Sorry Hagrid. You got JKR’d
I’m gonna go on a bit of a meta rant. I do my best to write every character fairly. Especially ones I don’t like, since I’m more likely to make them unlikeable, but the struggle is fucking real when I think the character design itself is offensive.
I’ve been writing a first year fic and, of course, Hagrid is there and just... Why JKR. I can sort of understand how it happened. His character is an archetype in Middle Grade fantasy: a large, physical imposing person who introduces the protagonist to the magic dujour, but is a fluffy bunny on the inside.
We’ll start with his accent. It’s very thick. It’s very noticeable and, to my dismay, written out how it sounds. This is almost always a recipe for being accidentally offensive, but JKR takes it one step further by using a thick country/rural accent and perpetuating the harmful stereotype that people with that accent have low intelligence, poor hygiene and poor social skills. It’s not as bad as writing him with a thick AAVE dialect, so don’t think I’m completely up in arms about it, but still, we can do better.
Then he’s biracial. Now, this is JKR, we cannot pretend that this is an accidental conflation with how hamfistedly she paints the allegories. Then presenting his mother as particularly bestial in nature? So we have all of the accent problems now also projected onto a biracial person. Then we go one step further into bad writing town by having Madame Maxine be the perfect picture of society, so there’s not even the vellum-thin defense of it just being a result of the non-human blood.
Madame Maxine could have been great. She was a very large woman with influence, a strong personality and confidence to back it up, but then JKR just turns her into nothing more than a love interest for Hagrid. Hagrid is not even considered an adult by wizarding standards because he never completed school. And ignoring wizarding standards, he relies on Dumbledore for everything and has almost from the moment he was expelled. They’re not equals in any area except size and Hagrids awkward attempts at flirting are done for laughs from the audience and the teenage characters. For shame.
It’s reductive to call him stupid because he clearly possesses a great deal of knowledge about magical creatures and the caretaking thereof, but he lacks the, pardon the D&Dism, wisdom to use that knowledge effectively. Someone with average wisdom would not trust a class of 13 year olds to all show respect to hippogryffs. Someone with average wisdom would not respond to the failure of that first lesson by reverting to flobberworms. That’s a childish response and Hagrid is painted as at a loss for what to do. He knows how to hatch and raise a dragon, but not how to fireproof his living space. He lacks the forethought to consider that Norbert(a) will outgrow his hut in short order.
He’s portrayed like Forrest in Forrest Gump, but the audience is expected to mock his attempts at romance with Jenny rather than feel sorry for him or conflicted at best. FG clearly shows that it’s not a relationship of equals and it’s uncomfortable all around, whereas Harry Potter tries to play it off like Hagrid is being a Nice Guy or something. I don’t know. It’s just all bad.
It’s hardly the worst instances of representation in HP, but I’m writing him and he’s just awful. He’s a caricature, not a character and the responsible adults working in and around Hogwarts should have removed him from the grounds because he is a danger to the students.
It’s tricky because my OC professor would not stand for it under any circumstances and would not so easily bend to Dumbledore’s will. I have some things outlined for how to handle it, but it’s just annoying that I have to.
But then again, if I wanted fantastic, diverse canon characters I’d be reading Rick Riordan.
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