#hp crit

[anthonycrowley]

okay i did end up deciding to reread harry potter as an adult and discuss things with a critical lens. anyway. first criticism i have. wizarding society is like. idk. actually really weird if you apply it in any way to the real world which obviously the author wants you to. like they’re this isolationist society that has their own form of government who actively looks down upon people who don’t have the same subjective traits as them. and jkr does nothing with this on a large level. you don’t have muggles eventually working with wizards to bring down the threat, you don’t even really have the characters risking discovery, because there’s never really a moment where they’re in danger because if it comes to that oh the little ants are stupid and we can wipe their memory. for years this book series was lauded for promoting love and acceptance which is just wild to me. you guys are like. in a cult.

[toast-ranger-to-a-stranger]

If Harry were resorted now, would he still be a gryffindor? I personally believe this would be the case, but i wanted to know *your* take on it

Absolutely still a Gryffindor. I feel like the original would be quite proud, in fact, and so would a begrudging Slytherin.

I think one of the biggest failings of the house system is the division of traits and the idea that these traits ARE specifically tied to these houses. Hermione's intelligence always chocked up to her partial Ravenclaw nature, for instance.... rather than her grit and determination to be The Best.

It's something I've done myself, but if I were one of the founders, I think the TRUE goal would be to have students that embody ALL aspects of each house by the time they've graduated bc all traits are present in each house. I.e. they draw differences between students so that students can grow to see their similarities. I imagine it was a big ol' thought experiment from them, and one that had unfortunately failed and created MORE division, but that may be just me, lol.

Harry is a Gryffindor because of his courage and loyalty and determination-- and he uses skills like cunning and as much street knowledge as he does book knowledge to enforce those traits-- and gee, loyalty is also a hufflepuff trait, isn't it??? And hardworking-- that's just a synonym for determined, right???-- and hey wait intelligent and creative and MOTIVATED, that's ravenclaw, look at that motivated right there, guess what that's a synonym for-- and oops! If you don't think being ambitious and being determined don't go hand in hand...

Yeah. You see what I mean? He's a True Gryffindor, at this point, in that he's grown to embody all traits the way many other do as they grow older.

[sirius-lives]

look, i am not saying that spending more and more time on insular internet communities in which fandom criticism and analysis is deprived of all nuance  and all criticism essentially comes from one lens or perspective, thus making us believe that any other perspective is “gaslighting” or “invisibilizing”, is making us loose our empathy and respect for other people. 

BUT i just saw a video of a girl saying that using a ship name makes you a transphobe. so there is that.

[anthonycrowley]

see i do think harry potter is one area that fanfiction has always been more interesting and does more with the societal structures presented to us than the book could ever hope to, partially because it is at the end of the day a children’s book. like with the information we are given throughout the series - that it is lily’s love that protected harry - we can’t discount the fact that harry could have grown up to be a squib. how do we, a racist society against nonmagical folk, deal with our chosen one being nonmagical? this is actually a significantly more interesting story than the one i am reading.

[anthonycrowley]

i know i’m getting nitpicky especially since i’m only like a quarter of the way through book one but the logic of wands also makes no fucking sense. this is something that i actually haven’t really seen discussed. like oh, wands are incredibly personal things. the wand chooses the wizard. etc etc. oh, unless it’s a really special wand. OR. you beat someone in a duel. OR OR OR. you’re poor so your brother gave you his. like. okay why did bill even GIVE RON HIS WAND??? most wizards have them for their whole life! it’s not like giving ron his hand me downs clothes. and like, how do disarming spells in this work? i don’t have a super good memory for this but didn’t harry use malfoy’s wand after he disarmed him during the duel? what’s the line? because there’s duelling club, and even i think teachers disarming students. is it about intent to steal the wand? because the series never says that explicitly. and i think i’m a little more lenient on some things, but the internal logic just in philosopher’s stone is off on this one. like. it’s this super personal item that no one else can use, BUT ALSO anyone can use it under certain circumstances. what?

[anthonycrowley]

if i post my favorite harry potter fanfic will you still think i’m hot

[anthonycrowley]

i also think how jkr discusses appearance is fascinating in a weird and bad way. obviously books should have pretty heavy character descriptions so people can picture the character. but like, most of the time when authors describe characters there’s reasons for describing them as ugly or different than others. take the hunger games. katniss describes her fellow tributes with pretty heavy descriptions both because some of them she doesn’t know the names of and because the districts are so isolated that it gives us as the audience a better understanding of life outside of twelve - careers are consistently described based on how strong they look for example. another classic example is asoiaf, grrm spends a lot of time describing character’s appearances, but that’s partially because partially because there are traits passed down amongst families that are important so understanding the physical differences there are plot relevant, and westeros itself is incredibly appearance based. tyrion and brienne being ugly is central to their characters because of how they are treated. however, the ugliness has nothing to do with their morality - even if you’re not a tyrion fan, he’s far from the worst character in the book. compare this to how jkr speaks about slytherin girls. does describing pansy parkinson do anything to further the plot? i guess you could say calling dudley fat shows the reader that the dursleys dote on him more than harry, but also if you have two braincells to rub together and aren’t hateful towards fat people you can also see that in real life he probably just got his genes from vernon. i think this is fascinating though because really it’s the only way that the snape reveal works - he’s constantly being described to us as like, the ugliest person in the book, but unlike tyrion his ugliness is not the reason he has been ostracized, his blood status is. lily didn’t leave him because he was ugly, she left him because he was a racist. etc etc. and i suppose you could connect his looks to his blood status if he looked like his father, but he appears to basically take negative traits from both of his parents. his ugliness has nothing to do with anything except to be used as a shorthand within the book for bad people. which makes it all the more shocking that he was ugly AND did all that shit and STILL ended up being a good guy.

[anthonycrowley]

also in case it wasn’t clear i’m sorry i’m reminding you all that harry potter exists