Heh yeah you beat me to unpacking this That's the real ugliness of the escapism here, right Because Harry Potter being a wizard HIMSELF is pretty irrelevant; he spends most of the series being textually mediocre at it, his abilities never really matter The magic doesn't matterhttps://twitter.com/TheNotoriousRBF/status/1307710560469909504 …
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People have written AUs where Harry Potter is born a squib (and winds up going to Hogwarts anyway, because of his Harry Potter privilege) and one thing they really lay bare about the series is that Harry's superpower isn't that he's a wizard; it's just that he's royalty
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Vonnegut wrote in SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE that the great narrative failure of the story of the crucifixion is presented not as the Romans having tortured an innocent person to death, but as them having foolishly tortured the WRONG person to death ...The subtext with the Dursleys
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HARRY POTTER never really challenges the idea that it is *wrong* for adults to treat children the way that the Dursleys treated Harry It just suggests that they treated *him* wrongly because they knew he was from a biologically superior caste and resented that superiority
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Harry, himself, never really has a thought like "there are muggle children being treated like I was all over the UK and they'll never have an owl from a wizard to take them away from it" He doesn't give a fuck They probably deserve it; trash kids deserve trash parents, right
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The Harry Potter books are disturbing in the sense that, for all that magic can do, one thing it *cannot* do is elevate you above your station To the point of inconsistency—there are supposedly spells to magically make you attractive, but people are still judged for being ugly
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e.g., Gilderoy Lockhart being widely adulated for naturally being extremely charming and handsome, despite the fact that becoming similarly attractive should simply be a matter of waving ones' wand a couple times And yet people are judged on their appearance constantly
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Because while magic is supposed to be powerful, JKR flinches away from permitting it to create an even SLIGHTLY more egalitarian society Like, this isn't some Starfleet thing where nobody cares Picard is bald; ugliness is jeered at in magical Britain, and yet cannot be changed
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
Filch is considered a weirdo creep cause he's an ugly dude, like yeah he's not super friendly but that's probably because everyone in the castle treats him like a gross weirdo
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Because he's disabled It's literally that he's a Squib and Squibs are treated like garbage in this society and Dumbledore gave him this job as charity where all the kids delight in tormenting and fucking with him just by casting the simplest spells
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