Be the person you need yesterday

It really is. Here’s Jon Stewart talking about how it somehow gets a free pass.

it's so fucked up. i remember reading the books expecting there to be a turn in the story, that house elves and goblins would be freed from wizard tyranny, i expected the story to culminate in some sort of a cultural revolution. we got to the part where harry buried dobby, and griphook felt touched that harry showed such respect to a creature that most wizards looked down on so he helped them in turn - and then betrayed them at his earliest convenience and it was all done out of greed. well fuck that shit. literally nothing changed. they killed voldemort and for what? they didn't put a stop to the ideals that sustained his influence! everyone stayed just as racist and classist as they were before and i read 7 books about the necessity of changing the status quo only for the protagonists to become the status quo in the end with a myriad of social issues never addressed.

Despite coming from one of the worst places on the internet, I always thought this was pretty good analysis of how nothing really changes in the wizarding world because Harry is born from an author who rigidly clings to the status quo rather than the betterment of society.

"The Harry Potter books are a childish rescue fantasy that feeds into a far more adult escapism: they are, after all, the ultimate fairytale of social mobility through merit. If you’re born with magical ability, you get to go to a special school where they’ll teach you special skills, and that’s okay, because you’ll be part of the good elite, who get to mess around catching pixies and playing wizard chess and protecting the powerless, and not the bad elite, who are like Nazis with better hair. In these stories, liberal meritocracy is set against the simpler evil of aristocracy—those wizards, including the Dark Lord himself, whose main bugbear throughout the series is the corruption of “pure” magical blood by Muggle-born witches and wizards. In a feat of worldbuilding that chimed perfectly with liberal triumphalism of the mid-nineties, it turns out that all magic is really good for—all Rowling’s Wizard government, the Ministry of Magic, exists to do—is to maintain the wizarding world as a secretive parasite universe, invisible to ordinary folk."