The Scary (Adult) World of Harry Potter

Legal roofies! Interspecies sex! Happy slave race! Sympathetic rapists! Permanent disfigurement as legitimate punishment for teen girls! Statutory rape! People-eating giant spiders! Reducing children to two or three personality traits that will define their whole future! What horror show is this you ask? Why, it’s none other than Harry Potter.

When Ron accidentally eats from a box of candy laced with a love potion meant for Harry, we learn that his twin brothers Fred and George make and sell such potions at their shop. How hilarious! So, if a wizard wants to buy a substance that allows them to brainwash someone into being obsessively in love with them (with all that entails) all they need to do is go to Fred and George Weasley’s joke shop. Dumbledore explains that giving someone a love potion is wrong because the feelings it causes aren’t real. That’s a nice way to explain the importance of consent to children. However, it doesn’t change the fact that in the world of Harry Potter, roofies are not only a lot more effective than in our world, but also they’re LEGAL! Sure, they’re frowned upon, but again, they’re fucking LEGAL! Yes, the lovable, funny Weasley twins make roofies and sell them to people wanting to force someone into loving them. As for the girl who sent them to Harry, there’s no indication that she’s going to be arrested or charged with trying to, you know, roofieing someone.

Big Hagrid turns out to be a half giant and in Goblet of Fire he asks the equally big headmistress of the French school which of her parents was a giant. Look, I know that this is a children’s book and that children aren’t meant to think about the details of how these half giants are produced. However, wtf was J K Rowling thinking when she came up with it? Hagrid’s human father is described as looking tiny next to his teen son, and Hagrid’s younger full giant half-brother is HUGE! Why exactly would Hagrid’s giant mother even be interested in copulating with that tiny human and how the hell did nothing get mushed while producing Hagrid? You know, tiny, fragile member + big, strong muscles… It gets weirder when you think of a human woman and a giant man. Sure, it expands enough to push out a baby, but still. This feels like something out of a Monster Erotica collection, not a children’s book.

Remember when everyone was so worried that Gone With the Wind might make people think slavery is okay that it nearly got banned? They should’ve been more concerned about Harry Potter. The house elves are basically a race of happy slaves that it’s okay to enslave because they love working for humans. House elves are bound to their masters by magic that gets cancelled if they’re given clothes. (which basically means that they’ll never do their masters’ laundry) (the wizards didn’t really think this through, did they?) When Hermione finds out that Hogwarts is able to function thanks to unpaid house elf labour, she tries to draw attention to the situation. Everybody else is just LOL, because house elves just love working for free at wonderful Hogwarts. Worse, none of the house elves we meet are that bright, which means Rowling created an intellectually inferior race that it’s okay to bind into servitude.

We first hear of Tom Riddle Sr in the prologue for Chamber of Secrets. He’s basically another snobbish rich asshole who lives with his equally snobbish, rich, asshole parents. They all get murdered by Tom Riddle Jr presumably for revenge for his father’s abandonment of himself and his witch mother. In Half-Blood Prince, we find out that Voldemort’s witch mother, Merope, had a crush on her handsome, wealthy neighbour, and eloped with him to escape an abusive household. How did she accomplish that? Why, by giving him a love potion, of course. She kept feeding him the potion long enough to get pregnant and then stopped, convinced he’d be really in love with her by then. He wasn’t and ran back home. Merope was so heartbroken that she stopped doing magic and ended up dying shortly after naming her new-born baby. When Dumbledore tells Harry about Voldemort’s parents, all the sympathy goes to poor abandoned Merope. Was her family utter shit and did she have the right to leave and start a new life away from them? Absolutely. However, she did that by becoming a RAPIST. Yes, Voldemort’s mother was a RAPIST and he’s a RAPE BABY. Can you imagine how confusing and traumatizing that was for his father? Then, years later, Tom Riddle Sr and his family are murdered by said rape baby. And the only thing we’re ever told of the Riddles is that they’re rich assholes. There’s no going back, no realization of the awfulness of Tom Sr’s situation. Then again, he was probably already snobbish before being roofied and raped for months, so we probably shouldn’t care.

Now, what’s the appropriate punishment for a teenage girl with conflicting loyalties who tells on her friends after being pressured by the horrible headmistress of the boarding school she’s currently stuck in? If you’re Hermione Granger, the answer is simple: permanent disfigurement. Remember that this is the same Hermione who explained to her idiot male friends the complexity of human emotions when Harry was trying to date Cho after Cedric’s death. From a feminist perspective, it’s nice that female characters can be as awful as the male ones. However, from a general perspective, Hermione is an asshole.

Speaking of Hermione, isn’t she like fourteen or fifteen in Goblet of Fire? And isn’t her boyfriend, Victor, like eighteen? Isn’t that kinda criminal even in the UK?

Now, back to Hagrid and his love of magical creatures. You know, like that people-eating spider that he was keeping at school and then got loose, multiplied, and now lives with its huge family on schoolgrounds. Shouldn’t someone do something about it? I mean, they eat people, ffs! They were going to eat Harry and Ron even after they were told they were Hagrid friends! It’s bad enough there’s a giant snake with a death stare in a secret chamber inside the castle, but at least you need to open said chamber for it to attack people. On the other hand, any curious student who decides to explore risks being eaten by a giant spider. Then again, they’d probably be beaten to death by the Whomping Willow before getting anywhere near the spiders’ nest. Seriously, Hogwarts is a death trap.

So, hmm, how exactly is the whole Sorting Hat/House system a good, or even smart thing? Wouldn’t it be more useful for the stupid hat to check for the kids’ aptitudes instead of analysing their personalities? You know, who’s better at Transfiguration, Potions, Divination… that kind of thing. Also, think about how embarrassing it must be to end up in Hufflepuff – their defining characteristic is that they’re good friends. It’s feels as if the Hogwarts’s founders didn’t know what to do with all the dumb, cowardly, unambitious kids and decided to just put them all together. Then you get the Slytherins, a whole House of future villains being taught the magic they’ll inevitably use to attack their former classmates. And if any of them happens to do anything heroic or self-sacrificing, like Snape, they’re told that maybe the Sorting Hat got it wrong. Thank God Rowling revealed that Harry had a piece of Voldemort’s soul in his head instead of letting us carry on thinking the series’ hero had anything in common with those vile Slytherins! Also, isn’t this the same type of system that caused the dystopian society in the Divergent series?

Anyway, it’s nice to see that most Harry Potter fans are capable of ignoring J K Rowling’s opinions on transgender issues and still appreciate the wonderful, wholesome, magical world she created.

By Danforth