Harry Potter and the Biased Misinterpretation of Fiction

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Posting here instead of the writing forum because I think anything regarding Rowling may be controversial.

Today, I saw a Facebook discussion of whether or not the Harry Potter fictional universe can move forward separated from Rowling and her views. One person who said it can't do that synopsized the original series like this:

"A rich jock becomes a cop."

If this were simply about Rowling's real-life views on trans issues, I wouldn't even comment on it. It's when they attempt to pull the fiction into it that I become interested. What fascinates me about this synopsis is that it's technically true in some sense, but it's so stripped of nuance and subtlety that it might as well be false. If this is how this person interprets fiction that's meant to be understood by children, in my view, it reflects badly on how they interpret real life, which is much more complex and confusing.

Let's look at this statement.

"Rich."

Harry is raised in a middle-class household, but is denied anything except the basic necessities. Essentially, he grows up poor. At age 11, he discovers that his parents, who were murdered by a wizard fascist, left him a decent-sized inheritance. This is allows him to, for example, splurge on candy for himself and his new wizard friend on the train to wizard school. You know, escapist fun in a fantasy novel. However, Harry quickly realizes that if he buys everything that catches his eye, he will soon run out of money. This is in contrast to his rival Draco Malfoy, who is so rich, he never has to worry about money. But some readers tend to pass right by that kind of character and decide the protagonist is automatically the one who represents wealth and privilege. I've seen discussions of "Rent" where they did the same thing with Benny, the landlord who married into money, deciding instead that the penniless filmmaker Mark represented wealth and privilege.

"Jock."

Harry enjoys sports -- I personally don't, but many other people do. He is the star player on his school team. This is because Rowling designed a sport where the skinny, wimpy kid who would typically get picked last for sports gets to be the star player. You know, escapist fun in a fantasy novel. The comment-writer seems to be implying that Harry embodies the "jock bully" archetype in fiction and this isn't true. In fact, Harry gets his position on the Quidditch team as an inadvertent result of defending another student from a bully. Also, grown-up Harry's wife is the professional athlete. So it might be more accurate to say, "Harry Potter is a jock's husband."

"Cop."

Grown-up Harry's career is technically in magical law enforcement. However, the job of an auror is, specifically, to fight dark wizards. Every dark wizard we see in the books is depicted as a fascist. So essentially, Harry Potter is a professional anti-fascist. I've seen it stated that characters who favor reform in the Wizarding World, like Dumbledore and Arthur Weasley "just want a nicer version of the Status Quo." So I think any happy ending other than "Harry Potter grew up to burn the existing system to the ground and replace it with the system I would prefer" isn't considered acceptable by people who think this way. What surprises me is not even that they would prefer that kind of ending, but that they expect it from a work of mainstream, commercial fiction and seem confused and frustrated when it doesn't give them that.

I probably just shouldn't care what these random people think about a book series I read a long time ago. Twisted logic just continues to be a curiosity to me, especially when it's applied to fiction.

Last edited by vividgroovy on 12 Sep 2023, 9:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It could continue in theory. Should it? No! The storyline was pretty thin to begin with. I think the author has already milked it for all its worth and then some. Its time to move on.

I mostly agree. I feel like they built up the threat of Voldemort very nice and slowly, establishing a universe we liked and wanted to see saved and then they paid it off in the end. If there were more stories in that universe, I'd want to see something different, like, new characters facing a different sort of threat. However, first we got the sequel play "Cursed Child," where they tried to say Voldemort could return again (at that point, I'd just give up trying to stop him) and then the "Fantastic Beasts" movies, which immediately jumped into the threat of Grindelwald, a.k.a. Prequel Voldemort.

The article was about continuing the story in fanfiction instead of things that Rowling personally had a hand in. What inspired me to write the post was nothing to do with that, but rather, how people in the comments misinterpreted the original books to fit with their current views on Rowling.

Even though Rowling said some controversial things about trans women and so many former fans want to boycott the Harry Potter franchise as a result, it's rather pointless in boycotting Harry Potter because Rowling has already gotten rich off the franchise that it wouldn't even have an effect on her wealth. The only people these boycotts hurt are people who work tirelessly bringing adaptations to life or making new stories based on the franchise.

In regards to Cursed Child - I thought that it had potential. However, I don't think that it works in the world of Harry Potter. Cursed Child came across as a choppy, action-based wannabe science fiction story with fleeting offbeat humour. It strays a lot from the established world. Breaks rules that it shouldn't. Whereas, Harry Potter is a slowly built-up mystery series with fantasy elements. I found the difference in pacing to be a bit jarring. Cursed Child felt as though it wanted to be its own stand alone story in its own world.

This may be a bit mean, however, it felt like an early draft. I think there's a decent story in there, it just needs to be refined. The older characters were out of character. I understand that there's a time-skip and that personalities and dynamics are going to have developed since the main series. With that said, Harry and Hermione seem off. Especially Harry, he came across as a bit of a jerk and that the only reason for this was to further the plot. He also acted as if he knew his parents more than he actually did.

