Somehow, over the span of a decade, I've gone from a Problematic Harry Potter Hater to a Problematic Harry Potter Lover. At no point in that decade have my feelings about Harry Potter changed; I would go as far as to say that I'm not sure I've had an original thought about Harry Potter between 2013 and today. There simply has not been that much to think about! I thought the books were very good, I thought the movies were very bad, and I ignored the Fantastic Beasts franchise because I cannot imagine an emotionally healthy person sparing a single thought for it.

Ten years ago, though, it was considered ill-mannered to find Pottermania in bad taste, or to tire of the deep analytical fan essays trying to find character depth in Anthony Goldstein or Ernie MacMillan—two characters whose personalities both amount to "room stuffing." I had more than one friend get mad at me for daring to suggest that Harry Potter intentionally made whimsical and silly worldbuilding choices, and that it might be counterproductive to invest in its ideas too seriously. Things that, to me, felt like "reading Harry Potter accurately" got derided as anti-fan and anti-fun.

Now, I'm far likelier to get criticized for liking Harry Potter than for hating it. Funnily enough, the same people are making the criticisms; they've just switched the polarity around. The maelstrom of Harry Potter reverence has turned into a maelstrom of Harry Potter loathing; astute literary critics have revisited the greatest book series ever written, and wisely concluded that it is immoral trash.

I understand (and sympathize with) the backlash. JK Rowling, an extremely rich woman who never has to go online a single day in her life, has instead used Twitter so long and so hard that she's wound up radically transphobic. The Internet has a way of propagating certain bizarre mental behaviors as though they were literal contagious diseases; you could watch the infection invade JK's mind step-by-step, as she went from "unintentionally problematic remarks" to "sincere attempts to reconcile personal beliefs with tolerance" to "flat-out trans-hating" to "low-key endorsing trans genocide." Former die-hard Harry Potter fans are heartbroken and upset, not to mention terrified, by this transition. And it's tempting, with any kind of heartbreak, to practice a certain revisionism: to rewrite your narrative about somebody until they were conspicuously vile from the start.

What I find frustrating, though, is that the new interpretation of Harry Potter as racist trash makes the exact same misreadings as the old interpretation of Harry Potter as sophisticated social commentary. From the beginning of Pottermania, there has been a tendency to insist that Harry Potter is important, that its appeal is to readers' hearts, that it must be treated as tender and emotional and dear. And that makes talking about Harry Potter virtually impossible from the get-go, because above all Harry Potter is enormously silly. In fact, it's not just silly: it's intentionally absurdist. And its deeper moral and cultural message—which does, in fact, exist!—is so rooted in its absurdity, so dependent on the reader's acknowledgment that certain things here are very very silly, that to take the absurd things seriously is to render the whole series borderline illegible.

Rowling makes this clear from the very beginning—not that she or her literary technique are ever given credit. Harry Potter does not, after all, begin with Harry Potter himself. It begins thusly: 

The book could not be clearer in its message: LOOK AT THESE PRIGS LOOK AT THESE PRIGS LOOK AT THESE PRIGS. "Proud to say that they were perfectly normal" becomes, in a nutshell, the book's critique of the evils in the hearts of man: to insist that you have the right to define what normal is, what perfection means, and to take pride in that fact, is to inherently exclude and ostracize anything that fails to meet your definition. It means cutting out everything in life that is mysterious and strange. Even more importantly, it means eliminating all the nonsense—and, as the series makes clear, nonsense is where life's magic really resides.

By the time we meet Dumbledore, the series' archetypal Wise Old Wizard, at the end of Chapter 1, it should be clear: silliness and goodness are inherently intertwined. When Dumbledore off-handedly mentions that he has a scar that's a perfect map of the London Underground on his left knee, we're well past the point where you can plausibly accuse Harry Potter of taking anything especially seriously. If you find yourself asking how Quidditch, a game in which the Most Special Boy can immediately score his team 150 points, could possibly function as a real sport, you have made a fundamental category error.

Now, there's a reason why this gets overlooked. Harry Potter is not just a very silly book series about a place called Hogwarts: it is also a moral parable about racism and classism, a Christian allegory about the redemptive power of love, and a pretty killer series of mysteries. It was a children's book series that tackled serious, even difficult, themes. And its runaway success permitted Rowling to take liberties that editors had never allowed children's authors to take before: Tamora Pierce, herself a marvelous writer—and a much better and more thoughtful person than Rowling—credits Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for the fact that she's allowed to write book-length books now, rather than curtailing her novels to 200-page chunks.

It doesn't hurt that Harry Potter itself hid its ambitions until after it became the publishing world's all-time greatest success: while it lays the groundwork for its deeper, darker themes across its first few entries, it's not until Nazis murder a teenage boy in book four that the series truly begins to spread itself out. And when it returned, after the greatest spell of anticipation for a new book in decades, it focused on institutional failure: the government and the media goes out of its way to cover up the burgeoning supremacist movement, publicly slandering another teenager's reputation. The primary feeling in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, unusually for a children's book, is one of dread: Harry confronting the frustrating feeling that something terrible is happening, and that nobody is doing anything about it, and that each and every day things are getting worse, horribly worse.

