I always read the Wizarding attitude to Muggles as being a direct commentary on class rather than an indirect one on race. Specifically, the English Public (ie private) School attitude to everyone outside that world.
"Muggle-raised" Harry is the talented outsider kid who got there on a scholarship, looked down upon because he doesn't really belong.
This is so very insightful. While I do admit that I'm only nineteen and thus don't pretend to have educated or informed opinions on everything, but I've been very frustrated with the new series nonetheless on a surface level, as a huge Potterhead who unashamedly also writes reams of fanfiction. Before reading this essay, all I'd seen with the Snape issue was the way that James would eventually be portrayed, out of necessity by the context, as bigoted. I didn't see the deeper themes you pointed out! I've also found issue with the casting of the student body as a whole; especially having watched "Am I Racist" a few years ago, I've definitely noticed the prioritization of inclusion over accuracy. It's hard to feel "allowed" to comment, knowing that many would say it's just my "whiteness" speaking, but the diversity shown in the TV series just wasn't there in the UK in the 90s! (There's my little rant, unnecessary but provoked by this amazing piece. Very much enjoyed and will think on this more.)
I would have thought it would be much more interesting to make the malfoys black - have a clear delineation that our silly precept of Muggle race have no impact on the wizerding world and they in fact care much more about bloodlines of magic then racial purity.
You could have still made an interesting commentary and critique on bigotry, and in more nuanced way then James actively linching Snape.
I had no idea a new Pens & Poison piece was coming out today but then I remembered you did mention new essays would be coming weekly, Liza and what a treat this one is! You absolutely nailed it with what’s wrong with this God awful Harry Potter series! Hollywood used to be a hit film making factory now they are a shell of their former selves. The new HBO Harry Potter series is Exhibit A as to why. They mess up all the characters and get them completely wrong, miscast several roles, get the tone wrong, and replace universals with particulars to push partisan political and identity politics messages.
None of these people have clearly read a Harry Potter book or watched a Harry Potter movie in their lives. They have no idea why the original series was such a massive hit. Not because it was some nihilistic, cynical garbage that preached at us about about abortion, immigration, gun control, racism, or homophobia. That’s for darn sure! It was a whimsical fun story about three Wizard kids who went on an adventure, fought evil and learned about life. It had timeless themes we all can relate to and understand. Like good vs. evil, the hunger for power, greed, the death of a parent, child abuse, bullying, friendship, growing up, trusting in yourself, self-doubt, love, being yourself no matter what anyone thinks, standing up to hate, fighting for a cause bigger than one’s self, authoritarianism, being courageous, doing the right thing despite it not being easy, death and grief, and many more.
None of that is here at all. A black Snape is also nonsense. First off, the character in the book is white, respect the source material! Second, anti-black racism has nothing to do with the Harry Potter story and shouldn’t be inserted into it. We don’t need BLM race grifting in Harry Potter. Lastly, that’s just NOT how you do representation! None of us have a problem with black, Latino, Asian, Native American, Alaskan Native, Pacific Islander, female, LGBTQ+, or disabled characters in movies and TV shows but it must be organic, they must be well-written characters and their identity can’t be all there is to their character.
Not sure how the black actor playing Snape negates the terrific character or why we should assume the casting is intended to inflict anti-racist homilies on the viewer. Maybe Essiedu was cast because he is 'an amazing Shakespearean sctor.'
Harry Potter is not a "kid's series". The problem with your perspective is you've infantilized the material, so all of this reads as a precious grandmother's bowdlerized idea of Harry Potter as a commercial brand, rather than a novel series, or a narrative. Deathly Hallows Part 2 is reduced to its "warm final scenes", rather than being characterized as a PG-13 film adapted from an 800 page book with an Aeschylus epigraph that is decidedly dark and not written for "kid's".
The Philosopher's Stone, is the first installment in the chiastic, alchemical story of Harry Potter. It is fundamentally a story about a boy marked by the murder of his two young parents and the attempt on his life. It's a story that foreshadows Harry's self-sacrifice in Deathly Hallows with the slaughter of the unicorn and the consumption of its blood, to sustain a villain living parasitically on another man's body - the man in question being burned to death by the boy in self-defense at the end. It never signals that it's supposed to be a lighthearted story.
