He was abducted by Hagrid when he turned 11 so that would place him maybe around the fifth or sixth grade.
I don’t know if canonically there are math classes at Hogwarts.
The thought came to while I was watching the anime Mashle. If you are into Harry Potter and One-Punch Man I’d recommend giving it a watch.
Someone mentioned this community below; I wanted to highlight it.
Small promotion for !harrypotter@literature.cafe
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I mean, there must be a reason why wizards are constantly perplexed by muggle technology.
And why goblins have to do their accounting for them.
The series would have ended much sooner if Harry had brought an AK47 to hogwarts
Outstanding
Typical Koldovstoretz graduates
Although that could also be them being perplexed by the fact that muggles did it with no magic at all.
Imagine us discovering a species that developed computers and tech just like ours, but using neither transistors nor electricity.
I’m not familiar with the series, what’s muggle technology?
Muggles is wizard slang for non-magical human beings. Like Darren on Bewitched would be a muggle. He cooks his food using an oven instead of magic. The oven is muggle tech.
Muggle is a racial slur used by magic-able people to refer to magic disabled people.
Not a slur, you’re thinking of mudblood
There can be more than one slur. Muggle is debatable I believe.
Idk I can’t remember anyone in Harry Potter using it as a straight up slur, the worst I can think of is some people use it in a rude way like “The Blacks” or “The Gays”. I haven’t read them in a long time tho, I just remember mudblood being a slur and muggle being the accepted term, even by muggleborn magic users
That’s because Mudblood is a magic user born from a Muggle family. A different term from Muggle itself. Pretty sure Muggle is an accepted term in the overall society (it’s used in the Ministry’s Department name for example), except from a few ‘activists’ you might hear of.
I believe there’s someone like that in Hogwarts Legacy as well.
What’s wrong about saying the blacks or the gays? That’s just refering to a specific group of people. Only thing I can see as problematic is the generalization that follows but that’s always the case when talking about groups.
People take offense to using adjectives describing a group of people as a noun. For example “the black community” or “people who are gay” describe a subset (describe a portion of the overall community,) whereas “the blacks” or “the gays” describe a distinct set (and imply that group as an “other”)
Muggle isnt a slur, just as wizard isnt a slur. It’s not a derogatory term. It’s just their word for non-magic people while non-magic people use the word wizard or witch.
The preferred term is NaMP - Not a Magical Person/Non-Magical Person. You could also say “Person of Non-Magic,” but it’s hard to pronounce “ponm.”
Non magical people living in the real world. It’s you. You’re a muggle.
You don’t know that
I do know it, via magic. You can’t prove I don’t know, because you’re a muggle.
Non-magical people’s tech. Aka our technology.
could hogwarts defeng itself against modern weapons? like missils and shit?
Yeah. Easily.
Reducto or any of a dozen other spells that make shit explode, magical barriers, simply transfiguring the weapons to something else… telekinesis. Simply not being there.
And before you add “what if they were surprised…” …. It’s possible, but remember how shocked Hagrid was about the lie the Dursley’s told Potter? “A car crash?! A Car CRASH?! Kill lily and James potter?!….”
I don’t know. I’ve always thought a sniper could have taken out Voldemort. Far away, camouflaged, and the bullet gets there faster than the sound. It’s a reaction time thing.
Obviously, JK Rowling was not a tactical mastermind.
However in the universe she created, any powerful wizard worth a damn would simply keep protective shields up all the time, especially against such simple things like “fast objects hitting them”.
Protego seems to be doing a lot with barely any effort to cast. Fred&George even create permanently enchanted clothing with Protego on it.
I would expect Voldemort to have protective spells keeping things like that from happening.
If it were that easy to kill a witch or wizzard… then there’s lots of ways to go about that. He wouldn’t have needed a special wand to fight Harry. he’d just fling a ginormous rock out of nowhere.
