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Notes -
The US Department of Education just posted Malfoid slop:
"There's Magic in Learning"
https://x.com/usedgov/status/2115069815505203483
Or rather, there is Magic in Yearning, Make Romance Great Again, am I right? …
Two weeks ago @KingOfTheBailey had an excellent post about the trend:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3960/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/486219
I want to note three things two weeks later:
Original:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L5g-17uLO90
AI Anime versions:
Kind of sloppy but neat:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=g6jjXAASi_Q
Better animated, but very Korean:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4mkZ8jEYySo
For example this illustration of Dracina casting a peacock as patronum is striking:
https://x.com/CaboVT/status/2106491934818853274
And was then canonized in this AI Battle of Hogwarts scene:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y6tAajsc9PY
And then discussed how a (male) peacock can sort of make sense as a representation of Harry for Dracina.
Then there was first an illustration of Harry/Dracina fighting Voldemort together with the same wand:
https://x.com/Aurondarklord/status/2106975585507418609
Which sparked this AI scene:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VgfNf79t3oo
I don't care how cheesy or juvenile or klischee it is; narratively it just makes sense: Draco is the rightful owner of the Elder Wand, we have the redemption arc of Slytherin and Voldemort is defeated (again) by the power of love. Could this not be done with a male Draco? Why not a good old fashioned friendship? One argument I read was that women often see rivalry as sexual dominance (e.g. the gay romance in Heated Rivalry) and so Rowling couldn't work out an honorable defeat/submission of Draco to Harry. So a Harrys + Dracos male friendship would actually need a more extensive rewrite than a female tsundere Dracina being in love.
Anyway, now that the US government involved (Hello fellow kids!), doesn't that mean the ship is sailed and the trend run its course into being old and uncool?
Not necessary, I want to officially register my prediction that with the start of the HBO series (December 25, 2026 (Christmas Day)) AI is good enough (or will be good enough in coming years) to replace Draco scenes with reimagined Dracina scenes. There will be alternative Malfoid-episodes which can be torrented.
The Malfoid phenomenon is the consequence of aging Millennials re-interpreting the Slytherin ethos. There's no question that Harry Potter is an anti-fascist series, and as such it takes the concerns that an authoritarian-leaning Wizard might have in that world and associates them with wonton atrocities, physical ugliness, dysfunction, and ultimate defeat and humiliation.
But let's consider the Mudblood Question. Imagine a pure-blood Witch reproduces with a male muggle. I do not know the in-universe specific of magical inheritance, but my understanding is that it is then a roll of the dice if the children will have magic. So maybe some do, and some do not. Or none of them inherit magic. Can you fathom the incredible recklessness that it would take for a woman who has literal magical genes to choose a mate that means her offspring may not inherit magic? Or at best some do and other kids do not, meaning your own children will never relate to each other or even belong in the same world. Even in Rowling's work sibling rivalry caused by disparate inheritance is a persistent cause of familial dysfunction. It's actual despicable, anti-social behavior. It should be shunned by magical society. You can call it "love" but from a different perspective it is an unforgivable neglect of your genetic inheritance and your own children.
Yes HP is ultimately a "love trumps hate" story but minimizes the fact that Slytherin social standards are molded by their love for their own genetic inheritance- their ancestors, their descendants, the protection of their genetic quality that makes them superior to muggles. Slytherin, for whatever faults ham-fisted by Rowling, ultimately represents an incredibly important cultural pressure- is it really only that house that has a problem with Witches and Wizards disinheriting their own children of magic?
Malfoid is introducing the concept of love within the Slytherin ethos, which has always been there intrinsically, only omitted from Rowling's portrayal to maintain the black-and-white dialectic required for a children's story.
There’s a sequence in HPMOR where Harry ‘disproves’ Blood theory to Malfoy through an experiment, thus starting the chain of events that lead to Malloy breaking from his father’s ideology. I was left somewhat baffled reading it due to how this was proven - you either had the magic gene (or the antimagic gene) on a chromosome pair or you didn’t, with squibs having half the alleles. This is enough for the boys to determine that Blood theory is wrong.
But my first thought was… doesn’t this finding just alter the belief system so that muggle-borns like Hermione could be considered real witches? It just so happened that her parents had latent magic genes - the end result of outbreeding heavily with muggle populations would still mean a lot less wizards were being born. Yud doesn’t really give much thought to that. The whole sequence was an unfortunate copout, with Harry’s Science conveniently to coincide with and support the belief system we're already primed for.
