The Cozy Tribalism of Hogwarts
Warmth and Belonging in a World of Categorized Humanity
Fair Spoiler Warning: The following essay assumes you have either read or watched the entirety of Harry Potter. I mean, come on. It’s Harry Potter.
Part One: Pottermania In a Cold, Cruel World
In 2026, real-world socialization and group gatherings seem to be falling by the wayside in favor of social media.
You might feel this is hyperbolic, but consider: Discord is social media. LinkedIn is social media. The dating websites and apps where you likely seek a significant other are social media. Ostensible ‘entertainment’ apps like Tiktok and YouTube are actually social media. Substack itself, over the last year, has made great and intentional strides toward becoming more social media-esque.
Here’s a cold take about social media: It’s often cruel.
Most people will see your identity and humanity through one post, or (at best) a series of posts. And a bad post, no matter how well-meaning, can make you the villain of the day to a group of people who see this singular message as representing everything you are. Take the below example.
The original post in this exchange was a one-and-done. Someone posted this, and was so attacked for it that they deleted their threads profile. And while I’ll stand by my perspective that this person has more inside them than this one foolish post, it is still deeply foolish. With genuine reverence, they tried to sort two innocent people killed by the US government into fictional wizard clans from a children’s fantasy series, believing it an appropriate eulogy. But if I thought this was some aberration, some unusual fringe behavior from Harry Potter fans, I wouldn’t be talking about it.
No, this is not one lone weirdo. This is a common way of viewing the world.
I am a substitute teacher. Every day I walk into classrooms filled with banners of Hogwarts houses, with JK Rowling quotes about courage, friendship, and love stapled to the walls. When taking attendance the other day, I had to sit up higher in my chair to see the kids’ faces over the 18 inch figurine of Dobby the House Elf on the teacher’s desk. Once, I made the mistake of loudly badmouthing “Slytherins,” and a friend who had been sorted into the house on Pottermore cried. I had no idea that the stakes were so high for her. (If you’re wondering, I said: “Slytherins are the kind of people who think they’re edgy outcasts for voting Republican.”)
Harry Potter mania has outlived ‘Twilight’ fascination and dwarfed ‘Percy Jackson’ It has transcended the brief ‘Eragon’ cult. And no piece of fiction has taken off the same way since without involving copious smut. My own favorite British Children’s Fantasy series is largely forgotten, but still Harry Potter lives on, with a level of popularity that competes with and possibly overwhelms the grandfather of all modern fantasy, Lord of the Rings.
This fascination translates to big money, and so the Harry Potter franchise and its offshoots are still very much alive. A few years back, Hogwarts Legacy became the bestselling video game of 2023 in the US. A trailer for a new HBO series has been released, despite the original movies being considered solid adaptations that haven’t aged much. The biggest ‘original’ fantasy novel release of 2025 was an adapted Harry Potter fanfiction. It feels like the enthusiasm has barely died down since this news story was filmed in 2007.
This is in spite of the contrast between the liberal values of most Harry Potter fans (they are, after all, readers) and JK Rowling’s bigoted politics, which are now the core of her public identity. The overlap of Harry Potter fans and cisgender white women who put ‘she/her’ pronouns in their bios is practically a circle. In recent years, it has been pointed out time and time again that eyebrow-raising aspects of the Harry Potter books reveal a creator who, at best, is not particularly conscientious in her worldbuilding. (Or, in the term’s original meaning: not woke.) But it hardly shakes her fandom made up of very (performatively) woke people.
So why? Why do the same teachers who dedicate themselves to emotionally supporting transgender students remain so dedicated to this one fictional universe, and continue to financially support Rowling? Why do I still meet moms of LGBT children with the triangular symbol of the Deathly Hallows tattooed somewhere on their bodies? (Or worse: “Always.”)
As I’ve read widely, and discovered books by other problematic authors, something has begun to ring true to me. I do not think that this fascination is in spite of Rowling’s hateful nature, but because of it. There is a silver lining to this hate, a kind of warmth that can only be stoked by its fire.
When we look at what is compelling and desirable about living in her world, the vision that her characters present, and (yes) the inherent nature of “Hogwarts Houses,” it becomes clear that Rowling’s art embraces tribalism and an ‘us versus them’ ethos with deep earnesty. Its comfort, grown all the more comforting in the cold social-media-addled word we now find ourselves living in, is the warm comfort of ‘belonging.’