Well, we know that wizards are vulnerable to physical attack and to surprise attacks. There’s the whomping willow, which they can’t just cast a force field against. There were the spiders and the centaurs in the forest. The big three headed dog. That devil’s something plant. And if I recall, Voldemort didn’t realize the caretaker had come into the house until he was in the hallway and Nagini saw him. Sorry, it’s been a hot minute since I read those.
Wizards, one would think, could go flinging cars around whenever they wanted to, but they use death spells, even on muggles. Maybe they think it’s gauche to do something so mundane as dropping a rock on someone’s head, I couldn’t say. Jedi use the Force to throw things, but not to just crush someone’s head or rip it from their body. That would take a lot less force (so to speak) than lifting an X-wing, but they still use lightsabers.
And for what it’s worth, I think a sniper could take out a Jedi, too.
Well, we know that wizards are vulnerable to physical attack and to surprise attacks…
the killing curse is probably simply more efficient for the task at hand. It’s also by and large, more discrete. In any case, all the things you listed were evaded by a couple of poorly taught kids. Like literally… children. Fluffy, the devil’s vine thing, (along with all the other challenges from teachers)… one of those kids had exactly a year’s worth of experience with magic. I could also kill an M1A1 Abrams with a rock if I stuffed it in the right place. (I’m thinking exhaust.). Doesn’t mean i want to fight an Abrams with a rock. or… at all.
again for surprise …[Hagrid’s insistence a mere car crash woudln’t kill the Potters[(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoeSuboKeBk). They could probably literally just poof into smoke before a bullet ever fully breaks the skin.
Wizards, one would think, could go flinging cars around whenever they wanted to, but they use death spells, even on muggles. Maybe they think it’s gauche to do something so mundane as dropping a rock on someone’s head, I couldn’t say. Jedi use the Force to throw things, but not to just crush someone’s head or rip it from their body. That would take a lot less force (so to speak) than lifting an X-wing, but they still use lightsabers.
Jedi use the lightsaber specifically because they’re taught the Force isn’t for killing. They just love running around in bathrobes waving their glowbats around. (stop giggling. no seriously. stop giggling. Okay fine. giggle. a little. mace’s has a vibrating lenses.)
The Sith have used the force to mow down entire armies, though. for example Maul running amok on a venator. still, the Sith use lightsabers as a symbol- invoking fear and terror, which further powers their dark-side natures. They also use lightsabers when it’s more efficient. (hurling rocks is… taxing, yes?)
I think we can agree to disagree on the sneak attack/sniper from a half a kilometer away.
I did not know that about the Jedi, though. I really was going to write “Sith” but said fuck it because I figured someone with the wherewithal to cut a bad guy in half wouldn’t have a moral system that would prevent them from crushing a head. Plus, it was a callback to a long forgotten skit (I think it was on SNL, but it could have been any of those sketch shows) where the character would look at a person standing far away through his thumb and forefinger and make it look to him like he was crushing their heads.
The Jedi do use their force power to kill droids, though, and droids in the franchise certainly possess self-awareness, and are conscious beings who demonstrate every human behavior, so I have to wonder how that’s handled. I think I remember someone getting offended because he was called “just a droid.”
I kind of lost interest in the franchise after the first prequel, and so I’m obviously forgetting a lot. Plus, I skipped most of the recent movies (although I’m told the new series is really good, and I did enjoy the first season of Mando.
Anyway, thanks for teaching me something!
Plus, killing an Abrams with a rock is pretty funny. It reminds me of the Beverly Hill Cop scene where Eddie Murphy puts a banana in the guy’s tailpipe.
Sure but anyone can win any fight if they have position and prep time that the other party doesn’t: under the same logic Voldy can easily kill any sniper so long as he knows there’s one (and in a war, there is one). Reminder, at least in the movies he doesn’t actually need to aim for Crucio, and he can manually and literally laser crush a castle-wide energy barrier .
Reaction time isn’t really relevant when you are good at divination and ultra sensory perception.
He came from muggle land, so he is probably aware of guns. He could probably easily made his skin bullet proof with some spell. It’s not like wizards can’t invent new spells and magic. They just almost always seem to choose not to. I think the vast majority of wizards are lazy hacks.
