I am truly struggling with the Lucifer series. I am literally getting by with watching a single episode a night but it's become such a chore. I just have so many problems with it so this is going to be a complete ranty negative post. Open at your own risk.
Lucifer is becoming less off a fun asshole and more of just an asshole asshole. It feels like he has no deep developement, like he's the same selfish dick he was in the first season except he shouldn't be because he's had no ends of lessons that should have helped him grow. But nope, he cares for Chloe but will still ignore and insult Maze or belittle Dan and put his own problems above Amenadiel and Linda and pretty much everyone else and so on and so on.
The romance between him and Chloe is so damn boring. I hate the will-they-won't-they at the best of times and this show seems to be doubling down on the trope twice as hard in all the worst ways. Every time Chloe and Lucifer have a new problem, I swear I want to ram my head against a wall. It's literally become a case of even when they're together and happy, I'm so sick of them.
Maze has the same twist every damn season. Like, seriously. How many more times is she going to betray Lucifer and side with that seasons antagonist? Her reasons may vary slightly but at the end, it's like clockwork and while I still love her and have great sympathy for her character, it's also still stupidly repetative.
The Dan hate is getting old too. I've never liked the trope of one character constantly getting kicked down on and despite Lucifer's nickname, Dan really isn't that bad a person. And if he is, it's only because of sympathetic circumstances pushing him to be. It was one thing when it was just Lucifer making fun of him but ever since Season 3 with Pierce, it feels like Chloe and everyone else is always smirking behind his back as well and it's just makes me dislike all of them.
On another Dan note, his treatment to finding out the truth is gross compared to the others. When Linda and Chloe found out, Lucifer was careful with them. He gave them space but was otherwise gentle because he understood how intense this information could be for a human. For Dan, he decides to try and make it worse by pranking him with a snake? Even Chloe, to me, is digustingly cold about it. She knows how scary it can be but she doesn't even try to reach out to him during this time. She's more concerned with Lucifer messing up her case than calling him out for pushing Dan during a sensative time? I dunno, it seems a bit sexist to me that the women got coddled and allowed to be emotional about it but the guy gets made fun of.
The only thing I'm looking forward to at this point is Eve returning and marrying Maze (I saw spoilers). But even that isn't going to be done all that well because with only one season to do it, we're not going to get any real development and build between them.
Typical argument goes as follows: it is bad and irresponsible for an author to create enslaved people who love their enslavement and love their masters because of all the real world parallels to real slavery. Similar arguments were actually made about American slavery and every other slavery before or since. In our world such rhetoric is always propaganda. But in Harry Potter it’s portrayed as genuine.
For a children’s book especially, it’s not a good look. As a children’s book, Harry Potter contains too many dark and difficult topics and without satisfying lessons or conclusions it’s tempting to say – don’t introduce slavery into your story. Don’t create willing slaves, for starters.
But the problem is in the lessons or conclusions part, not the introducing part. And even willing slaves can be explored in interesting ways and really done justice when in hands of a competent writer with good politics.
How so? Well, don’t create such creatures just because. Make them into a coherent metaphor for something. There are several possible options, starting from less fitting:
1. House elves are dogs. Or children.
You can frame dogs as voluntary slaves if you don’t know much about dogs. Unlike house elves, they are perfectly independent creatures that do not have an inborn desire to obey humans. They need to be trained and even then they can be very stubborn and do not appreciate or even tolerate abuse like house elves do. Dogs are more like children. You have the position of authority over them but that makes you responsible and it is your job to make them happy and occupied.
But if you are really committed, you can frame childhood as slavery too. Being a child or a pet is a vulnerable position to be in. Your labor is sometimes exploited and you don’t control your life much. You know how it is.
So, there are creatures who love their sometimes actually slavery-like situations because they love their "caretakers" and you cannot solve this problem by just separating the two groups. It would be doing everyone a disservice.