And in order to truly belong, others must not.
Part Two: Gryffindor and Slytherin
Around 2012 or 2013, I, who was not a devoted Harry Potter fan, took the viral Pottermore quiz expecting to be sorted into Ravenclaw. I got Gryffindor.
This unexpected result lent the test an air of validity. (After all, a bad test would be more transparent, right?) And instantly there was a surge of pride. Pride I didn’t take too seriously, to be fair. But like a genderbent Hermione Granger, I’d expected to be classified as nerd, but was instead sorted into the hero house!
I marched to my college friends the next day, full of half-serious brags. Feeling extra-boisterous, extra-Gryffindor. When someone else announced her fellow Gryffindorhood, we high-fived. A Hufflepuff rolled his eyes and said that Gryffindors could still be dicks. A few Slytherins, as usual, gave immensely convoluted explanations of what their house ‘actually stood for,’ none of which were supported by the text of the books, but were instead reliant on many later statements from Rowling that often contradicted each other. Again: None of these people were devoted Harry Potter fans. This was actually how much HP had infiltrated culture at the time.
It’s worth belaboring the Slytherin thing: Many adult human beings still walk this earth considering “Slytherin” a core piece of their identity. They often point out, correctly, that all seven Harry Potter books are biased. That to Harry and the other Gryffindors, the Slytherins come off assholes. This is fair, in some ways, especially since many of the adults at Hogwarts show a naked disdain toward Slytherin, even when talking to an impressionable child.
The above is a quote from Hagrid, one of the most beloved of all Harry Potter characters, and it comes before we’ve ever met a Slytherin. Throughout the series, professors such as Minerva McGonagall, a kind of author avatar for Rowling, show clear disdain for Slytherin. Albus Dumbledore himself, the Headmaster of Hogwarts, often blatantly favors Harry Potter, and seems to side with house Gryffindor against Slytherin because Harry is in it.
Of course, paying any attention at all to why these teachers, adults, and other respected figures are biased against Slytherin presents us with an obvious answer. Slytherins actually suck.
I understand if your goth heart loves the aesthetic of Slytherin. Believe me. I also have a goth heart, and I have dealt with many disappointments in the past. I get that “Ambitious and doing whatever it takes to meet their goals” is more words than “evil,” therefore it’s quite easy to trick yourself into believing that these are not the same thing. You can also, if you ignore Rowling’s worldbuilding, convince yourself that Slytherin bigotry is an aberration, not something at the core of their house identity and history.
If Slytherins are counter-cultural edgelords, then they are the equivalent of nazi punks. A group that’s out of line with mainstream opinion because of how aggressively they seek to uphold the status quo, and how unquestioningly they favor elitism. This all leads up to, of course, their participation in what is essentially a genocide-cult near the end of the books. (I honestly could never nail down whether Voldemort was giving “cult leader” “serial killer” or “fascist.” I guess it’s all three.)
So yes, if I was a Hogwarts professor, I’d be about as biased against Slytherin as any reasonable teacher should be against their on-campus TPUSA chapter, right about now. The bias against Slytherin is the book’s bias against Slytherin, because as presented, their values are evil.
Rowling did soften her view against Slytherin, but only near the final books, and then afterward. Her lazy attempts to shore up her evil house’s reputation included post-novel commentary in which she sorted the literal Merlin into Slytherin and made him some kind of Muggle-rights activist. Rowling also later claimed that Wizards used to poop themselves then cast it away with magic, and as long as you’re accepting author commentary as canon you have no reason to embrace one and not the other.
Why have I gone on about this so long? Because it is vitally important to understand that, in JK Rowling’s warm and comforting universe, a magical hat is placed on a child’s head upon their arrival to the main Wizard school. This hat then decides, usually in a minute or less, what kind of person you are. And every human in the universe can be categorized into one of four types: Smart, Brave, Compassionate, Nazi. The villains are color-coded, and Slytherin ‘green’ is evil as a law of nature, because it matches the ‘green flash’ of the most iconic forbidden spell: Avada Kedavra. When Harry duels Voldemort, his Expelliarmus is Gryffindor red (for good) just as Voldemort’s killing curse is Slytherin green (for evil.)
