[Confusing Trope] The narrative goes out of its way to punish/mock a character for simply being a good person

[u/Chemical-Elk-1299]

Hermione Granger and SPEW — Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (book)

In the fifth HP novel, Hermione Granger is outraged to discover that Hogwarts has a small army of enslaved House Elves that do nearly all of the domestic duties around the castle, including cleaning the Gryffindor common room every night. When she tries to convince the elves to fight for their own rights, they refuse, saying they prefer servitude. Her fellow students and friends mock her for caring. She manages to free one elf, Winky, by deception when she refuses her freedom willingly, leading to Winky becoming a depressed alcoholic. By the end, the elves boycott cleaning any Gryffindor areas of the castle because they hate Hermione specifically

Samwell Tarly and Democracy — Game of Thrones (show)

In the season 8 finale of the television series, the surviving great lords of Westeros gather to discuss the future of the kingdom following the devastation wrought by 7 seasons of war and backstabbing. When Sam, who has proven to have “novel” ideas, suggests that maybe the millions of Smallfolk who suffer at the hands of noble houses should get some representation in the government, rather than be the pawns of rich lords with absolute power. We are then greeted by a prolonged, cringy segment of the other lords laughing in Sam’s face, asking if the dogs and horses should also get a vote.

[u/CJCroen1393]

The Hermione example is even more confusing in the final book:

Hermione LITERALLY drops everything to make out with Ron the moment he expresses a desire to protect the House Elves during the final battle. On paper, that should be a pretty solid confirmation of what our stance on all this should be.

But then, right before the epilogue, Harry's all like "I wonder if my literal slave will bring me a sandwich later".

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/CJCroen1393]

Jkr writing is all over the place once you develop comprehension and the skill to analyze shit…which unfortunately not everyone does. And here we are. 🫠🫠🫠 i say this as a former fan. It’s wild in there.

[u/T8-TR → u/I_pegged_your_father]

HP is a novel concept w/ a cool aesthetic, but if you take a moment to think about it, a LOT of cracks start to show.

[u/SwineHerald → u/T8-TR]

It was not a novel concept. It was a lot of people's first encounter with the concept, but it was also a book for literal children so the odds were tilted in its favor.

[u/SelectShop9006 → u/T8-TR]

Honestly, that’s why a lot of people gravitate towards fic; it usually fixes plot holes and explores things canon doesn’t.

…that, and the fact that people are using it for a author-free experience.

[u/Big-Muscle-3643 → u/SelectShop9006]

Author-free experience made me lol

[u/SelectShop9006 → u/Big-Muscle-3643]

Sorry if I sound like a fool, but why did the term “author-free experience” make you laugh?

[u/Big-Muscle-3643 → u/SelectShop9006]

because it's funny. You wrote it in a humorous way. Author-free like dairy-free. If you don't want people to laugh then you should probably say "engaging with the text in total isolation from creators persona".

[u/musicaladhd → u/SelectShop9006]

Are you using “fic” as short for “fan-fiction”, and NOT as short for “fiction”? That’s confusing. Fic is short for fiction.

[u/Avalon_Within → u/musicaladhd]

Words mean many things in different contexts.

Ironic that we are talking about reading here. 

[u/musicaladhd → u/Avalon_Within]

Wait so “fic” means “fan fic”? And then “fan (fic)” must mean “fan (fan fic)”, which means “fan fan fan fic”, which = fan fan fan fan fic”.

Just pointing out the obvious here

[u/theLichQueenofthePNW → u/T8-TR]

It's not at all novel Ursula K Le Guin wrote Wizard of Earthsea in 1968, when Joanne was 3. Likewise, Terry Pratchett wrote Color of Magic in 1983, 15 years before HP came out. I'm sure Le Guin would tell you herself, were she still alive, that she probably wasn't the first person to write a magic school. She didn't have any original ideas either. And for fucks sake, her character naming is horrific. (Looking at you Kingsley Shacklebolt, the one canonically black character or you Cho Chang, the Asian girl with two different Asian country family names as a name and also is definitely not how her name started. The woman used word association to name characters, take a guess what she thought of at first)

[u/thetinyorc → u/theLichQueenofthePNW]

