Yeah, it's Harry Potter. Social change is the enemy in the book. At no point does anyone try to improve anything in the book. They don't even oppose evil that much. They just oppose it when the existing evil tries to go too far by the current standards of evil.
Hermione tries to raise awareness about elf mistreatment.
It's implied that Dumbledore was trying to influence Fudge to improve things in their regular correspondence before the GoF/OotP story arc.
Then she gets to meet the slave race they keep in the basement and said slaves explain that their enslavement is a fundamental part of magic society and the only reason Dobby in particular had to be freed was because his owners were a bit too mean to him. The message becomes "slavery is fine as long as slaves are treated well.". Then they drop that particular can of worms because addressing it would require societal change. It is one of few endeavours where the heroes of the story just fail to do what they want.
Fuck it. Some more rambles because the house elves drive me insane.
The correct response to a slave race that wants to be subjugated is to refuse. You can see in the books that the existance of slave races has made the Wizards worse people and it makes them used to treating other races, that are free and sentient, as slaves. Tons of sentient races we meet in the story are either service staff or set dressing for wizards amusement.
What the fuck, you're right. Owning slaves is detrimental to how even the owners see the world. If we tolerate slavery even if we're on the benefitting side, it alters our worldview to include better and lesser peoples.
The house elves plot is one of the best examples of why the movies are significantly better than the books.
I feel that they avoid most of the insane choices of jk Rowling but does not fix them.
Wtf? Hermione goes to a point where she tries her best to force the freedom on them (leaving clothes around so they accidentaly pick them up and) so be freed. I think it is canon that she still pursues it even after school and makes actual changes while working at the Ministry.
This sounds like a problem with media analysis. I don't know how anyone could read the books and view her efforts as serious and successful actions.
Yep, and she constantly gets made fun of for it.
So it's just like real life.
Those who argue for change are ridiculed.
Dumbledore is the single most powerful wizard know, and the most influential in magical Britian. He runs a school where he is beloved by nearly everyone. If he wanted to change things, he easily could have done more. Especially since Fudge wasn't very powerful and had to deal with an entire bureaucracy. Direct change at the school itself would have been feasible.
And while the parents might have threatened to remove their students, they weren't really. Where else are they going to send their kids to get educated? There are other schools but the culture difference was so stark that seems unlikely.
Tries and fails. It never goes anywhere, and she's mocked as a well-meaning fool for trying in the first place because "welp most elves just enjoy being slaves what can you do shrug emoji". Jkr sets up something with Hermione and the elves and then doesn't follow through with it in any meaningful way (and I don't count commentary from her outside the books as following through) so it's left to just sit there uncritically as "slavery is a thing in this universe and is seen as completely normal by most characters, and only one person ever tries to do anything about it and she's depicted as a cringey radical in the process". Jkr doesn't even show the beginnings of societal change like more elves coming to Dobby's side of things once they see it's an option and that Dobby's is happy that way, or other house elves being motivated to think differently about their situation and starting to unlearn their generations of indoctrination. We don't even see a glimpse of Winky starting to recover instead the last we see of her is as a depressed alcoholic whose life was ruined by her being freed from slavery. Jkr depicts it as "yeah slavery is bad but you can't change the way the world works so might as well not even try." the house elves' servitude is treated as something so fundamentally tied to their species that it seems to be biological and thus humans taking advantage of that is to some degree the natural way of things which, I shouldn't have to explain what the problem with that sort of depiction is. Maybe that wasn't what she intended, maybe she just added slavery because it's a common world building trope, but if that's the case she did so without considering the implications or how it would come across in the end product or the messages it would send.
Holy shit. The more I read the less I like that woman. Biologically coded slavery? Sounds like some debunked phrenology bullshit.
If you reread the description of the Goblins at Gringots, you'll find typical antisemitic stereotypes too.
They don’t even question systemic problems within the magic world, let alone challenging them. Everyone is extremely content with the social stratification - something emblematic of the British society. In the books everyone is perfectly content with the oppression, just as long as THEY get to be the oppressors.
I was never a fan of the series - noticed these issues right from the first book. Every subsequent book or movie I couldn’t help but noticing how cruel everyone was - even the protagonists.
Voldemort tried to overthrow the status quo. He was trying to install a viscous fascist state, but that actually wasn't important to the characters' motivations. The only thing that changed by the end of the series was the removal of Voldie's stooges from government. Everything went back to normal. I think they might not have rebuilt the Torture Prison, but unsure.
