As I said, a friend is reading Harry Potter for the first ever time

[conuly]

and it's making me have thoughts about that series again.

Lots of varied ones, most of which aren't worth delving into, but there is one question I'd like to see answered.

As we all know, Wizarding England is obsessed with two things: blood status* and Hogwarts House affiliation. I know, in school stories everything is a Big Deal and SO Important, but to carry over that attitude into adulthood, and late adulthood - well, that's something else.

Ever think that the muggleborns at Hogwarts get together and talk about the fact that wizards are super juvenile on this point? Like, they go to the mutual self-help society (because nobody else is helping them figure out the unwritten social rules of Wizards, such as they might be), pass around the popcorn, and start in on "Seriously, the gamekeeper was glaring at the first year Slytherins and declaring that they're all going to be evil. How would he even know that if it's true?" and "I heard two teachers arguing, and they kept calling each other house names. Geez, get over it, you're ancient!" or "My dormmate got a nasty letter from his parents because of where the Hat put him. That's crazy, right?"

* No, the good guys are manifestly not off the hook. The Weasleys have a cousin they don't even talk about because he's an accountant. Maybe if they talked to him, they'd find a way to manage their finances better. Maybe if all the wizards talked to accountants they wouldn't have to rely on Gringotts bank, and boy did I whoosh past that nasty little bit of stereotyping the first time around. Just didn't have the knowledge to grasp the context. Back to the Weasleys, that's there. That's right in the first book - "everybody knows we need muggleborn wizards or we'd die out, only bad sorts hate muggles, well, we do have a cousin we don't talk about because he's an accountant". It's there, and nobody ever calls Ron out on it! Not even the narration! It just sits there like a candy covered turd in a bag of M&Ms. Also, JKR, what's your deal with accountants? Is this an early sign of her well-documented phobia of math? (Maths.)

Comments

[brokenallbroken]

For a society obsessed with blood status, it doesn't seem to take many generations to be considered a pure blood. As far as I've ever been able to tell, it's either two magic parents, regardless of extraction, or four magical grandparents. Considering the IRL blood-obsessed societies such as the Nazis or the American South were counting back 7 generations (for Jewish ancestry) and had and applied words like "octoroons" (someone who was 1/8th Black), counting only back grandparents is very forgiving.

The Weasleys are in their own way as bad and any other pure bloods. Sure they say Muggles are alright, but they don't see them as people. Not just the Squib accountant cousin, but Mr. Weasley is totally fine with the campground owners being Oblivated every five minutes even though it clearly affects their cognition (GoF), and of course all the abuses he and the twins heap on the Dursleys. And when he praises Muggle ingenuity, Mr. Weasley sounds more like he's talking about a child that has surprised him with their cleverness than equals capable of thinking for themselves. The way Molly talks about Muggles the first time we see her on PLatform 9 3/4? Yikes.

The more JKR talks on Twitter, the more certain I am she thinks the Weasleys really do like and respect Muggles, not that she was intentionally painting a nuanced portrait of how prejudice manifests among the "woke".

I guess if there's only one high school in the country it takes on an outsized importance later in life than it would if everyone went to university and possibly moved somewhere else. Adult Wizarding Britain is just a continuation of Hogwarts because there is nothing else to influence the culture or pressure it to change.

[conuly]

1. Yes, but here I think we're bumping up into math again. We're expecting the same woman who can't multiply 40 by 7 and get a number more accurate than "about a thousand" to handle fractions into the 8ths.

2. Oh, god, the campground owners. Okay, obviously the Wizengamot could not have predicted that some rogue Death Eaters were gonna stage a drunken afterparty of their own. But they certainly could have predicted that Wizards are shit at pretending to be Muggle! Instead of a bajillion obliviations - which no doubt got worse in quality as the wizards got more and more fatigued and bored with the job - why not one very carefully targeted bit of mind control before the World Cup - say, something convincing the campground owner that he really should take this all-expenses paid vacation he won and leave the campground in the hands of this helpful young couple that just showed up needing some temporary work and housing. (That couple could be played by some young first generation wizards, who presumably could act like convincing Muggles, or by squibs or other relatives of wizards.) The vacation to wherever would be a hell of a lot cheaper than paying people to keep wiping this family's memories! A little bit of planning could've saved a world of trouble. At the very least they could've convinced him he was hosting some sort of fan event or something that required funny costumes and bad fake accents. Then he wouldn't've been so weirded out by all the reservations and would have had a convenient answer for all this besides "magic". (Not that this is anybody's first response, but still.)

