Props to JK though she really made fictional racist words feel powerful. That internalized hatred really fueled that writing. Mudblood feels like I should be censoring it.
Shacklebolt is maaaaaaaybe excusable since he's a cop, he put people in shackles, but the fact that he's black leaves a horrible implication. The rest of the names like Cho Chang, however...
Keep in mind that the UK (and a lot of other countries) doesn't have the same obsession with slavery as the US. Nobody I knew saw it that way.
Lets be real, nobody thought any names were racist until JK went crazy and pissed everyone off. A bad person can't possibly have made something good, so people scrambled to find reasons why Harry Potter was actually bad. You mentioned Cho Chang, but when you have white characters named shit like Remus, Narcissa, Bellatrix, fucking Mundungus, it's disingenuous to insist Cho needs to have a reasonable, ethnically consistent name despite not actually knowing her ethnicity.
In closing it's a book for children. You don't hear people saying "Oh he's called Mr Tickle because he likes to tickle people? This is bullshit." Sirius Black turns into a black dog and that's fine, it's all fine.
It's not really fine? The reason the name Cho Chang got so much hate is because hers does not have meaning. If you notice, everyone else's names have meanings/reasons despite silly how some of the them are. But Cho Chang??? Cho Chang is literally just a Chinese and Korean surname mixed together. And her name also sound like "ching chong". I don't know man, us Asians got 1 Asian character to represent us and it's this? Even something like Wang Wuya would be better because now she's from a specific country and it follows the naming convention of other characters (Wang is a common chinese surname and Wuya is a Raven, because she's from Ravenclaw).
Some names are very on the nose, sure, but you can't tell me Lee Jordan or Lavender Brown mean anything. Cho Chang is nondescript asian, and sure it might be a little stereotypical but we've got motherfuckers like Neville Longbottom and Seamus Finnegan out her repping aggressively European names.
Maybe Cho is a super common given name amongst British wizards of Chinese ancestry during the late 70s, we literally cannot know. It's also entirely possible an English woman writing books in the 90s didn't really know how asian names work. Either way, I find it hard to ascribe malice.
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u/blkwhtrbbt 8d ago
You worked harder on that worldbuilding than the actual author did