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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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It's amazing to me how even here, people will just repeat the worst bad-faith criticism ginned up by Rowling's haters.

Harry Potter goblins have long been associated with Jews.

This is kind of like JRR Tolkien's critics claiming that orcs are meant to be black people or Asians. Rowling's critics found that you can map some goblin traits onto Jews and decided that she did it on purpose because she's an anti-Semite.

Plus, there was actually a star of david in one of the films, on the bank floor of Gringotts. They used a real bank for filming, so this might have been an unintentional slip-up.

Sigh. No, it's not a Star of David. They filmed it at the Australia House in London. It's a star from the Australian flag.

This is kind of like JRR Tolkien's critics claiming that orcs are meant to be black people or Asians.

I'm not sure how to articulate why I don't like this kind of reasoning, but I think it's something like this:

  1. Trait X is widely regarded as bad.

  2. People want to portray ethnic group A as bad, so they associate group A with trait X.

  3. A fiction author wants to make fictional group B look bad, so they associate group B with trait X.

It doesn't follow that the author is trying to associate group A with group B.

At no point did I say Rowling was anti-Semitic, only that her work can be interpreted to be anti-Semitic.

They filmed it at the Australia House in London.

Correct, I slipped up there.

It's a star from the Australian flag.

It's clearly a hexagram, two equilateral triangles, which is also a star of David. The early Australian flag had a hexagram on it as well but this was changed in a couple of years to a seven pointed star. At any rate, there is nothing distinctively Australian about hexagrams, it does not symbolize Australia.

At any rate, there is nothing distinctively Australian about hexagrams, it does not symbolize Australia.

Indeed it does; it is a Commonwealth Star, representing the six original states of Australia. The Commonwealth Star now has 7 points but presumably when the Exhibition Hall at Australia House was designed, it had 6.

At no point did I say Rowling was anti-Semitic, only that her work can be interpreted to be anti-Semitic.

Sure it can, but I contend that that is not a good faith interpretation.

It's clearly a hexagram, two equilateral triangles, which is also a star of David. The early Australian flag had a hexagram on it as well but this was changed in a couple of years to a seven pointed star. At any rate, there is nothing distinctively Australian about hexagrams, it does not symbolize Australia.

I don't know the exact history of the Australia House, but are you claiming they laid down a Jewish Star of David when they built it for some reason? Because I find that a lot less likely than that it was either there for some other decorative purpose, or was based on the earlier Australian flag.

Yeah, I hate this kind of reaching. It's what leads Pathfinder and WotC to replace "race" with "ancestry" and "species."

The ancient Greeks likes to make up tribes of far off people like the amazons, the centaurs, the cynocephali, the Laestrygonians - and while they probably did reflect anxienties and bigotries by the Greeks against people in the world, I think this kind of imagination is an important part of human storytelling. Sure, the real secret of these non-human races is that they're all humans, but emphasizing one aspect or another of humanity.

But they still let us tell interesting stories about broad ideologies. Doctor Who wouldn't be the same without omnicidal Daleks, or assimilationist Cybermen. Those two alien species aren't "really" non-human aliens. Much of sci-fi and fantasy is not trying to do genuinely speculative "what if there was an alien species that differed from humanity in major way X", but instead presenting an allegorical reflection of humanity to criticize some tendency in humanity. It's like Black Mirror - several of the episodes are just our world, but with aspect X taken to some crazy extreme to make the faults of our current system more striking.

It's silly to pretend that the goblins in Harry Potter are or always were anti-Semitic. The best argument you could say on this front is that folkloric goblins might have some atavistic anit-Semitic traits, which Rowling unthinkingly reproduced. That doesn't mean that any story where the goblins rise up against oppressive wizard kind is automatically anti-Semitic.

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