The Consumerist Dystopia of Harry Potter

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the subway hunger games ad has me literally crying. “the people in district 12 are starving… luckily you won’t be like them with our $5 footlongs !!!”

"Please consider the environment before printing this email" at the bottom of those emails from the Harry Potter shop is the definition of performative corporate activism

I remember going to the Wizarding World when I was like 12 or 13. They do an Olivander's 'experience' where they fill up the room and select a random kid to try out wands while practical effects happen around you. I got selected from the back of the room, then went through a few wands before one 'spoke to me.' It did feel magical and special, until afterwards a plain-clothed universal employee pulled me aside to say, "You actually don't get to keep this, but your parents can pay for it in the next room if you'd like!" like really? you cant shill out 20 some-odd wands a day

I once heard someone describe the character of Harry Potter as that kid who goes to college, and learns about all the injustices and flaws with the world and society around him, and then decides to become a Cop because his dad was the chief of police or something. And I think that’s just an incredibly apt metaphor for the series as a whole; just barely brushing its fingers against self awareness, ALMOST recognizing the grievous ills of the social structures around us, before taking a sharp U turn and going, “Well wait, what if slavery’s GOOD actually!”

Imagine being on the train to Hogwarts and wanting to buy a wispa and a coke only to find out that nouveau riche Potter kid everyone's been talking about for years bought the whole cart Edit: I thought it was obvious this was a joke. I have no interest in debating the logistics of the Hogwarts Express food cart supply chain Edit 2: A second edit to make the first edit more prominent because Potter fans in 2024 still can't detect humour nor display basic reading comprehension 🤦

"forced to write her novel on napkins in a cafe" as a poor person in the UK, that part of her poverty legend never made sense, like, she spent way more on that cafe cup of tea/coffee, assuming it was a greasy spoon than paper costs

I think the impact of HP influencers is worth mentioning. They will endorse any trash product as long as it comes with Wizarding World trademark. The funniest video I've seen was a girl comparing "REAL wands vs. FAKE Wish wands". Girl, they are all plastic and probably made in the same Chinese factory with terrible working conditions.

I really love Shaun's video on Harry Potter pointing out that JK Rowling's morality is basically "if a character we dislike does something, it's bad, but if a character we like does the exact same thing, it's good"

Fun fact about gendered toys, when I was five years old, I asked for a toy garage to play with miniature cars. It had a system of pulleys that would bring the cars on the top floors and then drop it down à slide. My mother, worried, then asked my father if buying me the garage would make me a lesbian. I just thought the pulleys and slides were cool. Anyway long story short, my dad bought me the garage.

This may be just a personal gripe of mine, but the city where I study has one of the only intact medieval streets left in Britain, which is also spiritually significant to many Catholics as it was where a sixteenth century martyr lived and she has a shrine there. It's almost impossible to find anything out about said history now as the street is entirely full of fucking Harry Potter merch, because if you squint it kind of looks like Diagon Alley despite there being no evidence JK Rowling ever visited there while writing the books. There are at least four different Harry Potter themed shops along one 300m long street front, including next to the house of a woman who was fucking tortured to death who gets one dusty plaque no one looks at. I'm not even Catholic but I am an archaeology student and it is infuriating.

On my 11th birthday, I decided I wanted a harry potter themed party. So my parents and I made almost everything by ourselves: wands, brooms, a giant aragoge, the plushies, the fucking death eaters, the letters coming out of the fireplace with thousands of fake candles floating. It was magical and it was far better than those plastic, soulless merchandise. Btw, I still have some stuff and I usually give out to other harry potter fans.

I would argue that Dudley was never intended as anti-consumerist, particularly - it was about him being ungrateful for it and treating his stuff badly, rather than getting it in the first place (then again, I haven't reread it in years, for obvious reasons). Whereas Harry (because he grew up without anything) is suitably grateful for all his new stuff and treats it well and takes care of it. "Ungrateful" is a more common insult than "greedy" when villain characters use it, too

And rich people "donating to charity" is just another way they are able to control how resources are distributed. If you hold the purse strings, you can control how things are done.

My childhood best friend's cousin almost died in that fabric factory in Bangladesh. She was a few months shy of 11. I remember comforting my friend about that incident on the playground at 9 years old. That'll make you hate fast fashion for life.

The wand buying always struck me as kind of weird. Like, wands are supposed to be unique and fit only one wizard — but somehow Ron has a wand from one of his brothers. In the second book, when his wand breaks, Ron actually suffers because his family cannot afford a new wand for him. There's no way for him to go to Ollivander's shop and get a new one during the school year, no one at school says anything except for "you need a new wand", there's no way to fix it and nobody even thinks of it. Just... Buy a new one, duh. His EDUCATION is actually at risk because his magic tool is broken and he can't get a new one in ANY way. And also, am I supposed to believe that Molly Weasley wouldn't sew her son something nice for the ball in the book 4? Or at least, wash the thing?

When I was a kid I remember the whole “writing on napkins” thing coming off a bit weird implausible. Like how do you write on free cafe napkins? For one, they rip apart if you apply any pressure or try to write small, so you’d have to have hundreds or even thousands of them. Each napkin is going to fit like half a sentence tops. Is the cafe just giving her hundreds of free napkins while she spends an afternoon writing multiple drafts of a chapter?

Funny how most of the recognizable buyable objects from the HP universe are simple easily handmade objects from accessible fonts. Like, wooden wands and brooms. Simple woolen black robes. Hand knitted scarves. But ALL of those things are almost entirely made of plastic in the official HP stores. They're lifeless and ugly and do not look fantastical at all. When i was in my HP phase, i carved myself a wand from a branch of a tree, bought a choir kid's used black robes and adapted them to look like Slytherin robes, hand stitched owl plushies and got my grandma to knit me a Slytherin scarf. Everyone was always flabbergasted by the quality of my "collectibles" and asked me where i bought them and somehow they always looked disapointed when i said "i just made them myself". Like they want the consumerism part of it. They want to spend ridiculous amounts of money on plastic merch.

I thought using shopping to introduce the Wizarding World was clever in the books. It provides an easy setting to throw a ton of information at the reader without feeling boring. Ron bringing up his family's poverty was an important contrast. I always wondered how the hell did poor kids afford to go to wizard schools? What if they're a really poor muggle-born? But this was never explained. And you are absolutely correct. The films went HARD on the consumerism.

I love the parallel that can be made between Lyra's shopping spree in Northern Lights and Harry's in The Philosopher Stone. At first Lyra is so happy that Mrs Coulter takes her shopping and she tries new clothes, makeup, food in joyful abandon. But soon she realizes that Mrs Coulter is buying her. Harry's consumerist spree really never ends.