I also think it’s just supposed to be hard to make new magic and the spells that are common were built to be common.
For example, it is possible for anyone to write a new program for their phone. How many people actually can or do? How many people, with some training, can use most of not all of the programs that others have built to be productive.
How hard can it be? The Weasleys are all adept at it. The mother showcases spells and items never seen before or again in the story. The father turns muggle objects into working magical objects, the most famous being the car that can fly. The twins create three stories worth of magical objects for their store.
Maybe your right and the Weasleys, Snape and Voldemort are some of the most intelligent wizards.
Ok but you’d have to have pretty fast reaction times to transfigure a bullet just sayin
pretty fast reaction time to not die in a car crash, too. and your forgetting the part about wards and protection spells just stopping things cold.
Hermione mentioned in the first book that wizards tend to absolutely suck at things that are typically Muggle, like logic, so it follows that they probably suck at math too.
Logically, that does follow, but we’re talking about wizards here.
True, but their methods of learning do not differ significantly from that of muggles. They still need to take classes the same way we do, and this would need to learn maths and logic the same way too.
Whoosh?
That’s probably why wizards don’t run the bank 😂
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???
Reading is very common at Hogwarts and the wider wizarding world. Hogwarts has an extensive library, and most of their communications and news media are done over written mediums.
Contrast that to maths where the hardest thing most wizards would realistically have to do is basic money operations. Made even harder by their bonkers monetary system.
I think the OP meant that if they all stopped learning maths at 10, and there was no English class at Hogwarts, they probably stopped learning to read at 10 as well (well, the Muggles anyway, there’s no mention of how the Wizards learn anything before 11 I don’t think?).
There wouldn’t be additional English literature classes, sure, but by age 11 it’s mostly just practice and looking up words you don’t know anyway.
I think that’s a bit over simplified. Do you think they’d be able to understand Shakespeare? Or a spell book from the same time as Shakespeare? There’s a reason we continue to teach English until a child leaves secondary/high school.
Do you think they’d be able to understand Shakespeare? Or a spell book from the same time as Shakespeare?
The bigger question is, do they need to understand Shakespeare?
Shakespeare is important in UK Muggle culture, not so much elsewhere, including the wizarding world which very much has their own cultural icons.
They probably aren’t getting their spells from books that old either. The reason we don’t transpose Shakespeare to modern language is the loss of artistic intent in the process. Something that wouldn’t apply to purely factual books like a spell book.
Besides, they are expected to learn Latin; that’s where their spells come from.
She successfully brewed a complicated polyjuice potion that took months to make by just reading and following the instructions in the book when she was 12. She reads just fine.
But all wizard books are scribbled in crayon
I mean, the very existence of magic kind of nullifies the concept of math as a means to ascertain objective fact.
What good is 2+2 when 2 eyes of newt plus 2 legs of frog leads to random quantities of dancing forks with literally no respect as to the how because magic?
Math can’t quantify a world where physical laws are replaced by literal nonsense, and if math could ultimately explain the mechanics of magic and predict the outcomes of its applications, the magic wouldn’t be magic anymore, it would just be another great force of the universe like gravity or electromagnetism to be mapped by the scientific community.
I always wondered the opposite of the harry potter universe.
So much of math was difficult to teach or obscure because of difficulties in visualization or computation. Surely there would have been at least one wizard over hundreds of years that could figure out how to use the powers of illusion magic to visualize things? To demonstrate integrals to the unfamiliar? To render a fractal like a julia set?
Even if magic iteslf followed little internal logic, it could be used as a tool, surely? But that’s the sort of fridge logic (warning tv tropes link) that maybe didn’t belong in a story book like Harry Potter. I had to stop reading anyway around the time house elves were introduced, anyway. I took issue with that stuff even when I was a kid.
Exactly what more than 5th grade math do you need in such world?
I think a lot of people forget what they learn in 5th grade math. You learn negative numbers. You learn unit conversion, fraction, prime, square roots.