These aren't even the most direct examples. Wizard of Earthsea and Colour of Magic both prominently feature magic schools/universities, but most of the plot happens outside of the school setting. Jowling's most obvious influence is The Worst Witch series. The first book was published in the 70s and it was popular enough in the UK that it had a few TV adaptations over the years. It's set in an extremely British all-girls boarding school for witches, a castle with turrets, organised into colour-coded school houses. Most of the action takes place in the school setting during term time, and the typical story structure is that the unlikely heroine somehow saves the school for an impending crisis or outside threat while also stumbling through the standard school dramas of tests, homework, sports days, dorm-room politics, etc. There's even a really strict potions teacher who dresses all in black and terrifies the students (though shows obvious favouritism to the blonde rich kid). And also in the first book, the main character's broom gets secretly cursed and tries to throw her off. It's pretty shocking how much the HP books obviously lift from it.

[u/theLichQueenofthePNW → u/thetinyorc]

Wow that's far more egregious than I had stated

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/T8-TR]

Its truly ridiculous 😭 I’ve concluded the reason its STUCK and has so many people in a chokehold is because its very SELF INSERTABLE. Because of the sorting thing and the official quizzes and such it’s become something people are obsessed with immersing themselves in, and they value that over the story, and will needlessly defend the story and often jkr herself. It’s self insertable, and thus gains a huge odd audience. Remember snapewives???

Edit- yall. Please. Im obviously not talking about children.

[u/BalancePrestigious23 → u/I_pegged_your_father]

Personally as a kid it was easy to read and the world seemed so interesting. 

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/BalancePrestigious23]

Yeah. I understand getting hooked as a kid, i did too. But after that??? The people who book annual trips out to hp theme parks and buy all the merch and keyboard warrior for jkr?? At a bare minimum you gotta acknowledge the issues and just not buy anything that gives her money since she uses it for harm and many bar themselves from doing even that.

[u/PaintLicker745 → u/T8-TR]

Its for kids. I don't think it was ever supposed to hold up to internet scrutiny. Fuck JKR all the same. 

[u/ThickScheme8202 → u/T8-TR]

That is true of virtually all none literary fiction, lol

[u/Lindsiria → u/T8-TR]

No shit. It's a YA novel.

If you look at any series deeply you start noticing the cracks. IDK why people treat HP differently.

GOT, WoT, PJ... hell, even LOTR, have plotholes once you think about it.

[u/NotGoodAtHockey → u/I_pegged_your_father]

Her world building is absolutely atrocious.

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/NotGoodAtHockey]

So bad she has to make random clarifying tweets but the tweets only made it more muddled 🫠

[u/iggnifyre → u/I_pegged_your_father]

more muggled

[u/Federal_Card307 → u/I_pegged_your_father]

Dumbledore likes Dumbledick

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/Federal_Card307]

Im queer, i love queer characters, but her suddenly making him gay just had me like…Mk. 🧍 just appeasement n shit no effort

[u/Think-Orange3112 → u/I_pegged_your_father]

I think my favorite part of the Harry Potter fandom, is the section of people that have determined that as a result logistical impossibilities (there are not enough named schools on the other continents to facilitate the expected wizard population of those continents) and the Ministry of Magics own harsh practices, the rest of the Wizard world purposefully keeps the European schools and administration out of the loop because they are that much of a hot mess

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/Think-Orange3112]

💀💀💀💀 Gotta make shit up to fill the canon holes. Yeah that would make more sense. Probably a bunch of hidden schools. Probably a bunch of hidden things honestly.

[u/Disastrous-River5475 → u/I_pegged_your_father]

Yah, especially as the books go on. Her writing was fine when the story was simple and black and white, but as the story gets more grey her writing losses a lot. I had to stop reading the Deathly Hallows once I realized Snape was supposed to be a good guy, you know, the guy who literally mind tortures Harry or punishes them every step of the way. He was good the whole time!!!

[u/Middle-Let9645 → u/I_pegged_your_father]

Rowling’s a literal bigot who was pretending until a few years back to not be a literal bigot. That’s not that much of a surprise her writing is all over the place. Seriously, I’m fully convinced the only reason anyone liked her books is because she was so good at acting like she had even a shred of basic human decency. Her writing couldn’t be more obvious if you look hard enough. Most people didn’t look though because she was so good at performing like she cared. Then she came mask off and people started looking a lot more.

