He was abducted by Hagrid when he turned 11 so that would place him maybe around the fifth or sixth grade.

I don’t know if canonically there are math classes at Hogwarts.


The thought came to while I was watching the anime Mashle. If you are into Harry Potter and One-Punch Man I’d recommend giving it a watch.


Someone mentioned this community below; I wanted to highlight it.

Small promotion for [email protected]

  • @inb4_FoundTheVegan
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    10 months ago

    Please stop.

    JK sees the continued support of her work as proof that her views are supported. She is doing active harm to people lives. I know it’s common to say seperate the art from the artist, but that only applies to the dead. Rowling is alive and using her profits to write hateful proganda and restrict healthcare from an already marginalized group. I’m not ever going to tell someone what they can and can’t read, just please recognize the harm it does by promoting her. It’s the same as promoting the works of David Duke.

    Thank you.

    • @[email protected]
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      910 months ago

      Hello,

      Thank you for your comment. That’s one of our main threads, “On the sensitive topic of being a Harry Potter fan while acknowledging JKR’s transphobia” https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/9633657, quoting https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainment/harry-potter-fans-jk-rowling-transphobia-essay-49214964

      Still, there may be a way to enjoy Harry Potter as a trans person or ally. Over the years, many fans have found creative ways to engage with the series’s magic while also acknowledging its creator’s bigotry. In her paper “Transformative Readings: Harry Potter Fan Fiction, Trans/Queer Reader Response, and J. K. Rowling,” Jennifer Duggan, an associate professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway — says that it’s possible to interpret the text of Harry Potter itself in ways that would certainly horrify its writer. “My central thesis—one which has also been argued by other academics like Thomas Pugh and David Wallace — is that the Harry Potter novels are deeply queer,” she tells POPSUGAR. “I mean this in both senses of the term: they champion nonnormativity through the contrast of the ‘perfectly normal’ Dursleys and Harry, and they are, at their heart, a story about a boy with an ‘abnormality’ (as the Dursleys call his magic) who comes out of his cupboard under the stairs and discovers and finds and affinity for a hidden, colourful, queer world. I take this argument further to argue that the novels are easily read through a trans lens, since there is a focus in many of the books on shapeshifting, including several cross-gendered transformations.”

      Fandom, she adds, can provide spaces where Harry Potter fans can explore the series’s queer undercurrents while celebrating their own sexualities. “From what I have observed, I have concluded that for the most part, the Harry Potter fandom continues to offer queer and trans fans a positive space,” she tells POPSUGAR. “The two main trends I have seen in fan works are an ‘answer hate with love’ reaction, in which fans focus on trans positivity, and so-called ‘spitefic,’ which are works that are framed as revenge on Rowling for the hurt she has caused. These works are usually trans-positive, too. That said, I fully understand why some fans feel they can no longer engage with the texts in any way.”

      Link to the research paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10583-021-09446-9

      • Iapar
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        210 months ago

        Plot twist: jk is a selfhating queer and her subconsciousness wrote Harry Potter to break free without disappointing her self hating parents.

      • @[email protected]
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        110 months ago

        This response doesn’t address the legislation aspect of the critique. It’s an excellent response for if she were already dead and gone, but what about the harm that comes from supporting her now? Surely you have something to say about that, don’t you?

        • @[email protected]
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          -110 months ago

          Hello,

          You can see some initiatives that take the books away from her, such as this one

          A trans artist resells Harry Potter books with new covers that omit Rowling’s name. Canadian printmaker and book artist Laur Flom, who is trans, garnered major attention when they began a project of buying secondhand Harry Potter books and replacing the covers with redesigned versions that don’t have J.K. Rowling’s name. Flom then resells the books for £140, according to Yahoo! News. In a TikTok from February 2022, Flom said, “My aim with this project is to engage critically and give an option to people who do still want to enjoy Harry Potter without supporting J.K. Rowling.”

          https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy

          A link to the version from this person, they look quite nice: https://laurflom.format.com/harry-potter-rebind

          You mentioned legislation, I think that is an interesting point. If the books (and the HP universe in general) are so detrimental, shouldn’t they be condemned by countries court for xenophobia and transphobia? It seems strange to me that there are still 2 major amusement parks Harry Potter themed in the US, and a third one in London if you count the former shooting set, with thousands of visitors every year. That just seems so strange compared to the accusations the books face.

      • @inb4_FoundTheVegan
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        10 months ago

        Thank you for the reply, but I don’t see how that is relevant, you didn’t link to a queer fan fiction community.

        Linking to a cis author who said that some fan fiction theoritcally helps some queer folk instead of listening to the trans community that is actively being hurt in substative ways by the celebration of Rowlings current work, not fan fictions, is sort of indicative of how much you actually care about this topic. Your link is filled promotion for her shows, art and discussion of Rowlings work. I’m sure you have been criticized before, but I feel like you are using an one-size-fits-all copy/paste as cover instead of actually engaging with what I, and the trans community, are saying.

