things I do and you just displayed that you have the same values as me and that becomes their romantic moment because he's displaying that he actually cares...
I was so upset at the time when they changed that in the movie because it was such a big deal to me but it made sense because they had never set up that organization she'd made for house elves in the movies so they just reworked it.
but if you remember that moment was a big deal to her because he was finally acknowledging that she was right about caring about the house elves rights and Harry agrees after Ron points it out.
again, JKR is a terrible human being who is spreading tons of hate and no one should support her monetarily or otherwise but I don't think it makes sense to try and poke holes in Harry Potter that aren't necessarily even there like actually engage with the work of fiction completely or just toss it aside and say it doesn't matter either way because she's already tarnished it.
former cast members of the movie have spoken out against her and she's denounced them. thankfully they did the right thing.
I don't think it makes sense to look back at the books with these JKR as a transphobe glasses and just over analyze every little piece and say that these pieces are obviously signs of red flags of her being a bad person or doing bad things when that doesn't even really line up with what the book itself is saying. I agree there's a lot of stuff in there that's sucks that I didn't notice when I was a child, but i don't necessarily buy into this idea that because other people saw her organization as a joke that JKR wasn't saying that Hermione one of the main characters whose beloved and smart and known for being super intelligent wasn't always in the right for caring about the house elves and when Ron and Harry finally admit that she is right it's a huge deal for her and we're supposed to care and like her right? I just don't understand this perspective...
anyway, doesn't really matter. i just wish jkr had never opened her mouht andruined harry Potter for millions of queer people.
truly ideal content for insomnia at 2:10am. Drop the 127 CDs in a long vid plz and thx 😂
I wonder if Heather still has them 😂.
- The antisemitic depictions of the goblins in Gringotts bank shook me to my core when i first made the connection, it's so easy to see that theyre literally walking racial stereotypes, disgusting.
- what made me uncomfortable even as a child was how "Love potions" were always portrayed in a light hearted way and not as what they really are, date rape drugs.
6:50 On the 12th day of christmas J.K Rowling gave to me:
Lolll
I revisited HP, twilight and hunger games back in 2020, two years after i'd graduated uni. i went through uni referencing HP as my fav books, mostly bc they were the first thing i could think of under pressure in those stupid ice breaker games at the start of each semester. in year 7 in 2008, when my besties class got assigned philosopher's stone as their text in first term (and my class got something else)...... i offered to write EVERYONE's essays for them, bc i LOVED HP that much. but for some reason, in my besties class, no one wanted to read it. hell, i even wrote an essay on epistemic injustice in one of my philosophy subjects in uni in 2016, using the courtroom scene of harry's hearing in order of the phoenix.
but my god, i realised how problematic it was, particularly the plot points with Umbridge, but also the bit of professor moody/barty crouch jr in goblet of fire..... where moody was trapped in his own magical suitcase for an entire year. i thought that was writing GOLD at 10 years old in 2005. at 24/25 back in 2020, not so much. plus the point of how they treated moody's tough view (hyper-vigilance) on life as being "insane" after being an auror for too long.... not a traumatised front-line worker with very discernible untreated mental health issues caused by his job. which, very much in hindsight, is gross. god, he was even more considerably wary of people once he was imprisoned in his own suitcase for a year! anyone would be! but he was still referred to as "crazy", if not MORE so after that, until his death in deathly hallows.
like ok, i know everyone is going to go the "fuck cops!" route on this argument. but still. i think moody shouldn't've been painted as "off his rocker" (probably used in the books- let's be real), but someone with obvious mental health issues that were directly caused by his job. and yes also, it's a kids series. and it was the mid2000s. so no one really (presumably) took an issue with it. but it should be discussed now.
moreover, obvs as kids, the fan base was WAY more concerned with pointless shit in the movies vs the text. for example, the inaccuracies of the colour of hermione's yule ball dress in goblet of fire- pink [movie] vs periwinkle blue [book]. harry's vs lily's eye colour in the flashbacks in DH part 2 (and harry's/daniel's eye colour in general throughout the films) and other dumb shit that barely affected the plot or required deep thought.... but are still apparently hotly debated today, when i get the occasional HP post on my fb feed. like drop it. it's LITERALLY BEEN 20 YEARS and close to 20 years for the later films. the main thing wrong, still to this day, though, is the "said calmly" line delivery in the book being SCREAMED in the goblet of fire movie, for dramatic effect imo. let the other small shit die along with voldemort and our respect for JKR.
In Book 6... Arthur Weasley was a cop... However, the biggest thing about Aurors is... they don't go after the petty criminals. They go after the worst of the worst... the murderers, the torturers, etc. They are the equivalent of a modern day SWAT. Yet, Moody lived through one of the worst _insurgencies/campaigns of terrorism_ the UK based Wizards experienced. The people in the forefront would be the Aurors... and that made them, and their families, primary targets for assassination.
It's one thing to know that a wizard will do their best to kill you if you try to apprehend them... it's another to know that there are wizards hunting you down who have no problem of using charms on your friends/family to force them to kill you in their stead. That's assuming they don't use transfiguration magic to modify their appearance nor the easily accessible polyjuice potion to pretend to be your friend/family member.
Only the lucky, the skilled, or paranoid survived that insurgency, which only ended when the leader disappeared. Even then, usually just one of them wasn't enough. As depicted by the fates of the Original Order of the Phoenix.
Now, it's perfectly normal for dumb-butt kids to secretly mock Moody for his PTSD... they mock people all the time, especially those who are strange and/or different. Now, the adults on the other hand... they should be stepping in to tell the children they are behaving poorly...
The real world fandom seems to dislike anything auror nowadays. I get that people are projecting their hatred of real cops onto fiction, but I feel like auror in canon weren't inherently bad.
I don't think that Harry should have been an auror tho. He should have been DADA teacher
I didn’t read the Harry Potter books until after I graduated college. As I read them, I was shocked by so many of the things that you mentioned here. I don’t think I would have picked them up if I had read the books as a child, but as a young adult with a shiny new degree in sociology, they jumped off the page. The house elves thing especially made me deeply uncomfortable.
It's so ironic how there are all of these actually problematic things in HP, yet the conservatives all freaked out and burned the books because they contain witchcraft (not even real witchcraft, either) 😒
I was weirded out by the house elves thing when I first read the books at 9. She wasn't even trying to hide it
It’s like, “girl, people are dying and you are worried about what clothes other people want to wear”
0:22 That’s actually so wholesome ngl.