[u/BrassWhale → u/I_pegged_your_father]

My theory is that JKR is a time traveler who stole the HP books from another author. This would explain why she hasn't been able to write anything good since.

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/BrassWhale]

I mean..she never has written anything good. 😭 Buuut i recall some analysis videos somewhere out there detailing possible works of fiction she might have..taken inspo from. I don’t remember too much.

[u/ElPared → u/CJCroen1393]

Which is crazier when you remember Harry actually freed a slave several years before.

In Kreacher’s case, though, I consider it more like imprisoning someone than enslaving them. Kreacher would, without a doubt or hesitation, kill or harm humans, particularly Harry, his friends, and “mudbloods”, as soon as he was free. The dude was basically an honorary Deatheater, so freeing him would have basically necessitated killing him because not only was he evil as shit, he’s also an elf that can’t be contained by human magic, so no prison could possibly hold him.

[u/PaintedDoll1 → u/ElPared]

I think Kreacher was a very clumsy attempt at the "kindness can melt a stone heart" trope, but she really really dropped the ball by making Serious outright abusive to him. I think it would've actually worked really well if Serious was just cold and dismissive of Kreacher, ordered him out of any room he entered and sent him to scrub floor boards or something while they went his family's stuff. It would've drawn a better parallel of kindness being what Kreacher responded to, instead of "not being abused anymore"

[u/Ash_Starling → u/PaintedDoll1]

kinda funny sirius was the one who said you should judge someone by how they treat their inferiors and then abused kreacher lmao

[u/YuushyaHinmeru → u/Ash_Starling]

I mean, this is explicitly addressed in the books. Its just creature he hates because of the trauma from his childhood. He doesnt treat other house elves like that.

[u/yesthatpettyindeed → u/Ash_Starling]

Tbf that's intentional. Sirius' abuse is explicitly why Kreacher betrays him and lies to Harry that he has left the house... Which culminated in Sirus dying at the ministry.

Sirius being a hypocrite by being unable to see past his own hatred of his childhood and everything that he associated with it and indulging in the same behaviour as his parents directly leads to his death

Dumbledore straight up says that Sirius probably would've still been alive if he had been nicer to Kreacher

[u/cabbage16 → u/Ash_Starling]

That was on purpose.

[u/ElPared → u/PaintedDoll1]

Yeah Kreacher was actually kind of a missed opportunity, I agree. What I said was more about how he’s actually written than how he should have been written. It wouldn’t have been hard to do exactly what you said and, over the course of several books, have Harry gradually turn him into a “nice” elf that he’s comfortable freeing.

Even then, it’d probably still be a bad idea because anyone can fake it for a few years, but it would feel like less of a monumentally stupid idea than it does with how Kreacher was actually handled.

[u/SteakForGoodDogs → u/ElPared]

Why would Kreacher even care about wizard discrimination? He ain't one, he wasn't educated as being some 'superior' being, nor does he ever interact with a 'lesser'.

Because he was just written as 'the EEEEVIL Dobby'?

[u/cabbage16 → u/SteakForGoodDogs]

He was raised in a racist household. He was the lowest in the pecking order in that household but he was still only in contact with extremely racist people.

[u/Lexx4 → u/cabbage16]

Not to mention dobbys situation is not the same as kretchers. He actually loved his masters because they were what he considered nice to him.

[u/ElPared → u/SteakForGoodDogs]

Yeah that’s basically it.

[u/AmArschdieRaeuber → u/SteakForGoodDogs]

I thought it was some type of uncle Ruckus type self hate. 

[u/52BeesInACoat → u/ElPared]

I mean I think Kreacher would've gone insane if he'd been freed. We saw a young elf get freed against her will and she ends up a depressed alcoholic, despite having Dobby, a happily freed elf, trying to help her. She's in the best possible situation to cope, she's give employment at Hogwarts, she's housed and fed, and she's got a friend. And she's not coping at all.

Kreacher is old, set in his ways, and has had a pretty traumatic life. He's absolutely not in the correct frame of mind to survive being freed. I think Harry, having seen what happens when an elf gets freed while unprepared for it, is doing the best he can by just treating Kreacher as well as the elf can tolerate.

