As a nine year old I thought the Death Eaters were meant to be like the Nazis, but I guess Rowling is so dumb she didn’t make the connection until after she wrote them?
Don’t the “good guys” in Harry Potter sort you into a life-defining group based on apparently innate qualities they determine by measuring your head?
most of the “good guys” have house elves, a species bred to be slaves. (but its no problem see they like being slaves)
im surprised it took us this long to notice the writer’s, uh, tendencies…
most people only saw the movies where the screenwriters were smart enough to tone down some of this shit.
Well, just to try and be a bit fair (Rowling and HP both suck a lot, we can dunk on them entirely fairly) the sorting is explicitly quite arbitrary. Harry was told by the sorting hat that he’d be well suited to the nazi bad guy house, but he said he didn’t like that idea so it stuck him in the good guy main character house instead. And it’s not really life-defining as far as I remember, once you’re out of school you can identify with it or ignore it as much as you want, it doesn’t really follow you in any way on its own
Ironically Harry is so inert and cares so little about anything besides sports and defending the status quo that the hat was probably right in saying he’d make a good fascist. His only thoughts about endemic slavery are “I wish my nerd friend would stop being so annoying about all the slaves” and in book 2 he is preoccupied, not with the possibility that his ability to talk to snakes is an indicator that he’s made bad decisions/might be doing something wrong, but that people are being rude to him because he appears to be a fascist.
it’s like the political version of easily figuring out the author’s thinly veiled fetish.
doesn’t really follow you in any way on its own
Except that all the members in the Hitler youth house ended up joining the wizard SS
It’s still weird that there’s a house where pretty much everyone who joins it turns evil, yet the school doesn’t ban them? Seriously, Snape is the only Slytherin who is arguably good but even he only did the right thing for incel reasons.
Snape feels like this stand-in for authority Rowling does not like/ does not want the reader to like, or a cheap plot device to trick readers into accepting Harry’s lack of development. Two things that come to mind:
Philospher’s Stone: After Harry stopped Voldemort from getting the stone he is asking Dumbledore in the infirmary what happened after losing consciousness. Harry asks about the red herrings and Snape’s demeanor that suggest Snape was the true culprit. Instead of something reasonable like “Snape protected you because he is a teacher, it’s his job and there’s a huge difference between being nasty to discourage bad behaviour and wanting to harm you” Dumbledore says that Snape resents Harry’s father and that he helped Harry because he owes something to his father or something like that. Harry thus walks away without having to reexamine his own behaviour.
Prisoner of Azkaban: When Harry sneaked out when he was not allowed to Snape catches Harry and starts interrogating him. The scene felt like we were supposed to see Snape as obstructive and not Harry as being irresponsible for sneaking out to places where he should not be when there is a (alleged) killer that wants him dead on the lose.
Note that these were all in the first few books, way before the incel stuff got introduced.
I remember reading the first book as a kid and being vaguely upset at the idea I could be segregated from my friends because of personality traits and shit
Its an elite invite-only boarding school, so you’re unlikely to know anybody when you arrive. But also, it tends to clump people together by family cough bloodline cough and common interests, so the theory is you’ll make friends more quickly when you’re coughWEAZEcough segregated into like-minded groups gaspGAGchoke fuck me its really bad the more I think about it, isn’t it?
A bit more seriously, its not crazy unusual for schools and unis to organize people into fraternities and clubs and houses and other social units early on in your college career. Then you tend to just end up with these people as your friends by virtue of proximity. By applying a certain degree of blind randomness, or by sorting via interest and passion rather than letting people congeal based on their own historical biases, you get a better mix of students than you would if everyone just clumped by who they knew or thought they’d like.
The system doesn’t have to be modern phrenology.
From what I vaguely remember about the movie, it doesn’t really measure their head but more just reads their mind. Ostensibly it’s basically a personality test, but I think Harry pretty much told it what house to put him in.
2004
how many gay people and communists did asimov snitch on to the government?
I’ve actually read Homage to Catalonia, so the same number as Orwell. Zero.
Le Guin is the goat. My favorite author. Terry Pratchett too, but Le Guin’s the goat.
These two are people I read and realize I barely know English. Like their command of the language is so good I wish I could do anything with such skill as they write.
I also get that impression from Le Guin’s work. I wish I’d found her as a child. I remember that the only author I ever read who struck me that way as a kid was Tolkien. I recently read The Left Hand of Darkness and I was like “oh yeah, this is what it felt like to be sitting under my covers 2 hours past my bed time struggling to appreciate the work of a master of the English language”
Like the school houses, people mistake “pure-blood”, “half-blood”, and “muggle-born” as being original creations of Rowling despite being typical parts of British boarding school culture.
Me in 2024 learning what Germany was up to in the 30s and 40s
“They did WHAT”
edit: dang apparently from hexbear view images like this don’t display, this is an outrage
It’s because of the instance, some users from foreign instances trolled Hexbear by posting porn sometimes ago so they had to block that
I suspect she’s trying to make herself seem better by coincidentally opposing Nazi ideology without even knowing about it. “I’m such a good person my book’s villains were Nazis before I even knew what they were!”
🤡