Would more math help absolutely. Especially with the logic wizard seems to lack. But it is not like many people use higher level math today anyway.
What they lack is knowledge about volume and surface calculation. That is some stuff you definitely need in life. That wizards don’t need analysis or Calculus is kinda obvious.
For trivial calculations that’s still going to be accessible just by looking up a formula. For more complicated ones… I can’t remember the last time I needed something like that. What sorts of use cases are you thinking of?
If you haven’t already, take a peek at Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It’s fanfiction, but absolutely worth a read.
Oh man I totally forgot about that! Oh nice they have it in ebook and pdf formats now
Just a warning: this takes pretty much every bad FF trope you can think of and turns it to max. Awful reading.
pretty much the only character with real, proactive agency in this story is Quirrell
I stopped reading it halfway through, and was too lazy to figure out why.
This explains it.
To add, the podcast is phenomenal. Definitely worth listening to as well
I think the one exception is their money, you definitely need some basic math to use it.
I have often suspected that that’s exactly what it is, there’s even clues of a genetic basis. How such a force can somehow be responsive to specific language is hard to imagine but evidently it can.
There are laws baked into it, just like the formula proposed above. For whatever reason it’s not only about intent, there are certain quantities of “stuff” needed. How is it that someone like Snape can map out such a specific spell, if it didn’t take some sort of physical dynamics that could be measurable. Spells can’t just solely be about intent, otherwise anyone could yell out “Cowabunga” or something and have it do whatever they are thinking. And I know some of the names have intent baked in them, but not all of them. Some are straight up nonsense. This doesn’t even get into the fact that the wands are a straight up conduit to magic that are controlled more heavily than guns in most nations. Maybe the wizards just hide all the dragons, Phoenix and unicorns like nation states gaurd WMDs. It would be smart, without them most easy magic would be impossible and stuff would really take elbow grease with potions and whatnot.
That’s where arithmancy comes in.
“Arithmancy” is their name for math classes and is mentioned several times throughout the books. It is one of Hermione’s favorite subjects.
At one point, the real world evil witch that is JK Rowling suggested that Arithmancy is like dviniation, but with math, saying they use numbers to predict the future. I take this to mean that the wizarding community discovered calculus independently from the rest of the world and mistook it for a new form of magic.
Divination with maths is statistics.
Jesus Christ this book series is fucking stupid
It’s just fun, it’s not serious or hard fantasy. It could be much worse, a lot of people read Ayn Rand and think its good.
It’s just like an izekai but for English reading children.
Isekai is nothing new. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are all “isekai”. JK is just a special kind of bad writer.
Almost like it was written with kids and preteens as the intended audience …
what type of pervert writes a book like that
It is but I’m not sure why they called the author a witch instead of a shitty author. For whatever stupid detail you find, the writing is 5x more awkward
Even a dragon would make more sense because of the wealth hoarding
In the games, arithmancy is portrayed as number puzzles that need to be solved.
number puzzles that need to be solved.
In JK Rowling’s mind the number puzzles are things like “How many genders are there?”
The correct answer, of course, is “Fuck you, JK Rowling, that’s how many.”
So crazy that a woman who liberally employed the Polyjuice Potion in her novels and had ghosts who would just wander through the restrooms to talk to you would take some of the most insanely conservative positions on changing your appearance or who should be allowed in the toilet.
“Billionaire has shitty beliefs. In other news, the weather in London is still complete ass.”
I’ve been to London, sometimes it’s a little sunny with some overcast…
She has been outspoken on the fact that her positions are basically due to personal trauma and nothing else
Why would you encourage more people to be sexually assaulted as a response to your own history?
Remember when Hagrid assigned his dragon the wrong gender at hatching?
Had to jog my memory, because I haven’t read these books in nearly 20 years.
But yeah. I think the Rowling of the mid-90s was relatively chill and fairly progressive, given the tone of her writing. It wasn’t until she got Disney-fied (or, I guess, Warner Brothers’d) that she took a turn. The novels really take a dive in book 5 and her political opinions just get nastier and nastier after that.
