While we're dunking on Harry Potter, something that always bothered me about the books was the tension between the Hogwarts Houses as personality types treated as essential identities vs. social institutions built by the founders and students around their shared values.

Years later, I realized that this actually, and only, makes total sense in light of JKR's espousal in HP of a fascist notion of heredity and character, explaining the weird detail of certain, Pureblood families always being sorted into the same House,

e.g., Ron put in Gryffindor explicitly bc he's a Weasley; also, Harry as the "chosen one"/descended from Gryffindor via his father/rejecting Slytherin putatively due to values, but actually bc he has a literal piece of Voldemort's soul in him, which has to be destroyed.

But anyways, before I realized this, it was weird to me how many fans would totally overlook the institutional aspect of the Houses, and focus on them solely as essentialized personality types to project onto themselves and others IRL,

so that you would have self-identifying Slytherin fans complaining that JKR had villainized and dehumanized Slytherins by portraying them all as evil in the books, rather than as varying and complex like people of any other identity group.

I was pretty confused by this, bc Slytherin is (1) fictional, invented by JKR, governed by a magical talking hat, but also (2) the breeding ground of allegorical white supremacists (and literal, albeit fictional, genocidal fascists)???

Sure, not all Slytherins, ppl in other Houses can be evil too, they're sorted when they're 11 y/o... but the Slytherins are repeatedly depicted as disproportionately complicit in Voldemort's atrocities, even the students/children who are not Death Eaters.

They are also disproportionately adherents and beneficiaries of the ideology of "blood purity"/supremacy, which, it is explicitly specified, is one of the principles on which Slytherin as an institution was founded, and presumably continues to be used as a selection criterion.

Think about how such a fictional institution/identity "translates" into RL, and how we would discuss that RL equivalent. The allegorical association of Slytherin with racism/white supremacy/Nazism is so obvious and heavy-handed that I didn't see how any adult could miss it.

And indeed, the fans didn't miss it; they got it, and were objecting to it! They took a fictional allegory for white supremacy, naturalized it as an essential identity IRL, and then used that identity as grounds to discredit its negative depiction within the fictional text.

And though this was in a way reading against the grain, JKR herself very much enabled it, not just in the fascist logic of identity in her books, but also her constant intervention in and commodification of the franchise and especially the Houses and the idea of sorting.

She figured out that she could keep her hold on fans and extract more capital from them by expanding the franchise to author and authorize their naturalization of House affiliation as part of IRL essential identity, most notably via the Pottermore sorting hat.

But this required her to rescue her allegorical representation of institutionalized white supremacy from the accusation of white supremacy, as well as to disguise the core conceit of the institution of Houses:

that there's something essential and hereditary in your character that can be involuntarily read in your mind at the age of 11 to accurately determine your aptness for an institutional placement until adulthood depending on whether you are good/evil/smart/everyone else.

This is all to say that the problem of JKR/HP is more than just whether or not the author is dead, or even supposedly incidental details of racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, etc. tropes littered throughout the books.

HP is putatively an allegory for fascism, but one that reproduces fascist logics not only in the books, but also in its fans. To be clear, I'm not saying that self-identifying Slytherin HP fans are white supremacists.

Allegories of oppression are always tricky, but an allegory for institutional white supremacy that allows itself to be naturalized as an essential identity and then justifies its existences and refuses condemnation on the basis of that naturalization?

A process in which the author actively participated even outside what was represented in the text? In retrospect, it would maybe have been more surprising if JKR *weren't* a TERF.

I'm not criticizing anyone for still being fond of HP. But it is weird to hear ppl talk about HP's "values" as separate from/better than JKR's, when JKR has only ever been totally consistent with the values championed by the books themselves.

Anyways, these are just ridiculous things that I overthink way too much when I've had a week of insomnia and am dwelling on how reading books doesn't make you a better person even though some people think it does/should.