this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Ok I'm going to indulge in a little bit of HP overthinking but I swear I have a point so bear with me:
It's really fucked how JKR spent a whole book (and the only decent one in the series imo) and a bit of another one laying out how harrowing and dehumanizing Azkaban is, how Hagrid only spent like 30 days in it and was traumatized by the experience, and how unless you're uniquely mentally strong you will become an empty shell of a human being with no hope of leaving. But then we're supposed to believe that getting people out of there is bad.
We are told directly by the characters, and by the narrator, that being sent to Azkaban is BAD, period. This is the whole premise of why setting Sirius up for a crime he did not commit was a horrible thing to do. But later we are also expected to believe that Sirius was the ONLY INNOCENT PERSON in wizard history to ever be wrongfully sentenced, everyone else who is or has been in Azkaban is evil, except for this one (actually very simple) conspiracy to send an innocent man to torture prison. Except they do it again, about 10 years later, to Hagrid. If Harry wasn't there to reveal that it was someone else who had opened the chamber of secrets, he would've rotted out in a cell. So the wizard legal system does jail innocent people, one of them belonging to a marginalized community.
And JKR in her infinite Blairite, neoliberal wisdom, wants the reader to think that:
everyone in Azkaban is guilty and the most evil wizards around. The wizard legal system doesn't make mistakes
Literal forced depersonalization and psychological torture are fitting punishments for anyone the legal system deems guilty.
So of course breaking people out from there a few books later is bad. It's a very clear show of neoliberal "tough on crime" brainworms, being presented uncritically to a generation of children
God, these books were even worse than I remember them being.
Wasn't there almost the same type of dogshite with Dobby and the house elves?
something something the house elves LOVE being slaves and dobby is the one weird and whacky one for not wanting to be enslaved
this franchise is big headache
Ugh i was really into the books when they came out. I remember reading about the house elves and thinking how heavy-handed hermione's crusade to save them was and so was trying to skim past those parts and (perhaps cuz of that) being surprised that rowling went to a different place ("they like slavery?? Wtf?")
This was probably the first time i looked askance at rowling, started looking harder at the stuff she was pennin. Im pretty sure i noticed the house elves before the gringotts goblins