an thread:

if you want to understand why some of us hated harry potter liberal centrism even before rowling destroyed her own standing among the moderately progressive, i put it to you that actually

in that worldscape

*everyone* can do magic

there are kids born of parents both of whom know they can do magic. those kids of course know they can do magic. there are kids born of parents *one* of whom knows they can do magic. those kids, uncertain, may or may not know they too can do magic.

and there are kids born of parents neither of whom have any idea they can do magic, and whose kids of course, because it's all a big secret, also have no idea they can do magic, until they accidentally do magic so obvious that it has to be acknowledged.

but the truth is: everyone can do magic. there are no kids (and no parents) who could not do magic if only they knew that they could do magic. the entire culture is however designed to keep that secret, to keep magic cast as an innate talent that you, muggle, are born without.

there are those among the "purebloods" who are cast as villains insofar as they despise those coming from the ranks of those who do not know they can do magic; they aim to exterminate the "mudbloods" and subjugate the "muggles".

but the supposed heroes? they 100% subscribe to the lie that not everyone can do magic, that it's an innate talent one must be born with, that should anyone from the ranks of those who don't know they can do magic nonetheless do it, they are NOT to be seen as disproof of the lie.

they are instead to be accepted (more or less) into the elite, co-opted with the privileges denied those who simply don't know they can do magic because the system is designed to keep them in that ignorance. they are to be made class traitors, loyal to the system.

when the fascists seek to eliminate the "impure" & subjugate (or outright exterminate) the underclass (who could, remember, all do magic if only they KNEW they could do magic,) this is a bridge too far for the liberal centrist, but they fight only in defence of the system as is

every single one of Dumbledore's Army is hashtag-resisting only so far and no further, always already inculcated with the belief in the lie that not everyone can do magic. they fight to keep the bastion of their class privilege ruled by bourgeois propriety, not vulgar savagery.

they fight to maintain a system in which the underclass are subjugated by *deceit* rather than violence, in which crass brutality is abhorred as uncivilised, as breach of civility. they fight for a civil, polite, *paternalist* mastery of the subjugated underclass.

hogwarts is a fantasy of class privilege 100% bought into & selling the lie that not everyone can do magic, that it is an innate talent one must be born with, and anyone from the underclass who has proven that everyone *can* in fact do magic is simply a magically gifted exception

where the absence of diversity in HP is railed against, frankly the *last* thing i'd wish for is to see Teh Gayz represented in hogwarts, blithely signing up for the privileges of class, being boxed into an House, made a champion of the bourgeois status quo of muggle subjugation.

fuck that shit. i'm *glad* rowling kept dumbledore in the closet, showed us zero queers in all the houses. this is a truer picture of how hermione granger, class traitor, would be no more an ally to any abject group than she is to her own underclass, the muggle as prole

none of them would be. raised among the underclass of those who have been convinced that they cannot do magic, harry is a class traitor too, his parentage meaning SFA because everyone can in fact do magic. there are no muggles, only an underclass of those kept ignorant

for all the salt-of-the-earth drag slapped on the weasleys in contrast with the aristo drag of the malfoys, they are no less born into privilege, heirs of its perks and perquisites. the best that can be said of ron is he's welcoming to the class traitors where draco loathes them.

if you understand that the secret truth of rowling's mythos is that *everyone can do magic*--because ffs NO, blood does NOT determine one's capacity to achieve the extraordinary, only the expectations allowed one--then its ossature of classism becomes odious

there is no real resistance to fascism founded on such allegiance to class privilege. it is the ethos of the "moderate" (petit-)bourgeoisie who only seek to *moderate* the subjugation, to keep it non-violent, polite, proper. that liberal centrism is always already compromised.

if you know that you would not be a slytherin or a hufflepuff in this world, neither a gryffindor nor a ravenclaw, but rather a muggle who can do magic, fuck you very much--and not a fuckin "mudblood", just a muggle who can do magic--you know that liberal centrism is an enemy too

it may not be an outright fascism that'd crush your underclass beneath its jackboot if not eradicate it, but it sure as fuck is not your ally, even when it stands against that foe. if it buys into class privilege, you can't trust it not to oppose any "improper" egalitarianism.