The Norberta reveal actually happens in Deathly Hallows. And frankly, I don‘t see a shift that is connected to the movies. What I actually observed was the overcompensation for criticism two books after the fact (remember Winky?) that Shaun described in his video essay.
The Norberta reveal actually happens in Deathly Hallows.
No wonder I don’t remember. That book was a fat blur.
And frankly, I don‘t see a shift that is connected to the movies.
I saw it more in Book 4 and 5, when her writing style changed from something akin to Roald Dahl into a more Twilight/Hunger Games esque YA dramady. She was in the middle of writing Book 4 when the first film premiered and ended up selling the rights to the movies before the fifth was officially started.
The size the books swelled, and you could tell there was a lot more editorial/ghost-writer punch ups happening along the way. What started as these cute little Christmas-y children’s stories mutated into enormous screenplays.
What I actually observed was the overcompensation for criticism two books after the fact
Once Rowling got on social media and started yapping her yap, I think it cast a shadow on the series. The stuff about goblin bankers being a stand-in for jews and the sloppy way she fumbled through Hermonie’s SPEW plotline took on an increasingly sinister cast as she got more vocal in the wake of her movie debuts.
Also not unlike Roald Dahl, the media comments forced people to re-contextualize a bunch of these fantasy tropes as legit derogatory views.
Whether they were there early on or whether they only really found their legs once Rowling started hanging out with a bunch of rich British freaks… idk. But they definitely became more obvious as she climbed the economic ladder.
To be fair, I suspect the average adult in real life probably only remembers, and uses, 5th grade math.
Facts
Source: self
I bet I couldn’t help a 5th grader with their math homework.
can you add fractions?
Most people couldn’t, but that’s mostly to do with the way math is taught differently… (“New math” is better, fight me!)
Who needs math when you have magic?
Who needs magic when we have science?
Science: Here’s why water is wet. Magic: I’m a dragon now.
Science: wow that is a nice animal you have there; have you seen out Large Hadron Collider, it accelerates clouds of particles up to close to the limit of causality and slams them into specially designed targets. We do this to probe the secrets of the universe at the edges of imagination and plausibility.
Magic: I can kill people by pointing my stick at them…
Science: yeah, we have that also…how big do yours get? We have a problem where we went too far and now can destroy the world, but because everyone has these weapons we live in an uneasy tension called mutually assured destruction, so no one uses their most powerful weapons for fear that others will also.
Magic: I can make it rain when I want.
Science: ok now that would be useful, you have to teach me how to do that.
I definitely need that magic! o.o
not to forget scientific alchemistry
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
Imagine if scientists in-universe studied and quantified magic 🪄
If it can be studied, it’s not magic, it’s science.
Science is the process of converting magic into science
Who needs ethics when you have magic?
Who needs magic when you have drugs?
My wife, who is a big potter fan, told me they take traditional classes as well, but they are shown off screen as they aren’t interesting to the story.
Pretty sure they explicitly talk about those kind of classes in the books. They don’t have scenes in them, but I remember Ron and Harry complaining about arithmetic, or mathematics, or something like that.
“Arithmancy” is what they call their math disciplines and it’s mentioned a fair bit in the books, though understandably never really shown in the movies.
Using OP logic, none of these kids ever go to the bathroom either.
They do in the Chamber of Secrets.
I’m sure Hogwarts also covered general education stuff but that would be boring to us so they focused on the magic stuff. That’s my theory though.
They literally go through the class schedule in each book. General studies are not in it.
Can you imagine how absolutely ignorant the average Hogwarts student must be then?
Wizards are, as a whole, pretty damn stupid in that universe to be fair
What is the purpose of a rubber duck?
Yeah, none of them seem to be aware of guns. You now how often dark wizards do spells in the books to protect themselves against projectiles? Never. They never do a spell like that, so far as I know.