Almost makes you wonder why he bothered. I mean the society seemed pretty accepting of fascism before he got involved. Casually the racism displayed by random characters not even villains shows through. The man could have probably easily gotten into office. Like everything he accomplished could have probably been done in the daylight with minimal opposition.
At no point does anyone try to improve anything in the book
This just goes to show you how little people care about elves. Even after the revolution you ignore that anything has changed.
Almost nothing changed for house-elves. SPEW existed and literally only one person actually cared about it. The author also made her attempts laughably bad at raising awareness. Coupled this author sabotage with the author creating a race of slaves that want to be enslaved speaks volumes about the fact that there was never going to be real change. In the epilogue only Hermione really cares much still.
Just your usual reminder Just Kidding Rowling is a horrible TERF.
And those are the old reasons I alluded to in the title. Fuck her. I hope her bidet transmogrifies so it randomly starts firing staples.
Holy fuck!
Edit: I mean that in a, “That’s extremely specific, and one I haven’t heard before!” kind of way. Just to clarify. Rowling can EABOD.
Reminds me of this 
Reading the books you realize that there is no OSHA in the Wizarding world
"You three children have detention! Go spend a night in the forest of child-eating spiders!"
That is because injuries trough accident only happens to fat/clumsy people in her universe. Fat/clumsy is written like that because they are directly correlated in her world.
Don't forget how women you're supposed to dislike naturally have masculine features about them, too. If I have to read about a high school girl's "mannish hands" or square jawline one more time, I think I might blow a blood vessel...
Some comments complaining about the house elves status don't see how well it spills into real life.
Society didn't care in the books, society doesn't care in real life. Change was slow in the books, change is slow in real life.
Rowling was accurate as fuck in this regard.
That isn't how real life works and the fact that Rowling contributed that perception to millions of children is unironically worse than the TERF shit.
This might be true, but Rowling also makes choices in regards to how she thinks we should perceive individuals who do want to change the world for the better. Hermione wants to free the house elves and is depicted as being a busybody and white knight more interested in her own sense of self-righteousness than actually improving the world. In art, just as in real life, the particular contains the universal, and we can make the logical conclusion that this is how Rowling broadly perceives people in the real world that advocate for social change.
JK Rowling literally wrote a slave caste that loves being in servitude. Even putting aside the transphobia of her most recent past, the Harry Potter books are not leftist friendly.
Ok, I hate that you are putting me in a position where I have to defend her TERFy ass but this is not a valid criticism.
The House Elves(the eponymous slaves you were referring to) were not in any way framed as a good thing. She went out of her way to make it abundantly clear that to any modern sensibility such a class system is abhorrent. You can have unsavory elements in your work of fiction as a vehicle for your characters' story arc and not be a piece of shit for it.
However, if you're a fucking TERF shitstain on Twitter, that's an entirely different kettle if fish and absolutely feel free to light her ass up on that. That and being coy about Dumbledore being gay. Should have been in the books and not implied only to be confirmed online. Absolute bullshit.
Ron literally makes fun of Hermione for wanting to free the slaves. But it's all good cause the slaves like being slaves. Imagine writing this into your children's book.
I think it's closer to an fbi type but yeah
So he's worse than a cop, he's a fucking fed
Harry was billed in early books as this "Anti-Voldemort", who'd lead Wizardy to a gilded age and do great things... But JK Is a Status Quo loving Neo Liberal and can't imagine a better world. In all of her works the system is corrupt, but it's fine because the only thing that would make it go wrong is one bad faith actor (In this case Voldemort), who will stumble upon some obscure rule that undoes him. (In this case, killing Harry who was at that time the last horcrux)
Harry becomes a cop and doesn't change the status quo because the world as it is is the best JK can imagine it.
It's kind of like how no one did anything about Trump, they kept waiting for him to trip over some rule that sends the system crashing down on him, but it never happened.
It never happened because the system is powerless to punish anyone, because the system is just an idea, it is immaterial.
The Electoral College isn't going to magically vote for Hillary because it recognizes Trump's evil. People have to recognize his corruption and change the system to combat it...
The Democrats never learned they couldn't just wait for the System to punish the Republicans after they accumulated enough good/bad boy points
To be fair aurors seem to be doing the job of detectives/cops/militia/commanding officers/military police/federal agents/CIs/Deputies/Marshals/Troopers/ Dementor management/whatever
It's not just a cop. Besides the guys seem to be paid decently enough and deal with the most nastiest of the nastiest shit in the magical world. It's a miracle people decide to do it, given the mortality rates it seems to have and the kind of bullshit they need to deal with
He grown up to be Cormorant Snuggle or whatever his name is?
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