The line about the realism of the story being inappropriate is so bizarre, because the story is effective due to its combination of fantasy with realism. Harry is bound and gagged to a headstone in the fourth one, forced to watch a man self-mutilate, and witnesses a corrupted fetal form of an antagonist, while being tortured and abused by the man who murdered his parents and attempted to kill him as a baby. The book doesn't treat this as fantasy whimsy, it describes Harry's desire to "black out...to die" because of the pain. This is something that people like you cover up because you either a) cling to Harry Potter, misguidedly, as something meant to comfort you, because you read the books too young, or b) seek to maliciously infantilize the text and render it less effective by influencing others to see it in "bowdlerized" terms. Philosopher's Stone doesn't begin with the first person voice of an 11 year old, but from the third person perspective of adults leaving a scarred infant on a doorstep.
Harry Potter is a YA series in the vein of Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and His Dark Materials. It contains torture, graphic, bloody injury, murder, and dark themes (including child murder and desecration of corpses). I'm astounded the extent to which people like you, and those in your comment section, water down the story because you want it to be seen as something that's ephemeral and childish. What I notice in these strained, backhanded think pieces on the Potter TV show and why it's supposedly so flawed based on what we've seen in a minute long teaser, is a disgustingly saccharine and insulting bowdlerization of Harry Potter as something that is chiefly meant to comfort the kiddies with "fun" and "whimsy" and not be all "dark" and "adult" like...Batman. It's deranged and strikes me as pointed insult more than anything.
A significant amount of Harry Potter feels like the Shire. You have to establish what innocence you are fighting for and have moments of levity.
One thing I notice reading the books to my kids is that Rowling spends a lot of time (like literal word count) on the fantasy elements and the dark parts (by word count) happen relatively quickly.
Its just not a story where people are starving and dying on every page.
>"Its just not a story where people are starving and dying on every page."
No, and no one said it was. It also doesn't take a decadent level of misery for the story to be fairly dark. The story's darkness and tragedy are actually so stark and disturbing because it offsets the grotesque and the tragic with wonder and whimsy and character warmth.
>"One thing I notice reading the books to my kids is that Rowling spends a lot of time (like literal word count) on the fantasy elements and the dark parts (by word count) happen relatively quickly"
...Uh, no. The "dark parts" are plot-defining and constitute entire chapters, just like the lighter parts of the story. This doesn't work as a general claim. It just isn't true. It's also a fantasy...so yeah, of course she spends a lot of time establishing the wonder inherent to the world. But it's categorically untrue to say the dark parts "by word count" happen relatively quickly. They do not.
The prevailing tone of Potter isn't light comedy. Your comparison with The Shire is interesting, because Lord of the Rings isn't remotely as intimate, adult, and cruel in its darkness as Potter and Fantastic Beasts. It never feels as bleak. You don't have snakes hidden in old women's corpses, "flayed child" miscarriage symbolism at the series climax, and page-long descriptions of hemorrhaging teenagers in Lord of the Rings...
"I'm astounded the extent to which people like you, and those in your comment section, water down the story because you want it to be seen as something that's ephemeral and childish."
I agree with much of your comment, but casting your criticisms in the "people like you" mode reduces some very good arguments to petty ad hominem complaints.
The Harry Potter series indeed has vast dark swaths, but its good characters are very good indeed, suitable for building in children a sort of Victorian rectitude and sense of morality. (We won't get into what the Victorians were really like.)
And probably children miss some of those murkier passages. They'll catch them on rereading, when they're older.
While I found many of the books saggy in the middle, there were parts that had me in tears -- because light in the form of love had conquered the darkness.
My post aims to attack the author at least in a sense, precisely because this pattern of commentary on the "Wizarding World" IP is so prevalent. There's a very obvious anti-fandom that's grown up around the property, and as you saw with the response to Fantastic Beasts and with the increasing backlash to Harry Potter itself, there is a refusal to engage with Harry Potter as a novel series with a sophisticated plot. Instead, you get a lot of "Harry Potter is a poopy baby story"-type pontificating from people who obviously just want to discourage new readers and kneecap the story's effectiveness, more than they want to be fair critical evaluators of the story or its various new manifestations.
I’m looking forward to the series and I think the actors look amazing (I’m unsure about Snape but I’m definitely giving him a chance.) i initially hoped that with Rowling involved, it wouldn’t be as political. She’s political, but she values free speech and I don’t think she would try to push an agenda on kids. But she’s not the only one in charge of it and we don’t really know how she fits in.
“universal human themes are often set aside to talk about racism, politics, and other particulars”
This is something I think and write about a lot THANK YOU you put it into perfect words XD.
Arabella did a LOVELY job as Hermione in the full-cast audio books, for what that's worth. She does Hermione's voice-acting in the first three FCA productions.
