The video sharply exposes how the finale's failure to address systemic injustices like slavery leaves the entire narrative feeling intellectually hollow. It is a sobering reminder that world-building without moral resolution is just an empty exercise in escapism.
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Harry Potter and the Pathetic, Hollow FinaleAdded:
Welcome to your final class. I'm so proud of you all and I hope that you use your new magical law skills for good and not Slytherin, I mean evil. So, this is the grand finale of the Harry Potter Roast series and I guess also Joannne's Harry Potter books. We've looked at her characters, her themes, her worldbuing, her stories, and her morality. This time we get to look at the full synthesis of all of these ideas and importantly how her ending refuses to engage with its own implications. It raises so many interesting and nuanced questions but is unable to answer any of them. So let's all take our seats and get out our quills one last time and we'll jump right into it with a little bit of silliness.
I know it was a weak attempt at best, but it had to be done. So, gnomes got another mention last book. And here we actually see them twice. Once in chapter 6, where we get this line, Ron relieves his feelings by aiming a kick at a gnome. Ah, yes. We can't possibly mention gnomes without having someone kick them, can we? And another in chapter 8 where we find that old mate Xenophilious Loveg Good, who is in the running for the least subtle name in fiction history, is a fan of gnomes.
Yeah, who would have thought? And that's it for gnomes. Hope you enjoyed the world building there. These sentient little guys who are main characters just love to punt across the garden. Much like many of Joannne's side characters, gnomes only exist for one slightly malicious reason. For Eloise Mijon, it's to remind us that she's a repulsive subhuman beast because she has acne. For gnomes, it's to kick them. And quite honestly, I think the little [ __ ] deserve it. There's no greater crime than being short. That's why I became a magical lawyer. The stakes on this one are pretty low. I mean, not for the gnomes, but certainly for the reader. We don't see them enough for this to be a big sticking point. But in some ways, that's even more horrifying. It's kind of crazy, and I mentioned it in the second video, but you have these animals that are capable of speech, comprehension, and all of these other markers of sentience, and they're just reduced to almost literal punching bags, kicking bags. Joanne is so willing to make off-hand jokes about things that seem innocuous, but upon further inspection are pretty terrible. I know I'm reading too far into this, but this makes all of the Weasley's and in fact everyone who isn't Xenophilious Loveg good look like [ __ ] Why are you doing this? Would you kick a puppy across your yard? Would you yet a fetus?
In any case, this really shows that even the small things prove my point. Even the tiniest little details follow her inexurable pattern of never following through. Plus, it also shows just how cruel she's made every single part of this world. Let's move on to the other mistreated creatures because we've come full circle on house elves now.
Joanne has laundered slavery so thoroughly that all of the house elves have drowned in the washing machine.
Perhaps that's the better fate than them continuing their servitude and me having to talk about them. In any case, since they were introduced, you know, in book two when they're all 12, we've been treated to a bit of condescension about the house elves. Some characters will lament their suffering and advocate for their freedom only to be met with scorn and ridicule from the others. This is an inherently accepted part of the world. The slave race are slaves and they like being slaves and any attempt to change that is an insult to their proud slavery. Is it any different in this book? Do we resolve any systemic issues of slavery in this finale? Ooh, how mysterious and compelling. Keep watching to find out. So, the trio have put their slave to work after assuring him that they're working towards the same goal as his most beloved master was. They've also crossed the threshold that kind characters in this series always talk about, being nice to your slaves. Now that they've started being nice to their slave, he's perfectly happy with his enslavement again. He's cooking for them. He's cleaning. He's such a nice little slave now. He's not even that racist anymore because he's enjoying his slavery. Yeah, this is about what we come to expect at this point. Oh, don't you see how sick it is?
The way they've got to obey. Thank you, Hermione. [ __ ] me. Is no one else going to acknowledge this? Why don't they give a [ __ ] Even she doesn't care as much as she used to. Seriously. She has this big speech about how everyone should be better at a creature and how Regulus and Mrs. Black were nice to him while giving him orders as his owners. She then says, "I've said all along that wizards would pay for how they treat house elves.
Well, Voldemort did and so did Sirius."
Okay, great. What about [ __ ] Dumbledore? He has over 100 slaves. If owning slaves is not enough bad treatment for Hermione, who was appalled at this in her fourth year and advocated for their freedom, then what is she getting at here? Is she saying slavery itself is bad? She was before. Why not now? It seems like she's just taking the pathetic moved goalpost line of be nice to your slaves or else. Why? Why did this change? She was the only person properly calling it out. Now there's no one left. Well, I know why. It's because Joann's realize she can't keep pretending that Hermione is wrong.
Seriously, the narration in books four, five, and six not so subtly tell us that Hermione is wrong for wanting to free slaves. It gets dropped here because she's hopefully finally figured out that this is an insane and evil position to take. Much better to sweep it under the rug and pretend that this one was the claim you always wanted to make. Now, let me say that I understand the concept of nuance. I do. I get that there can be a discussion on Hermione's ideas from the other characters without saying that she's wrong. I get that we can talk about everyone's notions of house elves enjoying their slavery without saying that they are right. That's not what's happening here. Not only do Ron, Fred, George, and heaps of other people ridicule her for wanting to free the slaves, the house elves do it, too. This is not nuance. There's no other way to read it other than the story telling Hermione to cut the [ __ ] and leave the slaves alone. We can't order them to die for us. Well, better late than never, I suppose. This might be the actual bare minimum in terms of being against slavery, but it's better than what we've seen from Ron previously. Of course, Voldemort would have considered the ways of house elves far beneath his notice.
