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I’ve been listening to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Italian over the past few weeks. This was my favorite book as a kid, probably because the series ended here for me for a while on my nightly relistens(1), as my Dad took a few years to get the audiobooks of Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows out of the library to illegally burn onto iTunes. While many parts of the book don’t hold up very well: this book is the only one in the series where I skip chapters, on the current reread I was struck by the thematic tightness of Order. The political aspects are obviously more relevant than ever, especially with the current Trump presidency, although was funny to see the millennial left circa 2010-2020 act exactly like Umbridge when it came to cancel culture. There is also a very powerful sense of dread throughout the whole book: Voldemort is out there but no one has any idea what he’s doing, people are turning up in unexpected places with unexpected wounds at the Ministry, and the reformation of the Order of the Phoenix is a constant reminder of how much the last war cost on a human level. But the theme that has stood out most strongly on this read to me is social isolation, and how this can be overcome through deliberate community building.
When Order starts, Harry has been back at his aunt and uncle’s house in Little Whinging for nearly a month with practically no news from the Wizarding World. Unlike in his second year, he is still receiving letters from his friends, but they contain almost no content related to what is actually going on with Voldemort. David Yates captures this in one of the opening shots of the film of Order, depicting Harry alone a swing-set that is far too childish for him (more on this later), surround by a bleak chain link fence and dying vegetation.
Things get no better when Harry does manage to return to the Wizarding World. After an attack by dementors, he is nearly expelled from Hogwarts, a place that he views as his real home. While awaiting trial at the Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, a paramilitary group that opposes Voldemort and his own paramilitary group, Harry is also systematically excluded from the operations of the group by its adult members. When it comes time to return to school, things get even worse. Harry’s traditional mentor figures are either absent (Hagrid), or distant (McGonnagal, Dumbledore, Sirius). He is excluded from the traditional forms of social advancement when Ron and Hermione are made prefects and not him, kicked off his sports team, and his favorite subject (Defense Against the Dark Arts) is basically not taught at all. He is even isolated from his own peer group: the Wizard newspaper has been slandering Harry all summer, so upon his return to school, a lot of the individuals he thinks of as friends have turned against him.
In the movie this social isolation is depicted brilliantly in a scene where Harry is arguing with classmate and friend Seamus Finnegan.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zc5SnGw21HQ
As you can see from even the thumbnail, the scene is constructed such that Harry is alone facing Seamus and a bunch of other students who are positioned as to be taking his side physically, if not literally.
In the book there’s no such scene, but another similar moment that reinforces Harry’s isolation, even from his closest friends. When he’s getting on the train, Hermione and Ron have to go perform their prefect duties, leaving Harry alone.
Of course this is not the first time that Harry has been at odds with his classmates and the rest of the school, but importantly it is the first time that this isolation has been so complete, and that his adult mentor figures are so thoroughly unreliable. Even Harry’s rosy view of his dad is shattered in this book when he sees him tormenting Snape in one of Snape’s memories.
This isolation is an important part of Harry’s maturation process. Harry is undergoing parts of two archetypal transitions during Order. The first is the transition between the child and orphan archetypes. This is a typical transition during early adolescence, in which the child gains intellectual independence from his/her parents (or parent figures) and becomes skeptical of the broader superstructure of society. This is very much a deconstructive stage and is not long-term stable, requiring a fairly rapid transition to the adult stage.
In Order, Harry is reaching the end of his child to orphan transition. This transition begun much earlier, perhaps in books 2 or 3, where things like the wizard government, justice system, and social system are brought into question. In Order, even trusted adults, like Dumbledore and Sirius are questioned, and institutions that Harry trusted in the past, such as Hogwarts have the rug pulled out from under them. The isolation that Harry feels is a natural result of this transition, and we all feel it to some extent in our normal, Voldemort-free, lives.
Of course, the orphan archetype must itself be overcome in order for the individual to become an adult. The main form this takes is an increase in agency, a power to actually enact change in the real world.
As he completes the child-orphan transition in this book, Harry begins his own orphan-adult transition, which he will not complete until the end of book 7. Social isolation is not a problem that he just accepts passively. Harry of Order of the Phoenix is a very angry teenager, and while a lot this anger is wildly misdirected, he does begin to use his agency to redirect it towards external change.