3. I think that "Hogwarts is the only wizarding school in Britain" is one of the things we just have to toss out. The only in-canon evidence for this is Hagrid saying it (Hagrid also says all dark wizards come from Slytherin, and he knows that's not true, he has deep personal awareness that it's not true), Ron vaguely saying that he knew other schools existed somewhere maybe, and Hermione stating there are three wizarding schools in England. But one school of 300 students, or even 1000-ish students, does not provide the wizarding world with enough of a population to support the complex infrastructure we know it has. No, I think we have to assume that this is somewhat hyperbolic, that Hogwarts is the best or most prestigious school in Britain, that the three schools in Europe are in fact simply the three oldest and most respected schools in Europe, that Hagrid and Ron are a bit dim, and that JKR threw up her hands at this tricky bit of worldbuilding and said "oh dear, maths". (I shouldn't snark, I think there's a good chance that her unwillingness to even attempt simple arithmetic is connected to an actual disability, but it's easy to snark sometimes.)

4. The writing in these books is a lot better if you assume JKR does in fact know how it looks and did that on purpose. I mean, I agree that she mostly doesn't and didn't, but still.

[conuly]

2a. Also, I maintain that Draco was, in his conflicted and plausibly deniable way, attempting to give the trio some useful advice so his classmates, especially including Granger, would not be injured at the hands of his father or anybody else, at least not until the end of the school year. He didn't have to remind his hotheaded "buddies" that people who were spinning muggle children in the air would hardly scruple not to harm muggleborn students at Hogwarts.

But then, I've always had a soft spot for woobie, conflicted, marginally more self-aware than he seems Draco.

[(Anonymous)]

Ever think that the muggleborns at Hogwarts get together and talk about the fact that wizards are super juvenile on this point?

Hahaha, next thing you'll be saying is that MIT dorms and Harvard houses don't matter. /anon because I don't want to admit to knowing this (and also still believing it!)

[conuly]

Which do you still believe, that they do or that they don't?

[landofnowhere]

Harvard house assignments have been randomized since the mid '90s, so the primary difference is convenience to campus/athletic facilities/other dorms (and also I heard that the houses that once housed Slytherins still have larger social budgets due to alumni donations). There are some house stereotypes that have at least a bit of validity, but much less than they used to, though I'm sure some students are still immature and make too big a deal of them.

MIT dorms have much larger cultural differences, because there's much more self-selection.

[mindstalk]

Caltech has 800-900 undergrads, 7 (now 8) Houses, and if you get a bunch of alumni together "what House were you in?" will probably be the first question, and we can easily completely hijack a group conversation by talking about Caltech. I've seen it happen, with the non-Techers looking like "wtf just happened?"

It doesn't govern our whole life but if we lived in a small society where *everyone* went to Tech, it might.

Hogwarts gets the kids younger and longer, so it's even more formative.

[ayebydan]

1000000% this and everything in the comments too. Boarding school cliches to the hilt was Potter.

[pensnest]

And, boarding school clichés from someone who never went to boarding school. JR Rowling probably read the same 'School' books that I did (all of which could be subtitled, Girls have adventures at boarding school), and the first couple of Harry Potter books are definitely in the same vein.

But I actually went to boarding school, and Hogwarts is *horrifying*! There isn't a set quiet time for doing homework, there's no apparent organisation for everyday things (maybe sheets are changed by magic, I suppose) and children are allowed to wander about without anybody in authority having a clue where they are, even though the environs are full of danger—a lake! a sinister forest! a tree that actually attacks people! It really wouldn't have taken a lot of thought to include some simple, logical daily routines, and would have made Hogwarts a more believable place.

I think, though, that JKR got the idea for the first HP book and just wrote it, grabbing for a convenient magical something wherever one was needed. It totally feels like a 'School' book, and reality isn't a necessary feature of those.

When she started getting into Bigger Stuff, though, she really needed to figure out how this world worked. It's a bit like the Star Trek universe, you can make it work if you want to, but don't let a smidgin of logic in if you want to work in that universe.

[schneefink]

Yes, all of that. I'm planning to reread several HP books soon for a fic I want to write, but I'm worried that all the huge worldbuilding holes will bother me much more on a reread.

[conuly]

Only one way to find out!

[hilarita]

One of the reasons you might still obsess over your school as an adult is precisely because it's a boarding school. I was only ever a weekly boarder, but I spent time at schools where pupils spent more than half the year there, and it's very different. For months at a time, your parents are only accessible by letter (or ten minutes on the phone - obviously this was before mobiles were prevalent). Your school is very literally in loco parentis - and the school is providing most of your formative experiences - your lessons, your activities. In the holidays, maybe you get to go abroad and see some museums, play some quidditch, and hope that you see someone your own age, because all your mates are hundreds of miles away, unless you happen to live in a wizarding community. It's not at all surprising that you imprint on the school, because you don't have much else.

[conuly]

Do you think that 25% of your classmates were evil with no hope of growth after school?