it does not escape me that hermione granger, class traitor, erases all memory of herself from the minds of her muggle parents, in her battle for bastion of class privilege that is hogwarts, on the path that will ultimately lead her to a job maintaining the ignorance of muggles.

the truth is: there are no muggles. everyone can do magic. but cock forbid the underclass aspire to the extraordinary. perish the thought of the great unwashed sticking the vickies up at a scholarship to magical Eton, showing the truth of magic as capacity to their fellow scum.

there is a damned lie at the heart of rowling's mythos that no amount of queers or PoC ensconced in Hogwarts' dorms would rectify. & wishing them there is only buying into a fantasy of bourgeois privilege if one doesn't wish them there as muggles with wands crying "Incineratus!"

an addendum for the literalists: yes, of course, the canon tells that muggles *cannot* do magic, that's a TrueFact™ of the world. this does not deny a reading in which 99% would never know to try and any who try & fail do so simply b/c of a lack not of good blood but of belief

and what of squibs? it is not by any means unknown for children of the upper/middle classes to bomb out of the system, to be kicked out of eton, flunk out of oxford, to go live in punk squats or on the streets, rejecting their privilege or losing it in mental health issues

I think of the 7-Up documentary series following kids from the age of 7 over the last 7 decades, of the son of 2 teachers, who was expected by all to excel academically, but who was clearly stressed into a breakdown by the pressure to be extraordinary, to do magic as it is really

failing to get into oxbridge, he ended up dropping out of a london uni where he was living in a squat, ended up homeless & struggling. no alcohol or drug issues as many, but he ended up in the underclass, a kid with no belief in his own ability to do magic despite his class roots

a large degree of his "failure", to be clear, was rejection of the bourgeois future defined for him. if by the standards of the system he bombed out of the upper/middle class, he himself viewed his wilderness years as freedom, as a magic unfathomable to the (petit-)bourgeoisie

this is a "squib" in rowling's fantasy of class privilege, all rejection of one's elite status folded into failure to perform by its standards, and all of this essentialised as an inherent deficit in one's blood, an innate inadequacy the novels have zero sympathy for

we might imagine the childhood of argus filch, a scion of the elite expected to do the extraordinary, who instead "failed" to do the magic his parent(s) demanded. "failed" to meet the bar for hogwarts. "failed" to follow the path into privilege, instead ending up a janitor

shuffling and dishevelled in the movies certainly, embittered and unreasonable, lank-haired and unkempt, if he is not *shown* slugging from a hip flask, he has all the other markers of the long-term alcoholic burnout as a cultural trope. & he is to be reviled, a loathsome thing.

in the fantasy of class privilege, this cannot be another disproof of the lie. it cannot be that just as *everyone can do magic*, so the capacity to fail is distributed across the classes, regardless of some bogus talent carried in the blood. it cannot be that *anyone could fail*

so where we have the kids with one or more parents who know they can do magic, & those kids, despite being raised in full knowledge of the possibility of magic, are sure that they themselves lack the capacity, where we have these "squibs", that is cast as another freak exception

we might rather imagine a filch who *could* have done magic if only his parents weren't helicoptering arseholes, always pushing, stressing, driving a child into a crisis of self-confidence that became a lifetime of substance abuse, menial work the only job he could hold down

but there is no sympathy for the squib in hogwarts, nothing but contempt, abjection. the system of class privilege has a safety net for the most mediocre (ron or neville) and the most abusive (draco), but cock forbid you "fail" so utterly you move class downways, become a prole

removing the anti-semitic goblins would not fix this. removing the enslaved house elves would not fix this. the class privilege is written into the conceit of muggles and squibs being innately incapable, born to be inadequate, at best pitiable & more often despicable

to rectify *that* you'd need the chamber of secrets to have contained the truth: that everyone can do magic. you'd need harry & hermione--& ron as class traitor in the GOOD sense--to have uncovered the lie & waged a war as much against the bourgeois paternalism as against fascism

Responding to this here, as interesting meat to chew through. Yes and no. All power fantasies have an innate fascism, but (super)heroes are mostly made by transformation and/or trauma. Rowling brings in the Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince from epic fantasy... https://twitter.com/timfblogger/status/1292864846891974658

Coming from the faux-medieval worldscapes of aristos treated not just as GoT style humans born into whatever station in life, made hero/villain/complex by circumstance, the Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince Trope buys into the whole concept of literal actual bloodborne nobility.