As far as I know, the Protego spell protects against physical forces. The reason no one uses projectiles (they certainly could catapult stuff around with spells as well) is probably because it’s common knowledge that it does nothing.
Bullets are pretty quick though. Quicker than what it takes to spell Protego
Yeah. I a 1v1 the gun wins.
But Protego is something that you can simply have up around you whenever.
They literally go through the class schedule in each book
No they don’t?
Boring? This is the same universe where wizards canonically defecated in the streets and used fecal vanishing spells.
However, when Hogwarts’ plumbing became more elaborate in the eighteenth century (this was a rare instance of wizards copying Muggles, because hitherto they simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence), the entrance to the Chamber was threatened, being located on the site of a proposed bathroom.
https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/chamber-of-secrets
Im surprised that’s so controversial. I would expect wizards to do exactly that if it wasn’t for modern plumbing, I mean, people used to shit in pots and dump it out their window into the street in the morning. Or crap in a cold and smelly hole inside a basic wooden shed out in their yard.
If you have magic at that point why would you not instead delete it afterwards, considering the alternatives?
Does vanishing feces mean is deleted though or is it going to end up in the walls of buildings like Arby’s wrappers left behind by construction workers?
I think there’s a throwaway line in a book that a wizard discovered vanishing things sent them to another dimension.
Imagine it landed in our dimension and people are trying to make sense of it.
“Honey, I think the dog shat on the chandelier…”
Hogwarts was in India all along and we just didn’t know it.
I’m just over here chuckling at your casual statement that Hagrid abducted Harry.
He broke down his door, mutilated his cousin, threatened his uncle, then lured Harry away with cake (which was eaten by said cousin).
arithmancy - which is pseudomaths in a sense…
Isn’t arithmetic a class in Hogwarts and just a fancy word for maths (not a native speaker)? I think only Hermione takes it though and it’s only mentioned in the books.
arithmeticarithmancy
source :
Arithmancy | Harry Potter Wiki
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Arithmancy
Most of us only know 5th grade math
You don’t have to brag about it. Geez.
I thought you said Gaetz. He likes 'em at a fifth grade level.
Seems like someone reads at a 5th grade level too. :p
So that would put him only a couple years ahead of most republicans
They have arithmancy but Harry never took it AFAIK
I think you’re right. They probably don’t know math. I mean, what would they need it for? They probably don’t have to follow the laws of physics for the most part. If math is done it’s probably 100% recreational.
Something like increasing quantites for lake more potions .
Around that age kids learn what negative numbers are. I feel like some of it might be important
According to the British government 5th grade math includes interpret negative numbers in context, count forwards and backwards with positive and negative whole numbers, including through 0.
They just cast calcularmis.
Small promotion for !harrypotter@literature.cafe
Please stop.
JK sees the continued support of her work as proof that her views are supported. She is doing active harm to people lives. I know it’s common to say seperate the art from the artist, but that only applies to the dead. Rowling is alive and using her profits to write hateful proganda and restrict healthcare from an already marginalized group. I’m not ever going to tell someone what they can and can’t read, just please recognize the harm it does by promoting her. It’s the same as promoting the works of David Duke.
Thank you.
Hello,
Thank you for your comment. That’s one of our main threads, “On the sensitive topic of being a Harry Potter fan while acknowledging JKR’s transphobia” https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/9633657, quoting https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainment/harry-potter-fans-jk-rowling-transphobia-essay-49214964
Still, there may be a way to enjoy Harry Potter as a trans person or ally. Over the years, many fans have found creative ways to engage with the series’s magic while also acknowledging its creator’s bigotry. In her paper “Transformative Readings: Harry Potter Fan Fiction, Trans/Queer Reader Response, and J. K. Rowling,” Jennifer Duggan, an associate professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway — says that it’s possible to interpret the text of Harry Potter itself in ways that would certainly horrify its writer. “My central thesis—one which has also been argued by other academics like Thomas Pugh and David Wallace — is that the Harry Potter novels are deeply queer,” she tells POPSUGAR. “I mean this in both senses of the term: they champion nonnormativity through the contrast of the ‘perfectly normal’ Dursleys and Harry, and they are, at their heart, a story about a boy with an ‘abnormality’ (as the Dursleys call his magic) who comes out of his cupboard under the stairs and discovers and finds and affinity for a hidden, colourful, queer world. I take this argument further to argue that the novels are easily read through a trans lens, since there is a focus in many of the books on shapeshifting, including several cross-gendered transformations.”