For plenty of young readers, this was their very first time experiencing anything like this. Even for older readers, there was a shock that this was happening in children's lit—that Rowling was finding a way of welding this narrative to the kind of simple, accessible storytelling that made it palatable for less-experienced readers. And ignore the revisionism: the series is suspenseful, unpredictable, and (at times) emotionally devastating. It's far from perfect, but my experience of reading each book on its release day was of feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. I have to imagine that it must have been similar to how young Beatles fans felt after Rubber Soul and Revolver: absolutely flabbergasted, unprepared for what they'd just experienced, stunned to have that much of an experience in a space which had for so long been considered light, breezy, and insignificant.

So I get it. It makes sense that people dwelled on the big things, the heavy things, and not the silly things. It also makes sense that a huge chunk of the Harry Potter readership literally learned how to think about literature through this book—they didn't know how to interpret Harry Potter because they'd never really had to think seriously about a book before. After that, this series became the lodestone by which they navigated everything else; "Harry Potter" was a lens you could apply to other cultural events, but the Harry Potter series was defined by the emotional experience of reading it for the first time.

If you saw Harry Potter as a life-defining parable about what it means to be good—what it means to fight for justice—then I'm sure you can look back on it and be shocked by its casual bigotry, its meanness, its willingness to reduce characters down to caricature and cliché. But that's not some new discovery. In fact, it's part of the literary and cultural tradition that JK Rowling comes from. It was noticed and discussed by critics from the very first book onward: it's hard to overlook Harry's fat cousin literally growing a pig's tail as he's stuffing his face with Harry's birthday cake. The only shock comes from people for whom Harry Potter served as an event horizon of sorts: people who so fail to understand Harry Potter's origins that they still don't really know what Harry Potter is.

That's a shame, because it means that most of the contemporary criticisms of Harry Potter—an eminently criticizable book—fall flat. Meanwhile, the books' real genius goes largely unacknowledged and overlooked, because the people who most lauded it never really understood what Harry Potter was doing.

When Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame, offered to direct the entire series, he knew what he was doing. Monty Python is a blatant influence on Harry Potter, both for better and for worse. Flying Circus loves nothing more than to depict ostensibly-serious people digging in their heels to defend conspicuously ridiculous things; Harry Potter takes this vein of humor and runs with it, starting with the self-serious Dursleys before pivoting it around to lampoon self-serious wizards. What's ridiculous to us is completely ordinary to them; their prejudices and mores are taken to be deeply important, usually in the form of Ron Weasley saying bigoted, patronizing things without realizing he's saying them. (Ron, who's got a heart of gold, has nonetheless internalized a lot of the wizarding world, and finds it remarkable that anyone could find any of it funny, let alone shocked or appalled.)

The clever double-sided game that Rowling plays is to use her fantasy world to mock and lampoon the real one, and then to mock her own world when it falls into the same nasty human behaviors. Ron's father Arthur is endlessly delighted with Muggle inventions: he finds telephones and cars as fascinating as we find invisibility cloaks and flying broomsticks. But his wonder, his affection, is looked down upon by his fellow wizards—not by the genocidal supremacists, but by the "perfectly normal" wizards, his fellow government employees. They, too, have a supremacist attitude towards non-wizards; in fact, they take it for granted that wizards are naturally, obviously superior. Never mind how frequently their magical solutions are ludicrous, inefficient, and cause great amounts of pain: they're magic, which means they're better.

The irony of these inefficiencies is never once called out in text; if you're waiting for the books to tell you what to think, you're likely still waiting after a quarter of a century. Similarly, Rowling never calls attention to the fact that, by design, her books are likely to prejudice her readers into seeing wizards as superior too. Every reader wants to be a wizard: they want to see and do extraordinary things. They could never find everyday technology as incredible as Arthur Weasley finds it; in fact, it's silly of him to find subway turnstiles so intriguing. They take it for granted that wizards are superior, and that the wizarding world is preferable to this one. In other words, they affect the same subtle bigotry as Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge: it's not that they hate Muggles, because why hate anyone so conspicuously inferior? Harry Potter never calls attention to the fact that Fudge's worldview is not substantially different than Voldemort's. But the world of Harry Potter isn't just segregated: its wizards are so unanimous in thinking that this segregation is acceptable that it literally goes unquestioned.

I am one of maybe ten people who actually bothered to read Rowling's first non-Potter novel The Casual Vacancy. Don't bother with it: it's mawkish and heavy-handed. But the specific thing it's heavy-handed about is liberal racism: the ways in which a community of people who largely think of themselves as good and open-minded—the kind of community that would go out of its way nowadays to identify as anti-racist—drive a young Black woman to her death and then just... go on with their lives. Rowling is not particularly well-equipped to write about this sort of thing in the real world, but The Casual Vacancy is interesting because of what it says about Harry Potter: namely, that the overwhelming bigotry of the "nice" wizards isn't an oversight on Rowling's part, but is in fact a part of the point she's making. When Ron and Harry mock Hermione for her outrage at realizing that Hogwarts is run on slave labor, they are the butt of Rowling's joke. Time and again, Harry Potter makes it clear that the wizarding world is as dysfunctional and as inhumane as our world is; to assume that Rowling intends it as a utopian vision is to take her in the worst faith possible.