A society that “sorts” children into different houses, clans, or jobs based on their qualities is actually common in children’s fiction, and precedes Harry Potter in novels like The Giver. This makes a lot of sense. It appeals to a natural urge that young people have to figure themselves out. With all the stress of discovering who you are and where you belong, it’s natural to imagine: “What if someone just classified me? What if I was just given a place?”
Of course, more than ten seconds of introspection inevitably leads to: “But wouldn’t that be kind of fucked up?” Society having that power over young people’s identities? Shaping who they are, with no input from them? Especially when some of the things that they are sorted into are problematic. Which is why every novel that creates this kind of world, from The Giver to Divergent, inevitably imagines it as a dystopia.
Except, of course, for the world that goes so far as to ‘sort’ young children into the category of ‘evil.’ Except for Harry Potter.
Because maybe, just maybe, some of us actually do want the villains to be color-coded, and don’t see that as dystopian at all. Maybe part of our comfort is knowing who to comfortably hate.
Part Three: Love and Hate
Rowling is clear, multiple times across her series: The most powerful thing, by far, is love. Love has an actual mysterious power in her world, and it overwhelms any technical skill with magic. Before the series begins, the love of Harry’s mother literally saves his life from the forementioned killing curse and stops Voldemort’s first reign of terror in its tracks. Love continues to impact Harry throughout the series. I would argue quite strongly, in fact, that Hogwarts as a whole loves Harry, in a way that feels deeply personal.
Because that’s the other thing about Rowling’s love: It is not a spiritual, moralistic love, no. Not a Buddhist or Christian love for all things. This is fierce familial or romantic love. The kind of love that will motivate you to favor one person over another. Love that you will die for, even kill for. Love stronger than any principle.
So when I say Hogwarts loves Harry, I of course mean it bends over backward to favor him.
If you want to get absolutely hammered, watch all eight Harry Potter movies back to back, and take a shot every time Harry breaks a rule. Loveable Fred and George Weasley, also of House Gryffindor, give Harry the “Marauder’s Map." An item which, in tandem with his invisibility cloak, allows him to wander Hogwarts after curfew hours whenever he wishes and keep track of anyone who might find him. To use the map, Harry must literally say: “I solemnly swear I am up to not good.”
But, of course, it always is for the Greater Good, isn’t it? It’s Harry doing it, after all. Not one of those pricks from Slytherin. True to this, he is caught more than once on these excursions, and receives a slap on the wrist each time.
And in criticizing it, I sound like a wet blanket, don’t I? It’s fun, after all, to have a protagonist who breaks the rules. A lot more fun than it is to have a protagonist who always follows them. But part of what makes it fun is our identification with a character who breaks the rules and gets away with it. In inhabiting the mind of Harry, we are invited into a version of Hogwarts in which (to use a term now in vogue) the rules protect, but do not bind us.
So yes, the entire Harry Potter universe is, from end to end, biased in favor of Harry and against his rivals and enemies. This is not just his perspective, nor is it the Slytherin perspective. It is the actual law of Rowling’s world, and because we so thoroughly occupy Harry, it is comfortable. Hogwarts is a good place, because Hogwarts loves Harry, regardless of how he behaves. And through him, Hogwarts loves us.
But it isn’t long before we’re directed toward another type of character. Rowling has a unique talent as an author, one that I rarely see adult fiction authors do so well. She has both a penchant and gift for writing hate-magnet characters.
What is a hate-magnet character, in the context of this series? Typically, they are not a main villain, but a kind of secondary, lower-stakes antagonist that causes problems for Harry and his friends. Rowling’s hate-magnets are interesting in that they have some qualities that could be considered comedic, especially since they’re always ridiculous. But they can’t actually be found funny, because they’re too detestable.
The first was Gilderoy Lockhart in book two, a fraudster who takes people’s achievements for his own, then erases their memories. He is the most outlandish, but the more famous examples are semi-satirical, based on real-world archetypes that must have pissed Rowling off. For years, I never thought I would hate a character so much as I hated Rita Skeeter.
Featured prominently in book four, Skeeter is a caricature of a Daily Mail journalist writing slanderous articles about our main characters. She is a constant, irritating thorn in their side, spying on them and misrepresenting everything that happens to them to be as uncharitable as possible, causing as many problems as she can. Rowling seemed to almost delight in making this character hateable in a way that felt…oddly cruel? She was so contemptible, so genuinely painful to read about as she got away with her horrible dishonest schemes, that at a certain point, child-me didn’t even want her to get her comeuppance. I just didn’t want her to be there.