Fandom, she adds, can provide spaces where Harry Potter fans can explore the series’s queer undercurrents while celebrating their own sexualities. “From what I have observed, I have concluded that for the most part, the Harry Potter fandom continues to offer queer and trans fans a positive space,” she tells POPSUGAR. “The two main trends I have seen in fan works are an ‘answer hate with love’ reaction, in which fans focus on trans positivity, and so-called ‘spitefic,’ which are works that are framed as revenge on Rowling for the hurt she has caused. These works are usually trans-positive, too. That said, I fully understand why some fans feel they can no longer engage with the texts in any way.”
Link to the research paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10583-021-09446-9
Plot twist: jk is a selfhating queer and her subconsciousness wrote Harry Potter to break free without disappointing her self hating parents.
That’s an interesting theory. He literally comes out of a closet, after all.
This response doesn’t address the legislation aspect of the critique. It’s an excellent response for if she were already dead and gone, but what about the harm that comes from supporting her now? Surely you have something to say about that, don’t you?
Hello,
You can see some initiatives that take the books away from her, such as this one
A trans artist resells Harry Potter books with new covers that omit Rowling’s name. Canadian printmaker and book artist Laur Flom, who is trans, garnered major attention when they began a project of buying secondhand Harry Potter books and replacing the covers with redesigned versions that don’t have J.K. Rowling’s name. Flom then resells the books for £140, according to Yahoo! News. In a TikTok from February 2022, Flom said, “My aim with this project is to engage critically and give an option to people who do still want to enjoy Harry Potter without supporting J.K. Rowling.”
A link to the version from this person, they look quite nice: https://laurflom.format.com/harry-potter-rebind
You mentioned legislation, I think that is an interesting point. If the books (and the HP universe in general) are so detrimental, shouldn’t they be condemned by countries court for xenophobia and transphobia? It seems strange to me that there are still 2 major amusement parks Harry Potter themed in the US, and a third one in London if you count the former shooting set, with thousands of visitors every year. That just seems so strange compared to the accusations the books face.
Thank you for the reply, but I don’t see how that is relevant, you didn’t link to a queer fan fiction community.
Linking to a cis author who said that some fan fiction theoritcally helps some queer folk instead of listening to the trans community that is actively being hurt in substative ways by the celebration of Rowlings current work, not fan fictions, is sort of indicative of how much you actually care about this topic. Your link is filled promotion for her shows, art and discussion of Rowlings work. I’m sure you have been criticized before, but I feel like you are using an one-size-fits-all copy/paste as cover instead of actually engaging with what I, and the trans community, are saying.
I’m not going to argue, this isn’t how I wish to spend my time. All I can do is please ask you to stop and hope one day you will rethink what you’re doing.
The admin of the instance we host the community on is a queer Jewish man, who expressed his feeling about having that community on his instance in this comment: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/6746512
He is still okay with us having that community over there.
I don’t really engage in this community because of the discomfort Harry Potter generally brings me. I was honestly a bit relieved when it died.
The whole thing just upsets me honestly. Seeing the conflict is painful.
I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.
there’s a big difference between consuming public domain work made by awful people who no longer receive profit whilst consuming work by a woman who is actively engaging in political campaigns to make trans peoples lives worse with the profit she still receives.
Which makes it very different than Poe, Doyle or Seuess that were named in that thread. She is alive and well, and using her platform and fan base to produce more hateful texts. (Bad Blood)
The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism. His discomfort at the antisemitic tropes are entirely understandable, and while that is not something I am going to claim hurts me, it does seem to hurt Gabe.