The most important of these acts of adult agency is the deliberate construction of community. Harry has been denied membership in not only “standard” communities, such as the quidditch team, his peer group at Hogwarts, and the wider wizarding world at large, but also in the “alternative” Order of the Phoenix (2). While he does fight to gain acceptance in the wider Wizarding community throughout the book, doing an exclusive interview on Voldemort’s return for the magazine The Quibbler, most of Harry’s actions in this book center around building up his own alternative social groups out of people he actually likes and respects (3), in forming his own paramilitary group, Dumbledore’s Army.
In the film Harry’s overcoming of his own social isolation is shown literally. At the climax of the film, in the Department of Mysteries Harry is shown surrounded by his friends.
At the actual end of the film, Harry is also shown to be surrounded by the community he built.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=P7JB0ez_00E
In the book this transition is well highlighted by how Harry’s opinions of his friends shifts from the beginning of Order to the beginning of Half-Blood Prince.
In an age of social atomization, where traditional and alternative community organizations have been corrupted or destroyed, the importance of deliberate community building to overcome isolation is more important than ever. It is essential for each one of us to build and participate in our own organic, grass-roots communities.
Substack link if you want to see photos from the film: https://substack.com/@joshuaderrick/p-177318643
To be honest, throughout all the books Harry acted impulsively and against good advice of most of his allies. There is a reason why Yud was pissed or let's say motivated enough, to create a non-moronic version of Harry in his own fanfic. The fact that Harry even lives can be assigned more to dumb luck rather than anything else, so it makes sense that people keep secrets from him. Heck, Dumbledore himself held the prophecy for himself and told to Harry about it only in OOTP book you read - because basically he thought that Harry would be dumb enough to disobey and get himself killed if told earlier. And for good reason, Harry is just a child and being dumb is excusable. The same goes for Dumbledore keeping the truth about horcruxes for himself up until the last minute. The idea was to keep Harry free of concerns and give him normal childhood, but the unsaid part in this noble speech is that Dumbledore did not trust that Harry would keep it all secret, and would spill it over to somebody so that Voldemort would learn about the fact, and he would put together that Harry is a horcrux.
By the way, there is a great video comparing Frodo Baggins and Harry Potter as heroes, arguing that they are the opposites. Harry is the "chosen one", a special hero who on the other hand acts like a moron trying to do normal stuff like playing sports games and fooling around, while almost getting himself killed multiple times due to his own stupidity. Of course a lot of it is a plot device to make especially Hermione look awesome, but it is still there as his character trait. While Frodo is a normal or even unassuming guy especially among the heroes of the fellowship, but he almost always acts with integrity, courage and wisdom. This in turn paradoxically makes him extra special to the extent that he is even trusted with the One Ring as he can resist its temptations.
You think Harry Threenames is non-moronic? The little I read that was quoted about how great this new version was and everyone should read it made me want to slap the face off him and hope that he'd be eaten by a magical creature the second he did his "haw haw, I am Big Brains Know It All" performance about knowing magic better than adult wizards and witches despite never hearing of it until ten minutes beforehand.
EDIT: I know, I know: everyone says it gets better in the later chapters, Harry stops being such a brat, and EY deliberately wrote him like that at the start. I doubt that part, I think EY was writing Haroldus Potterus-Evansus-Verresus as a self-insert about being a boy genius autodidact whom adults didn't understand and so feared and bullied him and that's why it's okay if he bites his teacher during a meltdown while his legal guardians only laugh it off, and only due to reaction while writing the webserial about "Hey, Haroldus The Magnificent And Always Perfectly Correct is a pain in the you-know-what" did he tone it down. Like ST Enterprise etc., 'it gets better later, trust me' was too late, it had lost me by then.
Harry Potter is written in the traditional British children's fantasy fiction mould. So of course he's the gender-swapped Cinderella at the start. Of course he and a small band of friends go off adventuring despite the grown-ups trying to keep them out of trouble and abiding by the rules. For the non-magical version, see The Famous Five by Enid Blyton (an astoundingly popular British children's author of yore, during the 30s-50s) and the various boarding school stories for both boys and girls.
For the fantasy version, nearly too many to mention, from E. Nesbit to Alan Garner onwards, plus all kinds of TV shows (e.g. The Worst Witch based on a novel series first published in the 70s). Rowling isn't unique or novel, she's writing in a well-established tradition, but she successfully cracked the global fame formula.
There's an epidemic of people who want to write within the YA/Coming of Age paradigm, but don't actually want to write a story with child characters doing child things and thinking child thoughts.
Say what you like about JK Rowling's writing*, her eleven year old Harry Potter reads like an eleven year old. Hermione is smart, but she reads like a smart eleven year old who reads a lot. The trio are brave, but stupid. They're scared of minor things, irrationally. They lack incredible leadership or organizational skills. Draco is a bully, but he's a middle school bully.
