Abby and I finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone last night.
Abby and I finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone last night. I remember now why I liked these books so much. In the first book we’ve got a bad guy who has the face of a snake-wizard on the back of his head and drinks unicorn blood. Brutal.
And the Mirror of Erised is a great cursed magic item.
Not to mention the conceptual introduction of extreme self-punishment by way of Dobby in The Chamber of Secrets.
ReplyDeleteThe whole idea of house elves turns the magical world darker than it already was. Along with magical racism against goblins and muggles.
ReplyDeleteWizards are bigots. The sheer genius of making Tom Riddle a half-blood still amazes me.
ReplyDeleteThe great thing about Voldemort is that while he is cartoonishly evil in his direct interactions with the protagonists you can clearly see how he came to be that way.
ReplyDeleteHe's not quite Magneto but he's close.
Note to self: do not pick up mirrors in Casey's campaigns.
ReplyDeleteHouse elves, I agree, are fairly dark. Goblins are like countries that lose wars and have their military or arms production rights stripped. They gave them power over treasure. Their greediness. But it's sort of anti-Semitic if not totally Anti-Semitic in this respect. With muggles, the prejudice is against majority rule and a certain resentment for their ability to intellectualize through things without magic and still survive. All wizards were once muggles, disdain. Only Arthur Weasley sees this, apparently.
ReplyDeleteI think it might be a self-preservation thing as well, in slight opposition to bigotry. To maintain a wizarding community and world at large, away from the frightened hostility of the muggle world, the wild and chaotic creatures/races must monitored if not completely subjugated.
That isn't justifiable, but it is a serious power motivation for what truly is a fragile society that has and will always function upon archaic rituals. Rituals without technology.
The old Fey Round-Up is a complicit ritual based in the apprehension of power and a little bit of fear.
And only Harry Potter seems to realize that he's The Other. The real mutant freak in all of this.
Exactly. There's some kind of commentary on closed communities all over HP but Rowling hardly ever goes there and definitely never tells us what she thinks of it all. But the wizarding world is built on denial, disdain and abusive power relations, it throws up little Hitlers every generation without fail (who are merely wizards who try to dominate the wrong sorts of people) and we can recognise ourselves in it. It's mostly just middle class Britain (and America).
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