Great list!

I’ll add something.

Rowling shows poverty in the abstract, not as a relation. The Weasleys are poor, but they have magic! To Rowling, poverty is something that people are because they are ‘moral’ and ‘nice’ or avoid ‘decadence’ and ‘luxuries’, rather than because they are exploited or lacking the essentials.

The Weasley house is shown as a rickety shack, but there’s nothing wrong with it. If poverty is when someone lives in the countryside with a huge plot of land, access to food, water, travel, and energy, etc, with the ability to magic-up infinite bedrooms, then we’re living in parallel realities. If this is poverty, count me in.

They’re only ‘poor’ because they cannot afford the latest broomsticks. This is like saying someone is poor because they have all the essentials including a house, working phone, car, and laptop, but they don’t have the top of the range MacBook or newest Tesla.

Mrs Weasley lives as a struggling housewife. She can magic away any chore! So Rowling includes a faux feminism, which could be read as putting a spotlight on the patriarchy. But there are few material reasons for Mrs Weasley to be a housewife. Maybe to look after the kids, but again, they’ve got magic and wealth. Plus, when Rowling wrote this, childcare was more affordable for the poorest working families in Britain. Mrs Rowling could work if she wanted to but that’s beside the point. Neither of the Weasleys need to work! They are bourgeois, masquerading as the poor.

We are supposed to feel sorry for the Weasleys, but let’s look at their financial situation. Mr Weasley works in a public sector job and makes enough money as a sole breadwinner to maintain a huge family that does not struggle with the basics and lives, again, in a massive detached house on a huge plot of land. We can only feel sorry for the Weasleys if we compare them to the Malfoys.

So Rowling has created the literary framework for millions of well-off liberals to ignore real poverty and to feel sorry for themselves if they only possess a mansion, have essentially unlimited access to resources, and for whom work is something of an option.

This is how Rowling sees and wants us to see poverty and gendered oppression. She is a self-professed pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps neoliberal and has no sympathy for the poor because they would not be poor if they worked hard like her.

Rowling talks about being ‘as poor as it is possible to be in Britain’. But she was never poor. Apparently she cannot see her own privilege – she went to Oxbridge! I’m not downplaying what it’s like to live in a council house, to be truly poor in Britain, raise a child alone, or to suffer domestic violence (I think she left her husband). The problem is that when she lived in a council house, there were council houses and a safety net. That system had problems, still. But even that provision does not exist today. She uses her experiences to judge people living in social housing today. If she could do it, why can’t others? This comes through in Harry Potter.

Not to downplay the bullying and abuse that Harry gets from his uncle, cousin, and aunt, but his poverty is displayed in the same way. Rowling seems unable to imagine real poverty. Even before she reveals that Harry is actually rich, his ‘poverty’ means ready access to food, clothing, shelter, etc, but it’s not fair because he didn’t get all the luxury presents first-hand like Dudley does.

Disclaimer: I’m not saying that neglect is okay if a carer otherwise provides for material needs. But in Rowling’s hands, that neglect is mainly to do with ‘second hand birthday presents’ and ‘a small bedroom’. Millions of children in Britain go hungry and without adult supervision because their parents work lots and earn little, and many children suffer much worse. This is markedly different to the type of neglect that Rowling subjects Harry to.

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Yeah, all of these.

The ‘death of the author’ argument is one I agree with. We should judge the books independently from the author. If Rowling was horrible but the books were excellent, then the books are excellent (and under a better system, people could enjoy the books without worrying about supporting or vindicating the author).

I don’t even think Rowling had an agenda when she wrote the books - she was run-of-the-mill liberal ignorant when she wrote them and it was only after fame hit her that she was drawn into taking a side. But still, if we judge the books independently of the author’s intent they are stories that justify an unjust world and steer the audience towards rooting for that unjust world’s continued existence.

By no means am I a Harry Potter fan. I have been a very weird person since childhood, that never took pleasure in reading these fantasy novels other classmates did, but preferred better and valuable stuff to read and research and learn more.

But, is is simply not the case that Rowling made the whole story in an archaic castle setting with the flying broom fantasies? We can critique it in a realist way, pointing out the immoralities or the lack of revolution or all of those quirks, but these are stories that just exist as figments of imagination by these authors.

My idea is that completely ignoring these stories is the best way to nullify their importance, because these stories have archaic roots, and you can do nothing about castle world fantasies.