I enjoyed this read. Thanks for saying what you said. I didnt enjoy the trailer. To push back on that “Dumbledore” Lithgow said, I beleive introduction to this world has to come from books, not from tv series first. Especially tv these days that takes focus and puts it on details. The stories were never meant to be that. Not in these stories and not in many stories they choose to make series out of side characters. Not everyone is a mani character. People aren’t making nation wide campaigns for these things to happen. Its all decided by corporate board rooms they pretend are creative rooms. At the very least…if the world gets introduced to these kids today, let it be in a movie format. With a shared experience with strangers. On a premiere weekend. In the bigness of the screen and sound and popcorn and loved ones and friends with you as well. This is actually the ultimate teaser trailer to the Happy Potter books because they have to cut out a lot for the movie format. Perfect for then diving into the books to see what you missed. I introduced my kids through the audio versions. And their imaginations made the movie so much better in their heads that the movie wasn’t as good as the audio books. And then I would read to them before bed the same thing they heard in the car. And they loved it. The new TV way of writing and showing has dumbed down the audience so bad that its now very insulting. I wonder how often the series will repeat the plot since people are watching at home. And to me this is the biggest disservice to the fantastically fun series…taking it out of the realm of giving it your undivided attention. What a sad mogul world we live in where being able to be anywhere while fighting off distractions to give anything your undivided attention is…real magic.
The greatest criticism about the new Harry Potter series is that there's nothing left to say. Unless you're going to change the story and the ending so that people get something new there's just no reason to watch for tiny little bits of lore and scenes that didn't make it into the movies.
This is especially true in regards to Snape. Who wants to watch a series where the main character's primary antagonist Is secretly a good guy but we can't reveal that for multiple seasons?
They are not "tiny bits of lore", there's massive amounts of character backstory, story context, and many scenes that were cut that made the films a very poor adaptation of the book's story.
I'm just not a person who hangs on every word of the text and wants to see every scene. I might feel that way about Tolkien and The Silmarillion, but not about Harry Potter. What was already produced scratched the itch for me and I'm more concerned about a TV series wrecking the legacy than with the possibility that it might add something small, but new and awesome.
I always read the Wizarding attitude to Muggles as being a direct commentary on class rather than an indirect one on race. Specifically, the English Public (ie private) School attitude to everyone outside that world.
"Muggle-raised" Harry is the talented outsider kid who got there on a scholarship, looked down upon because he doesn't really belong.
In the books people like the Malfoys also put a lot of emphasis on "old" Wizarding families which is definitely a British class thing.
This is so very insightful. While I do admit that I'm only nineteen and thus don't pretend to have educated or informed opinions on everything, but I've been very frustrated with the new series nonetheless on a surface level, as a huge Potterhead who unashamedly also writes reams of fanfiction. Before reading this essay, all I'd seen with the Snape issue was the way that James would eventually be portrayed, out of necessity by the context, as bigoted. I didn't see the deeper themes you pointed out! I've also found issue with the casting of the student body as a whole; especially having watched "Am I Racist" a few years ago, I've definitely noticed the prioritization of inclusion over accuracy. It's hard to feel "allowed" to comment, knowing that many would say it's just my "whiteness" speaking, but the diversity shown in the TV series just wasn't there in the UK in the 90s! (There's my little rant, unnecessary but provoked by this amazing piece. Very much enjoyed and will think on this more.)
I would have thought it would be much more interesting to make the malfoys black - have a clear delineation that our silly precept of Muggle race have no impact on the wizerding world and they in fact care much more about bloodlines of magic then racial purity.
You could have still made an interesting commentary and critique on bigotry, and in more nuanced way then James actively linching Snape.
Yes! Or one of the other teachers, not Snape.
This choice seems designed for maximum controversy, so the show's creators can say any legitimate criticism of the show is "racist."
I had no idea a new Pens & Poison piece was coming out today but then I remembered you did mention new essays would be coming weekly, Liza and what a treat this one is! You absolutely nailed it with what’s wrong with this God awful Harry Potter series! Hollywood used to be a hit film making factory now they are a shell of their former selves. The new HBO Harry Potter series is Exhibit A as to why. They mess up all the characters and get them completely wrong, miscast several roles, get the tone wrong, and replace universals with particulars to push partisan political and identity politics messages.
None of these people have clearly read a Harry Potter book or watched a Harry Potter movie in their lives. They have no idea why the original series was such a massive hit. Not because it was some nihilistic, cynical garbage that preached at us about about abortion, immigration, gun control, racism, or homophobia. That’s for darn sure! It was a whimsical fun story about three Wizard kids who went on an adventure, fought evil and learned about life. It had timeless themes we all can relate to and understand. Like good vs. evil, the hunger for power, greed, the death of a parent, child abuse, bullying, friendship, growing up, trusting in yourself, self-doubt, love, being yourself no matter what anyone thinks, standing up to hate, fighting for a cause bigger than one’s self, authoritarianism, being courageous, doing the right thing despite it not being easy, death and grief, and many more.