I think the wrong things are emphasized in the criticism of Rita Skeeter. A lot of people point out how the text describes her “mannish hands,” how this is a tell for Rowling’s eventual transphobia. But I think the real problem is both simpler and bigger: Skeeter, beyond any other character up to this point, revealed something troubling about Harry Potter’s comfortable world filled with likable, cozy characters. All stories need conflict, but the characters on Harry’s side generally didn’t argue or fight with each other, and when they did, it was easy to resolve. To maintain tension, they needed to be under constant siege from villains both big and small. These villains shouldn’t have valid points, they shouldn’t be understandable or even sensible, they shouldn’t feel human, and they didn’t even need to be evil in a broader, higher-stake sense. What mattered was how they personally undermined the characters we loved.
To some people, that might sound like all fiction. Protagonists and antagonists abound, and we root for the former. But is it? There’s all kinds of fiction in this world, and many stories make their villains sympathetic, or even likeable in a kind of Freudian-id way. Sometimes there are even plot lines that are more shades-of-grey, and refuse to identify a clear ‘good’ or ‘bad’ side. Many of these stories are actually for children! There are so many different ways of creating conflict, and making it compelling.
More than anything else, this level of “us” versus “them” conflict is something of a sliding scale. How much is the audience supposed to identify with the ‘us’ and how much are they supposed to hate the ‘them?’ It’s all over the place, but I will say this: In all my years reading hundreds upon hundreds of books, watching countless movies, and even playing video games that put you directly in the shoes of a protagonist, I have never experienced a story in which we are encouraged to love our protagonists and hate their adversaries as much as Harry Potter.
And I think it’s finally time to touch on the character I have been omitting up to this point.
In truth, I have little to say about Dolores Umbridge that has not already been said. Take everything that I said about Rita Skeeter, and multiply it at least by a factor of ten. She is the apex of all Rowling’s hate-magnetism, never to be outdone. A caricature of a right-wing female politician that has been called many, many things, all of them referencing how utterly rage-inducing she is.
So I’d like to bring up only one thing: Her ending.
All these hateable characters, after all, get their just deserts. And it is satisfying. This includes Umbridge. Near the end of the fifth book, Dolores Umbridge is accosted by a group of centaurs in the forbidden forest. She insults them and tries to blind them with magic. They then pick her up and carry her away. This is her exit from any relevant position in the story.
Later, she is found in the medical wing of Hogwarts, traumatized. It’s specified that she was not physically harmed, but she is still left with an eternal fear of centaurs as well as horses, and faces PTSD-like triggers whenever she hears sounds that resemble clopping hooves.
What did the centaurs do to Umbridge? Literally, but also figuratively? What implication are we supposed to take from this?
Why is it played entirely for laughs?
Why is it that I, along with so many children who read this, felt genuine catharsis?
Part Four: Humans Love Tribalism
I opened by talking about social media, and the Potter fan who humiliated herself pondering the Hogwarts houses of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I do not know this person. She is not my friend.
But if she was, I definitely would not lose all respect for her after that one statement. I would have a hundred positive memories to fall back on. If I wanted to point out that she was acting like a fool, a lot of possible phrases jump to mind. “Hey, I love you, but that was poorly thought out.”
Or, depending on how permissive your ethos is, and how much you tend to avoid petty conflict with your friends, you might even excuse it. Don’t lie. Some of the people reading this very well might say: “Oh, that’s just Jenny [not her real name.] Jenny’s a huge Harry Potter fan. Don’t be offended, she meant well.”
We might even look at the same exact action from someone we did know and love, and someone we didn’t, and conditionally excuse it. The key, most important question is this: Are they part of our group?
“Group” can mean a lot of things. They might be our family, our tribe, our race or class or religion or a fellow denizen of our city. They might even be a member of our Hogwarts House. What matters is that looking at someone who is a part of a ‘group’ we are part of, versus a person who is not, creates all kinds of cognitive errors and blindspots, if we don’t watch out for them.
Let’s start with the Ultimate Attribution Error.