I bring up the slave-labor bit because it's become one of the go-to canards for reinterpreting Rowling as a sneering racist. It's become popular to assume that, when Rowling depicts Hermione's failed efforts to liberate the house-elves from their servitude, the joke is that Hermione's some misguided angry nag. That's a weird assumption to make, given that JK Rowling herself decided to include a plotline about liberating an enslaved populace. The fact that Hogwarts has slave labor to begin with was introduced specifically so Rowling could critique it; the fact that Ron and Harry find Hermione to be so ridiculous goes to show just how quickly even an outsider like Harry comes to take systemic injustice for granted, to the extent that he even sees it as good and right. Later, Harry's beloved godfather Sirius winds up dead because he's too much of a bigot to take his own house-elf Kreacher seriously; even later, that same house-elf—who is himself extremely racist—is given a redemption arc, which kicks off with the revelation that Sirius's Nazi-loving brother harbored such affection for Kreacher that he's driven to betray Voldemort and his entire cause when he sees Voldemort treat Kreacher as poorly as... well... Sirius treated Kreacher too.

The fact that this is cited as proof that JK Rowling fundamentally supports racist institutions goes to show how pernicious this sort of revisionism can be. It undermines the more credible things you can accuse Harry Potter (and Rowling) of, when you're so conspicuously looking to interpret things in bad faith that you start misreading the book's literal text. Similarly, the fact that Hogwarts is inspired by British boarding schools—themselves a classist and elitist institution—leads people to conclude that Rowling loves boarding schools, and thinks they're just hunky-dory. That's a take that requires you to overlook just how frequently the book touches upon the miserable poverty of the Weasley family—and accentuates how much of that misery comes, not just from the unspoken assumption that everyone should have enough money to afford basic everyday living, but from the bigotry of Ron's classmates, who treat him as an inferior in ways both blatant and subtle. (Just as Voldemort's racism goes hand-in-hand with Cornelius Fudge's, so too are the more classist jabs at Ron paired with many quiet moments in which Ron's friends treat him conspicuously differently for his lack of money.)

Ironically, for a book series that's often criticized for being too obvious about its messaging, a lot of the critiques JK Rowling receives now is due to her willingness to let things remain subtext. The fetishization of Hogwarts' house system, in which fans excitedly take declare houses for themselves and construct elaborate justifications for how good their specific one is, overlooks how frequently the series itself points out that these houses are unnecessarily divisive, and only came about because Hogwarts's four founders were petty bickerers who wanted to treat their favorite students like their property. The myths of dignity and nobility surrounding the founders are just that: myths. (You'd think that Rowling's stance on idolatry would've been pretty clear when Dumbledore turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer who accidentally murdered his own sister.) Like so much else in the series, going back to the "perfectly normal" Dursleys who need you to know the exact posh street they live on, institutions are inherently suspect, and usually awful. So critics smugly point out that the Sorting Hat system miiiiight be a wee bit problematic, missing how frequently Dumbledore himself calls the house system awful.

The problem is that Harry Potter's fans unironically bought into a world that is heavily ironized. They insisted on seeing Hogwarts as a utopia, when it was an absurdist hodgepodge from the get-go. Every time that a character insisted that everything about Hogwarts was Good, Actually, fans took that as face value, rather than seeing it as the Pythonesque pratfall that it was. And now that they're older and performative consciousness has become the norm—and now that JK has become a genuine virile bigot—their only recourse is to accuse Rowling of taking everything she wrote as seriously and dully as they themselves first took it. Rowling intended no ironies a decade ago, when everything she wrote was wonderful and good; she intends no ironies now, when everything she wrote is disgusting and bad. In neither case do Harry Potter's fans see Harry Potter as the series it actually was: they read Harry Potter about as astutely as Pink Floyd fans who think that The Wall was Roger Waters's way of saying he loves fascism.

The most obvious precedent to Harry Potter might be the worlds of Roald Dahl, which are even more conspicuously nasty than Rowling's works are herself. Dahl found that same blend of wonder and wretchedness: Willy Wonka is a psychopath, his factory is a hellscape, his adults are nasty bullies, and his children are nastier still. There's a similar emphasis on authority figures being conspicuously terrible while insisting that they're simply being proper; there's a similar sense that a more wondrous world might inherently be a more gruesome one. And there's a similar attitude that children might just be wretched little pricks, constantly hurting one another for the most inane of reasons.

Roald Dahl and Monty Python have quite a lot in common, on some levels; Rowling draws from both of them liberally. She also draws from another vein they both share: namely, mean-spirited caricature that doesn't hesitate to turn flat-out bigoted and cruel.

Here's where there's a genuine criticism of Harry Potter to be made: it's not even remotely considerate of the line between "satirical" and "reductive." Dudley Dursley and his aunt Marge are both grotesquely fat, in ways which (it's implied) say something about their moral character; Draco Malfoy's flunkeys Crabbe and Goyle are similarly defined by their obesity and their obsequiousness, until a nasty little twist in the final book. Minor characters are named in ways that reduce them to racial or national stereotypes: Cho Chang, Anthony Goldstein, Pavarti Patil, Seamus Finnegan. The whimsical naming strategy that's fun when it comes to naming spells or lampooning fantasy tropes turns into a different, worse kind of trope when it's defining people. (And the way that that intersects with the also-conspicuously-tropey Hogwarts houses isn't great: much ado has been made of the fact that the Jewish and the Generically Asian characters are both in Ravenclaw, the Hogwarts house for people who get good grades in school.)