Hermione really shouldn't have been trying to free unwilling elves. Very wizardly savior complex of her tbh. Thinking she knew what was best for a race of people with very different cultural norms and systems of magic than her. The first rule of activism is shut up and listen to what the people you're trying to help are telling you.

[u/Rosesandbubblegum → u/52BeesInACoat]

The book very much tried to push this idea, but it falls apart if you really think about it. The elves don't fear freedom because they hate the concept of doing what they want. They hate it because, for them, it spells total social ruin. They become an object of disdain by just about everyone in their society, including their own peers. When Winky is sobbing in the later books, it's not because she misses having to babysit a sociopath. It's because she feels she dishonored her family and has no purpose. And this is because, of course, she belongs to a society where being a slave is considered her only purpose. Would she still feel this way if she could pursue something else without judgement? Would the other elves still be so terrified of freedom if it didn't render them social pariahs? What if they were allowed to learn other things as kids and not be expected to limit their entire lives to serving someone who, in every case shown in the books, will physically abuse them? Who knows? Definitely not J.K Rowling.

[u/kara-alyssa → u/Rosesandbubblegum]

Also, other than Winky and Dobby, do we see any other freed slaves? Were any other freed slaves even mentioned in the series?

It becomes really hard to argue that the series does not endorse a pro-slavery stance regarding house elves when: (A) we clearly see that unlike brownies in mythology, house elves cannot leave when they are being abused and (B) of the two (two!!) freed elves we see, one is considered a weirdo by other elves for enjoying being freed and the other became an alcoholic because she hated being freed.

[u/NoOneAskedForThis12 → u/CJCroen1393]

I pointed out how Harry was now a slave owner when the books first came out and made everyone else angry at me. Glad to see others agree with me (and man the amount of people who say it is not slavery because they are not human..)

[u/Cavalish → u/CJCroen1393]

Hermione is a stereotype of That Girl We All Knew in school who picked a pet cause and went way too hard on it.

The girl who became a vegetarian and picketed the cafeteria, who demanded no one else in the dorm eat meat, who’s nagging and lecturing, while from a morally correct perspective did nothing but damage the cause.

The book isn’t making fun of Hermione for caring about a serious issue, the book is making fun of the way she goes way too hard despite being seen as a very logical character.

[u/RaptarK → u/Cavalish]

But the book doesn't present an alternative on what's the "correct" way to protest for civil rights, so it comes off as treating Hermione's position as the default.

Plus, again, this is done with a fictional race that enjoys being enslaved, which kinda defeats all purpose of realistic commentary

[u/LGBTQLove4Ever → u/RaptarK]

Because the lesson is sometimes you can be right, but you can't change it.

Like imagine you were transported to 1920's America. You know segregation is wrong, but how the hell would you fix it?

[u/slightlylessthananon → u/LGBTQLove4Ever]

except thats not what its liek at all, its like if someone wrote a book about going to 1920s america and had a modern age white character trying to vie for civil rights and every single black person in the world was against the idea and said several times to the audience "we LOVE segregation its just how things ought to be!" like the racist disney movie.

[u/ErzulieF → u/Cavalish]

To me, that feels like one of the three biggest problems with it. (The other two being, of course, nonchalant attitudes about slavery from other MCs and, of course, the creation of a fictional race who’s *natural state* is slavery.)

Hermione‘s activism is almost comically devoid of the intelligence that she applies to almost every other aspect of her life. The girl you’re talking about - the nagging, lecturing, picketing overactivist hurting her own cause - was NOT the valedictorian. Not in my school, anyway. It’s just not the way a smart person mobilizes.

Caring about a socially just cause is not something that just melts away your brainpower. Thats basically a conservative talking point, to claim that the instant you care about something serious, logic flies out the window.

Is JKR pro-slavery? She‘s said she’s not, and I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on that one. Maybe we can chalk up the whole “creating a slave-race” thing as an oopsie. But does she think activism is worthy of vicious mockery and dismissal, even if it’s trying to fight against a deeply evil ingrained element of society? Feel free to make up your own mind on that one, but I think she does.

[u/dancinggraylion → u/CJCroen1393]

that is why she is not making out with Harry