But in Harry Potter, Hermione decides to free elves purely on philosophical ground and in her zeal doesn’t consider the reality of their special psychology. Who would even make such a silly mistake?
2. House elves are house wives. And Hermione is a lesbian separatist.
This angle really comes into focus when we meet Winky in the fourth book. She is a female elf and a loyal supporter of her master Barty Crouch Snr. You can very easily read her as this conservative fearful simple-minded wife that just wants to keep peace and make her husband happy above all else*. The only thing that is above the “husband” is her “son", her perfect boy who can do no wrong – Barty Crouch Jnr, a death eater and the main villain for most of the book.
In the beginning of the book, Winky gets "divorced" against her will, by her “husband”, for a public transgression that made him look bad. It’s this situation that shocks Hermione to the core and makes her believe that all elves should be free. But then Winky ends up in the Hogwarts kitchens (where elves live among themselves like in a convent) and we see that she’s devastated, blames herself, becomes an addict and never fully recovers. Hermione never gets strong evidence in the opposite direction and eventually abandons her activism.
This does sound like a cautionary tale a conservative would write about marriage. How feminism is women’s main enemy and how we all are deeply unhappy without the authority of a husband. Again, actual arguments that people make about modern society TODAY.
Obviously, that’s not how the real world works. But even here separatism is a bad solution. Yes, there is a rare house elf that can handle freedom**. There are women (not quite so rare) who don’t want to engage in relations with men. But it would really be doing everyone a disservice to force apartheid between men and women. Most wives love their husbands. Even when they are abusive. Most women can stop loving a particular man, but not men in general. There’s no escape from the biological prison of heterosexuality.
Anyway, those are all bad metaphors that require a lot of stretching. House elves don't look like creatures that evolved to cooperate with humans like domesticated animals or humans themselves. They are too subservient. Such a thing wouldn't happen naturally. They seem to be created (or altered) artificially to accept humans unconditionally***.
3. House elves as perfectly aligned Artificial Intelligence.
House elves have stronger magic than wizards, they think differently from them but still are perfectly loyal and obedient to those they consider their masters.
This is the best metaphor, in my opinion. After all, science is similar to magic. They are both really powerful. And both can be used for better or worse. You don’t have to write sci-fi to talk about any futuristic concept. Those are just aesthetics, really****. And that’s a pretty cool question to ask – if people could create a house elf… would they? Not a far fetched idea at all.
So, when written well a house elf can be a perfectly good narrative device. Introduce them into your story as a metaphor for domestic servitude or AI, an enslaved god in a box. You can even mix those metaphors. Make your house elf a stand-in for a waifu simulator. Make them Joi from Blade Runner 2049. Make it real dark.
Tone it down for a YA audience, of course, but still, why not? There are real life implications here. You can even start with the SPEW plot as well. Show that brute force lesbian separatism or rewriting the code of a perfectly happy and aligned AI is stupid and, in the latter case especially, really dangerous. Don’t separate families on the basis of some abstract philosophical grievance you made up. Don’t kidnap people’s pets. Sure!
What’s next, though? What do you do with a subservient creature you cannot just free?
In the real world we have laws surrounding all of these issues, protecting all spouses, children and pets from abuse. And when sentient waifus become a thing we will have to intervene as well.
How come this point never crosses Hermione’s mind? How come she gives up on SPEW and never finds a third alternative?
A better written Hermione would say: “Okay, Hagrid, I concede that house elves should not be taken from their homes. Fine. But are we really also fine with families like Malfoy’s treating their elves like dirt? Elves do become distressed when it happens, we can all clearly see that. Harry was right to free Dobby, we all agree on that. But do we agree that it was Harry’s responsibility to do that? No authority had taken Dobby away from his masters even though Dobby actively wanted to be taken. No authority had permanently taken the right to own house elves from Malfoys. They can just buy a new one and abuse them as well! I know you don’t have child protective services either, so we should probably start with that but can we at least agree that it's a goal for the future? There’s a pile of clothes for elves who want freedom in the kitchens now. That’s a good thing, right?”