Harry Potter certainly belongs to a tradition here; that tradition is also certainly worth critiquing. You can see Monty Python as brilliant and subversive and also acknowledge that it frequently did some pretty fucked-up shit; you can absolutely go to town on how awful Roald Dahl almost always was. And you can go further than that, and critique the authors and artists themselves: Dahl was an out-and-proud bigot, and John Cleese of Monty Python fame has veered towards cranky "anti-woke" takes as he's gotten older, occasionally landing in outright transphobic territory himself. In other words, there's a lot to take issue with here. But it also allows you to note the context in which Harry Potter veered into bigoted and fat-shaming territories: namely, that this reductive caricature has often gone hand-in-hand with social critique, satirical farce, and absurdist exaggeration. It points to the kind of story that Harry Potter wants to tell; it suggests the methods with which Harry Potter wants to send its message. This is a book series that intends to present you with ludicrous figures, who then go on to tell you that they are in fact extremely normal and proper, in the hopes that you'll decide you maybe shouldn't trust them.

A lot of Harry Potter's bigotry is simply thoughtless: it takes for granted that it can be reductive without causing harm, and doesn't examine its decisions any further. When it does present more complex instances of unfairness or oppression—whether you're talking the house-elf system or the general boarding-school vibes—it either makes direct critiques of the system in question or, at the very least, presents them as extremely unreliable. The series as a whole is incredibly anarchic: Peeves, its most chaotic character, becomes an almost heroic entity in Order of the Phoenix, and troublemakers are generally upheld as more worthy of reverence than actual heroes are. (Mischief, as a general rule, gets lauded; it's also suggested a few times that mischief is a kind of playful precursor to genuinely challenging unjust institutions.)

In other words, there's an argument to be made that JK Rowling is frequently thoughtless or inconsiderate; the fact that she literally got radicalized because she couldn't stop picking fights on Twitter—that she was so unwilling to back down from an argument that she's landed on endorsing trans genocide—enforces this argument, rather than undermining it. But it's a stretch to go from that to claiming that Rowling's intent, with Harry Potter, was to uphold classist, bigoted Britain as a good thing overall. You can argue that Rowling's obvious support of institutional reform—which shows in the way Harry winds up working for the government and in Rowling's own fondness for the Liberal Democrats—is insufficient as a political ideology. But these are not the arguments that Rowling's contemporary critics make.

Again, the simple fact is that every illegitimate criticism of Rowling undermines the very legitimate ones that can be made. As a Jewish man, I get annoyed by—even upset by—the ballyhoo that's been made of Rowling's assigning goblins to work for Gringotts Bank. Goblins, in medieval lore, have often been used as stand-ins for Jewish people; they're often characterized by their greed for gold and shiny objects, as if they were the fantasy equivalent of magpies. And, since the conceit of Harry Potter starts with "what if traditional fantastic creatures were assimilated into a contemporary Britain," Rowling places goblins in the bank, and—with typical thoughtlessness—doesn't seem to think much more of it.

If that's where the argument for Rowling's anti-semitism ended—well, that and Anthony Goldstein—then you'd have a legitimate critique: Rowling doesn't once stop to ask whether she ought to examine the connotations of where she's placing whom. This is inconsiderate, even offensive. But there's not a lot about Rowling's depictions of the goblins that's particularly anti-semitic: it's the movie's depiction of Griphook the goblin that gives him a large pointy nose, and adds Stars of David to the Gringotts bank floor. The actual physical description of goblins in The Philosopher's Stone is as follows:

I've never heard Jewish people accused of having long fingers and feet before. Maybe you can get somewhere with the adjective "clever," but this is not a particularly Jewish description of a goblin. Only the word "goblin," and its proximity to gold, carries that traditional anti-semitic denotation.

What's more, when Griphook returns in The Deathly Hallows, it's obvious that Rowling is harking to a different trope altogether. Specifically, she uses goblins as a substitute for dwarves: rather than being indiscriminately obsessed with money, the goblins are craftsmen, and the treasures they value most are their own works. Griphook's betrayal of Harry and his friends, where he makes off with a sword that the gang needs to vanquish Voldemort, isn't simple (possibly-Jewish-coded) greed: he's taking back a goblin heirloom. And he's taking it back after Harry promises the sword to him, fully intending to renege on his promise.

The valid critique of Rowling's putting goblins in a bank—it inconsiderately reflects medieval tropes of Jewish people as goblins—is cast aside. It doesn't adequately portray Rowling as the monster it would be convenient for her to be. Instead, a farther-reaching claim is made: one that blames JK Rowling for the art direction on a movie that Christopher Columbus made, ignores her book's actual text, and disregards every detail that fails to contribute to the Rowling-as-anti-semite narrative.

