(I can't be bothered editing this for typos.)
Spoilers abound.
The major problem with this theory is the author's analysis hinges on an interpretation of the books that simply doesn't fit what's actually in them.
To preface my rebuttal: Thanks to the fact that the Harry Potter books are in my relatively small audiobook library and I used to work in mining, where I spent all day every day listening to audiobooks while doing my work, I've "read" the books at least thirty times. I'm intimately familiar with them. I'm also a lifelong lover of fiction and a fiction writer myself; I've read thousands of novels and I've been studying storycraft for most of my life.
I'm not going to address all the background stuff. I don't care to spend a load of time doing the research to check the sources. I'm going to focus entirely on the claims made
about the actual story (taking the series as one complete story) to see if they hold up.
Quote:In support of that, we find the Harry Potter books selling many of the same points of other Intelligence projects, including the destruction of the family. Harry has no family, being adopted by “muggle” relatives who don't like him and whom he finds both ridiculous and contemptible.
Harry spends the entire series longing for family. One of the key themes is
family and how tragic it was that Harry's parents sacrificed themselves to protect him out of love. His mother's sacrifice is the whole reason he's even alive and it protects him time and again throughout the series.
Harry is very envious of Ron and his large, loving family. If family is torn down in
Harry Potter, why is the strength of the Weasley family showcased so heavily? Why is Harry constantly yearning for a family of his own? He basically becomes part of the Weasley family--explicitly stated by Molly Weasley in the beginning of
Order of the Phoenix as being "as good as her son". He ultimately even marries into the Weasleys when he hooks up with Ginny at the end.
Why is traditional marriage and early childbearing amongst the women shown to be the norm? It's normal for the mothers in the Harry Potter universe to start popping out kids soon after school. Stay at home moms are showcased as well. I don't think divorce is ever mentioned at all (no examples come to mind). If there's a non-intact family unit, it's because a spouse died. There's nothing in the story to suggest JK Rowling is against the classic nuclear family.
In fact, when Lupin is scared of having passed his werewolf curse onto his son and seeks to join the Trio in the horcrux hunt, Harry calls him out as a coward for abandoning his wife and child, shaming Lupin into returning home where he belongs. Lupin later explicitly thanks Harry for doing so.
There are several other pro-family examples I could lay out as well. Hagrid and Grawp is an easy one. Even the Malfoys, as shitty as they are, are ultimately shown to be more concerned about each other than their greed for power. When it comes down to it, at the end of Book 7 (
Deathly Hallows), Lucius and Narcissa care much more about their son than their own power. The theme behind all this is "love and goodness win", basically.
The people who chase power and cast aside family lose, the best examples being Bellatrix Lestrange and Voldemort himself.
Quote:He is glad to leave them and go off to a boarding school where he never sees them. So the books are selling an updated version of Plato's The Republic, where children are taken from their parents by the State, divided into classes, and raised to serve the interests of the Elders.
One wonders if the author of the theory even read the books.
Harry is happy to leave the Dursleys because they suck. They're terrified of appearing abnormal because they worry it will damage their social standing, and try to squash the wizardishness out of Harry by treating him horribly.
Nobody has to attend school. The parents may choose to teach their children themselves if they want, they just mostly don't in Britain that we see. However, since the books do revolve around Harry and the people he meets at school, it's entirely possible that plenty of kids do get taught at home.
And, the schools are privately run. Hogwarts is repeatedly and explicitly shown
not to be under the control of the government for most of the series. When the government attempts a coup at the school in Book 5 (
Order of the Phoenix) the very school itself--a sort of pseudo-living entity in a way--resists their effort, both directly and indirectly.
I'm not sure how the kids are supposed to be broken up into classes. Because they're sorted into school houses? That scheme is directly lifted from how British boarding schools actually work in the real world.
Also, students get a remarkable amount of leeway in choosing their own courses of study. Nobody forces them to learn anything specific. So how are they being "raised to serve the interests of the elders"?
Quote:Children today are being taught to look upon their own parents as contemptible muggles and upon themselves as a superior class of magicians, who can potentially get whatever they wish with the proper spell. They will be happy to be taken from their witless parents and placed in fortified castles, as long as they are issued fake wands and are presided over by people in black robes. If you think that is a recipe for a healthy society or homelife, you need to cut your fluoride dosage.
While I do worry that
Harry Potter promotes a bit too much magical thinking as a consequence of its handwavy magical system, I think this is
wildly exaggerated.
Quote:Harry Potter is often compared to The Lord of the Rings, but the comparison could not be less apt. Potter is actually an inversion of LOTR. In LOTR, the heroes are hobbits—short and unattractive common folk living on the land. They are the muggles of their time and place. But Potter reverses this, making common folk less than useless. Without a few high-born wizards like Harry to fight for them, the muggles would soon be wiped out. But in Potter, it is hard to understand why this wouldn't be good riddance. Tolkien made the hobbits ignorant and provincial, but through the actions and explanations of both Gandalf and Frodo, we understand why they are worth saving from the Dark Lord. In Potter, we have none of that, the muggles as described being completely expendable. This is no accident, since it is exactly how the current Elders see it.