But such a conversation can never happen in Harry Potter, about any issue*****. Because that would imply a systemic change. It would imply that the Ministry of Magic, portrayed as useless and incompetent most of the time, has to do something. And we can’t have that.
Instead we have a toothless morality that we should just all be better as individuals. We should help victims when some injustice really stares us in the face. And we should treat our own elves better. Be nice to your wife. Be kind to your children. Don’t hit your dog. Don’t inflict pain on your waifu simulator. What happens behind the closed doors of your neighbors is really none of your business. Family is the cornerstone of society and the government should not meddle in its affairs.
This is what makes Harry Potter's house elves irredeemable. Not their existence but all the lessons we expected to not learn from them. A competent writer with good politics wouldn’t stop the conversation on “well, they enjoy slavery so we must not intervene”. In a bad situation there’s always a less ridiculous alternative to doing nothing.
_____________________
* There are no sexual relations between wizards and elves anywhere in the books as far as I know. I’m only talking about the social dynamic of traditional marriage, nothing more. (Although in real world sexual abuse does happen in all of the situations discussed here)
** The only one we see is Dobby but even he was not free from his affection for wizards. He just switched from serving his family to serving the main character, not de jure but de facto. He risks his life and suffers abuse for Harry and in the end he dies saving Harry’s life.
*** As far as I know it was never confirmed how elves came to be in Harry Potter. Which is bizarre considering this author's love for writing extra worldbuilding. That suggests to me that she was uncomfortable with the topic herself and didn’t really want to make it into a coherent metaphor. Else she could have given them any origin story she deemed fit.
****I do mean that fully. A spell that reads minds and computer chips in brains can and should serve the same narrative purpose. You can go full Black Mirror in your fantasy novel. That one episode where people’s eyes film everything they see – literally a pensieve.
*****They ponder once that they sort children into houses a bit early and even though it would be a comparatively easy fix they still do nothing. They never do anything!
There are really so many ways, how this could've been handled better.
Another one, to fit the fantasy-theme better: Turn the obedience into a curse that forces the house elves to act the way they do (similar to the Imperius curse). That curse could be applied at birth or inherited. Send the protagonists on a mission to break it. There would still be fallout, from this, of course. (The elves would need support post curse-breaking, in a similar way to your examples.)
But, yeah. That, too, would require Rowling to give a fuck. And she clearly doesn't.
My guess is that she appropriated house spirits from European folklore (just like she loves to appropriate mythologies from cultures she isn't a part of) and never bothered to really integrate them into her world. Those creatures usually love to help with household chores without real payment - but they require the respect of their family and have the ability to turn on their humans or fuck off into the sunset, should these humans insult, upset or hurt them. (Rowling probably took the "love to help with household chores"-stuff and completely ignored the rest. And when people started to compare the results to slavery, she got upset and doubled down.)
I genuinely don't understand why ppl insist that the female characters in Harry Potter are as well written as the male ones
Luna literally saw her mother die in front of her at a young age. Ginny was basically groomed, possessed, and almost murdered by an older boy who would become the most dangerous wizard to ever exist. Hermione was amongst a persecuted class of people who's whole existence was opposed and threatened by 2 wars, one of which she fought in.
All of these are addressed in no more than 1-2 lines. And somehow all these events get lesser attention than Ron's sibling insecurities (this is not to downplay anything ron went through, I'm just making a point about the bias in the writing). "The books are from Harry's perspective" doesn't work because Rowling has been able to add character backstory and development whenever she wanted to in creative ways. She just didn't care to do that with these characters
#the thing that gets me is the accidental potential for really interesting female characters that she does NOTHING with#well fine i'm going to love nymphadora tonks even more aggressively for it#and ginny and fleur and andromeda and minerva and luna and lavender and anyone else who i'm like “we need to hear from you more”#imagine trying to pretend you're about protecting women but actually you don't even like women if your books are anything to go by <<<< prev
LEGIT though!!!