I find this far more offensive than I find Rowling's actual text, because it cynically uses accusations of anti-semitism to fabricate a narrative. It's as if it's not enough for Rowling to be profoundly transphobic: she needs to be more of a bigot, or else it doesn't count! Which is how I've found myself in situations where non-Jewish people angrily accuse me of supporting anti-semitism, simply by questioning the goblins-as-anti-semitic narrative they're trying to push. Because—let's face it—these people don't actually care about Jewish identity, or about Jewish oppression. They're about as sincere as the white liberals in The Casual Vacancy: performing sociopolitical consciousness to make a point, rather than trying to make a meaningful criticism of a work of art.

When Rachel Rostad went viral for her slam poem about Rowling's depiction of Cho Chang, she captured the zeitgeist for a reason: Cho's ambiguous racial identity is essentially a costume that Rowling dons on her. It defines her physical looks, her cartoonish name, and not much else. In fact, Cho is not given much characterization at all: she's kind of nice-ish, and then she's very sad about her dead boyfriend, and then Harry gets mad at her, and that's about all. When Hermione unpacks Cho's feelings for Harry and Ron, it's almost entirely defined by her feelings about two men:

Cho's a convenient narrative prop: she exists to further Harry's narrative, and to help emphasize the tragedy of Cedric's death, and that's about it. She's also Asian, because without that she'd literally have nothing that sets her apart. And it's a problem that "Asian" got treated as a way to differentiate her! It's an issue on two levels: first, that nothing about Cho's identity has any weight in any way; and second, that she's only Asian because Rowling needed a basic adjective to set her apart.

The outrage about Anthony Goldstein, on the other hand, makes close to no sense because Anthony Goldstein barely exists. He is mentioned exactly seven times across exactly two books; in all but two of those mentions, he is named along with a list of other generic students. Of those two other mentions, one of them consists of him standing idly, waiting to be magically disarmed by another student; the other student is the actual focus of the sentence. His finest hour comes when, in the middle of a speech that Hermione is making, he says "Hear hear." (Hermione, we are told, "looks heartened.")

If you want to point to Goldstein's last name as evidence that Rowling often assigns her characters reductive names—as I did, in this very piece!—then, yes, you have a point. Rowling is, at times, so lazy that it's outright offensive. But it's inconsiderate more than anything—just as failing to consider the historic context of "goblins" as a myth is inconsiderate. And if your entire argument about JK Rowling hating Jewish people comes down to long-fingered goblins and Anthony "Hear, Hear" Goldstein, you have to ask yourself whether you're really making the point that you think you're making.

Once again: I'm not pointing this out because I intend to exonerate Rowling. JK Rowling is a rich woman with a giant audience and she's using her wealth and her audience to actively oppress transgender people. It is legitimately monstrous and vile. My issue is not that people have turned on JK Rowling: they were correct to do so, the moment she started abusing her power for such an atrocious cause. Rather, my issue is that the bullshit revisionism of Harry Potter makes her critics come across as deeply unserious people, wholly uninvested in actual social causes or in meaningful artistic critique. It comes off, instead, as illiterate and opportunistic.

Part of the broad appeal of Harry Potter is that, by abstracting out its messages about oppression to a fantasy landscape, it was able to speak more universally to the lonely outsider—to the child who, for whatever reason, felt ostracized and outcast, bullied, unloved. The fantasy of Hogwarts was the fantasy of realizing that, somewhere out there, there were people like you: people around whom you could finally feel normal. Harry Potter's queer and trans fans saw their experience reflected in Harry's: that niggling sense that they were different, that sense that the world was conspiring to keep them from discovering who they were—that their very families were trying to suppress their very nature—and that, if they slipped into the right universe, they might find the place where their identities were not only acknowledged but commonplace, to the extent that they might build an entire life around this.

You can understand why this kind of reader might overlook the way that, from the literal first sentence, Rowling also questions this idea of normal—not just that one person's idea of normalcy might be damaging and wrong, but that normalcy itself might be highly suspect. The fact that, once Harry escapes his family, he exists solely in a world where wizards and their normal are the most conspicuous bigots—where Harry's "chosen family" reveals itself to be just as flawed as the world that he escaped from—complicates Rowling's outsider narrative, especially since she makes it clear with Voldemort that that same "outcast" mentality defines her world's most pernicious bigots.

This is not a "both sides" narrative—far from it. Instead, it's what Rowling uses to push away from the book's early in-group/out-group binary towards her real central theme: namely, the redemptive power of Christian love, and the way that it transcends all over deciding factors.

Five characters in Harry Potter serve as tentpoles for Rowling's inquiry into ethics and human nature—basically a questioning of nature-vs-nurture, and an attempt to ask what "defines" a person's being. What can we truly, fairly judge them by? What distinguishes a good person from an evil one?

Harry serves as the series' tabula rasa. He is wholly unfamiliar with this world, raised in squalor, surrounded by a family that hates him. He is left only with the idea of his parents' love—and with his famous scar, which serves as a physical reminder that his mother once loved him so deeply that it saved his life. When he enters the wizarding world, he is given every reason to love it; he is also, almost immediately, presented with a vast fortune, ensuring that he will never want for anything. All of his choices, therefore, are made with absolute freedom: he may choose to do anything that he feels he ought to do.

