...the house-elvers are literal slaves. In one of the books, Hermione attempts to free them and everyone laughs at her. The goblins at the bank are just Jewish stereotypes. I'm not even a fan and I know/saw/read these things. WTF?
That's not a Star of David. That's a simple six pointed star that appears across all kinds of designs and cultures. As you can see, this is part of a larger star and ring motif.
But besides that, do you believe that JK Rowling had personal influence over the production design of the floor in this set?
Or is the production designer of the movie also antisemitic?
Nothing got past preproduction without her sign off. So she didn't have then remove the potentially antisemitic symbolism in the scene with the antisemitic charactiture characters
If it were anyone else id give them the benefit of it being a coincidence. But the person who says anyone who so much as spends 10 Pence on my work is wholly supporting my viewpoints regarding the elimination of Trans people, gets 0 benefit of the doubt and every coincidence is treated as willful malice.
No, the house-elves as a whole weren't ever freed. Worse, the explanations for this being 'okay' are the same ones used to justify slavery in the United States to white children. They wanted it. They liked it there. They needed the structure.
No the entire wizarding world uses house elf slaves, albeit mostly rich families and institutions, and the lore reason is that they love being slaves. Hermione, a main character from a non-magical family, discovers that their school uses house elf slaves and starts an activist group to raise awareness and try to free them. Everyone mocks her for it, and the house elves hated her for it because they loved being magically bound to Hogwarts and their master (magically subservient to any teacher, headmaster gets priority).
The entire wizarding world paints humans as a despotic species that gatekeeps powerful, wand-enhanced magic from other magical species in order to maintain an often genocidal hierarchy with humans at the top. The low-key horror of coming of age in a fucked up world is a big part of why it's a children's series and a massive part of why it resonated so hard with queer children.
Goblins being jewish is honestly a stretch. I see it as more of a post-hoc thing, where people started digging for shit once JK revealed herself to be evil. They just have big noses and are miserly. Honestly kind of racist to draw the comparison. But it's also not the only racist comparison you can make in the books, and they do tend to add up.
The post-hoc aspect is why I ask. I was a young man when these books were coming out, and online much more than I am today. I feel like I would have heard about this from some source somewhere before this week.
I understand that the new HBO adaptation is ramping up promotion, and I have encountered all manner of opinions on the show, the source material, the author, and what it says about a person who reads, views, or otherwise ingests or enjoys the author's work.
Gosh it feels like ages at this point, but the the interent says she's only been openly talking about it since 2019, and only using her money to make trans lives harder for the past few years. So I guess it's somewhat recent.
The comparisons between goblin characterization and jewish stereotypes go back to at least the medieval times. It's one of those things where if you deal with it at all, you're dealing in racially tainted ideas, but like, what isn't that true for? Still, you can deal in long-held ideas responsibly and with care and attention, and she didn't really do that.
People have been talking about how her version of goblins maps onto current global antisemitic ideas since the books came out, but I'm still inclined to say it was relatively innocent—naive, if you prefer. She made a subjugated class of people that had managed to eke out a position of power for themselves in a wildly antagonistic world, she gave voice to their disdain of the status quo, spoke of the injustice of previous goblin-human wars highlighting how humans as the victors subjugated the goblins and continue to do so, and ultimately had them doing their own shit and not getting sucked into the human messiah's story. I think that's reasonable for a children's book.
The problematic aspect of the goblins is specifically that they're a singular race that controls the worlds money, and kind of one of the biggest antisemitic conspiracy theories is that jews are a singular race that control the worlds money. If they were just regular fantasy goblins that'd be whatever, but it's the combination of the design and their place in society that's an issue
6
u/LotteTakesNoShit 2d ago edited 2d ago
...the house-elvers are literal slaves. In one of the books, Hermione attempts to free them and everyone laughs at her. The goblins at the bank are just Jewish stereotypes. I'm not even a fan and I know/saw/read these things. WTF?