With the final Harry Potter film set to release in only a few days, I think it's a fine time that we took this moment to put the whole series under a microscope. I know what you're thinking,
"But Javier, won't this simply expose that pop-lit written by a mediocre author who just got lucky enough to find the perfect synthesis of old fairy tales/myths, modern fantasy, and wish-fulfillment can be entertaining sometimes?"Yes, it will expose that, but it's nothing you shouldn't already know by now anyway. I mean, if you thought Harry Potter was by any means original, you haven't been around for any decent amount of time..
Just look at what happens in the books. Harry Potter turns into this sort of varsity quarterback with an imaginary game that, until setting foot in a school, had never even heard about when he's just 11. Not to mention that he never really developed any real comparable magical skills through out the whole book.
He's just "The One", as if that wasn't annoying enough from the Matrix films, it has been beaten over our heads for a whole seven books already. The one who got away. The one who survived. The one who fucked he who can not be fuckin' mentioned.
How does he survive all this? Well, he just sort of bumbles along through the whole saga, never really changing or growing into a role in which the events of the book just happen to keep throwing him into. It seems that in every book he beats the big bad through no actual skill of his own and a sheer amount of dumb luck.
To add insult and spoilers to injury, he marries the first person to show a romantic interest in him, stays best friends with the first two people who befriended him, names one of his kids "Albus Severus," and does nothing notable for the next 20 years of his life except bringing his children to the train station he was once shown and nodding at the bully he hated when he was 11.
Way to succeed in life there, Charlie Brown.... er... Harry Potter.
But it's not like I can blame Harry. He is, after all, a product of his education. And what kind of school is Hogwarts anyway? You have in the sixth book a potions teacher having the kids have a competition to get a luck potions by seeing who makes the best Living Death potion. A concoction that could kill a person if not made correctly. What the fuck kind of school is this? Or should I ask what kind of terrorist training center is this?!
You don't go into public schools and see kids being told to put a gun together. I think it's a real good idea to look into what the wizardly world is teaching their students, Given that it seems they only go to school for seven years.
But even then, Harry essentially took the last year of his schooling and did a little soul searching adventure to find some fucking treasure hunt / Lord of the rings bullshit. You have to admit, the world of Harry Potter is some fucked up shit.
Hmm yes a dying world filled with inbred racists so desperate to stop their declining numbers and increasing squib birth rate that they follow a madman on a course that would eventually result in their discovery and extermination by the muggle world send their children to a half-empty sham of a school that can no longer attract talented teachers or genuinely prepare their students for the outside world so they can be vaguely mean to a dysfunctional child abuse victim. How happy and optimistic.
But no I guess the real happy part is the other stuff. Like the fact that the gigantic wealth disparity in the wizarding world doesn't even matter since they have nothing worth buying or the fact that all of the pureblood Hogwarts graduates immediately go into government and become idiot manbaby prime ministers, clumsy cops who are less effective than actual children, and misuse of muggle artifact investigators who don't know what the fuck RE: stamps, phones, rubber ducks, etc. The muggleborns just go back to the real world, I guess. Hope they like trying to get into college with a sixth grade education!
I have to admit though, if you were ever a little kid and stories like these didn't give you an overwhelming sense of optimism and happiness, then you were probably dead inside before the ship ever sank.
But back to reality here, the biggest tragedy of the franchise is that they glossed over allt he social class struggle of elves that was painted in the book through Dobby. If you want some heavy shit dropped on you, here we go. Dobby the house elf has been compared to the labor lawyer Dobby Walker, who introduced Rowling's heroine, Jessica Mitford, the Communist Party.
In 2002, she stated that "My most influential writer, without a doubt, is Jessica Mitford. When my great-aunt gave me Hons and Rebels when I was 14, she instantly became my heroine. She ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War, taking with her a camera that she had charged to her father's account. I wished I'd had the nerve to do something like that. I love the way she never outgrew some of her adolescent traits, remaining true to her politics - she was a self-taught socialist - throughout her life, I think I've read everything she wrote. I even called my daughter Jessica Rowling Arantes after her."
As shocking as it may sound, Harry Potter is all about socialism and communist struggles. Just look at the books. The upper class (Malfoys) are all evil inbred racists, the middle class is made up of folks like the Dursleys who are obsessed with keeping up with the Jones while spoiling their son and abusing their nephew.
The lower class family (Weasleys) are the lovable idiots who always have happiness even when they don't have two cents to rub together. Even if the father has a fucking government job. It really makes you wonder why the Weasleys don't just transfigure a bunch of rocks and shit into galleons so that they can stop being so goddamn destitute.
Then you have the 7th book. Which had a lot of World War 2 influences going on all throughout it. At least in the films you have the gestapo types just taking the subtext of the book and blowing them up on the big screen for the world to see.
So as you can see, Harry Potter is literally a seven-book long paean to the aristocracy. When I read the books I kept waiting for her to address how the wizards casually mind-control and abuse non-wizards, but it never really happened. Muggles of the world, Unite! you have nothing to lose but your chains!
The stated reason why the wizards cloister themselves off is that if they revealed themselves all the proles would want them to solve their problems for them. Please help! My child has cholera, he is so thin! All I ask is some clean water. Oy croikey! Sorry, gots to do the quidditch tourney, don't I? *zooms off on a broom leaving a cloud behind them*
So you can say that the wizard world has gone Galt to such a degree that, despite being nearly geographically coterminous with a population whose language and cultural background they share and from which new citizens come out of regularly, they still don't have the foggiest goddamn idea what is going on out in the prole world.
I wonder if the global economic crisis has affected the wizarding world. What's the exchange rate on galleons anyway?
I mean, in all seriousness. In a world where no basic needs are really an issue, where does a class system even exist to such an extent that "poor" wizard families have to taken second hand books into a school which in itself has the infinite power to create those books for free. Expanding on that, why is there house any smaller?
The next twisted part is there inability to meld with the muggle world, which they are so clearly a part of. I mean, they are fucking humans. That's just reality. Yet their attitude towards them is involve fuck all except ignoring them despite the massive problems in their society which they could literally solve at the wave of a piece of wood.
This separation has also made them backwards with I doubt many wizards having even the basic ability in any "basic" skills such as Maths or English and with little enough political reasoning to make anything but a moral argument against pure blood dominance
The only response to this is the formation of the muggle liberation front which will show the "wizards" such force that there only option will be to act in the interest of muggles under our laws and for our future.
"muggle pride world wide
And that's how you basically turn a children's book into some sort of strange political siding campaign. Check back tomorrow for more of my rants..
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