We're literally handed Tonks- this character who could be the MOST powerful spy the Order has with the fact she's a SHAPESHIFTER working the most ELITE job in the wizarding world and all we get is "she's sad because man :("
Ginny, who was possessed at ELEVEN, basically spends books 5 and 6 just going "boys :)"
Hermione, who is the brightest witch in her class, super crafty and clever, and it just becomes "problems with Ron :("
And Fleur, who was likely one of the BEST students at her school(because the theory is that only select students got to attend Hogwarts for the tournament), works at Gringotts, is fiercely loyal, basically gets boiled down to "I'm French and a snob, attend my wedding :)" even though we don't see that 'snobby' attitude in GoF.
And don't get me started on Lavender. She DOES NOT DESERVE THE HATE SHE GETS. NEITHER DOES CHO. THEY WERE TEEN GIRLS.
Hermione's canonically been at Grimmauld Place since the beginning of the summer holidays in OotP...
What about her pArEnTS???
She stays at the Burrow during GoF, doesn't go home for Christmas because of the Yule Ball, nor Easter, and then she goes to Grimmauld during the first 4 weeks of the summer hols to help make it more "habitable."
Like what?
I can understand the Weasleys being there, but with Hermione it just makes no sense! Girl, where are your parents?😭
No wonder she was so okay with Obliviating them in Deathly Hallows.
I would love to see it more exploited. Like, Hermione must have been unconsciously patronizing her parents because she knows a whole world they're not permitted to enter.
Her parents had to deliver letters with owls to keep contact with her, even though they probably never went near one before.
The only place they went is Diagon Alley, and strangers like Lucius treat them like trash.
Muggles are not welcomed and to the Grangers, it must have become clear, year after year, that Hermione chose the wizarding world over them. Changing her teeth, not going to university, spending most of her time during holidays reading wizarding books...
I remember they went to a lot of nice place for the holidays, travelling in other countries. Maybe hoping to keep Hermione away from the wizarding world, at least for a few weeks ? So she can be theirs, like before.
Hermione obliviated them because of the war. For their safety, yes. But she also must have think it best for them not to suffer from her primary choice : becoming a witch.
To add on the distance between Hermione and her parents; Hermione, like, never talks about her parents. She talks about them a bit in book 1, mentions they're dentists, and some of their vacations, but that's it. She doesn't talk about them at all. As if they don't exist. I mean, she doesn't even mention their names!
Contrast this with Colin Creevy, a muggleborn that wanted to share the Wizarding World with his parents and brought a camera for that exact purpose. He mentions his parents in the bits we see of him and clearly has a good relationship with them.
Hermione, though, Hermione chose the wizarding world over her parents very early on. She's almost pretending to have always been part of it. Her reading Hogwarts a History and all the books she can get is part of that choice. She wants to be part of this world as if she was always there. So she reads and learns and stops mentioning her perants because wizards don't know what a dentist is.
I always feel so sorry for Hermione's parents. They are such a non-entity which is so strange. It's so tragic we learn more about Regulus, a dead off-screen DE character, than the parents of the main heroine. And JKR calls herself a feminist. Hermione's parents are portrayed as frightened animals half the time. And whenever someone tries to justify Hermione obliviating her parents, my fictional heart aches more for these poor people. I wonder if the Grangers even got to spend much time with their grandkids :'(
This is really a gr8 way of thinking of the whole obliviation business.
Because most stories i read, it was about how Hermione feels after she does it but never about how she took the agency of two people away.
Also it must be like loosing their daughter with how less time she spent with them. And fics show them to be absent parents. But never how she could be an absent daughter and they rhe parents who just wanted their daughter to be happy and safe...
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