As shown above, the Ultimate Attribution Error is a simple but far-reaching cognitive bias. When we fall for it, we attribute positive traits to entire groups that we are a part of, but individualize negative traits. And vice versa, we blame entire other groups for their negative actions, but treat good actors as exceptions. It’s why, in the news, white shooters are ‘mentally ill loners,’ when black shooters are gangbangers. Or, if I am a Gryffindor, and another Gryffindor does something brave, Gryffindors are brave. If a Slytherin does something brave, that’s just one weird Slytherin.
This fits smoothly with research on Out-Group homogeneity. The belief that we (people in the same group) are diverse individuals. But they (the members of the group outside our own) are all very similar. It becomes very easy, then, to assign negative traits to an entire group. Or to assign a negative trait to only one individual within our own group, no matter how widespread the problem actually is. There’s nothing inherently hateful about this on the surface. Think about it: We know the people in our own group, in detail. We see how complex they actually are. The people in that other group? We don’t know them, and our brains want to simplify the complexity of all their individual personalities and experiences by generalizing. Otherwise, the reality that there are hundreds of people in that other House just as complex as the hundreds here might be far too overwhelming.
But of course, all of this works together with the most obvious group-think trait, if you’ve paid any attention to the bloody history of the human race: In-Group Favoritism. The favoring of our own group over others. It becomes especially problematic when your group happens to be “men” “white” “straight.” This is the very psychological origin of bigotry, the proterozoic goop that all prejudice evolves from.
When these things were first pointed out to me, I resolved to treat everyone with love to counter this exclusionary human instinct. To offer warmth and respect to every single person that I could. But I was immediately slapped in the face by how hard that actually is. And truth is: I am inclined to be loving to random people. I know, it sounds like I’m bragging, but bear with me. If that is my tendency, and it’s this hard for me, then what about people without my inclinations?
There’s murky science around a maximum number of people you can possibly befriend, due to set cognitive limits, unalterable. Dunbar set the number at 150 people, absolute maximum, though other research has yielded different results. Generally, the agreement is there though: We have a hard limit on who can be in our ‘group.’
So this is where we come back to Harry Potter, and one particular character who serves as a proof of concept for everything I’m saying. In the same way that Rita Skeeter and Dolores Umbridge were our (through Harry’s eyes) avowed enemies, I’d like to focus on arguably our best friend. Ronald Weasley.
In case it’s been a while since you’ve read Harry Potter critically, or in case you never have, I hate to break it to you: Ron sucks. He’s a terrible student, he’s petty and small-minded, he’s incapable in just about every way. Even when looking at his hopes and dreams, they are shallow and vapid desires to be special. The most revelatory moment for his character comes in book seven when we see the full extent of his envy for Harry. His conscious awareness that Harry exceeds him in every way, both in skill and luck, and the way he suffers because of it. Many better authors would reveal some kind of hidden talent, some valuable trait that Ron has that goes beyond any skill of Harry’s (or, for that matter, Hermione, his eventual girlfriend who completely overshadows him with her intelligence and magical prowess.) But Rowling neglects this, and Ron remains borderline tragicomic throughout. A boy from a massive family who has never stood out among his multiple more accomplished brothers, and who, as it turns out, never will measure up to them through any merit of his own.
And Ron’s characterization is this way because ‘having Ron prove himself capable’ is not the way that Rowling thinks. She isn’t even so interested in whether Ron will prove himself to be morally good.
Rowling values Ron Weasley’s unflinching loyalty.
He sticks by Harry’s side through thick and thin, entering multiple dangerous places that he, by any reasonable assessment, is not equipped to handle. When reading Harry Potter, we become Harry. And so we feel Ron’s steadfast loyalty as if it were being shown toward us. Ron isn’t a competent person, he isn’t even a good person, really, but he is good, above all else, at being a member of the team.
Characters like this are everywhere in Harry Potter. People like Sirius Black and Professor Lupin in the third book are helpful to Harry, so they must be misunderstood despite their darker edges. Albus Dumbledore’s blatant favoritism for one particular student at his school is admirable. Severus Snape at first feels like an exception. He’s a man with an irrational, unfair hatred toward Harry, who never really starts to like him. But by the end we learn that he has nonetheless protected Harry for this entire story out of obligation. So it holds true: Even if our beloved characters don’t like Harry, they do still need to be on his side.