Before he's met any other classmate, Harry encounters Draco Malfoy—the first of his four foils. Draco is supremely rich; we will also learn that he is supremely racist. Harry rejects Malfoy internally simply by witnessing Malfoy's attitude towards the world: sneering, closed-minded, the antithesis of Harry's wonderment. By the time he meets Ron, who's "pure-blooded" but poor and therefore earns Malfoy's derision, Harry has made his first significant choice. He then makes his most famous symbolic decision when, as the Sorting Hat works out where to put him, he asks to be put anywhere but the place where Malfoy's going. Much later, Dumbledore will tell him that this matters more than anything: who he is matters far less than what he chooses.

Opposite Harry is Tom Riddle, who later becomes Voldemort. Tom's upbringing intentionally reflects Harry's (as does his name, which makes him another of the "Toms, Dicks, and Harrys" that mark him as an everyman of sorts). He, too, grows up orphaned and unloved and without a cent. Their one telling difference is that Tom's mother, unlike Harry's, never loved him—but as neither of their mothers raised them, the only material difference is that Harry has a scar.

Harry's magic manifests, in his youth, as a series of whimsical, wondrous happenings; Tom's, on the other hand, becomes the means with which he asserts himself as superior to his fellow orphans. When Tom discovers Hogwarts, he sees it solely as a means with which to acquire power—a way of marking himself as exceptional. The supremacist "pureblood" ideology that he adopts doesn't even apply to him: Tom is what racist wizards would call a mudblood. But he adopts it just the same, as he adopts any means with which he might assert himself as superior.

Dumbledore himself serves as the third of Harry's four foils—and as a foil to Tom-slash-Voldemort as well. Dumbledore, like Tom, is exceedingly brilliant; unlike Tom, and unlike Harry, he grows up in a relatively well-adjusted, loving family. He takes on supremacist beliefs, in his youth, because they reinforce his understanding that he is naturally superior in some way; he ignores the way that this ideology casts his more-average brother, and his struggling sister, as inferior. This results in his sister's death, his brother's lifelong animosity, and a profound guilt on Dumbledore's part; we retroactively learn that the source of Dumbledore's wisdom is less his natural gifts, and more his devastating realization that he too had committed a tremendous evil.

Malfoy is not as brilliant as Dumbledore or Voldemort. He's far more average: the series makes a point to note that he and Harry are neck-and-neck in most ways. His upbringing and Harry's are inverted: Draco grows up in the wizarding world, with two living parents, surrounded by lavish wealth. And his trajectory and Harry's are inverted too: when Harry goes on the run, Draco gets conscripted into Voldemort's Death Eaters. Draco's never quite heroic: he's just reluctant. He doesn't love the things he's being made to do. And his supremacist ideology crumbles, not through traumatic grief like Dumbledore's, but by a gradual recognition that this fascist regime is also a loveless one.

(Another irony is that Draco is shielded from this fact because his parents do genuinely love him. It's only when he encounters Voldemort that he has second thoughts. And while Draco's parents, who are Death Eaters themselves and are profoundly elitist, never turn their back on their worldview, they abandon the war altogether at a crucial moment, simply running to find their son so they might keep him safe.)

Equidistant from all four of these characters is the most controversial character in the series: Severus Snape. It's around Snape, ultimately, that the entire series turns: his unseen actions lead to the death of Harry's parents, which is where the first chapter opens, and the seventh book's epilogue ends on Harry telling his son that Snape was the bravest man he ever knew. This line from Harry is partly why Snape is so controversial: he is, in many ways, a reprehensible man, with a single redeeming moment that many readers don't think quite suffices.

Like Harry and Voldemort, Snape grows up in poverty; like Voldemort, he is unloved; like both Voldemort and Dumbledore, he becomes obsessed with his own exceptionalism. Unlike Harry and Voldemort, he grows up with a parent, though that's of little comfort, considering the parent. And like Malfoy, he readily adopts the Death Eater ideology, and with considerably more efficacy to boot.

Like Dumbledore, Snape's actions lead to the death of a loved one. Unlike Dumbledore, Snape would have been completely fine with killing somebody—he just got the wrong person dead. In fact, there is only one person who Snape ever loves: Harry's mother, even after she marries Snape's cruelest childhood tormentor.

What we learn, right before the series' climax, is that Snape turned turncoat after this: that he devoted his life to Lily Potter's memory, and to doing what she would have wanted him to do. It's not for Harry's sake—on the contrary, Snape despises Harry, start-to-finish. Rather, it's the only thing he can do for the women he loved and effectively killed: try and be who she saw him as.

Between these five tentpoles, Rowling establishes a simple and universal axiom: love, selfless love, is the single defining determinant of a person's moral position. Voldemort was not loved, and does not love; Dumbledore was loved, yet failed to love in kind. Draco sets out upon a loveless path, but the love he did receive eventually pulled him from his path. And Snape was never loved, and loved but only once—and that was the single act of love that winds up literally saving the world.

(While Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the only book in the series that isn't overtly a mystery novel, it reveals itself in the end to have been a mystery all along: Harry's final confrontation with Voldemort hinges on the question of who a certain wand belonged to, and their "fight" consists more-or-less of Harry solving the mystery out loud, tracing the wand's lineage from Dumbledore to Snape to Draco to Harry himself—conveniently outlining the relationship between these five tentpole characters at the same time. And it's Snape's redemptive act that means it's Harry, rather than Voldemort, who truly owns the wand that Voldemort has spent the book pursuing.)