You can probably trace that back to the demigods of Greek myth. Yes, absolutely all heroic power fantasy appeals to a juvenile (often compensatory) superiority complex. But there's a distinct reactionary class politics where it's a fantasy of actual *bloodright*.

And Rowling takes this from the faux-medieval elsewhens folding fairytale fantasies of innate nobility into Tolkien, puts it into a British public school fantasy of the 19th/20th century, from Tom Brown to Billy Bunter. She validates a specific real *Etonian* superiority fantasy.

I think it's worthwhile *not* collapsing the distinctions here, lumping this in with a general dubiety with all power fantasy, or even just with all works employing the Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince trope--fairytale, Arthuriana, etc., all set in fantasy elsewhens eons from the real.

The profound alterity of those fantasy realms makes the trope far less mappable to the realities of our world. The dream of being a born prince in such a fantasy worldscape doesn't pander to the same bourgeois class prejudice & fantasy of privilege in a near modern class system.

Snape is interesting as a squandered potential of a class traitor in the GOOD sense--one born into the elite who falls for Lily--who, in this thesis, mind, is actually just a muggle who can do magic. This could have spurred him to abjure his privilege. https://twitter.com/timfblogger/status/1292866716805070848

His hate for Harry could well be read, in the early phases of the big story, as resentment of Harry's unearned greater privilege as an Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince, an inkling of the secret truth that blood doesn't actually mean shit, born out of his love of Lily.

Had the heroes discovered that secret in the Chamber of Secrets, one might well imagine a Snape who became ally in the struggle not just against fascism but against the bourgeois system that steered him into Slytherin, boxed him into a role in which he'd never win Lily's heart.

In a class analysis, he is to all intents and purposes made a member of the Bullingdon Club at age eleven. He is given no option for his social group but the most blatantly toxic of the elite, the Boris Johnsons of the world. He is told this is his innate nature.

He's bullied by an equally privileged member of the elite, one shorn of the aristo drag slapped on most all the Slytherins, not just the Malfoys, but every bit the born toff, one who's arguably been privileged further by sorting into the house of "innately" sword-wielding heroes.

Yup, he's absolutely disgusted by the falsities of this system. He's put in the Bullingdon Club at age eleven because he's socially awkward. James is put into the ROTC because he's deemed to have the courage, chivalry & fortitude of the officer class. OFC James gets the girl.

Imagine a Snape who learned that everything his Bullingdon Club cohort had been inculcated to believe was not just morally repugnant but *factually wrong*. That there are no muggles, that the class barrier denying him Lily was an utter sham, the whole system built on a lie.

Fuck Dumbledore's Army, we'd have Snape's Subversive Insurgency: Harry & Hermione as class warriors, allegiance to the subjugated muggles they were raised as; Ron as class traitor, disavowing his loyalty to the elite, siding with the underclass despite his "pureblood" status.

Someone might well have a word with Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, etc., wise them up as to why exactly there are so few PoC in Hogwarts, how their admission into the bourgeoisie is a rarity only b/c of a white class system's lie maintaining a disproportion of "muggles".

What, you mean it *just so happens* that the kids who know they can do magic b/c they have parents who know they can do magic are disproportionately white, that a whole lot of the muggles who could do magic if they knew of it must be PoC? In a British Empire era public school?

Anyway, because I'm still getting the odd QT reading the Secret Truth as an assumption that needs to be supported by the text, let me reiterate that, au contraire, the inability to do magic being bound to blood is what needs to be supported by more than just character dialogue.

Only an *omniscient narratorial declaration, within the narrative itself, that this is the case* would render this an invalid reading--and only then if we accept the narrator as reliable. The narrator is not *intended* to be read as unreliable, of course, but so what?

Death of the Author, baby, Death of the Author. The meaning of a text for a reader is its *import* for them, which can be quite at odds with the meaning intended by the author as *purpose*. You can afford the Author final say if you want. They're not the boss of you though.

And ultimately, this is not intended as an *assumption* about how Rowling's worldscape works, as if this were a reality to be empirically (dis)proven. Rather it is a *contention*, deliberately rejecting the blood-based rationale for muggledom as *figuratively* false.