This is fun:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzhvRguZOF4_SEI1OTNHWHdHeUU/view?resourcekey=0-hXfTA_XZz4T-qvjPkc1Vtg
If the magic trait depends on two dominant genes, than a Wizard could be AABB (to AaBb), a Squib would be AAbb (to aaBB) and a Muggle is aabb.
At least in the weaker sense in that purebloods mating with muggleborn and muggles increases the risk of descendants being squibs.
Blood theory makes a stronger claim though in that pureblood wizards are superior in magical ability. This is more difficult to prove with Voldemort being super powerful but having a muggle as father or muggleborn Hermione Granger doing quite well. Magical ability could be polygenic in the sense that the magic allele is a switch on/off, but IQ and other mental traits influence its power.
Edit: Speaking of Voldemort: Parseltongue is hereditary and linked to the bloodline of Salazar Slytherin. So there are magic genes beside the active/inactive switch.
That link is hilarious. I wish Yud would have been brave enough to get into the weeds of wizarding genetics in the story.
Blood theory's main claim is probably not true in the story, but what Harry and Draco found should have been more than enough for Draco to pivot into a more scientifically-defensible version of it, and him not doing so feels close to a plot hole with how hard he was searching for a way to hold onto his beliefs. Also, the boys were only really testing the gene that allowed someone to use magic - they could have done a lot more in trying to isolate what influenced the level of magic power someone had.
Even in-story, Harry is pretty manipulative here:
Draco could have pivoted into a more scientifically defensible version, if he had more time and less pressure, and he outright comes up with those pivots later for the 'why is Hermoine a good spellcaster' problem. But Harry's certain that it wouldn't matter, because he'd need an explanation that could be tested, and once you speak a lie, the truth forever becomes your enemies. With Hermoine, she might have been a pureblood adopted or raised unknowingly by muggles, but to someone who's seen how you test a hypothesis, seriously, that explanation only exists so long as it's put to the proof, and can't be an excuse any longer. Once you tell a lie, the truth becomes ever after your enemy.
((This is... naive, to be blunt, and not just in the casual 'some intelligent people can lie to themselves' way. But it was 2008, the Sequences took it in the same sense they took Kahneman.))
It really was a different time. I first read HPMOR last year after over half a decade spent posting in its shadow and the main thing that stuck out to me was how much of a time capsule it is to that era of internet atheism. It was nostalgic and bittersweet to experience as someone who came online during the late years of internet atheism, though imo it highlighted how the story was built on a rotten foundation. How many of the social science studies Harry cited fell victim to the replication crisis? The optimism for an enlightened humanist future seems dead and buried. Where is the promised age of rationality that leaving religion behind was supposed to bring about?
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On the other hand, the main character inherited a lot of money but isn't evil, owning personal weapons for self-defense is good, and the girl who claims that the servants are slaves who need to be freed is wrong.
And most of all for modern "anti-fascism" and the entire culture war, Dolores Umbridge is considered a villain.
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Wizard-muggle pairs are almost always magical in their offspring.
It's basically nonsense, Rowling did not care about the nuts and bolts of how the universe actually works at a mechanical level. The power of love (her version) stands at the very top of her cosmology as a paramount power.
How could a gene make one magical anyway when it's clearly a supernatural property, to do with the soul? Only wizards leave ghosts.
The logical consequences of HP magic being real, with the rules as written, would end up with total wizard world domination and all humans being wizards in a few generations. Because wizards, invisible mind-controlling teleporters with access to powerful abstract magic and time travel (not to mention immortality via Philosopher's stone) would not let muggles control the majority of the world's land and wealth. Harry Potter wizards are ludicrously powerful. But that's not a story she wanted to tell, so she writes about things that wouldn't happen instead.
The broad ethos of Harry Potter as a story is 'liberalism good!' and that's just how it was written, it's no good arguing against the message within a fictional world specifically designed to convey that message. There's no internal consistency that makes a genuine effort to reflect reality where that would go against her message or beliefs.
Do we actually see any? Pureblood-muggleborn pairs are always magical in their offspring on screen. (Do they have a higher risk of squib children? Unclear given how rare squibs are generally.) But both parents are wizards in those cases. But wizarding and muggle society are sufficiently separate that I don't see how a wizard-muggle pair would work. We definitely don't see non-squib muggles living as associates of wizards in wizard places like Hogwarts or Hogsmeade, and a wizard living with a muggle partner in the muggle world would have a hard time complying with the secrecy laws.