It's made clear that Harry is defined, more than anything, by his heart: to put it cornily, he can't help but love. This is often seen as a weakness—it's manipulated by Voldemort to betray Harry, and to kill his godfather Sirius. And at other times it's simply seen as less valuable, less meaningful, than brilliance or talent or skill. The power which Harry's mother bestowed upon him with her love is seen as merely a fluke; the fact that Harry himself remains alive is treated as irritating coincidence. And the point which Rowling makes, more and more explicitly, is that nothing could be further from the truth: it is Lily's love for Harry that saves him, it is Harry's love for Hogwarts that sways the final battle, and it was Snape's love for Lily that, in the end, meant that Voldemort's campaign was doomed from the start.

The imagery is explicitly Christlike—though there are two Christ figures, since both Harry and his mother qualify. And this notion of love—love as a kind of transcendental force, overcoming material circumstance or even justified personal enmity—is extremely Christian in nature. In their final showdown, Harry sincerely tries to get Tom Riddle to show remorse; we are told that Voldemort is shocked by this. But what's shocking isn't just the request. It's that Harry means it—that, having seen the remnants of Voldemort's fractured soul, he would rather try and get his mortal enemy (and history's greatest monster) to find redemption himself than relish in the suffering that Voldemort will have to endure forever.

Viewed through this lens, Snape's choice to live as the person his loved one wished he'd been becomes the act of courage that Rowling describes it as. It's this Snape—or even Snape's capacity to rise above himself in the name of love—that Harry reveres. "Courage," as a term, is frequently revisited in Harry Potter, but its meaning remains nebulous. Up until the epilogue, that is: if Snape is the most courageous man Harry has ever known, then it's because Snape finds it in himself to act, day in and day out, in the name of his one and only love. That it was a one-sided love scarcely matters—in fact, it underscores the nature of the love that Rowling is describing, because Snape gets no reward for loving. His only reward is the opportunity to become who his love for Lily made him want to be—and to acknowledge that as his highest and best possible self.

Depending on how you look at it, this theme can be seen as either radical or conservative. (Just like Christianity!) It is more ambiguous, more complicated, than the narrative in which outsiders and outcasts finally find a home. At the same time, it intentionally divorces itself from any kind of material analysis: love transcends class, it transcends race, it transcends intentionally trying to murder your loved one's husband. On the one hand, it's an interesting ambiguity to show Sirius murdered by an indentured servant whose life he neglects, while Sirius's Nazi brother's love for the same servant gives him a moment of redemption. On the other hand, it does lead to a series of moments in which people who've done monstrous things are not only allowed to turn over a new leaf, but revered for it—and given more deference, even, than people who were good and loving from the very start. (Should Snape really be given the final word in the series, out of everyone we've met? Snape?)

Taken even further, you get JK Rowling's current attitude towards the transgender movement, which is that trans people are angry and mean to her and not showing her much love (true!), and that therefore they're part of a conspiratorial attempt to abuse children and seize tyrannical power for themselves (false!). Rowling, who is unable to conceive of the staggering cruelty she is showing trans people, doesn't see the profound love and self-acceptance at the heart of the trans movement: she sees only the face it displays towards her, which she provoked in ways she refuses to comprehend. She interprets her critics as hateful, and interprets herself as the one trying to show love; ironically, she's in more of a Tom Riddle position, incapable of finding the remorse that would let her find grace.

It may come as a shock that an author best known for her children's books is not the most reliable person to acquire a comprehensive life philosophy from. Certainly it was a shock to millions that an author of children's books in which love and acceptance generally got posited as "pretty good" turned out to fall radically short of loving or accepting, thanks to a web site that let her get real mad about people equating Jeremy Corbyn to Dumbledore. Harry Potter is sloppy and inconsiderate in all sorts of ways; I like Rowling's prose more than some, but she occasionally drops a real clunker of a sentence. At times, that sloppiness crosses a line and turns outright shitty, whether it's playing fast and loose with actual race or insulting a woman by describing her jaw as "mannish." Revisiting Harry Potter, it's eminently fair to say that some of the things which people overlooked or shrugged off in 1997 or 2007 would nowadays be far less accepted.

You might go a step further, in fact, and suggest that it might not have been a great idea to regard Harry Potter as a healthy foundation for a serious worldview, ever. You might say that it makes sense to keep "beloved things" separate from "meaningful things"—that you should be allowed to love things without forming some half-baked ideology which claims that the things you love are the most moral, the most proper, the most good things to fill your life with. You don't even have to go so far as the blasphemous claim that grown-up conversations about serious issues with grave real-world consequences should not require its participants to know what patronuses and horcruxes are.

One of the nice things about maintaining a healthy critical distance from things is that you don't look ridiculous when the things you love turn out to be less perfect than you claimed. Another nice thing about critical distance is that it means you don't suffer an existential crisis when, fifteen years after she finished writing your favorite childhood book series, a writer starts tweeting inane shit that will almost certainly lead to actual people dying.

