this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Lovecraft is a bit of an odd duck in this comparison largely because his own works are fairly dull and uninteresting on top of being a generally shitty person overall.
His contributions are mostly that he had some really interesting ideas from the world building side of things that other authors and creators turned into far more interesting stories. Not really comparable to JKR in that Harry Potter is actually a pretty good piece of YA fiction.
I think Harry Potter is pretty shitty and uninteresting fiction. It is not really a constructive argument though, because it is entirely subjective. A lot of people thinks that Lovecraft wrote some great and interesting fiction, so I am not really sure what you are trying to say.
Well, Harry Potter is entertaining, but it is racist and bigoted in a more modern subtle micro-aggressive way. “Slaves actually want it, if you are a good master” apology, Voldemort is evil because he wants to be immortal (not because he promotes the ideas of an genocidal eugenicist), glorifying emotional manipulation, the high school jock is the protagonist and he grows up to be a cop. The text is difficult content wise for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with Rowling's political stances. I mean the girl of Asian descent is literally called Cho Chang.
She called the Asian girl "ching chong", she called one of the few black people in it "shackle bolt", and she might as well have called the Irish kid "Irish O'Carbomb" given his name an propensity for unintentionally setting things on fire.
Don't even get me started on the goblins.
She straight up admitted lycanthropy is HIV, and all werewolves are interested j is spreading their disease by attacking anyone nearby, one werewolf specifically targets children, if I remember correctly.
The only gay characters I am aware of, one is a villain, and the other other is "one of the good ones" who never acted on it after a point and just stayed a celibate single.
The only non-magical users in the magic world "squibs", basically disabled people, are portrayed as shitty humans. Every summer Harry got left with ms fig who was "a mad old lady", and the school caretaker Filch, who is a sadist that welcomes umbridge with open arms, a parasite who latches on to whoever benefits him most.
I'm sure there's others I've never caught or thought about.
Notice that two queer coded characters (Lupin and Tonks) are shoved into a straight, age gap relationship, where they immediately have a baby and are killed off.
Tonks is especially egregious. You have a woman who dyes her hair crazy colors and chooses to go by a more masculine nickname, and then at the end, we have Lupin calling her “Nymphadora.”
The alcoholic driving instructor. Her name is Madam Hooch, what more proof do you need?
That's not quite true but the degree that's tolerated is what makes it odd.
In (I think) the seventh book, the trio is horrified, upon infiltrating the Ministry of Magic, at a statue that the Death Eaters have installed which has wizards sitting on muggles as a throne with the phrase "Magic is Might" (for whatever reason, my brain remembered this as, like, a centaur and an elf and, maybe, a goblin underneath but I think this still qualifies for genocidal eugenicism, nonetheless).
But (as you and others have pointed out) these ideas have kind of tepidly been present throughout wizard society well through the books. Even if we disregard – say – Malfoy's use of Mudblood and such (as his family was always analogous to supremacist families, anyway): Arthur Weasley's pretty much not respected by his colleagues for his interest in muggles (which, if we were to actually take themes seriously, could have been an opportunity for Rowling to draw further connections with his monetary class) while those who do respect him kind of just regard it as pointless amusement, the fact that nearly every magical creature exists meaningfully segregated from wizarding society without any exploration of why (even in cases where the text provides it as being a choice by the magical creatures), and other small bits.
Like, perfectly reasonable if you're trying to represent a realistic society (people have all kinds of prejudices) but Rowling and her protagonists seemingly have no interest in it (or, perhaps more importantly, rooting it out more thoroughly past the overt supremacy of Voldemort).
Explicit, in-your-face bigotry: the books come down hard on but it seems wholly interested in maintaining the status quo, so long as it isn't disruptive.
Which, like, (considering the author) isn't surprising but I do find it interesting in the ways in manifests itself.
You remembered correctly, kinda. The "Magic Is Might" statue was installed later on, but during Order Of The Phoenix in the ministry there's the 'Fountain of Magical Brethren'. It's a wizard and a witch that are being stared up at adoringly by a centaur, goblin, and an elf.
Which I wouldn't call genocidal eugenicism, but it's definitely problematic in a different way. I think I remember Dumbledore pretty explicitly calling the statue a bad thing, but I don't remember exactly how or when.
Oh, I meant that the muggles being made the throne, rather than other magical creatures, was still genocidal eugenicism (basically, still qualifies, even if I didn't remember correctly).
But the previous example you bring up is another case of what I was trying to highlight: the books are aware of the low-key prejudice present throughout the society. Both implicitly and explicitly (e.g. Dumbledore's highlight), it's aware that less overt forms of prejudice exists.
Which is what makes it never getting addressed, by the end of the books, so…I dunno, notable, in some capacity?
It'd be much more simple if we could just say that the books implicitly argue for the status quo but it's something more overt, instead. The books seem cognizant and aware of marginalization – both supremacist (à la Voldemort) and social/somewhat-systemic (various examples we've brought up) – yet there's a way in which even this awareness is tamped down to that's-just-the-way-it-is by not even arguing for it but just by…doing nothing about it. These microaggressions and prejudices are noticed though never confronted while we continue to socialize and interact with these people who express such bigotry and never gets resolved in any meaningful way, by the end.
I’d say his writings were more novel, and interesting, than Rowling’s. He overused fancy words, and when you stripped away the ornament, his stories ran on xenophobia and catastrophising (“what if those weird-looking foreigners practice human sacrifice, or are really not humans but fish-monsters?”), but he could write a compellingly eerie story. (Some of them have, of course, aged worse than others.) Rowling, meanwhile, plots like a LLM trained on the past century of British children’s literature.
Meanwhile, neck-deep in AI slop and surrounded by bots, the uncanny valley of people that aren't people with unknowable intentions may turn out to be the most resonant.
Fourth grade me disagreed with it being pretty good YA fiction even at that age. It was generic and only decent if it was your first exposure to YA fantasy.
I liked them until the fifth book came out - I was about in fifth grade. You could tell that when Order of the Phoenix came out that she had George Lucas syndrome and wasn’t being told “no” by editors anymore.
I still did the midnight releases and fun stuff, but it jolts from a decent “monster of the week” children’s series to overwrought garbage.
HP ain't got shit on The Hobbit.