I’m quite bored with you 2.

Gia:

1. You’re basically saying that Harry didn’t win every game and didn’t help Gryffindore with every game they won. I know that. I’ve never expected J.K.Rowling to be so obvious. And she was not. The point here is that if there was a game that truly mattered in the book for Harry to win, he’d. And J.K.Rowling as well as you apparently have no insights into the way that sports work. Third graders and the likes of you might think that Quidditch holds up, but any avid sport fans who think about the matter for longer than 2 seconds and feel no fear to interrupt his/her HP loving bandwagon would see the falseness of it. You know what would be realistic? If Harry worked for years before getting on to the team. If he lost games after games after games, some in humiliation. If seeing his ankles and wrists broken would break his heart. If he agonized over Quidditch and let it sabotage his homework, his friendships a little bit before he finally have his sweet victory. Because newsflash: that’s what it’s like for kids in high school/middle school who pursues sports seriously/have talents enough to become pros someday. It’s not fucking “you have a long lost dad who was a star and now you will walk on the field and become a star yourself without even knowing the rules of the goddamn sports”.

2. Did you even get my point? I was saying that it was nearly impossible to assign blames or praises to certain individuals by just looking at the points of each house. The fact that characters do that all the time smacks of illogical plot devices to me. If the system worked all the time, considering the fact points get lost and gained EVERY SINGLE HOUR, how would you know why Gryffindore has A points and not B? Because Harry sassed Snape? What if it was because some kid in Year 1 in Transformation waved the wand the wrong way or something? How in the fresh hell can anybody tell especially at the end of the year why each house has a certain number of points?

3. Don’t put too much faith in me. I’m losing interest by the minute in your ability to cherry-pick obscure arguments in order to rebuke. I didn’t make it. And you still haven’t addressed the ones that I have made.

4. Yeah sure. Because J.K.Rowling thinks that she can write a rude person and still sell him as a hero to worship. It doesn’t take much craft to create a person who would pass for the “nice” test nowadays. But Harry’s still a douchebag. He looked down on Ron’s poverty and generally ineptitude at everything compared to him. He would let Ginny humiliate Ron in front of him. And even though he said nice things to Mrs. Weasley, he secretly felt disdain toward her boasting of Mr.Weasley’s promotion. What do you think that a douchebag would say to someone he used successfully? Huh? “Go away, you’re annoying me”? Harry appreciated Hermione as an almanac. Harry’s not an abomination to human decency, he’s just an average douchebag we see every day in the streets, in the coffee shop, and somehow J.K.Rowling worked him into her novels and asked us to love him.

5. Uh not really. Did you even read the first book? When they first met, Draco clearly offered his friendship only to be turned down by Harry. Once again here, you don’t understand the distinction between what could have happened and what happened. Draco has never considered himself a worshiper of the Chosen One. He had a lot pride himself even in an 11 year old. So obviously J.K.Rowling had slapped upon him the title of an opponent. Ron took Harry’s shit. Hermione took Harry’s shit. But Draco would not, so of course that would hurt her precious little hero. That’s what I was talking about.

Percyfan:

Your comment is highly offensive. And here’s why: there are many people who grew up in an emotionally abusive (not physically abusive) family, having to receive years of therapies to recover. If any of them at the age of 11 has been thrust into a foreign world with the mission of killing the most powerful being of that world, he/she’d not grow up to become a 100% mentally healthy person, let alone a goddamn hero. That’s not because they’re not strong enough. Saying that Harry was strong enough to avoid the “antihero” trap is like saying a crippled man is strong enough to walk without a limp. The man’s not strong. He’s just not crippled as told. The characterization of Harry rings absolutely false and generally ignorant on J.K.Rowling’s part to me.

Yes, many people act like jerks in their teenage years, but others don’t call them heroes. When a 13 year old acts like a jerk, then he/she’s a jerk, not a “hero under too much as the Chosen One”.

Don’t be obtuse. I’ve read the books, and Harry was spectacular at Defense Against Dark Arts, great at Transfiguration and did well at most class, with the exception of Potions even which he had his stint in year 6. Don’t make me scoff. Once again, I know kids with sports talents. They have to work harder than 99% of the academic kids to make their talents shown. That’s just a fact.

You and Gia seem both to content with J.K.Rowling’s halfhearted coverage of people other than Harry. Let’s face it: Ravenclaw, Slytherin and Hufflepuff only exist in relation to Harry. If Harry was year 6, year 3 in the Hogwarts wouldn’t exist. That’s okay really. Except J.K.Rowling intended to build a world for the readers and it collapsed everywhere I cared to looked.

The reason there exists a condescending attitude toward Muggles is that J.K.Rowling herself harbors an condescending attitude toward people who do not belong to her class: white, has college education, living in relative comfort of middle class privileges. She wanted to write metaphorical books to fight racism but ended up betraying her biases. Harry Potter is the fantasy’s equivalent of books about white people solving racism and people of color feeling gratitude toward them.

Am I taking the books too seriously? Not really. Because even though not many people can vocalize this subtext in the books, it affects most of them, especially Potterheads. Wizards and witches in Potterverse fought for Muggles but looked upon the condition of having no magic as lacking and deficient. If that doesn’t reek of ableism then I don’t know what does. Yet people rave about, going so far as using “Muggle” as an insult the way racists would use the N word as a racial epithet.

Giants are magical creatures. And Hermione could not give a shit about the fates of them. She could wail on all day about elves, but at the end of the day she would basically be saying in Muggle language “I want dogs to have great lives, but lions could go extinct because they scare me.” However, considering the context, comparing giants, elves and goblins to animals seem horrifyingly offensive. That would be like comparing the centaurs to horses. They seem on par with human beings as magical beings to me really.