Millennials love Harry Potter so much because Millennials bought into the idea that we could work within the system as it exists and by the time we realized that was impossible, it was almost too late for some of us to change our thought processes

And Millennials will scream to the high heavens how they thought Harry Potter was anti-establishment, how it was about FIGHTING the system but it wasn't. It was a book about a wealthy sporty white British kid who went to an elite boarding school and then became a cop

Harry Potter gave white US-ian Millennials a palatable version of the American dream: that progress comes from reacting to situations within certain confines while maintaining an allegiance to some form of systemic power.

White Americans tend to believe we are temporarily poor rather than systemically oppressed, and we will be rewarded once the power structure recognizes us as special ("wizards"). It's a comfortable sort of belief. It requires waiting, not action. It requires reaction, not action

And of course, Millennials--especially white Millennials--were and are desperate to belong to something. We were able to recognize white supremacy and racism. We understood the evils of the American Empire. But we still wanted desperately to Be Something, to define ourselves

And here comes a book series based almost entirely around what amounts to a Buzzfeed quiz as a form of identity.

It was so perfect and so easy and meant nothing so of course it meant everything

I said in another thread Millennial humor is, in some ways, a universal shorthand. A set of references that at once seem deeply personal and also universal.

Remember when Facebook started and there were all those groups like "I Check Behind The Shower Curtain For A Murderer"

It sounds so trite now but back then, in the early/mid-2000s we were, for the first time, seeing weird personal habits reflected by so many others. It was like the inside jokes we had with ourselves had like, through osmosis, become universal

Hence all those awful rage face memes ugh

Well Harry Potter provided an even easier form of that universal shorthand. You could condense your entire self-image into a word made up by a British transphobe! Neat!

And because Harry Potter was so...bland in its world-building and writing style, it was so easy to superimpose meaning; to find wide open spaces in the text where we could pretend it meant much more than it did.

Building a community around like, candy-coated elitism was easy

Millennials suffered from being told we were special by our Boomer/Gen X parents. Especially white Millennials who later started reading and learning just enough to realize how awful the idea of individual specialness actually is when combined with whiteness.

But Harry Potter offered us a way to rationalize that desire for specialness by framing it in a particular British style of funny child abuse and underdog elites. It didn't feel like elitism. It didn't feel like privilege. It felt like an underground society of freedom fighters

Truly, Barack Obama was the Millennial President, despite him obviously not being a Millennial. His whole mandate--acting w/in the system, trying to reach across the aisle, pretending that if we were nice enough we could win them over, stressing the importance of institutions

That was a fantasy too, but it defined the political awareness of kids just coming of age. Obama was the benevolent leader who let bad things happen because he had a larger, more important plan that was worth the sacrifice of a few, worth treating human lives like chess pieces

And look, the problem is you can totally forge real and meaningful bonds around bland milquetoast platitudes and worldbuilding that's one-half funny words and one-half dirty mirror. Fan communities can and do carry important meaning to those within them. I'm not gonna deny that

But when confronted with real-world wrongdoing, the metaphors holding those communities together, propping up the shorthand, fall apart completely because Harry Potter was never a guidebook for resistance--it was instead a seven-book paean to trusting authority

To believing the ends justify the means. To accepting the people asking you to sacrifice everything are doing so for some greater good rather than to just prop up the same system that created the bad stuff in the first place.

Harry spends half the books running from the Ministry

And then he becomes a cop.

Like. That's the lesson of Harry Potter: PEOPLE can be bad but institutions are good. PEOPLE can cause mass suffering but systems are still worth preserving and supporting because as long as those bad people are gone, the system will then do good

Rowling created a world where a slave class existed because They Liked To Be Slaves and the one character who seemed to find that weird was made fun of throughout for suggesting change. Rowling deployed antisemitic tropes with all the aplomb of Bean Dad.

But worst of all Rowling taught a generation of kids that fighting oppression is only valid when it's against an individual, not a system.

Look I did a thread once where I listed like 100 or so things wrong the Harry Potter AS A TEXT so I know I'm biased. But I also am able to see that community formation is good! It is! But it's not enough. Fandom is not enough. It never has been, it never will be.

But it pretends that it is.

And that's the issue. That's the biggest problem. Millennials have been taught to believe it's enough to get Always tattoos and label themselves Slytherins or whatever instead of actually divesting ourselves from systemic violence

And Rowling herself is a perpetrator of systemic violence. Even before the t/e/r/f stuff came up she was silencing Indigenous critics who told us her use of Natives and their traditions was demeaning, racist, and dehumanizing. She believes herself a do-er of good b/c

on a PERSONAL LEVEL she's "totally fine!!!!" with people identifying however they choose!!!! She totally has trans friends u guys!!!! It's fine!!!!

Her worldview is one of people being bad or good and systems being either neutral or good enough to work to maintain

GenZ is right to make fun of us, Millennials. Because we never went far enough. We embraced symbolic resistance rather than fighting for real, actual change. And of course this means mostly white Millennials, mostly American Millennials. Nothing is absolute

But we embraced rainbow capitalism, feminist t-shirt slogans, and Harry Potter references as symbols of resistance.

We were just feeding the machine friendos.

Anyway this is way too many words already so I'll end by saying as Trump (hopefully) leaves office Millennials need to remember--it's not enough. It never was. It never will be

I am not ashamed to post this thread of ways you can help me rescue cats https://twitter.com/ellle_em/status/1309999500992405504?s=20

Ugh ppl replying with "but I just want to enjoy it!" well I'm not stopping you, go for it but remember consumption of media is political whether you want it to be or not