Slavery in Harry Potter

[uncledark]

Over on FaceBook, leswamp posted, "One of the most interesting things about facebook is the posts that garner huge reactions and the ones that don't. IME any post that mentions Harry Potter or religion or the civil war is a sure fire billion comments. I know! What side would Harry Potter take on the civil war and does Wizard count as a religion

Comments

[treecat]

this was a bothersome part of the series, but I hadn't worked out quite why.

[uncledark]

Like so many other things in the setting, the slavery issue was tossed in as an interesting setting aspect and plot point, with very little (if any) thought given to the implications, before or after inclusion. This often leads to bemusement on the part of the thinking reader, of one kind or another.

[uncledark]

See also.

[broken_anchor]

I'm not sure whether to thank you or not since I have now been absorbed by the black hole that is tv tropes. ;p

[synteis]

Really interesting essay and also thank you for that laugh.

[uncledark]

You're quite welcome.

[belledejavu]

Yeah, overall it's ambivalent at best. And yeah, agree that it's baseline small-c conservative in a sort of C.S. Lewis way.

[belledejavu]

There is the sort of handwave that the elves "like it," the slavery, that is, but it's not really clear how much of that is a genuine sort of consensual thing and how much is ah internalized oppression, let's say. Mostly you get the sense that the author didn't really want to go too deeply into the really icky implications because, well, *awkward.*

there's also the Goblin War thing; for a while it's sort of interesting because yeah, you do get a sense that the wizards have been seriously engaging in revisionist history for their own ends, but on the other hand: the goblin's a nasty piece of work, and the sword shows up of its own accord to meet the needs of the true Gryffindor anyway, which seems to finally answer the question of whom it belongs to.