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conulyClicky.
There's a book from childhood that recently popped back into my mind, Pick-Up Sticks. A middle school girl is tired of living with her artist mother and their own personal housing crisis, paying for her orthodontia with custom-made stained glass, and so she goes to live with her well-off uncle.
Her uncle is awful - ableist, classist, the "nice" kind of racist who won't actually use a slur but definitely thinks it, and he's also a bad father. Probably doesn't think he is, since he's technically present when he's not at work, but he is.
And eventually our protagonist realizes this and goes back to her mom and the fight to keep their building from going condo, but I gotta say - her uncle didn't make any complaints about taking her in, didn't give her some huge chore list or set of restrictions, I think he even gave her an allowance, and he doesn't pat himself on the back for it either. He's a bad father, but he's not physically neglectful or actually abusive in any way, he's just absent. None of this absolves him from being generally terrible, but it's not nothing.
I had that same uncomfortable realization when nostalgia-watching The Color of Friendship, which is very very loosely based on a real story. Sure, the apartheid South African government is evil, and has been heavy-handed and intrusive for the entire movie - but at the end, when they come to fetch her and send her home? That's actually perfectly reasonable, for all the script plays it up like OMG EVEN MORE EVIL. There's demonstrations against South Africa all over the world (quite rightly) and it makes sense to recall your unaccompanied minors and send them home to their parents, especially if those parents are in any way connected to your (evil) government.
(I wouldn't go quite so far as to say "At least the Dursleys don't own any house elves", though.)
There's a book from childhood that recently popped back into my mind, Pick-Up Sticks. A middle school girl is tired of living with her artist mother and their own personal housing crisis, paying for her orthodontia with custom-made stained glass, and so she goes to live with her well-off uncle.
Her uncle is awful - ableist, classist, the "nice" kind of racist who won't actually use a slur but definitely thinks it, and he's also a bad father. Probably doesn't think he is, since he's technically present when he's not at work, but he is.
And eventually our protagonist realizes this and goes back to her mom and the fight to keep their building from going condo, but I gotta say - her uncle didn't make any complaints about taking her in, didn't give her some huge chore list or set of restrictions, I think he even gave her an allowance, and he doesn't pat himself on the back for it either. He's a bad father, but he's not physically neglectful or actually abusive in any way, he's just absent. None of this absolves him from being generally terrible, but it's not nothing.
I had that same uncomfortable realization when nostalgia-watching The Color of Friendship, which is very very loosely based on a real story. Sure, the apartheid South African government is evil, and has been heavy-handed and intrusive for the entire movie - but at the end, when they come to fetch her and send her home? That's actually perfectly reasonable, for all the script plays it up like OMG EVEN MORE EVIL. There's demonstrations against South Africa all over the world (quite rightly) and it makes sense to recall your unaccompanied minors and send them home to their parents, especially if those parents are in any way connected to your (evil) government.
(I wouldn't go quite so far as to say "At least the Dursleys don't own any house elves", though.)
