Things I've Noticed About the World of Harry Potter PT. 5

For the final installment of this surprisingly long series, I’m going to go completely off the rails and spend 300 words on wizard school cutlery.

Silverware: A Technical Consideration

This one takes some explanation. I was recently thinking about the scene in The Goblet of Fire where Hagrid accidentally stabs the little music teacher with a fork. This made me think about how, presumably, Hogwarts needs a lot of silverware to serve all their students and faculty, three times a day, roughly 8 months out of the year. Even with some kind of magic dishwashing spell that's still a lot of silverware.

To some extent this is true of plates, goblets, etc. as well, but there are many different style of plates and goblets and things, and some styles are more fitting a wizard school than others. Silverware, however, is pretty interchangeable.

For example, I once spent a summer studying at Harvard University. As such, I ate almost all of my meals in their main dining hall, which is, predictably, very nice. It's a converted church building complete with hand carved wood inlay, arches, and stained glass. In fact, it looks almost identical to the Hogwarts dining hall.

The fact I was there studying witchcraft is purely coincidental

And do you know what kind of silverware they had there? The exact same steel, functional silverware they've had at every other college dining hall or cafeteria I've ever been to, because no matter how fancy it is, day-to-day silverware all looks the same.

This raises a very weird technical question in my mind: Where does Hogwarts get it's silverware? I assume it's not simply conjured up out of nothing since it seems like the ability to make something out of nothing would've come up more. This means someone (probably that bag of assholes Argus Filch) has to go to some wizard equivalent of Costco and buy bulk packs silverware. And that makes me giggle.

Fuck. You.

That's it for Harry Potter, but come by next time when I'll be writing about something else, with equal parts sass, bile, and ignorance.

Things I've Noticed About the World of Harry Potter PT. 4

Azkaban: Magical Guantanamo

Azkaban Prison is a fairly central feature of Harry Potter, and it's actually one of my favorite things about Rowling's world. It suggests a very dark, gritty underbelly to all of the lighter Scooby Doo-style adventure that's the central theme of the books. But this does raise some troubling questions.

“I would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”

It's explicitly stated many times that Azkaban is a terrifyingly torturous place where roaming apparitions act as guards and ensure there is no sense of happiness and drive prisoners insane in a matter of weeks.

Now, the concept of a prison using torture is one thing, and I'm not going to argue that it's inappropriate in a youth-demographic book. As I said, I like that Rowling includes these touches of harshness. My problem is where is the message that constantly torturing prisoners as a matter of policy is somehow wrong?

Throughout the Potter mythos, characters are regularly sent to Azkaban, both good and bad. And while other characters often have misgivings when they must imprison a friend or loved one, never is it brought up that maybe it's wrong to drive people insane as a security measure.

“Sorry old friend, but we’re going to have to turn your mind into pudding as a precaution.”

This was addressed by Rowling in a post-Deathly Hollows web chat interview, where she stated that after Voldemort and his minions were defeated Azkaban was reformed to no longer use Dementors....because they were corrupt. She never addresses that their entire purpose as jailors was to constantly torture the inmates.

This is baffling for two reasons:

One, while the muggle populace is unaware of the wizard world, the wizard world is very much aware of muggles. This means that all the otherwise vigilant and moral characters aren't ignorant to the idea that torture is widely held to be cruel and unusual. They know that muggles mostly did away with torture in their correctional institutions, yet they aren't really bothered that with the power of magic at their disposal the best security measure wizards have come up with is waterboarding phantoms (incidentally, Waterboarding Phantoms would make a killer band name).

Two, not everyone who goes to Azkaban stays there, and I'm not just talking about the people who escape. Not only are multiple characters released after being proven innocent or making a deal with the Ministry of Magic, but according to the Harry Potter wiki, multiple wizards were sentence to six month terms.

This suggests wizards who commit misdemeanor offenses are sent to a prison filled with lunatic lifers where people routinely "go mad within weeks." That's the equivalent of our legal system catching someone with a gram of weed and sending them to an unregistered CIA black prison. Which seems a bit harsh, even for the English.