I.e. regardless of what characters say, what the narrator says, what Rowling would surely say if asked, it can & should be judged as figurative rendering of reality, and if one does so, it is transparently a damned lie, an odious fantasy of class "superiority" as eugenic truth.

A follower posted CFing my class analysis of Harry Potter with this thread on the ideology of "talent" behind the recent exam debacle. Can't RT said follower's protected account, but this is excellent, so I figured I'd point folk at it from the end here. https://twitter.com/Prolapsarian/status/1295586770801905664

And I don't know if I even used the term "talent" up there, but aye, I have gone off on how I hate the whole notion in the past, and it was very much in my mind while laying into the essentialisation of ability as innate gift.

FTR, sure, if there's genetic factors that disadvantage some in terms of basic traits e.g. agility, mental or physical, there may be factors that advantage, but I'll die on the hill that the complex abilities we deem "talent" are mostly just a virtuous circle of interest & skill.

You enjoy playing footie as a wean, you play footie more and get better at it. You enjoy playing keepie-uppie, so you play it and hone a particular skill: ball control. You apply that skill in playing footie, & you enjoy it all the more as you achieve more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The exact same is true when it comes to the games of Make Believe by which one develops that virtuous circle of interest and skill and gets drawn deeper and deeper into the craft of writing stories, until people are talking, as with a teenage footballer, in terms of "talent".

Were the magic of Harry Potter an Actual Thing, I'm firmly of the opinion it would be entirely as complex an ability as playing football or writing fiction and therefore likewise cast as "talent", but with that framing likewise a blind for a virtuous circle of interest and skill.

Out of curiosity, btw, I had a read through the first book just to see if anything in the text invalidates my take, and nope. It's all set out via character dialogue & assumptions, and the belief that muggledom is innate can entirely be read as institutionalised eugenic bollocks.

One could well argue indeed that Neville's family thinking he "might not be magic *enough* to come" [my italics] is awfully suggestive that magical ability is *not* in fact a genetically encoded binary reality of haves and have nots.

One might further argue that his mediocrity is clearly tied to a lack of confidence, readable as effect of that cause rather than vice versa, with the pushiness of his Great Aunt & Uncle the root cause; that he narrowly escaped becoming a "squib" exactly as outlined with Filch.

“My Great Uncle Algie kept trying to catch me off my guard and force some magic out of me—he pushed me off the end of Blackpool pier once, I nearly drowned—but nothing happened until I was eight.”

The son of two maths teachers not a maths whizz? Unthinkable!

How do I get a gig doing a read through of these books and just laying out the receipts for dosh, I could totally write one of those read-through blog series just vivisecting the class politics of the texts book by book, somebody pay me?

A few further thoughts for the monster thread, having had a shufty through the second book, where I find a *little* more authority for the orthodoxy... but not much: "The Dursleys were what wizards called Muggles (not a drop of magical blood in their veins)..."

We might read this as a Word of God binding of magic to blood... but is it? Couldn't one easily read it figuratively, even insert a comparable metaphor after: "(not a drop of magical blood in their veins, not a magic bone in their body)"?

Where the narrative shows us Lucius Malfoy and Borgin disdaining Hermione as "a girl of no wizard family", lamenting how "wizard blood is counting for less everywhere", why should we take this prejudice as anything more than the baseless ugly eugenics it presents as?

Should we do so simply because Hagrid ironically applies the same eugenic rationale for the bigotry and general malice of the Malfoys--"bad blood, that’s what it is"? Hagrid is a simple soul, not the most likely candidate to see through this TrueFact™ every student is taught.

Ron does though, dismissing the whole "pure blood" matter as bollocks: "I mean, the rest of us know it doesn’t make any difference at all. Look at Neville Longbottom—he’s pure blood and he can hardly stand a cauldron the right way up." He has no truck with the eugenics, good lad.

"Dirty blood, see. Common blood. It’s ridiculous." With that "common", the classism of the conceit is made explicit. It's aristos versus commoners, nobles versus proles, an archaic nonsense of "good breeding" that it would seem against the very thematics of the story to validate.

Writers, alas, aren't always as astute as their characters, don't always pick up on the logic of a story driving toward a reversal of some underpinning premise they've adopted, taken at face value. Oblivious of the undercurrents, they gloss over the contradictions.

