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galen  ·  1658 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The wonderful, weird world of wizard rock

Here's my thing about Harry Potter:

It's a book series about a race (or group, or caste, or aristocracy) of privileged people (wizards) who have power (magic) over a race/group/caste/proletariat of the underprivileged (muggles). The villains want to enslave the underprivileged and prevent race-mixing, while the good guys are firmly against this--one of the protagonists is even mixed herself.

So far so good.

The point where you start to run into problems is when you start naturalizing this hierarchy. See Innuendo Studios on the origins of conservatism: conservatism (and eventually, fascism) is what happens when people begin to believe that some people are inherently better than others, that the natural world is full of hierarchies and so any attempt to produce a fully egalitarian society is stupid and counterproductive.

We return to Harry Potter: the problem with even the good guy wizards saving muggles from Voldemort or whatever is that even in this scenario, the wizards are better than muggles. Even in this scenario, good wizards have to save the muggles from the bad wizards because obviously the poor disadvantaged muggles can't do it themselves. And why should the good wizards do this? Because racism is mean and those poor lil normies :///

It's aristocratic, colonialist, racist, Tory bullshit: a white savior complex in kid-friendly form. And these dumbasses call it punk?