The magical society certainly has more than its fair share of problems - I have documented a fair few of them in these pages. Many authors though come across as incredibly lazy. Whether because of actual laziness, ignorance, or stupidity I cannot say naturally, we see the following pattern time and time again:
- Author detects a real problem in either the society Mrs. Rowling describes, or in one of her characters.
- Author blows this flaw out of proportion, ignoring the examples, evidence, anecdotes, and so on that Mrs. Rowling used to give nuance and depth to the world she has built and the characters that inhabit it.
- Author writes a story around this distorted flaw. Either Harry, Hermione, or both get very snarky about pointing out this flaw. There are comments (in the story itself) about how stupid all the other characters are not to have seen this flaw for themselves.
- Author gets reviews that point out that this is a distorted view.
- At this point we face a three way fork
- Author refuses to admit there is any such evidence, despite any citations provided.
- Author claims that he/she read the books and/or watched the movies a long time ago and a flawed memory justifies the distortion.
- Author claims that it is artistic license and that the reviewer can always simply not read.
Note that “author claims this that the reviewer failed to detect an example of satire” was purposefully omitted from the above list - because that is not part of the typical pattern. The authors in question are rarely trying to write a satire of Mrs. Rowling’s works, nor of anything real in society. Rather they are typically just lashing out against something they dislike, or, almost as frequently, acting out (in written form) their own self-aggrandisement.
The easiest example of this is the authors that talk about the ways in which magical society is biased against those not born to magical parents. In the actual books, Dirk Cresswell was able to rise to head of the Goblin Liaison Office despite his heritage.1 While I doubt that was a well regarded office, he was still a department head. This directly contradicts the many stories out there in which someone of entirely mundane lineage cannot rise higher than a department secretary, janitorial staff, or cafeteria worker.
If your story depends on society being biased to that severe an extent, reconsider. Are you writing about Harry Potter, or the American South before the Civil Rights era? While there are many parallels in Harry Potter to real events, none of them are perfect, and you lose something when you force the world to fit your historical stereotypes to exactly.
Interestingly, I know of one work, Poison Pen that both accounts for the exceptions that Mrs. Rowling includes and uses this exaggerated stereotype. In that story, Cresswell is arrested for falsifying his records when he is used in the story as a counter example to the stereotype.↩︎