As I said before, I’m not going to force you to do anything. Just please understand how you continued celebration of Rowling and her work is hurting others.
The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism.
That’s the first time I hear the treatment of Rita Skeeter is transphobic. James, Sirius and McGonagall are also able to shapeshift, and they are positive characters in the books.
For the house elves, the whole SPEW plot is designed to both make Ron (and the whole Wizard word as a whole) look stupid and bigoted, and Hermione a bit too self-righteous, as teenagers can be.
Relevant reference: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/122283/why-did-rowling-seemingly-make-light-of-the-house-elf-situation
I’ve seen several times that the fact that the society isn’t changed by the end of the last book as a critic, but do all work of fictions have to uphold their societies? Game of Thrones definitely isn’t becoming a democracy during the books, and Brigderton is as classist as it can be.
If this is the first time you have heard this criticism, then I think you should try to be more engaged with those discussions, I worry you have used that copy/paste citation of fanfiction as opposed to actual understanding why people are upset.
As I said before, I’m not super willing to go through every theme in the book I take Umbridge with (pun intended). I don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to go through point by point. Shaun has a wonderful video doing exactly that. But briefly, I have no reason to think Sketer is trans, but Rowling is well known to use physical insults for characters that are morally wrong, such as the Durselys being fat. Rowling uses the description “man hands” and allusions to her dressing like a Drag queen, and changes her body to spy on children, a theme she follows up in her openly transphobic book Bad Blood. This also goes hand in hand with Rowlings racist naming convention, Cho Chang and Kingsley Shacklebolt just off the top of my head. Similar to the way Goblins are clearly using anti-sementic banker tropes. And finally while I agree that there are positive shapeshift characters in the books, but the concept itself is very clearly an allegory for HIV/AIDS with their transmission fears.
Game of Thrones definitely isn’t becoming a democracy during the books
Game of Thrones isn’t about bringing democracy to westoros, thats not a theme at all, historical realism IS a major theme so democracy would be entirely out of place. Plus an extremely mature book aimed at mature audiences. Conversely, Harry Potter is a book aimed at children ostensibly about defeating racists that use slurs like “mudblood” who want to enslave muggles. Which makes it odd that Harry himself keeps his house elf slave because the slave “enjoys it”, which was another major criticism of slavery abolition. The reasons cited in the book for why racism is wrong is that “some of those mudbloods turned out to be great wizards just like Hermonine” as opposed to “its wrong to subjacate anyone based on bloodline”, Harry and Hagrid only talk about how useful those subjugated people could be to the general population, not the intrinsic rights that humans deserve.
But that is me trying to be brief, and not at all what I wanted to talk about anyways. I do not want to discuss the text any further. You can read whatever you like and from the start I said I would never try to take it away from anyone even if I personally find it hateful. What I am asking is to stop promoting the works of bigot who is doing materal harm to peoples lives. I can’t and work control your actions, I am just please asking you to be more critical of the author your community is celebrating. Its easy enough to say you disagree with her, but actions speak louder than words. And instead of citing papers about the health of fanfiction, perhaps actually listen to the trans community when they talk about the harm they have suffered from her actions and propaganda.
I will take your word that Gabe has allowed the community, cleary it still exists. But by his own words he appears openly uncomfortable with it. Of course, the views of one person who literally said they don’t want to speak on the behalf of the trans community should not weigh to heavily on this topic anyways. It feels gaslighting to cite him and the paper as reasons why the trans community is wrong about HP, instead of actually listening to harm.
TL:DR, this whole interaction is longer than I wanted it to be, I kept my original comment succulent in politely asking you to reconsider. I may not reply again for my own mental health, but let me simply say you are of course entitled to do as you wish. Just please put more effort in to understanding why people want you to stop.
I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.
I reached out to him in private, I wasn’t going to copy our conversation as it is private.
I was very ready to move that community elsewhere, and I refrained from posting for a week before getting Gabe’s approval.