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That is quite a many paragraph of conclusions following an assumption that you just state here you imagined up.
The genetics of the magic are not very realistic, because it's not that kind of book. However, the setting implies that muggles can carry latent magical sparkles, and the latent carriers numerous that practically randomly matched muggle parents produce a large proportion of the magical kids in every generation. Predictably, after some thousand years, practically every so-called pureblood family has either some muggleborn ancestor with laundered paperwork, their family line has died out, or is inbred degenerate that produced the most insane wizards ever. Squibs appear relatively much less numerous than muggleborn, and are sometimes produced by pureblood families (Weasley extended family knew of one accountant).
If an utilitarian wanted to maximize the magically capable population, they should propose a mass crossbreeding and breaking the masquerade.
Classic subversion from the goblin-controlled Daily Prophet.
Seriously though, the rules of inheritance are not actually fleshed out anywhere as far as I can tell. You could contrive a system that makes ancestry irrelevant. That would be a cop-out. But there are enough clues in the book to suggest it does matter although the rules are not concrete. But what's interesting is that the particularities of the system, in particular if they approximated real-world ethnogenesis, would mean Slytherin is right.
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Isn’t it just the consequence of someone drawing a cute anime girl based on a well-known series?
I mean I love over-analyzing but this seems like a stretch.
Most people reposting the pics probably don’t even remember any of the worldbuilding details from the books.
Nah, I do think "aristocratic-racist hot girl" plays well for a reason. Would not have worked for a Hufflepuff girl with mainstream anti-racist politics.
Isn't it just "Boy from non-aristocratic background gets to marry a princess after slaying the dragon"? That is one of the oldest ones in the book.
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It's kind of implied by us never seeing an example otherwise, but is there a definitive word that children of two individuals gifted with magic will always result in a gifted kid? Rowling's point would be strengthened if it wasn't the case, though it would be hard to explain magical society as a hidden counterpart to normal society if either the wizarding world or normal society was filled with the ungifted scions of witches and wizards (ie: wouldn't the ungifted seek out the technological tools of muggles to not live like they're handicapped in the wizarding world? and if they were exiled to the muggle world, there would be too many of them walking around, with no particular reason not to reveal what they know).
There are two named characters who are squibs, at least according to my memories. I haven't read it in a while, but I can remember both the neighbor crazy cat lady and the janitor being born to wizard parents and not having powers.
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https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Squib
It's rare.
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The dynamics of the genetic inheritance of magic are acknowledged by Rowling but not actually fleshed out anywhere. It's a catch-22 for the story. If ancestry doesn't matter in determining the likelihood of a child inheriting magic, that would go farthest in discrediting the Slytherin ethos: it actually doesn't matter what your ancestry is, and those people are obsessed with their ancestry for no reason. Classic late twentieth century take on the Race Question.
On the other hand, if it does matter then it lends justification to Slytherin's class structure and arguably adds more ambiguity to the story.
Or maybe they are like us, and they ignore all the Ministry studies saying it matters and instead the conventional wisdom is that ancestry does not matter when it actually does. And Slytherins are the only ones who (rightfully) believe it does. And if you believe it matters then you must be a follower of you-know-who.
So there we get Malfoid, the high-class racist girl, a much different interpretation than Voldemort.
The way the books lay it out, you need someone in the family line to be a witch/wizard in order to produce one yourself. But once you are born with magical talent then you have it to the same degree as everyone else. Hermione being the series' example of this. Diluted blood does not mean diluted magical ability, just that the odds of being born with it are less.
The Slytherin's worldview can still be unjustified on the basis that treating people poorly is bad. They bully those they perceive ass lesser and abuse institutional power for their own ends. They are clearly not worthy leaders regardless of their noble blood.
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Ancestry obviously matters (squibs are very rare, and muggleborns even rarer considering the large denominator, to the point that "infidelity" and "genetic mutation" might explain them all) but it might matter in a mostly trinary way. If there's something like a simple Punnett square for wizardry, with WW wizards and ww muggles and Ww squibs, then obsession with ancestry in the "don't marry a squib unless you're fine with half your kids being squibs!" sense would be descriptively correct, but obsession in the "Our purebred W alleles are better than their muggleborn W alleles" sense wouldn't be.
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