[ SECRET POST #5980 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5980 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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[Andy Warhol]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 47 secrets from Secret Submission Post #855.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

*shrugs* YMMV, anon, but a lot of those takes make me very happy.

[(Anonymous)]

Why?

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

In part because I grew up vastly outnumbered by fearful religious people who treated atheists like devil-worshipers. When wizards had to beat a path to Harry Potter's door over the impotent protests of his surrogate parents, who hate him for being able to understand what they can't and do things that they despise and are afraid of, a lot of things about that story resonated. But "oh, we magic-users just hide from the muggles because they'd constantly be after us to solve their silly little problems if they knew magic was real," seemed like absolute bullshit to me. It seemed like the sort of lie you might tell a child if you thought you could bury the violence between two groups that had murdered each other throughout history by fabricating a simpler past. For political reasons. Which is exactly what Dumbledore and his followers seemed intent on doing.

[(Anonymous)]

But how do you square that with the fact that other people in the wizarding community act like equally ignorant bigots, and your point of view requires you to agree with them and get on board with their views?

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

My point of view requires no such thing. It seems fairly obvious to me that the old families have been talking and listening mostly to each other for a very long time, and they seem to have no clue what modern muggles would be able to marshal against them in any modern war. Voldemort's followers think their enemy is the statute of secrecy, and that if it were abolished they could take their rightful place at the helm of humankind. That seems incredibly naive and ignorant to me, too.

But some of their older assumptions, and some of the stuff Salazar Slytherin was working off of (like realizing that if anyone was going to have the means and the motivation to betray wizards to muggles, it would be the muggle-borns and half-bloods at Hogwarts), seem more grounded in reality than this idealized view of muggle harmlessness and benevolent wizard supremacy that seems to inform the Gryffindors.

And make no mistake - someone who can avoid burning to death by waving a stick around is not "different but equal" to someone who can't. So, in a very fundamental sense, it's not reasonable to equate muggles and wizards to different races of humans. Colin Creevey at twelve had powers that Filch will never have. Harry the wizard can look forward to getting to be several hundred years old, if he doesn't die an unnatural and premature death. He could outlive Dudley's grandchildren. These are not minor differences, and the fact that wizards and muggles can interbreed does not make them insignificant. And I could go on. For simplicity's sake, I just picked out a couple of things. But the fact that (some) wizard demagogues overstate the case for what magic gives them doesn't mean there isn't a serious power imbalance here. And "let's make them forget we exist instead of dealing with it" does not seem to me like a reasonable way to handle any of that.

And what's not being addressed eats into the edges of the story - notice how in all these cases where one of the parents is a wizard and the other is a muggle, it's the woman who has magic. The minute you try doing that the other way, there's a power imbalance stacked on another power imbalance. If Seamus' father had been a wizard, and his mother had been a muggle, would it still be funny if she got a nasty shock when she found out she'd married someone quite different than she assumed he was? But the fact that it isn't in the book doesn't mean it isn't happening. So how do half-bloods look, if you consider that one of their parents has all the powers magic puts at their disposal, and the other doesn't? Maybe not so much like the product of open-mindedness and the power of love, or not automatically so.

I'll stop here because I think I answered your question and then some.

[(Anonymous)]

You sure did. Yikes.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it is fair to say that wizards can live for hundreds of years, they do live longer which is true, but at most it is maybe an extra few decades. And it isn't extra decades of being young, it is extra decades of being old men and old women. To borrow from Terry Pratchett, and it is just as true in Potterdom and Discworldverse, magic doesn't keep you young it just lets you be old for longer. The only time we see people getting vastly increased lifespans it is an aberration even by wizard standards. Flamel has the Philosophers Stone, and Tom Riddle has the whole horcrux thing and taking some time off being dead (but not for tax reasons) in the middle of his life. Other wise you just age as normal, and even Dumbledore was topping out at about 150 and described as very old.

They don't get the centuries witches and wizards get in works like Sabrina the Witch, or Bewitched.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I don't think so. That was another way the world opened for Harry upon realizing he wasn't a normal human. For him, and for everyone who didn't already know what a wizard could expect out of life.

I remember wondering if Voldemort's longevity was unusual, and realizing that part actually wasn't. Hagrid is just two years younger than him (a third year when Tom was a fifth year), and the groundskeeper is hardly living an old man's life when Harry meets him! Hagrid is seventy years old when he fights in the battle of Hogwarts, interacts with Harry's children at Hogwarts nineteen years after that. And this is not exceptional. The books are full of people who knew the protagonists' parents as children and were already adults at the time, and they're peppered with people who are a good deal older than that. It gives the world a kind of warmth - the fact that the people in it get to watch multiple generations grow up, and they have about a century of active life to look forward to, if something doesn't kill them prematurely.

Muggles my parents' age ragged each other about being "old" at forty or fifty, because often their bodies declined noticeably from there on and they rarely clear a hundred. Wizards are "old" when they reach a hundred. And that's not even getting into the difference in health expectations.

[(Anonymous)]

Not to detract from your larger point, which is valid, but James and Lily were only 20 when they died. Harry started at Hogwarts 13 years after they graduated. It would frankly be weirder if there weren't a bunch of teachers at the one wizard school in the UK that had them as students. Hell, in the fortyish years that an actual, non-fictional teacher is likely to be working, they can expect to teach their first students' kids and possibly grandkids.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

You're quite right.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I definitely don't agree with your reading of HP, but I'm trying not to just get into an argument about how to interpret the text here because the text is so full of holes that you could drive just about any interpret through it.

But I also don't think this fully answers my question. If "muggle harmlessness and benevolent wizard supremacy" are the underlying ethos of the Gryffindors, that still seems like a better and more justifiable point of view than the ethos of the Slytherins. Even if you think there's something to be said for a degree of wizard separatism, the Slytherins absolutely take that to a place of bigotry and prejudice and, indeed, wizard supremacy. Even if you think that muggle-human relationships are fraught, that's still no reason to act like total dicks towards individual muggles or wizards with muggle parents, and try to exclude them from full participation in wizarding society. But that's such a large part of what Slytherins actually do.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Ah. Then I apologize for not answer your question before. I think muggles are feeling the lack of wizards and magic, and wizards are feeling the lack of muggles. I think they need to find a way to coexist with a realistic understanding of what they do and don't have in common. The books make it abundantly clear that wizards are not inherently finer human beings than muggles are. But, if it comes down to a contest of force, the wizards will generally have the means to get their way. And yet, muggles are not so inferior to them that they could just *enforce their will* without being in a state of constant, costly war. So yes, a better solution needs to be found. That's only going to happen by moving away from the statute of secrecy and trying to help the two worlds become one again. From a point of view of honesty and looking for what these people have to offer each other.

"Muggles are just like us, except for something that doesn't matter" is willfully untrue. "Muggle lives are less valuable than ours" is equally untrue.

I don't have to be a death-eater to think that year after year, it's kids who are getting brutalized at the join where these two, inextricably entwined societies are bridged by the lives of children, who just can't help being what they are, quite separate from what their families were or expect them to become.