The world is from the POV of the wizards, not an omnitient unbiased entity.
Giles: Stop that, you two. Riley: He started it... Xander: He called me a bad name! I think
it was bad; it might have been Latin.
'Selfless'
The Buffista Book Club: the Harry Potter iteration
This thread is a focused discussion group. Please see the first post below for the current topic and upcoming book discussions. While natter will inevitably happen, we encourage you to treat this like a virtual book club and try to keep your posts in that spirit.
By consensus, this thread is reopened specifically to discuss Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It will be closed again once that discussion has run its course.
***SPOILER ALERT***
Trudy Booth - Oct 23, 2007 6:50:44 pm PDT #3234 of 3301
Greece's financial crisis threatens to take down all of Western civilization - a civilization they themselves founded. A rather tragic irony - which is something they also invented. - Jon Stewart
Connie Neil - Oct 23, 2007 6:52:53 pm PDT #3235 of 3301
brillig
The world is from the POV of the wizards
The POV who gets most of his wizard knowledge second-hand, at that. Hermione pretty much proves that the wizarding world is an unreliable narrator in re: house elves.
Trudy Booth - Oct 23, 2007 6:55:02 pm PDT #3236 of 3301
Greece's financial crisis threatens to take down all of Western civilization - a civilization they themselves founded. A rather tragic irony - which is something they also invented. - Jon Stewart
It would be hard for Dumbledore to have problems with the various prejudices if there were none.
Typo Boy - Oct 23, 2007 6:55:06 pm PDT #3237 of 3301
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.
As far as I know Hermione can only get house-elves to seek freedom by tricking them. That seems to confirm the wizard view stereotype.
Connie Neil - Oct 23, 2007 6:56:46 pm PDT #3238 of 3301
brillig
That seems to confirm the wizard view stereotype.
True, it's not a perfect example. But she's willing to take the preconceptions and try to shake the truth out of them. She's just not willing to see the unwelcome results of her shaking.
Typo Boy - Oct 23, 2007 6:57:18 pm PDT #3239 of 3301
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.
Dumbledore seems to want fair treatment; not the same thing as denying the truth behind many of the stereotypes - just that the species characteristic does not mean the various species are not valuable with a right to their own viewpoint. Sort of a 19th liberal viewpoint.
Scrappy - Oct 23, 2007 7:01:49 pm PDT #3240 of 3301
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Or using actual animal species as your basis for your non-human species. Like the difference in personality between a retriever and a herder. If I say retrievers are all about their toys and herders are all about controlling others, it isn't a stereotype--it's a basic trait of their p species.
§ ita § - Oct 23, 2007 7:05:59 pm PDT #3241 of 3301
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
If I say retrievers are all about their toys and herders are all about controlling others, it isn't a stereotype--it's a basic trait of their p species.
But it's like Star Trek or D&D or whatever--humans get to be generalists; bad or good is to be determined, but for other species it's in the genes.
Which makes a diversity lesson more like respecting others despite their inherent flaws (which you might as well go and prejudge), and not as useful a parallel as it might otherwise be.
Typo Boy - Oct 23, 2007 7:15:41 pm PDT #3242 of 3301
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.
Right. I'm not saying that the universe of the book is badly constructed. Plot, and a certain kind of world building are Rowlings skills. (I actually have never found her world building convincing when I think about it. But her worlds feel real. ) But fictional intelligent species don't have to differ from one another in the ways she has them. And it makes it very easy to read as analogies for racial and cultural stereotypes. Now I don't think an author of fiction is obliged to teach didactic lessons; or even neccesarily avoid teaching the wrong ones. But I think it puts the gay Dumbledore thing in context. If she intended the series to put forth a pro-diversity message to her readers (and I have no reason to think she did) she failed miserably.
Hil R. - Oct 23, 2007 7:20:24 pm PDT #3243 of 3301
Sometimes I think I might just move up to Vermont, open a bookstore or a vegan restaurant. Adam Schlesinger, z''l
The Wizard world has stereotypes, they're just different stereotypes than the real-world ones. (Well, sometimes. No one seems to care at all about race, but the Irish and French and Bulgarian wizards that we saw were all fairly stereotypically Irish and French and Eastern European.)