Yudkowsky's Harry Potter reads like an MIT freshman, or maybe a dorky high school senior. He does not think or act like a child. Draco talks frankly about rape in his introduction.
This makes sense in that Yud was 30 writing his Harry Potter fanfiction, and I doubt that Yud spent a lot of time with kids.
A similar problem infects a lot of media made about kids. Big Mouth suffered from this increasingly as the show went on. The characters were supposed to be just hitting puberty, but talked and acted like college kids.
It tends to destroy my willing suspension of disbelief, and also lead to off-putting situations where a story really starts to become about kids having sex.
*Introducing a new macguffin because you realize that the party is going to get the old set of macguffins out of the way too quickly is, like, a classic rookie dungeon master error.
I mean - I was not quite eleven years old when I was figuring out how to protect my "bodily sovereignty" using mutually-assured destruction dynamics. However, Yudkowsky's Potter is just too brilliant for eleven - you need to make him at least 14 or 15 to be halfway believable as literary fiction. Unless he's getting plenty of coaching from someone older and wiser.
Depends on what you count as coaching.
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I mean yeah, I don't think the idea of HPATMOR was that is was supposed to be a realistic protrayal of children. It was a vehicle for delivering Yud's philosophy. I found it grating myself but not really for this reason.
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I am even more relieved that I noped out before I got to that little gem.
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So, on the one hand, yes, the characters in HPMoR don't act like realistic kids. But, on the other hand, I don't want to read about realistic kids, because realistic kids are annoying and boring; I'd much rather read about an MIT freshman. There is a reason I dropped Harry Potter after Order of the Phoenix, and that's because Harry goes all emo.
I only went back and read the last two books because Methods was ongoing and Eliezer was clearly drawing on material from all seven books so I wanted to make sure I understood the lore. Half-Blood Prince was decent; I'd probably have enjoyed it a lot as a teenager. Deathly Hallows was terrible.
If you want to read about MIT freshmen, then read about MIT freshmen.
What's weird and often disgusting to me is the practice of writing a story about middle schoolers and making them think/talk/act like college freshmen at MIT. You're writing fiction, you can choose what age you want the characters to be!
If you want to write a story with mature, rational, scheming characters who talk frankly about sex; then you ought to place them at an age where it makes sense for them to be mature, rational, scheming, and have frank conversations about sex. If you want them to be eleven, write them as eleven year olds. Game of Thrones is an unfortunate example of this, of course, though I think GRRM is bright enough to have recognized the problems and that's one of many things keeping The Winds of Winter from ever being publishable.
There's no rule saying you go to Wizard school at 11! Wicked has seen plenty of success making magic-school a college level endeavor, with Elphaba beginning school at 17 in the book and 20ish in the play (and played by comically old actors in the unfortunate film)! HPMoR could easily have started by having McGonnagall say "We start wizarding school at 16 here. Starting at 11 would be quite irrational!"
Rowling was writing twelve year olds for twelve year old readers. Writing twelve year old characters for adult readers is a different thing (particularly if you're using those characters as didactic puppets to get your message across). That is where the "A and B are supposed to be twelve but talk and behave like they're twenty-two year old college students" does get uncomfortable (ranging from "these are not kids and this is bad writing" to "uh yeah no Stephen I didn't really need a pre-teen orgy in the middle of a good scary horror novel").
Point of order: it happens at the very end.
And while it was a very, um, off-putting scene, I still find myself defending it inasmuch as I understand what King was trying to convey there. In his very unfiltered and probably-written-on-a-coke-bender way. I mean, the entire book was full of really unpleasant things happening to children - that was the point.
Now if you want skeevy, let's talk Piers Anthony (or not).
I gave up on the Piers Anthony series because it got too uncomfortable for me, but the scene in "It" was still just too much. Like you say, I understand what he was trying to get at, but it still reads very badly (particularly when the girl's father is abusive, and may be going to be sexually abusive once under the influence of Pennywise, and her husband later on is physically abusive to her because he gets a sexual thrill out of it). Group hug surely would have been enough?
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I don't really think this is true. Natasha in War and Peace is 13.
Bingo
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The Magicians does a pretty good take on adult wizard school (wizard school replaces college with all the associated neuroses of high-achieving college students included).
Eh, I hated it because it felt like it was just taking a spite-filled dump on the source material. The sequel makes it even worse when he takes an even more spite-filled dump on CS Lewis.
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