Thread by @AlexandraErin

LRT: The number of people who read Jay Kay's books and concluded that the purebloods must have a point about blood purity meaning *something* or it wouldn't have been in the book has changed how I think about depictions of evil in my work.

I.e., if you're going to have a tropey allegory for some real-world evil, it's not enough to just attach it to The Very Obviously Bad Guys and expect that everyone will get the point that the belief is foolish and wrong in the world of the story.

In small and large ways, the Wizarding World's obsession with blood purity (and "the right sorts of families" and all the connected ideas) matches with and maps onto widespread beliefs and prejudices in the real world.

So you get people who recognize their own beliefs in the Death-Eater and adjacent families and instead of recoiling and having a "Wait, are we the baddies?" movement, they conclude that Death-Eaters are a bit Trumpy: sure, they're right, but they shouldn't say it. It's gauche.

Honestly, Zhay Que's books are replete with this kind of mixed messaging. The Malfoys are fantastic-racist jerks about Hagrid BUT ALSO he's not qualified to be teaching children.

BUT ALSO nobody teaches anyone how to teach children in this universe...

...because there's no non-magical education system for magical children, so people who want to go into teaching basically have to have passively absorbed "how it is" and "the things one does" when teaching, which means that only "the right sort of people" are qualified to teach.

Right, and the one other freed elf we see is an alcoholic depressed wreck who literally can't handle freedom.

https://twitter.com/HerHandsMyHands/status/1439943492806057989

I feel like when she started she wasn't committed to the idea that Hogwarts was It And All Of It for British magical education (Hagrid in the first book is very insistent it's "the best one"), and then she over-committed.

https://twitter.com/micamoan/status/1439948123468599309

Or when the sequel trilogy turned up the loudness of the Nazi metaphor 0.1% and people who had thought the empire was cool thought Star Wars was suddenly getting political.

https://twitter.com/lchanwrites/status/1439949220589432844

Honestly, when you think about the apparent breadth of the magical community as evidenced by mass media and a whole league of Quidditch teams just within Britain, and compare it to the size of Hogwarts classes... it looks like a plague hit them.

https://twitter.com/PunguinWizard/status/1439949773952409604

Like more recently than the Wizarding War or whatever it was called with Grindelwald, something happened to cause a massive population plummet. We know that prior to book seven some of the families home schooled their children, but still.

I guess Harry's year in particular was conceived during the second war and the terror of the Death-Eaters so maybe it's a small year, but if his year was typical, then Hogwarts is about the size my high school was, for a village of a thousand people.

Which would make the British wizarding community basically into a village of a thousand people scattered across the isle(s). Which matches *somewhat* with what we see, in that everybody does seem to know everybody and their business.

But it makes the idea that there's rock stars and sports leagues and competing brands of things all within this village of a thousand wizards seem like a bit of a put-on or pantomime.

Which is straying beyond discussions of moral depictions and into just being comically bad at world-building, I guess.