Item — HN Reader

It's not the only example of extreme immorality that's presented pretty causally in the series.

I loved the books as much as anyone, but Azkaban struck me as utter barbarism even then. You're telling me that prisoners, regardless of what they were actually sentenced for, get psychologically tortured through the magical induction of deep despair until they develop a form of dementia? And this happens whether you're a murderous dark wizard or you do a bit of magical petty theft or fraud? The Ministry using Dementors for law enforcement would morally justify rebellion against it in my view, not only are they slavers they're also torturers on a scale that would make many dictatorships blush.

It's obvious that the Ministry a wicked institution, but it's also an incompetent one since the Dementors aren't even really loyal to them; they jump ship to the Death Eaters as soon as they get the chance to.

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To be fair, dementors are consistently depicted as pure evil that has no place in society. The funnier thing for me is how the Ministry is a militarized law enforcement body that functions as the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the magical society.

But there are things you can't unsee once you revisit the series as an adult, like all the harmful tropes that's casually littered throughout the series. From unpleasant people almost always being portrayed as fat and ugly to house elves who have a frightened reaction to the idea of being freed from enslavement, and cunning, greedy creatures with long, hooked noses that run the wizarding bank. If that weren't too on the nose, that bank even had a seven pointed star on the floor in the movies. Oh, and Kingsley Shacklebolt is quite an interesting name to give a fictional black person. And that's barely scratching the surface.

Yeah Winky the house elf definitely rubbed me up the wrong way for how pitiful she made the condition of freedom seem.

> Oh, and Kingsley Shacklebolt is quite an interesting name to give a fictional black person.

I'll be honest this one sailed over my head when I was a kid, I always assumed because he's a magical policeman the Shacklebolt referred to handcuffs. There's a lot of things named along those lines.

It's hard to catch some of these questionable things as a kid reading a fantasy book, who'd think fictional settings exist in a vacuum. And if it's like one or two isolated cases, the whole thing can be brushed off as pure coincidence. But with the Harry Potter series, there are dozens of these disturbing tropes with real world parallels. It's safe to say it's a pattern.

> and cunning, greedy creatures with long, hooked noses that run the wizarding bank

I don't think they're portrayed as greedy? Although I'm willing to be proven wrong if anyone has textual evidence otherwise. They are also mistreated by wizards in the books, which I think portrayed them sympathetically. I remember scenes where Harry notices their mistreatment and thinks it's wrong

The portrayal was anything but sympathetic when Griphook was slaughtered by Voldemort right after betraying Harry and taking the sword of Gryffindor in his possession.

Also, notice how real world tropes are just portrayed as facts in the Harry Potter world.

Azkaban was basically Abu Ghraib on steroids, and for any petty crime, as you say. I remember thinking "what kind of bleak dystopia are they living in, and why have they accepted it so wholly"?

Not to mention the whole "muggles are basically subhuman" thing.