Things I've Noticed About the World of Harry Potter PT. 3

Ethnic Discrimination: Pakis GTFO

Last week I wrote about how Hogwarts seems to let in anyone who’s magically-inclined within the British Isles. This is closely related to today’s point: where the hell are all the brown wizards? This is mainly a movie issue since I'll give Rowling the benefit of the doubt and assume she left a lot of characters races un-described and we're the assholes for assuming they're all white, but the movies are WAY disproportionately Caucasoid.

I know there's Harry's Asian crush, and a couple black kids are Harry's friends, and he and Ron took Indian twins to the big ball, but according to the 2001 Census, the UK (where Hogwarts seems to get all of their students) has a 16% non-white population. That's not a lot. In the school where I went for the 9th grade 16% of the school would be one Latino kid's ankle.

But I went to a pitifully small school. According to an interview with J.K. Rowling there are around 1,000 students at Hogwarts each semester. My rudimentary math skills tell me that means about 160 non-white students. And while big group shots of the Hogwarts dining hall do look pretty racially mixed, 160 students spread over 4 houses means there should be around 40 non-white kids to each house. You would think Harry would at least know all the kids in his house, but as I said, I can only think of about 5 students Harry knows who aren't whiter than soda bread.

If not for the red hair, Ron would be completely invisible.

This leads me to several upsetting possibilities. One possibility is that Harry is fucking racist and intentionally distances himself from as many wizards of color as he can. This adds a whole, weird subtext to the stories.

The other possibility is that the houses are not equally racially mixed, which suggests the even weirder theory that the sorting hat is racist. Which actually kind of makes sense. His whole deal is he makes snap judgments five seconds after meeting someone AND he does look kind of like an anthropomorphic KKK hood.

The third possible scenario is that for some reason non-whites are disproportionately less likely to be born with magic powers. That's right, you heard it here first: Magic Doesn't Care About Black People.

Things I've Noticed About Harry Potter PT. 2

Today we tackle two related subjects: People not understanding math, and how humans and giants have sex. Danielle totally stole my thunder on the giant sex thing, but I’m going to go ahead and post my thoughts on it anyway, since I actually did a surprising amount of research on it. Suck it, Danielle.

Hogwarts School Subjects: Wezurds Dun't Nead Know Book-Lernin'

In the last post I pointed out that Hogwarts teaches a lot of basic wizarding stuff, which makes sense because the kids are there to learn magic and it makes sense to start by teaching them beginner stuff and then move on to more difficult and dangerous techniques. The problem is this is apparently all Hogwarts students learn.

Now, I'm not faulting the books for not spending chapters detailing Ron's algebra homework, it's escapist fantasy, I get that. But we do regularly hear about the kids homework, assignments and classes, so the absence of more mundane studies is kind of weird. They learn how to read tea leaves, but not how to read Shakespeare. They learn about unicorn physiology but not about human biology. The learn how to defend themselves from dark curses, but not how to defend themselves from the darkest curse of all, syphilis.

The morning after pill is kind of like magic.

Which reminds me...

Human/Giant Cross-Breeding: Close Your Eyes And Think of England

Believe it or not, throughout college I was a sex-ed. instructor. This, hopefully, is why the minute I found out that Hagrid was half-giant I immediately thought "That means, at some point, a normal-sized person had to fuck a giant." Thankfully the giant parent was his mother, because the reverse is terrifying to comprehend.

It's stated that Hagrid's half-brother Gwarp, a full-blooded giant, is 16 feet tall and is small enough that by giant standards he's considered underdeveloped and his mother was ashamed of him. This still means that the physical mechanics of Hagrid’s human father actually impregnating his giant mother are mind-boggling and J.K. Rowling is a terrible person for making me think about it.

Things I've Noticed About the World of Harry Potter PT. 1

Over the next couple of days I'm going to be posting things I've noticed about Harry Potter and that I wonder about. Some are funny, some are poignant, some are wildly inappropriate for someone of my age and education to think about in his spare time.

To begin let me start by making an admission that will piss of every single person reading this: I have never read any of the Harry Potter books. I know, but bear with me here. Even though I haven't read the books, I love the world of Harry Potter. I think, like Star Wars, the Matrix, and, judging by fan-reaction, Avatar, the Harry Potter books create a world that people wish was real and love playing in. And that's awesome.