[chelseagirl]

That's weird, since it's later established that Ron's father is fascinated by Muggle technology. Perhaps she dropped the line before she realized she was going that way? (I have not reread the books in quite a long time, so I don't recall the order in which many of the things happen.)

[conuly]

Fascinated in an extremely patronizing way. And you'll note he keeps his stuff out in the shed.

[(Anonymous)]

Gringotts is pretty blatant anti-semitism to my grown up eyes :(

[conuly]

I see it now, was a bit more ignorant as a child.

[sabotabby]

Haha, good points.

The "1/4 of the child population is destined to become evil" is, to me, one of the worst things about the series, even with fannish revisionism about Slytherins. The thing is, I can see it working in two ways. One is an overt acknowledgment of how fucked up Wizarding society is and a real commitment to change at the end (and at least some Slytherin characters who consciously fight against their stereotype). The other is a parallel to the theory that 20-30% of the population is fascist no matter what, and Wizarding England is trying to rein in and redirect that evil.

But she doesn't go there.

The Gringotts stuff is absolutely vile.

[conuly]

The fact that Albus Severus* is worrying so much about it in the epilogue is proof that that charming bit of toxicity is still alive and well, even if Harry reassures him.

And yes, argh, Gringotts.

* That name alone ought to be justification for a child services call.

[silveradept]

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a campaign among non-Blood wizards to replace the Wizengamot with a Westminster style parliament, where all the blue bloods can still be Lords, but otherwise be ceremonial, and the ones actually interested in change can run for Commons and get themselves elected. If they did it well enough, they might even do it without having to be loud about it.

Then again, I also believe that the prejudice against not-Blood wizards persists even after school, because it's still present in school, so there would be motivation to rip out the current system of government and replace it with something better.

[captainsblog]

On the Wizard/Muggle Relations issue:

What's with letting their star pupil live with relatives who mistreat him that badly and cage him in a cupboard under the stairs for ten years? You'd think WCPS could come up with a spell to turn Vernon into something less of a shit.

[movingfinger]

It's almost like they wanted him to come out hating Muggles, isn't it?

[cynthia1960]

My disbelief kicks in when I think that there has to be no way in hell that wizards can live so completely apart from Muggles. I thought that way back when, and even more now.

[movingfinger]

I was thinking about this just the other day, in terms of "overlaid landscape" fantasies. China Mieville's The City & the City is the most obvious and notable example, but I'm sure there are others---in which two cultures or landscapes are superimposed, one being unaware of the other, or mutually inaccessible, or similarly separated. It's different from the "hidden landscape" or magical landscape situation with portals or magical places everyone can see but not obviously magical. It shows up in fairy legends, a little.

Given how interlaced Rowling's wizarding world is with the ordinary world, the snobbish ignorance of wizards seems (in a Watsonian view) intentional.

[cynthia1960]

The Pottermore Sorting hat has me in Hufflepuff and my wife in Slytherin. She's not evil. OMG, I just had a flashback to Monty Python and the Holy Grail when I think about the Sorting Hat and the Slytherins=evil equation.


King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king.
Dennis: [interrupting] Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.


Some tatty old headgear babbling is no basis for tagging a quarter of the wizarding population evil.

[conuly]

You are not the only person to have made that connection between the quote and this book.

[peristaltor]

Oh, and another thing to add: What's up with Hufflepuff?

Seriously, the Slytherins are evil. That's a thing. But Hufflepuff? "You will never find a better friend in…?" That's it?!

Have you read/heard Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? Several of these holes get spackeled up, even polished to look reasonable. I'm told it's the only alternate Potter series to get the official thumbs up from Rowling.

[conuly]

Also they're unafraid of toil etc.

[nostalgia]

I'm only halfway through the first book so it's still twee for me. But the adults-fixated-on-school thing fits with what I know about people who went to private/boarding schools. "the old school tie" and nepotism/cronyism and all that. Which is not a good look on anyone but it doesn't strike me as implausible. As far as I can tell so far (I'm reading it in Spanish, so some of the details miss me) the only thing Hogwarts cares about is Hogwarts. They're all destined for a life where they either work at Hogwarts or do... actually I don't yet know what wizards do after they leave the school. Do they go to Magic University? Do they go to a normal university and learn to read and add up?

[conuly]

The ministry. Almost everybody who doesn't work at Hogwarts, or run a private shop, seems to work at the incredibly packed Ministry.

I wonder if I should direct you to this other person. They've been posting under lock, maybe I'll point them your way instead.

[greghousesgf]

don't call me muggle, honky

[peristaltor]

Oh, and while I'm showing how old I am, may I ask what the term "super juvenile" means specifically? Is that a thing, to call something you don't agree with or completely understand that?

[conuly]

...well, I suppose it's a little childish itself, but I'm sure we've been calling particularly inappropriate behavior variations on "babyish" since we all were in kindy ourselves.