Because what is endlessly compelling about Harry Potter, what makes it such a joy to read despite all the writing flaws I’ve alluded to is this: Our brains like tribalism, they like group-contingent moral judgment and they veer toward all the cognitive biases I mentioned above. Many authors refuse to indulge this. Especially children’s authors. Their books are usually not just about ‘who we like,’ but the greater good, and thus acknowledge fairness and seeing beyond stereotypes. But in Rowling’s world, children are in tribes. Our tribe is Gryffindor, and Gryffindor rules. Slytherin sucks.
So it feels like no accident that her world includes a magical hat sorting children into tribes, and that this is no dystopia. Some children are brave. We understand them. Other children are smart. We understand them. Still other children are kind, and yes we can understand them. And some? Well, they’re just rotten eggs.
And this, to a certain kind of person, is good. Because people become comprehensible, and therefore comfortable. We know what group everyone belongs to, and their identity follows. All our stereotypes are validated, and people do not have to be messy. This is not a dystopia, this is beautiful. Because we all have innate qualities, and it is a waste of time to think that they change as we grow.
And so, if a Gryffindor were to change to a Slytherin? Or a Ravenclaw to a Hufflepuff? Or, maybe, a boy to a girl? That would be an aberration.
That’s who you are. That’s your label, given to you by the very laws of the universe. What would be most dystopian of all would be a world in which you were allowed to defy it.
Part Five: JKR the Loving Bigot
I’ll spell it out more explicitly: I do not think that JKR was so anti-trans when she was writing Harry Potter. I do think, however, that she had the latent thought-patterns of bigotry. That she has always had the tendency to love those in her own ‘group’ and hate those outside it, and that this is something she indulges in without care or scruple.
To read her infamous essay, which I will not link to, is to read the deeply troubling account of a woman who has, in fact, been victimized and abused. I don’t know many details of the person who abused her, but I do know based on her implications that it was someone close. A cisgender man, deep within the in-group.
And so transgender people must be attacked.
Did a transgender person attack her? No, of course not. But one could, if they were allowed into a women’s bathroom. And if your mind desperately seeks an out-group to blame, if that is the way you tick, then that’s enough. It doesn’t matter how irrational it is.
None of this is an excuse. But it is a way to understand her.
One last thing that always stood out to me about Harry Potter was its macabre fascination with death. Especially in the seventh book, the character deaths became so frequent that they hit the reader with perverse excess. As if the author were self-flaggellating. Sometime around when Dobby died, from having a knife thrown into his small body with incredible accuracy while he was in the midst of teleporting, I sat back and really considered how it seemed like Rowling wanted the characters to die in the same way that most authors want them to live, and seemed just as willing to stretch believability to make that happen.
But it’s more complicated than that. The deaths in Harry Potter book 7 are so senseless because they depict in death a deep, narratively unsatisfying hollowness, a mourning impossible to resolve, and catharsis that will forever remain out of reach.
Imagine this: You are a person who does not think in terms of higher morality. You do not care about ‘people’ as a whole. But you do care about your friends, family, the people immediately close to you.
And then some of those people die.
This can’t happen. This person—and this one person, this small group of people, they are the only people that matter—gives your life purpose. You have nothing without them.
We all mourn the dead. But what if the only thing I valued in life was a deeply personalized form of love? A love that wasn’t an open door, but a closed one? A ‘fuck everyone else’ kind of love? What if people were irreplaceable, because they were part of my tribe, and my tribe was so incredibly finite? So destructible?
Death of a loved one, a miserable experience for anyone, would be intolerable to me. I would never be able to resolve it, really. I would never know how to go on.
By the end, this series’ reverence for finite love comes crashing down. The happy ending doesn’t seem to satisfy anyone. “All was well” became a shitty meme for every Harry Potter reader I knew. When your love is so narrow, so contained. When you are so unwilling to expand it, there’s no replacement, then, for the people you lose. And any sense that there is joy to be found after all this death rings hollow.
Harry Potter never resolves this, and so its happy ending reads false, forced and irresolute. The most famous final quote from Dumbledore feels more honest, in its hopeless misery.
Because here’s what’s unsaid: What if you’re Harry? What if you never even knew your parents? What if an absolutely massive percentage of your loved ones are now dead, with more dying all the time?
The message is that he is still better off than Voldemort, because he loved them, and was capable of love. It doesn’t fix anything, though. It doesn’t heal. It just valorizes the pain. And there are actual ways of healing. You can adopt a perspective that sees bigger. Embraces all of humanity instead of your small, inward-looking world.
