So I noticed that the Harry Potter series and Pacific Rim: The Black had a certain vibe in common, but for months I was unable to put my finger on what it was. But I finally figured it out when I found an article from 2005. Here are the relevant parts:
...Rowling refuses to view herself as a moral educator to the millions of children who read her books. "I don't think that it's at all healthy for the work for me to think in those terms. So I don't," she says. "I never think in terms of What am I going to teach them? Or, What would it be good for them to find out here?"
"Although," she adds, "undeniably, morals are drawn." But she doesn't make it easy. In Goblet, the good-hearted Cedric Diggory dies for no reason. In Phoenix, we learn that Harry's dad, whom he idealized, had been an arrogant bully. People aren't good and bad by nature; they change and transform and struggle. As Dumbledore tells Harry, "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." Granted, we know Harry will not succumb to anger and evil. But we never stop feeling that he could. (Interestingly, although Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland, the books are free of references to God. On this point, Rowling is cagey. "Um. I don't think they're that secular," she says, choosing her words slowly. "But, obviously, Dumbledore is not Jesus.")
So essentially, both of them are attempts to create a narrative filled with messy, imperfect people without heavy moralization. And I say attempts because none of the writers actually had the chops to pull it off.
But why not?
For one, pulling this off requires a certain level of cultural, historical, economic, social, and emotional awareness - or in other words, you need to actually understand why things are the way they are and why people do what they do.
Developing this awareness requires a certain level of curiosity and willingness to engage with some deeply uncomfortable topics.
I don't know much about Rowling's capacity to handle topics that make her feel uncomfortable. But I do think it's obvious that she is an extremely incurious person. Her worldbuilding throughout the entire Wizarding World franchise shows a consistent failure to research anything relevant to her world beyond the most superficial levels. In fact, her worldbuilding often suggests that she did no research at all, but basically just went on vibes based on stereotypes she picked up and never thought to question.
We see Rowling's lack of curiosity reflected within the text of the Harry Potter series itself. Harry is apathetic where history is concerned. He rarely takes initiative in investigating anything. He never learns or practices any kind of investigative skill. Harry mostly just faffs around until someone else does the work for him (Hermione does nearly all of the actual research), or until he stumbles on the next thing he needs by pure accident. It's very telling that in Deathly Hallows, Harry did nothing to work out for himself that Ollivander was being held in Malfoy Manor, but only discovered him there because he accidentally caught the attention of some bounty hunters who caught and carried him there.
The Black shows a similar lack of curiosity. It is most apparent in the show's disregard for the rich worldbuilding created by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro. Its entire comprehension of the Pacific Rim world is superficial. And not only does it display a lack of interest in the original worldbuilding, it displays a lack of interest in anything. There is not one single sign of interest in topics that would be highly germane, such as engineering, biology, sociology, or psychology. Its very depiction of Australia as a desolate wasteland full of deadly animals is based on racist colonial narratives. None of its main characters engage in research or investigation; instead, the progression of the story is a literal walk from Point A to Point B.
There is another point that both media fail on: if you are going to commit to writing a narrative full of imperfect people, you must be comfortable with your audience refusing to forgive any of them. Both HP and TB have characters that its creators are aware on some level have crossed lines that could make some people disinclined to forgive them. For Harry Potter, it's the character of Snape. For The Black, it's Shane.
Both of these characters spent years abusing and torturing children. Both are (or so the stories want us to think) redeemed through doing something for a woman and her child/children and dying in the effort. Both of them were cruel to the children of said women in addition to being cruel in general.
The writers clearly knew on some level that Snape and Shane had gone too far, because they felt like they had to make a special point to emphasize that they had been redeemed.
In HP, Harry names his son after Snape and says that Snape was one of the bravest men he ever knew. In TB, one of Shane's men comes and says that he wasn't all bad because he looked after his people. The writers can't bear the thought of anyone finishing the story and not forgiving either of these men for their cruelty.
(The implicit message that men deserve forgiveness for doing one right thing in a lifetime of cruelty sure is something, isn't it?)
HP and TB also have similar issues with girls and women. There is a certain implication that mothers and girls and women who take on maternal roles are inherently kind and self-sacrificing. Meanwhile, women with no interest in motherhood or maternal roles are among the most fearsome antagonists. For HP, it's Bellatrix Lestrange and Dolores Umbridge. For TB, it's the kaiju cultists whom we are told kidnap women to induct into their ranks and kill all men they meet.
While it's not quite as simple as "mothers are good, childfree women are bad," there are still certain misogynistic prejudices at work. There is no recognition of the fact that patriarchal systems often force women to be self-sacrificing, nor that mothers and women in maternal roles are as capable of being cruel and selfish as fathers and men in paternal roles. What HP and TB did with its female characters did not explore the dark and messy aspects of human nature in an honest way, but distorted and diminished them.
(And before anyone mentions out that the primary antagonist in TB is the Mother Superior, I want to point out that sisters are typically not viewed as maternal figures.)
Also, this kind of storytelling does not work if you cannot let go of the idea of absolute evil in this world and the idea that people can embody absolute evil.
Neither Voldemort nor the Mother Superior reflect the reality of being the worst version of oneself. They are not written as kinds of people that anyone could potentially become if they followed certain kinds of impulses that become very tempting under certain kinds of pressures.
In fact, Rowling invented an elaborate magical explanation to justify why Voldemort was like that. He was conceived the wrong way, which made him incapable of feeling certain emotions, which made him unable to value anything or anyone other than himself. Many parts of the story talk about the importance of our choices, yet the story's main antagonist had no choice.
In the world of The Black, the Mother Superior has no motive other than the utter destruction of humanity, because she is a human-kaiju hybrid, because having too much kaiju DNA erases your human will. (How did she become this? When did it happen? We do not know. We are never told.) She is antagonistic because her DNA does not allow her to be anything else. The character arc of the half-kaiju child Boy emphasizes the value of choices, yet the main antagonist is not shown to a product of her choices, nor is she shown to be capable of choosing. (Boy can make choices because he doesn't have as much kaiju DNA as the Mother Superior. If he were to gain more kaiju DNA, he would lose his free will.)
Both Voldemort and the Mother Superior are effectively the Devil as understood in modern conservative Christian mythology, inalterably antagonistic because they just are. This is not an archetype that belongs in the kind of story HP and TB attempted to tell. It's an archetype more suited to conservative propaganda, which functionally makes these works conservative propaganda. We don't have to question why certain people choose to be antagonistic toward others, we just have to accept that some people are pure evil and must be done away with - they must die if we are to live.
Both stories value an unsettling level of obedience to authority. In The Black, the PPDC is portrayed as unquestionably good even though they are 100% the reason the children were stranded in the desert. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry isolates himself from almost everyone he knows because Dumbledore told him he couldn't talk about the horcruxes to anyone other than Hermione and Ron.
Ultimately, both narratives demonstrate why teaching love and acceptance isn't much good if you aren't also aware of the value of curiosity and critical thinking, the necessity of questioning everything, and the importance of researching beyond reading the first section of a Wikipedia page, or (God forbid), asking ChatGPT to write you a summary.