None of that is here at all. A black Snape is also nonsense. First off, the character in the book is white, respect the source material! Second, anti-black racism has nothing to do with the Harry Potter story and shouldn’t be inserted into it. We don’t need BLM race grifting in Harry Potter. Lastly, that’s just NOT how you do representation! None of us have a problem with black, Latino, Asian, Native American, Alaskan Native, Pacific Islander, female, LGBTQ+, or disabled characters in movies and TV shows but it must be organic, they must be well-written characters and their identity can’t be all there is to their character.
Not sure how the black actor playing Snape negates the terrific character or why we should assume the casting is intended to inflict anti-racist homilies on the viewer. Maybe Essiedu was cast because he is 'an amazing Shakespearean sctor.'
Harry Potter is not a "kid's series". The problem with your perspective is you've infantilized the material, so all of this reads as a precious grandmother's bowdlerized idea of Harry Potter as a commercial brand, rather than a novel series, or a narrative. Deathly Hallows Part 2 is reduced to its "warm final scenes", rather than being characterized as a PG-13 film adapted from an 800 page book with an Aeschylus epigraph that is decidedly dark and not written for "kid's".
The Philosopher's Stone, is the first installment in the chiastic, alchemical story of Harry Potter. It is fundamentally a story about a boy marked by the murder of his two young parents and the attempt on his life. It's a story that foreshadows Harry's self-sacrifice in Deathly Hallows with the slaughter of the unicorn and the consumption of its blood, to sustain a villain living parasitically on another man's body - the man in question being burned to death by the boy in self-defense at the end. It never signals that it's supposed to be a lighthearted story.
The line about the realism of the story being inappropriate is so bizarre, because the story is effective due to its combination of fantasy with realism. Harry is bound and gagged to a headstone in the fourth one, forced to watch a man self-mutilate, and witnesses a corrupted fetal form of an antagonist, while being tortured and abused by the man who murdered his parents and attempted to kill him as a baby. The book doesn't treat this as fantasy whimsy, it describes Harry's desire to "black out...to die" because of the pain. This is something that people like you cover up because you either a) cling to Harry Potter, misguidedly, as something meant to comfort you, because you read the books too young, or b) seek to maliciously infantilize the text and render it less effective by influencing others to see it in "bowdlerized" terms. Philosopher's Stone doesn't begin with the first person voice of an 11 year old, but from the third person perspective of adults leaving a scarred infant on a doorstep.
Harry Potter is a YA series in the vein of Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and His Dark Materials. It contains torture, graphic, bloody injury, murder, and dark themes (including child murder and desecration of corpses). I'm astounded the extent to which people like you, and those in your comment section, water down the story because you want it to be seen as something that's ephemeral and childish. What I notice in these strained, backhanded think pieces on the Potter TV show and why it's supposedly so flawed based on what we've seen in a minute long teaser, is a disgustingly saccharine and insulting bowdlerization of Harry Potter as something that is chiefly meant to comfort the kiddies with "fun" and "whimsy" and not be all "dark" and "adult" like...Batman. It's deranged and strikes me as pointed insult more than anything.
A significant amount of Harry Potter feels like the Shire. You have to establish what innocence you are fighting for and have moments of levity.
One thing I notice reading the books to my kids is that Rowling spends a lot of time (like literal word count) on the fantasy elements and the dark parts (by word count) happen relatively quickly.
Its just not a story where people are starving and dying on every page.
>"Its just not a story where people are starving and dying on every page."
No, and no one said it was. It also doesn't take a decadent level of misery for the story to be fairly dark. The story's darkness and tragedy are actually so stark and disturbing because it offsets the grotesque and the tragic with wonder and whimsy and character warmth.
>"One thing I notice reading the books to my kids is that Rowling spends a lot of time (like literal word count) on the fantasy elements and the dark parts (by word count) happen relatively quickly"
...Uh, no. The "dark parts" are plot-defining and constitute entire chapters, just like the lighter parts of the story. This doesn't work as a general claim. It just isn't true. It's also a fantasy...so yeah, of course she spends a lot of time establishing the wonder inherent to the world. But it's categorically untrue to say the dark parts "by word count" happen relatively quickly. They do not.