But it also spares you from the ludicrous performative act of claiming that you've uncovered the Spawn of Satan beneath a book series that you've spent over a decade of your life heralding. It keeps you from being the equivalent of Bible numerologists who pull verses out of context to prove that gay people go to hell, or that women shouldn't get to have abortions. It's unsurprising that Harry Potter stans, who are as dogmatic a fandom as fandom has ever seen, would resort to the sort of grody faffy shit that religious conservatives pull to reinterpret their texts. Dogma is dogma. But it's a terrible way to go about analyzing books.

I'll admit that Harry Potter was never one of my deepest inspirations. I read too much, when I was young, for it to stand out above everything else; I was more interested in Isaac Asimov (problematic!) and Frank Herbert (problematic!) and Lemony Snicket (problematic!) than I was in JK Rowling. And by the time the denser, heavier, better books came out, I had already discovered Diana Wynne Jones, whose Chrestomanci series is often cited as one of Harry Potter's major influences, and is also incomprehensibly better. Chrestomanci, even more than Harry Potter, emphasizes absurdity, equates magic to delightful nonsense, and suggests that the most wondrous thing about magic—or about imagination—is the way it frees us from taking things so seriously that we wind up behaving monstrously.

But I loved Harry Potter for what it was. For the most part, I still do. It's a very entertaining comedy of manners. It's a series of mysteries so well-crafted that I'd like to think Agatha Christie would've approved. It's surprisingly moving, even to this day. And its message about what matters about people is one that still resonates with me, no matter how much its author seems to have forgotten it herself.

One of the things about the series that's stuck with me the most is the attitude with which Dumbledore approaches the world: merrily, unconcernedly, even nonsensically, but in a way that deftly and gently cuts intolerances to shreds. About once per novel, somebody approaches Dumbledore requesting that he do something immoral, something oppressive, something which would hurt innocent people for no reason. To which Dumbledore replies with the same merry unseriousness—only now there's an edge to his words, a suggestion that he won't take the other person seriously, because no decent person could ever seriously consider such a thing.

It's a critique, a reproach, and often a witty little put-down. But it's also, in a sense, an invitation: You don't need to do this, you know. You can change your mind. Please, why not try any other thing, in any other way, than this thing which I know you know is not okay?

It's telling, I think, that this is how Rowling depicts her Wise Old Wizard. That he is ridiculous at the same time that he's completely serious. That his serious response to serious problems is to say, I might not act seriously, but you're the one who's being absurd. That he distinguishes between serious mannerisms—between acting "perfectly normal, thank you very much"—and serious substance. That, while he may fight Voldemort now and again, he spends far more time fighting with people who are so convinced that they're utterly reasonable, completely ordinary, and therefore absolutely in the right, that they will endorse injustices and atrocities unblinkingly, in their banal and wretched ways. (All traits which, incidentally, Rowling lifted from Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci.)

The silliness, in other words, is a crucial part of the series' message. It's crucial because the silliness is where the joy is found; it's also crucial because so many ridiculous things try not to seem ridiculous, at which point treating them like they're laughable becomes one of the most powerful ways to disarm them. (And it's crucial to note the difference between "finding something laughable" and "failing to take it seriously.")

Again, it's telling how Rowling's increasingly histrionic investment in her transphobic agenda, her attitude that she's being "persecuted" for "what she believes," utterly contrasts with the position of her books. Now she's the one insisting, over and over again, that she's reasonable; she's the one claiming that all perfectly normal people ought to think the way that she does. It's utterly laughable, which isn't to say that it's not upsettingly serious.

But I think this way, in part, because of Harry Potter. I see the world this way because I've come to believe that imagination and wonderment are far better tools for learning how to understand and love my fellow humans than anything else there is. To some extent, I believe in the kind of love that Rowling spent seven books trying to describe; to a much greater extent, I believe that our choices, more than anything, define us. Which means that love, in the end, is the belief that it's not too late for somebody to choose differently.

I'll keep hoping that Rowling finds remorse. I'll keep hoping that she'll choose differently.

And I do my best to understand the Harry Potter fandom that I never quite belonged to, for all I loved the series. I try to understand the radical ways in which they found things in the series that they'd never seen before: not just a sense of community, but political ideas, a push towards activism, and the sense that our society might be fundamentally broken, that our rules might not make sense, and that it's up to us to reject them when we must and push for something better.

I understand why so many fans feel the need to reject Harry Potter outright. And I certainly understand how much easier it is for them to do so—to not only reject the person JK Rowling has become, but to reject everything she's ever been, every book she's ever written, and to rewrite the narrative and cut Harry Potter all the way out.

It's the same reason why they didn't reject Harry Potter when it first got published. Why it took a decade after it finished for people to start critiquing even the obvious racism that had been there all along. When Harry Potter was what they defined themselves by, it was impervious to criticism, all its glaring defects easy to argue away. Now, it works the other way around: Harry Potter is thoroughly blighted, its every choice exposing Rowling's all-pervasive hatefulness. Every line, every character beat, every name of every spell, is the work of an untalented, hateful hack. To admit to liking Harry Potter now is tantamount to saying that you think that hating Jewish people is okay.

Personally, I find that attitude somewhat silly. But I try and love those people all the same.