As where Filch, the "squib" with no magic... *has magic*: "Drawn to the spot by the mysterious power that seemed to connect him with his foul cat, Argus Filch burst suddenly through a tapestry to Harry’s right."

Wait, what? The freak born with no magic has... a mysterious power?

I mean, why the fuck else would he be doing a "Correspondence Course in Beginners' Magic" if he didn't? Why would the Eton dropout be signed up for an OU course to try and get a proper education if the lack for a squib wasn't, as for any muggle, in nurture rather than nature?

Again Ron doesn't think for a second that this is futile due to some inborn failing. On the contrary, he takes it as so natural a goal for a squib to teach themself, it *proves* what he is: "If Filch’s trying to learn magic from a Kwikspell course, I reckon he must be a Squib."

Neville's "pure blood" status means nothing to him, doesn't stop him fearing being targeted with the "mudbloods": "And everyone knows I’m almost a Squib." In a novel where the villainy is eugenics, he & Finch stand as disproofs of the lie, as do the mudbloods, Hermione et al..

Where I talked of the secret in the Chamber of Secrets being the truth, that throwaway fancy rather holds up under a reading of the text. Is the purpose of that chamber simply to hide a monster for the sake of having a hidden monster, or is the monster there to guard the chamber?

When this school was established in the era of the first universities by the forebears of the four houses--our magical Sandhurst, Bullingdon Club, Royal Society, and Civil Service--what better reason for Salazar Slytherin's secret chamber than to bury the uncomfortable truth?

What better reason for a Muggle-raised halfblood loathing his Muggle father, abjecting that part of himself, focused on his noble descent via his mother from Salazar Slytherin, to go full Dark Lord on opening that chamber to discover the hollowness of his fantasy of princedom?

Much is made of the parallels between Harry Potter and Tom Riddle. Tom also is the Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince. Tom is the ugly apotheosis of that trope in full-on fascism, the refutation of the eugenics, the narrative's failure to catch the point it's driving to a tragic misstep.

The narrative itself asks the question via Lee Jordan: "why don’t they just chuck all the Slytherins out?" The answer: complicity, the other founders accepting the mere *moderation* of the prejudice, rejecting an extreme of class subjugation but not the lie of its righteousness.

Out of the mouth of Salazar Slytherin comes the great serpent, perennial symbol of deceit, to render the muggle-born--which is to say the muggles who know fine well they can do magic--inert. If they can't be exterminated, let them be ossified as in ignorance, made unable to act.

If one imagines the basilisk as guardian of a buried truth, there could hardly be a better hidey for it, if only this other muggle-raised Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince had thought to press on after his vanquishing of the fascist monster there is a little bit of within him, if only.

This isn't, perhaps, quite the place for the revelation in the series though. Too early, I'd say; it's a reversal for a midpoint, to upend this whole unspoken assumption that Slytherin eugenics has a foundation in aught but class prejudice. No, you'd want just a clue here.

Me, I might have put a broken statue in a tomb deep inside the mouth of Salazar Slytherin, a mystery figure with a wand in hand, the "Muggle" after whom all others are named, the Muggle Who Did Magic, the Muggle Who Rebelled. Call him Mikkel Mollytoff, heh, the Muggle Who Could.

Mikkel becomes Mickle becomes Muckle becomes Muggle, the vulgar prole who stood against the bastioning of privilege, who was turned to stone & broken & buried deep below the foundations, giving his name, by way of old words for "many" & "great", to the mob of the Great Unwashed.

A broken statue and a name--or some other signpost to the forgotten truth--might be all the greater narrative needed to avert its surrender to eugenics as TrueFact™, to undermine the assumption here, allow the contradictions we get via Ron, Filch & Neville a foothold to exploit.

I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that had the thematics been pushed just a little further, had author (or editor) only seen the tacit validation of the very beliefs the villainy hinged on, Rowling's reported struggle with the fourth book might never have happened.

Why did she have to go back & overhaul it? A book doctor's answer: 9 times out of 10, if there's a problem in the middle of a story, something's gone awry in the first act; there's a misstep, a *missed step*, a plot point the narrative is signposting that the author's overlooked.

Reading Chamber of Secrets with my book doctor hat on, I can't help but see in it exactly such a misstep, a turn-off that the narrative drove right by, where there was every opportunity to take Harry into the mouth of Salazar Slytherin's statue to get behind the lie born from it.