In fact, I'd really like to have read the books so I could play in that world more. The problem is, even as a kid, I never really liked "Young Adult" literature. I found it patronizing and usually boring. So, although I was roughly in the right age demographic, I only heard about Harry Potter because I read a satirical piece about it in the New Yorker. No offense to J.K. Rowling, but a kid who reads the New Yorker and criticizes the review David Denby gave American Beauty probably isn't going to be able to be lost in the magical journey of a prepubescent wizard.

While I haven't read the books I have had many friends and family who have, and I have seen all of the films at least once, except The Half-blood Prince, which I just haven't gotten around to. I know there's been a lot of fan criticism of the way the movies represent and explain certain things, so I'm also using internet research to fill out my literary ignorance on the list below.

I know there have been examinations of Harry Potter like this before, so there is one thing I am not going to do here and that is criticize Rowling as a writer. Many people have suggested that Rowling's plots are very formulaic, that the books are filled with plot holes, etc. I'm not going to go into that.

Furthermore, nothing I'm mentioning here should be taken as criticism. These are all simply things I've noticed that I wonder about the world Rowling has created. Some of these things I've noticed were never explained for good reason (as we will see when I mention the giant fucking).

That said, some things here could have been explained better as part of the narrative; but mainly this is a list, in no particular order, of things I've noticed about the world of Harry Potter that my overactive brain thinks about when I'm watching The Goblet of Fire on cable for the 20th time.

To start things off, here's something I've noticed about Hogwarts admissions.

Admissions Standards: Easier To Get Into Than Arizona State

Everyone in Harry Potter pretty much treats Hogwarts like it's a really nice private boarding school. This makes sense since it was clearly modeled on that system. The problem with this, is that apparently the only standard for admission to Hogwarts is if you're born with the ability to do magic, you're in.

On some level this makes sense, a lot of what the characters study is basic use of magic stuff, so if they didn't let all magically-oriented kids in you'd have a bunch of stupid kids with magic powers they didn't know how to use, because they couldn't get into a good wizard school. And nothing is more dangerous than combining stupidity and magic.

Case in point

The flaw in this is that much of Harry Potter is about class warfare. Sure Voldemort and the Deatheaters are concerned with blood-purity, but if the Malfoys are any example, they're clearly not fans of the underclasses either. I think it's cool Rowling puts these kinds of harsh lessons in her books sometimes. Way too many youth literature tells young people that money doesn't matter and it's what's inside that counts. Rowling does this, but she also says that sometimes people won't like you just because you wear hand-me-downs and there really isn't anything you can do about it.

This is why the admissions thing doesn't make sense to me. With all their disdain for the lower-classes why wouldn't families like the Blacks and the Malfoys use their money and power to found their own academic institutions and not let in the poor and the muggle-born? Instead they seem to choose to constantly bitch to everyone who'll listen about how they don't like ANYTHING the school does, even though their combined fortunes probably dwarf Hogwarts' operating budget several times over.

For some reason all of these rich, powerful, evil familes want their kids to go to Hogwarts, even though the only thing they like about Hogwarts is Slytherin House, whose headmaster acted as a double agent against them years earlier. That would be like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin sending their kids to Oxford after the Revolutionary War because they really liked the dorm that was run by Benedict Arnold.

And Yes, I did just imply that Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin were evil. Read you history books people.

Pardon Me for Immediately Contradicting Myself...

...but this first post is not a list, but an observation, with photographic evidence.

I was watching Home Movies last night and it occurred to me that Dwayne and Nathan Explosion might be the same person.

This occurred to me, oddly enough, because both are voiced by Brendon Small. After thinking about this for longer than anyone really should, I decided to see if anyone else had thought of this first. I quickly found an Adult Swim message board where someone brought up the possibility, but was quickly shot down by fellow posters for various mediocre reasons.

In all honesty, Brendon Small really doesn't seem to put a lot of depth into his backstory, and that's really what makes his projects work. Both Home Movies and Metalacolypse work through both intelligent and absurd surface humor, with more depth created when it helps. I doubt he has an elaborate framework built up for how Home Movies and Metalacolypse fit in together, but since reading an article on fan theories on cracked.com I've decided silly overthinking can sometimes add something to already great material.