Okay, I'm going to have to unpack this a bit to address it.
1. Comparison to
LOTR:
The only things
LOTR and
Harry Potter have in common is they're both fantasy--not even the same subgenre--and they both have similar basic story arcs. They're both classic Hero's Journey tales. And that's all the comparison you can make. So most of what he said is just convenient shoehorning, frankly.
2. Muggles are useless.
Ridiculous. The wizards protect them because the muggles have no defense against magic. But some wizards, like Mr. Weasley, often remark on how clever muggles are to get along without magic. The way it's presented it is often actually a way of showing how ignorant wizards are, and how helpless they would be without their magic.
3. Muggles are described as completely expendable.
Again, ridiculous. The
villains treat muggles as no better than game animals, but the heroes do not. Is the theorist saying we should take the antagonists' message as the true one of the story? Many of the more-or-less good wizards don't really care for muggles much, but many others defend muggles with great ardor.
Quote:This is also useful in understanding muggles: If, by unfortunate means, non-magical people do happen to observe the working of magic, the Ministry of Magic sends Obliviators to cast Memory Charms upon them causing them to forget the event. Just substitute “agent” for “Obliviator”, “non-agent” for “non-magical person”, “Intel hoax” for “magical event”, CIA for “Ministry of Magic”, and “propaganda blitz” for Memory Charm.
The wizards want to be left alone, as is explicitly stated in about chapter four of the first book. If the muggles in general knew about them, they would be bugging them all the time for magical solutions to their problems. And, though it's unstated as such, many muggles would probably want to kill the wizards. Witch burning is explicitly mentioned in the middle of the series. Perhaps the wizards don't want muggles with modern technology attacking them.
Many of the consequences of a hidden wizard society living amongst muggles are not explored, but that's because they're books aimed at teenagers. Heinlein didn't go all-in on his social commentary in his young adult books either.
To repeat what I said before, reading this theory about the content of the books and their secret meaning makes me wonder if the theorist even read them.
Other points...
Is JK Rowling a genius? No, she's not. The plots of the Harry Potter books had a number of minor-to-significant holes in them, frankly. She had to do some retconning because she clearly didn't think of some interesting ideas until later in the series. But what she excelled at was creating an interesting, vivid world with excellent
characters. The world is very good, but the characters make the series.
Her success is proof of nothing sinister. For one thing, the books didn't even take off as quickly as the theorist claims.
Philosopher's Stone, the first, sold about 300k copies after 2 years. That's very good to be sure, but it's not out of line with what a number of other new authors do every year. Much shittier books than any of the
Harry Potter novels have taken off quicker than that. As I recall,
Harry Potter didn't really blow up until book 3. But I did not look up the numbers to be sure.
There's nothing about the stories that make me think they were written by more than one person. There's no "written by committee" feel to them, certainly, and they have all the hallmarks of having been written by a new author who gained skill along the way. Her later books are
much stronger than the first couple, but her style was consistent throughout. I'm very good at spotting a different voice in a series; it's obvious when someone else did the bulk of the writing. There was no sign of that in the
Harry Potter series.
I'm running out of steam here and some of the points I was going to make slipped my mind, but here's a good one that always struck me as interesting about the
Harry Potter books: in effect,
every wizard in the story is armed with a lethal weapon at all times. There's no effort to strip wizards of their ability to do lethal damage, the way governments are always trying to ban and confiscate guns and other weapons. There's never any mention of some kind of detuned "civilian wand" that can only cast certain spells. So it's as if every wizard was wandering around with a full arsenal of weapons at all times, as long as they had their wands. Is that the sort of society a shadow cabal of statists would want to push?
To summarize, I think the theorist sees what he wants to see in
Harry Potter and doesn't seem all that familiar with the work to begin with. To my mind,
Harry Potter does a great deal of good in getting young people interested in reading. I guarantee JK Rowling is responsible for many more avid readers than government schools that force kids to read utter dreck that's boring and halfway incomprehensible. Government schools are excellent at convincing kids that reading sucks.
...And since a love of reading is a major gateway to questioning authority--because you don't need to be
told things anymore and will find out if the authorities are full of shit on your own--I kind of doubt a committee bent on controlling the youth and breaking up the family would really encourage a love of reading.
Edit to add about JK Rowling: I've bitched on the forum before about her virtue signaling. She's been pulling shit like that for years. She loves to retcon her own work after the fact to make them more in line with SJW ideals. For example, Dumbledore is gay. Wat? That was not demonstrated
anywhere in the series. I figured he was basically an ascetic intellectual type. I think she came out a couple years ago saying Hermoine was black or something too. Eh? Then why was she cast as a fricking white girl in the movies, and why were all the other black characters in the series explicitly described as black, but Hermoine wasn't?
Her social justice retconning shenanigans are retarded, and I wish she'd stop adulterating the work.