But these books do not believe in universal love. They believe in a love deeply personal. And within that framework, there is no realistic escape from this pain.
Conclusion
The earlier “Protects but does not bind/bind but does not protect” quote is profound, but too elevated. It makes the perspective it describes sound like deep philosophy when, in reality, it describes a type of thought base and common.
In Lindsay Ellis’s “Police Bodycam Youtube” video on Nebula, in which she analyzes hours of bodycam footage of people being arrested, she starts with scorn for the entire bodycam medium. It isn’t long, however, until the first person says: “You can’t do this to me, I’m a Republican.” Or: “I’m not an illegal.” Or: “I voted for you, I voted for cops, you can’t do this.” At which point she can’t help but demand, with disgust, that they be thrown in jail.
All of these people unquestionably deserve to be arrested by the letter of the law. They are all, at the bare minimum, disrupting the peace. But it is shocking how nakedly they desire freedom from those consequences. Their ideal society is instead based on consequences for class or social group. In which their tribe is inherently innocent, and another tribe is inherently guilty. “Illegal,” as the descriptor of an entire human being, is the perfect word to use. Because an “illegal,” in their mind, is a person whose very existence within the USA is a violation of the law. Meanwhile, the ICE agents who murder them and anyone who protects them are not just following, but protecting the law. Because ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ are innate qualities we are born with. And we are legal. We are citizens.
Looking at the enduring popularity of Harry Potter, and what such seeming liberal-minded people find ‘cozy’ about it, many of us are not so distant from this as we think.
Do not deny that it feels nice to step into a magical school in which everyone is on your side. In which teachers nurture a not-so-secret hatred for all your bullies, and the head of the administration is your personal friend and mentor. It feels nice to be part of a class so protected that it is protected even from the consequences of its own actions. It feels nice to be a Gryffindor. But more specifically: it feels nice to have all that, and to also be a famous person who has a bottomless bank vault in his name. It’s fun to inhabit this world as Harry Potter.
I’d like to delve one last time into the story of Snape, because it shows both Rowling’s weaknesses as a writer, and the tragic desperation of her fandom.
Near the end of the series, Rowling vividly reveals Severus Snape’s backstory. In school, he was in love with Harry’s mother, and Harry’s father James laid claim to her while bullying him with the other Gryffindors in a storyline that would feel like the melodramatic one-sided chronicle of an incel if it wasn’t written by a woman. Within this story, we learn not that Harry’s father was a complicated and flawed human, but that he was a total asshole, his friends were assholes, and that Snape was a tragic lovestruck boy. It is so uncharacteristic of how Rowling has depicted Gryffindor and Slytherin up to this point that it feels not like she wrote it herself, but like she transcribed the thoughts of a pro-Slytherin fanfiction writer.
And that is exactly how it hit that segment of the fandom. So many people who would later get ‘Slytherin’ on their Pottermore quiz (and retake it if they didn’t get Slytherin) felt vindicated by this. They felt like their entire view of Slytherin being misunderstood had always been the right one.
Which is to say: Rowling doesn’t do nuance. When she tries to shore up the reputation of one group, she always ends up implicating another. When one clan is innocent, another is evil. When one group ‘isn’t so bad,’ another is proportionately much worse for it.
There is only one proper deconstruction to any of this. An acknowledgement that this artificial division, one that creates conflicts between children that will follow them into adulthood, is abhorrent. That this labeling of people who are just forming their identities and this nurturing of competition between them is cruel.
But Rowling, and by extension her fandom, like it.
Because it is beautiful to be a part of something, to be labeled when being labeled means being loved. When personal and limited love is the most important and powerful thing in this universe.
After all, when we look at social media, we see firsthand an entirely different kind of cruelty. The cruelty of a world where no one knows or loves you, and you belong to nothing.
If my social sphere was determined entirely through the internet, if I then had to choose between the cruel world of social media anonymity, or putting my Hogwarts house in my bio, I’d choose the latter any day. Anything is better than a broken down family, a lack of real friends, and twitter (Now X, and even worse for it).
And if participation in the group means hating someone else? That’s one easy bargain to make.
There is hope! Just yesterday on the NYC subway I overheard one teenage girl giving her friend the “JK Rowling is transphobic” talk.
Very impressive work!!