        I’m not going to argue, this isn’t how I wish to spend my time. All I can do is please ask you to stop and hope one day you will rethink what you’re doing.

          • @inb4_FoundTheVegan
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            10 months ago

            I don’t really engage in this community because of the discomfort Harry Potter generally brings me. I was honestly a bit relieved when it died.

            The whole thing just upsets me honestly. Seeing the conflict is painful.

            I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.

            there’s a big difference between consuming public domain work made by awful people who no longer receive profit whilst consuming work by a woman who is actively engaging in political campaigns to make trans peoples lives worse with the profit she still receives.

            Which makes it very different than Poe, Doyle or Seuess that were named in that thread. She is alive and well, and using her platform and fan base to produce more hateful texts. (Bad Blood)

            The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism. His discomfort at the antisemitic tropes are entirely understandable, and while that is not something I am going to claim hurts me, it does seem to hurt Gabe.

            As I said before, I’m not going to force you to do anything. Just please understand how you continued celebration of Rowling and her work is hurting others.

            • @[email protected]
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              -110 months ago

              I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.

              I reached out to him in private, I wasn’t going to copy our conversation as it is private.

              I was very ready to move that community elsewhere, and I refrained from posting for a week before getting Gabe’s approval.

            • @[email protected]
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              -110 months ago

              The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism.

              That’s the first time I hear the treatment of Rita Skeeter is transphobic. James, Sirius and McGonagall are also able to shapeshift, and they are positive characters in the books.

              For the house elves, the whole SPEW plot is designed to both make Ron (and the whole Wizard word as a whole) look stupid and bigoted, and Hermione a bit too self-righteous, as teenagers can be.

              Relevant reference: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/122283/why-did-rowling-seemingly-make-light-of-the-house-elf-situation

              I’ve seen several times that the fact that the society isn’t changed by the end of the last book as a critic, but do all work of fictions have to uphold their societies? Game of Thrones definitely isn’t becoming a democracy during the books, and Brigderton is as classist as it can be.

              • @inb4_FoundTheVegan
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                10 months ago

                If this is the first time you have heard this criticism, then I think you should try to be more engaged with those discussions, I worry you have used that copy/paste citation of fanfiction as opposed to actual understanding why people are upset.

                As I said before, I’m not super willing to go through every theme in the book I take Umbridge with (pun intended). I don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to go through point by point. Shaun has a wonderful video doing exactly that. But briefly, I have no reason to think Sketer is trans, but Rowling is well known to use physical insults for characters that are morally wrong, such as the Durselys being fat. Rowling uses the description “man hands” and allusions to her dressing like a Drag queen, and changes her body to spy on children, a theme she follows up in her openly transphobic book Bad Blood. This also goes hand in hand with Rowlings racist naming convention, Cho Chang and Kingsley Shacklebolt just off the top of my head. Similar to the way Goblins are clearly using anti-sementic banker tropes. And finally while I agree that there are positive shapeshift characters in the books, but the concept itself is very clearly an allegory for HIV/AIDS with their transmission fears.

                Game of Thrones definitely isn’t becoming a democracy during the books

                Game of Thrones isn’t about bringing democracy to westoros, thats not a theme at all, historical realism IS a major theme so democracy would be entirely out of place. Plus an extremely mature book aimed at mature audiences. Conversely, Harry Potter is a book aimed at children ostensibly about defeating racists that use slurs like “mudblood” who want to enslave muggles. Which makes it odd that Harry himself keeps his house elf slave because the slave “enjoys it”, which was another major criticism of slavery abolition. The reasons cited in the book for why racism is wrong is that “some of those mudbloods turned out to be great wizards just like Hermonine” as opposed to “its wrong to subjacate anyone based on bloodline”, Harry and Hagrid only talk about how useful those subjugated people could be to the general population, not the intrinsic rights that humans deserve.

                But that is me trying to be brief, and not at all what I wanted to talk about anyways. I do not want to discuss the text any further. You can read whatever you like and from the start I said I would never try to take it away from anyone even if I personally find it hateful. What I am asking is to stop promoting the works of bigot who is doing materal harm to peoples lives. I can’t and work control your actions, I am just please asking you to be more critical of the author your community is celebrating. Its easy enough to say you disagree with her, but actions speak louder than words. And instead of citing papers about the health of fanfiction, perhaps actually listen to the trans community when they talk about the harm they have suffered from her actions and propaganda.

                I will take your word that Gabe has allowed the community, cleary it still exists. But by his own words he appears openly uncomfortable with it. Of course, the views of one person who literally said they don’t want to speak on the behalf of the trans community should not weigh to heavily on this topic anyways. It feels gaslighting to cite him and the paper as reasons why the trans community is wrong about HP, instead of actually listening to harm.

                TL:DR, this whole interaction is longer than I wanted it to be, I kept my original comment succulent in politely asking you to reconsider. I may not reply again for my own mental health, but let me simply say you are of course entitled to do as you wish. Just please put more effort in to understanding why people want you to stop.