The prevailing tone of Potter isn't light comedy. Your comparison with The Shire is interesting, because Lord of the Rings isn't remotely as intimate, adult, and cruel in its darkness as Potter and Fantastic Beasts. It never feels as bleak. You don't have snakes hidden in old women's corpses, "flayed child" miscarriage symbolism at the series climax, and page-long descriptions of hemorrhaging teenagers in Lord of the Rings...
"I'm astounded the extent to which people like you, and those in your comment section, water down the story because you want it to be seen as something that's ephemeral and childish."
I agree with much of your comment, but casting your criticisms in the "people like you" mode reduces some very good arguments to petty ad hominem complaints.
The Harry Potter series indeed has vast dark swaths, but its good characters are very good indeed, suitable for building in children a sort of Victorian rectitude and sense of morality. (We won't get into what the Victorians were really like.)
And probably children miss some of those murkier passages. They'll catch them on rereading, when they're older.
While I found many of the books saggy in the middle, there were parts that had me in tears -- because light in the form of love had conquered the darkness.
My post aims to attack the author at least in a sense, precisely because this pattern of commentary on the "Wizarding World" IP is so prevalent. There's a very obvious anti-fandom that's grown up around the property, and as you saw with the response to Fantastic Beasts and with the increasing backlash to Harry Potter itself, there is a refusal to engage with Harry Potter as a novel series with a sophisticated plot. Instead, you get a lot of "Harry Potter is a poopy baby story"-type pontificating from people who obviously just want to discourage new readers and kneecap the story's effectiveness, more than they want to be fair critical evaluators of the story or its various new manifestations.
Those liberal-looking women! They ruin everything! Just look at them with their pants and their liberal blouses!
Considering JK Rowling is a raging Boomer cunt, I don’t know why anybody other than network executives see any potential in more Harry Potter crap.
I’m looking forward to the series and I think the actors look amazing (I’m unsure about Snape but I’m definitely giving him a chance.) i initially hoped that with Rowling involved, it wouldn’t be as political. She’s political, but she values free speech and I don’t think she would try to push an agenda on kids. But she’s not the only one in charge of it and we don’t really know how she fits in.
“universal human themes are often set aside to talk about racism, politics, and other particulars”
This is something I think and write about a lot THANK YOU you put it into perfect words XD.
Arabella did a LOVELY job as Hermione in the full-cast audio books, for what that's worth. She does Hermione's voice-acting in the first three FCA productions.
Why must these people ruin everything???
My next Harry Potter read will be my first. I simply have no interest. It’s probably genetic.
I enjoyed this read. Thanks for saying what you said. I didnt enjoy the trailer. To push back on that “Dumbledore” Lithgow said, I beleive introduction to this world has to come from books, not from tv series first. Especially tv these days that takes focus and puts it on details. The stories were never meant to be that. Not in these stories and not in many stories they choose to make series out of side characters. Not everyone is a mani character. People aren’t making nation wide campaigns for these things to happen. Its all decided by corporate board rooms they pretend are creative rooms. At the very least…if the world gets introduced to these kids today, let it be in a movie format. With a shared experience with strangers. On a premiere weekend. In the bigness of the screen and sound and popcorn and loved ones and friends with you as well. This is actually the ultimate teaser trailer to the Happy Potter books because they have to cut out a lot for the movie format. Perfect for then diving into the books to see what you missed. I introduced my kids through the audio versions. And their imaginations made the movie so much better in their heads that the movie wasn’t as good as the audio books. And then I would read to them before bed the same thing they heard in the car. And they loved it. The new TV way of writing and showing has dumbed down the audience so bad that its now very insulting. I wonder how often the series will repeat the plot since people are watching at home. And to me this is the biggest disservice to the fantastically fun series…taking it out of the realm of giving it your undivided attention. What a sad mogul world we live in where being able to be anywhere while fighting off distractions to give anything your undivided attention is…real magic.
The greatest criticism about the new Harry Potter series is that there's nothing left to say. Unless you're going to change the story and the ending so that people get something new there's just no reason to watch for tiny little bits of lore and scenes that didn't make it into the movies.
This is especially true in regards to Snape. Who wants to watch a series where the main character's primary antagonist Is secretly a good guy but we can't reveal that for multiple seasons?
They are not "tiny bits of lore", there's massive amounts of character backstory, story context, and many scenes that were cut that made the films a very poor adaptation of the book's story.
I'm just not a person who hangs on every word of the text and wants to see every scene. I might feel that way about Tolkien and The Silmarillion, but not about Harry Potter. What was already produced scratched the itch for me and I'm more concerned about a TV series wrecking the legacy than with the possibility that it might add something small, but new and awesome.