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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35149 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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I suspect Rowling is simply completely unaware of the real-world implications of Defense against Dark Arts, and would instinctively shy away from recognizing the analogy. A more charitable view would be that she recognizes it but thinks that the world of wizarding is a throwback to earlier times when such things were necessary, and in our civilized world we have government to do our defense for us -- that sort of thing is not uncommon among American gun control supporters. It clashes with the idea that the magical ministries are pretty obviously satirizing the real ones, but whatever. There's a 0% chance Rowling meant people to take the lesson that children should learn to defend themselves effectively with deadly weapons, and if people actually took that lesson I am sure she would be horrified.

It's also an instance of a more general problem of fiction aimed at minors; you typically have to make people of similar age the major players in the book, and to do so you have to give them far more responsibility than they have in the real world. Or maybe the problem is not actually with the fiction.

I feel like the whole thing wasn't ever designed to be rigorous in the first place. The way magic works is inconsistent, consistently whimsy, and conveniently suited to whatever the plot is at the moment. I want to double-underscore whimsy here (the chocolate frog cards? ever-flavor beans? constant alliterations? freaking owls?) and point out it's really more whimsy for its own sake, rather than making a broader point (like magical realist novels do). Rather than world-building taking place from the start, offering hints as to future books, aspects of the world are constantly tacked-on in precisely the book they become relevant. Major events are plainly ret-conned as the series progresses. There is never a satisfying explanation for why the magical world actually manages to stay hidden nor how Muggle tech never gets used at all - except for, like, trains. I also feel like HP was ahead of the curve of the "modern" YA novel - later entries would be much more explicit in their attempts to place teenagers front and center in the plot.

So yeah, the point of the novels is to be whimsy, and explore a Chosen One narrative in a school setting. That's it. Everything else is bolted on and accessory.

The simple, textual answer is just that DoDA in general only worked against bad guys. Expecto Patronus only kills Dementors, just like holy water only kills vampires. Indeed, when Potter et al are in duels, they largely rely on a disarming spell, not the death or pain spells. (The limited dueling repertoire is definitely a weakness of Rowling's action scenes.)

DoDA works on everyone; as I think Sluggy Freelance points out, levitate someone out a high window (perhaps after disarming them) and they're as dead as if you used the killing curse. And of course they DID learn the unforgivable curses; Harry tries to use two of them. There's Stupefy (stun), Petrificus Totalus (body bind), Sectumsempra (cut), Bombarda (explosion), Confringo (blasting), Incendio (fire), Levicorpus (hang someone in the air by his feet; strangely specific but probably quite useful for interrogation). Lots of good stuff that works on everyone.

DoDA works on everyone; as I think Sluggy Freelance points out, levitate someone out a high window (perhaps after disarming them) and they're as dead as if you used the killing curse.

This is even made explicit in the books themselves at one point: Harry defends his use of Expelliarmus in a broom chase by pointing out that Stunning them will make them fall from their brooms and kill them just as well.

"Harry, the time for Disarming is past! These people are trying to capture and kill you! At least Stun if you aren’t prepared to kill!"

"We were hundreds of feet up! Stan’s not himself, and if I Stunned him and he’d fallen, he’d have died the same as if I’d used Avada Kedavra!"

It has to be noted that unlike defending yourself with a gun, a wand is a lot more optionally lethal. The stunning curse that Harry habitually uses and teaches his classmates in Order of the Phoenix is probably less dangerous than a taser.

The caveat is that all those spells are only reliable against an enemy who can't use shielding charms. Avada Kedavra is the only spell advertised as something that can't be blocked.

The discrepancy isn't that Rowling "doesn't acknowledge they teach defense with a deadly weapon in Hogwarts". It's that they explicitly don't teach you to defend yourself in the only reliably lethal manner.

The discrepancy isn't that Rowling "doesn't acknowledge they teach defense with a deadly weapon in Hogwarts". It's that they explicitly don't teach you to defend yourself in the only reliably lethal manner.

They DO, though. Well, "Mad-Eye" does, but he is the DaDA teacher at the time.

Right, but it’s noted that those lessons are basically illegal and permitted only on Dumbledore’s say-so. They’re also noted to be pretty unethical and leave Neville and Harry semi-traumatised. They don’t teach any of those curses either, just how to resist them. And finally of course they’re an initial hint that Mad-Eye is a Death Eater, although they can’t be that out of character for the original.

Harry does in fact use two of them, right? In Deathly Hallows he uses both Imperius and Cruciatus. The only one he doesn't use is the Killing Curse, and even that seems a bit hollow considering that the conclusion of the novel hinges on him using magic to kill the villain.

Forgive the geekiness, but Sectumsempra is very pointedly a bit of obscure dark magic that a teenager had no business learning - the whole deal is that he finds it in what later turns out to be Snape's old diary, and uses it on Malfoy without knowing what it'll do. It wasn't something he was taught in defense class.

