Comic Strips

No-one is immune from propaganda. And those awful books promote quite a few bad messages. Well firstly they promote criminally bad writing. But besides that, they work very hard to make a lot of oppressive power structures sound cool, whimsical, and aspiring to the uncritical reader. From the police institution to the prison complex to the famously abusive English boarding school system to the literal ethnostate to slavery somehow, and I haven't gone over the half of it.

It truly feels like every other bit worldbuilding that Rowling put in sounds whimsical on the surface but makes you go "wait, the implications are truly terrible!" when you think about it for more than two seconds. Except she clearly did not think most of it through; she literally just thought "race of jewish caricatures who want nothing out of life besides being bankers" is good and whimsical worldbuilding... And somehow got away with it.

It's impossible to quantify or prove but these books have had the most cultural impact out of any modern book franchise, and I don't see how the systemic normalization of so many awful things to uncritical children and teenagers can balance out the joy and whimsy that people got out of them (especially when there is so much better written teen/YA fiction out there).

Shifting the Overton Window in the way that those books did is some insidious type shit that actually does matter quite a bit more than most people realize. New hot take: I think the bigots are correct to get big mad at Queer representation in media because it moves the Overton Window the other way and that actually impacts bigots long-term. In a very real sense a trans actor in a movie is a concrete and real step towards the de-legitimization of bigoted views. And HP is very much doing the opposite of that every time it touches on any kind of social subject.