The writers didn't seem to understand what made the series work and wanted to make an entirely different story. A shame really since the idea of a Slytherin protagonist is interesting. To have a character who is definitely a Slytherin without any after-the-fact backtracking of 'I regret putting this character in Slytherin'. A character who uses their cunning shrewdness to trick villains. One who is ambitious perhaps to the point of stubbornness.

Hogwarts Legacy Spoiler in coming...

(Bold mine.) This is a good description of what a Slytherin protagonist could be like. Albus Potter is the polar opposite of that. Not only does he have no ambitions, he doesn't even seem to have any interests or hobbies. His only traits are "hates being Harry Potter's son" and "likes Scorpius." The playwrights seem to like the idea that Harry's son being a Slytherin subverts expectations, but lack any interest in exploring why being a Slytherin is important to him, or what it means to be a Slytherin in a Post-Voldemort world. I can imagine a version where the Slytherins are trying to reinvent themselves and Albus is unsure whether they genuinely like him or are just trying to use "Harry Potter's son" to change their image.

Voldemort's relationship with the Slytherins is interesting. Their ambition makes them susceptible to his manipulation, but neither he nor the Slytherins are really loyal to each other in the end. When Voldemort returns, he chastises his followers for behaving with Slytherin-like selfishness and abandoning him, preferring his more loyal, cultish followers like Bellatrix Lestrange. In the end, Voldemort is undone by Slytherin characters like Snape and Narcissa Malfoy who put their "selfish" love over supporting his "cause."

None of this is addressed in the play.

Going back to the topic of the thread, I think the playwrights also rewrote the original stories in their minds with a strange bias towards Snape. Their alternate timelines take the "good" characters and try to show that if circumstances were altered, they would have wound up just like Snape. Like, unrequited love would turn Hermione into a bitter schoolteacher, or embarrassment would turn Cedric Diggory into a wizard Nazi. The problem is that that doesn't fit with those characters at all. And then you have the "Voldemort won" timeline, where Snape is somehow still alive and a resistance hero.

But I guess I'll marginally take a bias towards a fictional character over people re-writing the entire story to fit their real-world politics.



I'm extremely skeptical of the "vote with your wallets" concept. Especially in this case, with the idea that Rowling's ability to share her anti-trans views rests entirely on whether or not you decide to buy a Harry Potter keychain today. Even if they somehow managed to make Rowling lose all her money, she would still be the celebrity author of one of the most popular book series of all time.

It's all a ripoff, anyway:

I see quite a lot of bad Harry Potter takes these days, I agree. And it's one of the few works that enough people have the familiarity with for these discussions to take place. But I've repeatedly heard people assert that the goblins are antisemitic caricatures for example, which is just dumb, or that Kingsley Shacklebolt's name is a reference to chattel slavery - just dumb takes. Then you get people who completely miss the Christian imagery

I think "rich jock becomes a cop" is supposed to be pithy rather than a serious analysis, but you're right that it doesn't really work.

Agree with the general "everything since Deathly Hallows has been rubbish" consensus.

...This is making me want to write fanfiction.

I love this pithy synopsis from an old TV listing:

"Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again."

And the movie is "The Wizard of Oz."

The thing is, I never thought the guy who wrote that had it out for L. Frank Baum and wanted to prove everything he wrote was secretly evil. I think it was just meant to be funny.

With the bad takes on "Harry Potter," I don't believe any of those either, but the thing that gets me is that these people don't say, "Gee, it's ironic that Rowling wrote a book series that's overtly pro-inclusion from start to finish and then put that stuff in there," they tend to say, "Well, of course Rowling put that in there! Every word she ever wrote is in favor of bigotry, hatred and bullying, because she's evil!"

If we want to continue the story but we don't want him to be a jock or become a cop, I move we make Harry Potter and the methods of Rationality the new canon.

Very nice.

And Star Wars was inspired mostly by Frank Herbert's Dune btw.

Never read the books, but I wish they ever made a spinoff movie on Hermione's S.P.E.W movement and the House elves.

Both Star Wars and Harry Potter simply follow Joseph Campbell's theory of the universal "heroe's quest" in mythology.

Star Wars did so consciously (actually studied Campbell's theory). Ms. Rowling in Harry Potter (like just like Tolkien, Homer, and every other story teller since the creators of Gilgamesh) probably did so unconsciously.

It's just the Hero's Journey, all stories are Star Wars, some stories just do a better job of hiding it (JKR is not exactly known for her subtlety).

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy is a great example of a Hero's Journey that doesn't feel like a Star Wars knockoff, partially because it predates Star Wars, but also because it was written by a legitimate author; Tolkien wrote literature, not pulpy genre-fiction. However I would say that Tolkien and Rowling both have the similar problem where the bad guys in the story feel like a proxy for the author's own unexamined racial prejudices.

I can get where you're coming from with Tolkien's depiction of the orcs. Not sure about Rowling though, unless her unexamined prejudice is against the French. Maybe you're talking about... the giants? I guess I could see that, although they're hardly major antagonists. I dunno?