Yeah, both Sectumsempra and Levicorpus were Snape's. He wrote them as a teenager, IIRC, being a dark genius himself. Still, even if you don't count those, there's plenty of DoDA spells that work just fine on good guys.

Of course, and the people advocating kids being thaught to use and encouraged to carry weapons also hope and believe that the kids would only ever use reasonable force, only in situations where it's reasonable to do so, and wouldn't use them for anything like griveously hurting a classmate due to some run-of-the-mill bullying.

The students in Harry Potter mostly use disarming or stunning spells in combat, but they do separarely also learn fire spells, explosion spells and a lot of other spells which would require only a tiny bit of imagination to turn lethal.

I suspect Rowling is simply completely unaware of the real-world implications of Defense against Dark Arts, and would instinctively shy away from recognizing the analogy.

I think half the fun of these "misreadings" of the text is that it forces us to acknowledge the complexities of reality: even in a constructed magical world, "but what if I need to use (near) lethal force to defend myself?" is in fact a question that doesn't have a trivial answer. Well, some partisans on both sides would have you think it has two different ones, but I'll accept some level of nuance.

There's a 0% chance Rowling meant people to take the lesson that children should learn to defend themselves effectively with deadly weapons, and if people actually took that lesson I am sure she would be horrified.

Of course, she didn't mean it, but she still wrote it, in detail, over multiple books. Her hand didn't slip. When writing a world that made sense to her, she basically wrote children should be carrying and training in the use of weapons that range from tasers to bazookas, in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.

She would be horrified to hear that's a takeaway from her books, but it still is an opinion that she persistantly expressed. I think it's not a meaningless accident but a fascinating window into discordant beliefs she holds (ie: mostly a clash between "Trust the Institutions" and "Fight the Power!")

There is an interesting moment in HP 7 where they are preparing to smuggle Harry and the Dursleys to safety. Vernon Dursley asks why he has to trust his family’s safety to randos and suggests talking to the Ministry of Magic.

“Harry laughed; he could not stop himself. It was so typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the Establishment, even in this world that he despised and distrusted.”

Ultimately the only way to hold both pro and anti establishment views is to also hold to a steadfast belief that there is a very narrow and clear line between a benevolent establishment you should yield to, and a corrupt one you should resist. Which is to say, you shouldn't need guns, except if you live in Nazi Germany or know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years. If Vernon had suggested that Harry asks Professor McGonagall, a "good coded" authority figure, would have Harry laughed him off?

But even that is hardly followed in Harry Potter. As while it's hard to know what would have happened if the heroes had yielded, the books seem to make a very broad anti-establishment point frequently, rewarding the heroes rebelling against the orders of even benevolent authorities. For instance, not sheltering when ordered to by Dumbledore and fighting a troll to save Hermione.

I think the key here is to trust tradition, which means some establishments but not others. Dumbledore is the central authority figure in the book and he is to be trusted implicitly. Where establishments are to be defied, it's because those establishments are modernising, bumbling bureaucrats. Dumbledore and Umbridge are both figures of institutional authority, but only Dumbledore is a figure of tradition. Umbridge is a come-lately, an interloper appointed by an authority that is both ignorant and interfering with something beyond its proper scope.

know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years

I'm glad you're trying to steelman it, but isn't this a great counter-example to the "we don't need self-defense until it's almost too late" philosophy? Maybe 100k Jews got out of Germany to avoid the Nazis (peak Jewish-German population was in 1910, so many were surely leaving for other reasons too), and roughly another 350k got out after the Nazis took over but before they made emigration illegal and really started in on the mass murder of the remaining 150k ... but that didn't make as much difference as you'd think in the end, because the biggest single source of Holocaust deaths wasn't the victims who had failed to escape Nazi Germany, it was the 20 times as many Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. When Poland was invaded it had still been trying to negotiate a day before and it was conquered a month afterward. If you're only ready to defend yourself against corrupt establishments that give you a few years' warning then their natural countermove is to just not give you that much warning.

in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.

To steelman as much as I can, yes to the first point (defending one’s own life and limb) but not the second.

DADA was never portrayed as being about defending against the government; it was always about fighting off malicious magical creatures (earlier books) or dark magic performed by evil witches and wizards (later books). That the Ministry of Magic was at first subverted by a recalcitrant Fudge who wanted to cover up Voldemort’s return, and then co-opted by Voldemort himself, was never mentioned as a reason for studying DADA.

Does it matter?

In practice the unsubverted government saw competent wizards (reacting to a real threat) as a threat to it. Its response was to select the longhouse manifest, Umbridge, to totally remove all practical knowledge in favor of book learning and indoctrination in schools.

The subverted government was obviously even worse. Most wizards are incompetent at defense magic, and as a result seem powerless once Voldemort starts imposing his will. The well-meaning apparatchiks like Umbridge reveal themselves to be tyrants just waiting for an excuse.

In practice the message ends up being that you can't trust the government (not even to protect itself) and so must defend yourself. That's basically the RW American take and the Ministry of Magic is arguably more arbitrary and illiberal than the US state.

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