🖤: Which character is not as morally good as everyone else seems to think?
💖: What is your biggest unpopular opinion about the series?
Ask game: unpopular opinion edition <3
🖤: Which character is not as morally good as everyone else seems to think?
Disclaimer: the onus here is on "as good as everyone else seems to think." I'm not saying this character is completely immoral or evil, but that I think the fandom overlooks a lot of issues with him.
I think Hagrid is problematic and his behavior often gets overlooked because he's Harry's big, fuzzy, fiercely loyal friend, and because the films really toned down his aggression and carelessness. He's not just a bumbling teddy bear of a giant, he's violent, unfair, and his carelessness is often to the detriment of others who have to help clean up his messes.
Even when acknowledging that PS is very much a children's book with deliberately Dahlesque villains, I can't help but think that if the author was keeping notes and had plans for a 7 book series, then there's something that rubs me the wrong way about authorial decisions re: characters, that cater to that approach even though they won't work in a book about a 17 year old the way they do about an 11 year old. Specifically I'm thinking of Hagrid giving Dudley a pig's tail as punishment. His anger at Vernon and Petunia is justified, but he takes it out on Dudley, who's an 11 year old child. It's vindictive, misdirected, and even Hagrid acknowledges that he lost his temper. And then he asks Harry not to tell anyone about it because he's not supposed to use magic.
So within the first few pages of meeting Hagrid, he's shown as having difficulty controlling angry outbursts, physically harms a child, and asks another to keep quiet about his having done something illegal. In the same book Hagrid obtains a dragon egg illegally, hatches it, and then takes no responsibility for the ensuing problems. The obvious problems he causes, of course, are that he relies on Harry, Ron, and Hermione to keep this secret as well (more asking children to keep quiet about illegal activities), and then to solve the problem of the dragon quickly outgrowing his house. In the process the trio get into trouble, and Hagrid takes no responsibility, doesn't get them out of detention, and when they serve that detention with him he puts them in an even more dangerous situation. On top of that, he lectures Draco about consequences and punishment, even though all the students serving detention that night are there because of Hagrid's own actions and poor choices and because most of them got into trouble while covering for him.
I'm not the first to point this out, but all of this does bother me a lot. Almost as much as the idea that Hagrid loves dragons, yet not enough to not be selfish about it. Because he wants a dragon he doesn't consider what kind of living conditions his pet is going to grow up in. Keeping a dragon in his hut is like keeping a great dane in a studio apartment, except it doesn't get to go for walks because it has to be hidden, not to mention a dragon will inevitably outgrow a little cabin, for which Hagrid makes no plans. On top of that, his carelessness is also the reason Quirrellmort gets to the stone and nearly kills Harry.
Throughout the rest of the series, we find out that Hagrid was expelled because his irresponsibility with dangerous creatures makes him the perfect scapegoat (except this is presented as his love of these creatures, but I think his lack of responsibility for and to them is a serious issue). He sends Ron and Harry into a life threatening situation because he has zero ability to assess risk, he physically assaults Karkaroff because of his short temper, he gets drunk and needs to be sobered up and taken care of by Harry and his friends who are literal children, and the list goes on and on. He shouldn't have started his first lesson with Hippogriffs, not just because they're capricious animals and thus dangerous for the students, but because he's responsible for them and if a student mishandles them and the Hippogriffs react in the way that is their nature, then it's the Hippogriff that will get punished. And as we see, that's exactly what happens. Malfoy's injury is avoidable, but in this world it's also easily healed without scarring or pain. However, Buckbeak is essentially deemed unsafe and the government decrees that he must be put down - when the real problem was that Hagrid started a class by introducing creatures with complex needs, instead of building up to that lesson and preparing his students appropriately. This sums up how I see Hagrid in a nutshell: he only thinks about his love of Hippogriffs, not whether the choices he's making are good for them. Later in the series, Hagrid brings his giant brother back to England and stashes him in the Forbidden Forest, which is bad for his brother, bad for the ecosystem, and unsafe for everyone at the school but again, Hagrid does what Hagrid wants. I don't like the way the narrative excuses and downplays the effects of his choices just because Hagrid does these things out of love, because his actions are still detrimental to the objects of his love.
And this is because Hagrid is, ultimately, selfish. He's very affectionate with Harry and fiercely loyal, traits which endear him to readers. But he's also self-serving, negligent, has no foresight, and can only see things through the lens of his personal interest and enthusiasm, while actively rejecting alternative perspectives and reason. Affection and love aren't enough when they wreak havoc, cause harm, and endanger others. He's frustrating, violent, and dangerous. I've never enjoyed the parts of the books that involve him because they feel like a slog to me. Hagrid is written as a bumbling, well meaning lug who looks scary but is really a softie. But he's actually careless and dangerous, kind of like a 10 foot tall child would be sweet and well meaning but ultimately destructive and dangerous. And because of how irresponsible he is and the effect it has on everyone around him, I don't think Hagrid is as moral as the narrative, or the fandom, perceive him to be. McGonagall is right at the start of PS when she questions if Hagrid can be trusted with an important task, because we see throughout the series that every time this happens, he ends up causing harm, even if unintentionally.
💖: What is your biggest unpopular opinion about the series?
Apparently that Snape is a great character, seeing as most of the fandom seems to hate him lol. What's my biggest unpopular opinion in the Snapedom, though? That people focus too much on Lily's lip twitching during SWM. I think a lot gets projected onto her but really there just isn't a lot of information about her character. Of the little we have to go on, the fact she was best friends with Snape and that they were friends for many years takes up more space and energy in these characters' lives and relationship than that one moment. I also subscribe to the interpretation that what the lip twitch really betrayed was Lily's perspective that after Snape excusing all the things Mulciber and Avery did, he was experiencing it firsthand and suddenly it wasn't "a laugh." Since Lily didn't seem to know the extent of Snape getting bullied by the Marauders for years, and she had defended them after the prank because of her ignorance of what really happened, from her point of view Snape was friends with creepy bullies whose behavior he excused and was now getting a firsthand experience of and learning that it wasn't so funny when it was happening to him. I read a meta once (I can't find it but please link it if you know which one I'm talking about) that proposed the idea that the creepy thing Avery and Mulciber did to Mary Macdonald was also Levicorpus, because it would have indeed been creepy to expose her underwear, and because Lupin says in OoTP that Levicorpus was "in vogue" at the time.
**EDIT so while tumblr's search function is useless, someone liked the post I was referring to literally right as I posted this, because I had reblogged it back in August. So here you go, I highly recommend reading it, it's a fantastic bit of meta.
