One thing that I’ve noticed is that, even before JK.Rowling outed herself as a tone-deaf TERF caricature of who she’d been before, is that people attacked the Harry Potter series for things that other YA series don’t get the same attacks for.
Like, JKR sucks, but let’s let our attacks on her and her books exist in the realm of fair reason, hm?
The one that really stands out for me is the complaint that the Harry Potter series is bad because Harry didn’t.... fix all of the problems with the Wizarding World?
This one has always baffled me. Like, leaving aside the fact that there was hardly room for fixing everything in a seven book series (what, did we want ten, twenty, thirty more books covering the rest of Harry’s life? I’m sorry, I don’t want to read Harry Potter and the Landlord’s Inspection followed by Harry Potter and the Series of Boring and Straight Forward Criminal Cases With No Plot Twists), How is it Harry’s responsibility to always, 100 percent of the time, be on the fore of solving all the world’s problems. Give him a freaking break, he spent seven years fighting for his life, let him have something nice!
Like, yes, the Wizarding World is packed full of problems. Many of them ones that J.K. Rowling deliberately included, and many that she doesn’t really see as problems (which is it’s own set of issues with her writing), but since when is it the responsibility of a book series to resolve literally every bad thing that exists in the world?
Yes, I’m all for a story about Aragorn’s tax policy, but I wouldn’t want that to be part of the Lord of the Rings proper, because that’s not what LOTR was. And I wouldn’t expect (or enjoy) a story where Aragorn literally fixes every single wrong in Gondor and then the rest of Middle Earth because that’s not how things work. Shit doesn’t get fixed like that, doesn’t get rendered perfect. (It’s telling that the loudest voices on this line of attack tend to be the kind of lazy socialist who thinks that everything can be solved by just screaming ‘eat the rich’ and ‘medicare for all’) Problems are solved, and the solutions raise new problems. They expend scarce resources. They require limited decision bandwidth. A solution for one group makes things worse for another. Or actually implementing the solution in a way that doesn’t accidentally kill innocent people becomes a challenge all it’s own.
And all this assumes that all the relevant figures in a society can be convinced to back a solution. Or you could use violence, but that doesn’t tend to work out all that well for anyone, by every single historical example we have. But sure, this time when we feed people to the Guillotine, it’ll work.
So yes, it’s not that it wouldn’t be interesting to read a series about a world like the Wizarding World being reformed, or even having a violent revolution (though if that violence led to a perfect utopia, I’d question the sanity of the writer). But that’s not what the Harry Potter series was, and I doubt JKRowling, with her abundance of character and writing flaws, would have been able to write it to the satisfaction of the people who bitch about it. And Harry Potter would hardly have been the right protagonist for that story anyway.
But that’s not what the series was. It was a Juvenile fiction/YA series about an orphaned boy finding a place in the world, graduating school and defeating a Dark Lord. It’s not a particularly innovative model of a story, but it’s one that works well, and that is well established. It was very clear from the start what sort of story it was, and it was never gonna be ‘Harry Potter Fixes the World’.
I mean, it’s fine to want to read a story where someone discovers they belong to some secret, hidden world and then they set out to correct all the injustices of that world. And depending on how heavy-handed it was, and how unrealistic all that fixing was, I’d probably even enjoy it. But that isn’t what Harry Potter was. And getting angry at J.K. Rowling for not doing that in her seven book YA coming of age story is a bit like walking into a McDonalds and then screaming at them for not carrying vegan nonfat soy gluten free kale smoothies! It’s like going into a pizza place and wondering where the Chicken Tikka Masala is. You’re in the wrong place for what you’re looking for, and that’s not the proprietor’s fault.
And again - and this is what gets me - I have never seen any other YA author taken to task for this. I have seen tons of them attacked for bad representation, or lack of representation, or daring to have sex happen in the story, or for ‘sending bad messages about relationships to impressionable kids’, et cetera.
But I’ve never seen - and maybe I’m just not looking in the right places - any sort of widespread idea that the author’s story was a failure because *looks at smudged writing on hand* “... they failed to have the protagonists resolve all the problems of the society...”
That can’t be right?
Oh, but it is somehow what people expect here. I have not once, in my many years of reading fantasy fiction, Sci-fi, and YA stories encountered any novel or series that ended with everything being solved. Or even most things. It’s never been an expectation I’ve seen anyone throw at any other story. The fact of the matter is, even the most complex of stories is only going to resolve a small number of problems just from a logistics of writing approach. I can’t even begin to imagine how complex a story focusing on just a tenth of the major systemic problems of our society and their ‘fixing’ would be.
JKRowling is, now, trash. She’s an out of touch, elitist, tone-deaf, perpetual victim TERF who has more in common with the alt-right than anyone to the left of Richard Freaking Nixon. Her refusal to take even reasonable and mild criticism, and her constant and persistent doubling down on her nonsense while continuing to screech about how dare ‘cancel culture’ attack her shows how thin her skin is, how badly she takes even the slightest disagreement, the barest hint of a ‘no’.
There are many problems with the HP series, and many in the Wizarding World, including the ones that she didn’t seem to see as problems. A lot of unexamined Very British Baggage, for instance. And had JK Rowling been able to do any self-reflection once she started getting criticism, maybe she could have addressed those problems, at least a little.
But a lot of the attacks the books got, and still get, were and are unreasonable. Expecting things that no one had any legitimate reason to expect or by judging it by standards no one ever judges books by. If you graded books by ‘solve all the problems in the world’ every book gets an F. But I’ve never seen any series get hit with that same, persistent line of attack.
It’s unreasonable, and stupid, and more than anything else, it’s baffling. Why did anyone ever expect this of Harry Potter in the first place?