Sorry, what's the best way to dispose of gnomes again? It's like being a house elf, except without the job satisfaction. Are you saying you have some sort of problem with all of this unpaid labor your mother's making you do for your brother's wedding? Is there an issue with you not being compensated in some way for this work you're having to do for your own brother's godamn wedding? Yep. You're basically a slave, except the slaves totally have it better than you because they love it. Shut the [ __ ] up, Ron. You're a piece of [ __ ] Spoiler alert, this doesn't get resolved. We'll touch on it again later, but the slavery point does not get fixed. The slaves aren't freed. The wizards don't change their ways. [ __ ] you if you're paying attention, I suppose. Let's move on to something less depressing, shall we? Actually, let's first touch on another fantasy race. In chapter 6, we get the introduction of ghouls. Apparently, they're weird, slimy humanoids who can't talk. Are they just not of human intelligence, or are they not really capable of speech? What's going on here? This is not as bad as the gnomes, and certainly nowhere near as bad as the house elves, but Ron and the other Weasley's treat this ghoul like a prisoner. Maybe he likes it, so I guess I can't judge too hard. But Joannne's brought in a lot of creatures she conveniently doesn't have to give rights, hasn't she? Anyway, now we can move on.
In chapter 20, Zenol Loveg Good teaches the gang about the Deathly Hallows. He describes each one, and when he talks about the invisibility cloak, he describes it as enduring, as eternal, as always giving perfect protection. Yep, that's the whole deal with invisibility cloaks, right? I mean, we've only ever seen one invisibility cloak, and that's exactly how it acts. Throughout the whole series, it's the only one we see, and it behaves exactly as Zeno describes it. He then says, however, that most cloaks aren't like this, that Harry's cloak is an outlier because it's the cloak from the story. It's the Deathly Hallow. This isn't a problem with the cloak, but it is a problem with the Deathly Hallows as concepts. They've never once been mentioned before, yet here, they're lynch pins of the narrative. It's a little deflating to get this far in and then introduce them so late. It's also a retcon. In technicality, nothing has been contradicted. In spirit, we know that Joanne didn't plan his cloak to be super special and different to all the other cloaks from the outset. No one's mentioned it before. Now, you might say, Josh, Dumbledore had it the night the Potters were murdered. She totally did plan it because that's in book one. And look, that's completely fair evidence to bring up because it seems really strong on face value, doesn't it? But I think it's time to put my law teacher hat back on and really lay out my case. I can't prove that Joanne didn't plan this. But here goes. The argument is that in text, Dumbledore takes the cloak to examine it to see if it really is a Deathly Hallow.
The fact that we have Dumbledore admit that this event we saw already happened for this reason she's introduced in the last book reinforces the notion that it was always meant to be this way. Why else would Dumbledore have the cloak?
Allow me to counter this with a question. What's the alternative for getting the cloak into the story? It can't be sitting in his parents' house.
He needs it at Hogwarts. It can't be with Sirius. He needs it in book one. It can't be with the Derslley's. They're magical racists. It also can't be with Hagrid because he needs it at a specific point in the story. This leaves us with very few options, doesn't it?
McGonogal's already given Harry a broomstick, so it's really just Dumbledore left. He's basically the only one who could have given the cloak to Harry at the right time for the narrative. In other words, Dumbledore having the cloak is narratively inevitable. So, if we're locked into Dumbledore anyway, who's to say the reason wasn't what Joanne said in book seven? After all, doesn't Dumbledore say in that very first book that he doesn't need a cloak to be invisible? I'd first point to the people in the order knowing about the cloak and never remarking upon it being special or important in any way. Lots of wizards and witches are aware of the existence of this cloak that makes Harry perfectly invisible, made his father perfectly invisible, and has never faded over that period. But they don't suggest that this is out of the ordinary. I would also point to Hermione, studious and knowledgeable as she is about the wizarding world and magic itself, never mentioning the cloak and its remarkable nature. She's used it. She's seen firsthand that it possesses all of these characteristics.
Yet never has she hinted that invisibility cloaks don't normally act like this. Lastly, I would point to Joannne's demonstrable pattern of making [ __ ] up on the fly. Thestrals at the end of book four, the 1st of September being a Sunday every year, the wizarding economy, the Fidelius charm. Many of these things break the story much more than this cloak, but they all show her willingness to jam things in at any point for any reason. To think that she wouldn't continue to do this with the Deathly Hallows is not only giving her too much credit, it's going against all of the available evidence. She fit the details into what she'd already written.
Dumbledore already had the cloak, so why not have him take it because he thinks it's a hallow? Why not make Harry's cloak the special one? It doesn't mess anything up. It doesn't contradict anything, so why not? It may not contradict existing details, but it certainly raises questions. There's all the obvious ones, like why has no one mentioned this? But there's also now some vagueness around Mad Eye Moody's eye. Body Crouch Jr. sees right through the cloak in Goblet of Fire using that eye. So, is it really as impenetrable as Xenophilia said? How is this magical artifact able to circumvent something so powerful? Again, it's not imperative to answer these questions, but they're definitely raised. I don't blame her for adding this detail about the cloak or for fitting it into the story in this way, but let's not pretend that it's some clever throughine she planted in book one. It's still part of the new mcguffins that we never heard of until the 11th hour. I'm not saying nothing was planned. It's clear some things were like Harry's connection to Voldemort.
But I do think it's important to identify which parts weren't important in a nitpicky annoying video essaist way. Not in any way that actually matters. To anyone saying I'm taking this too seriously, I would suggest it's Joanne who's taking all of this too seriously. She's the one that is insisting her later books are mature, profound stories aimed at all ages and not just little baby infants who love magic. Even if she weren't trying so hard to inject all of these themes, they're serious works of fiction that invite serious analysis, just like any other published book. Consistency is important, and she's trying to claim after the fact that she maintained a level I don't believe she did. Suck my [ __ ] Joanne. You're not as clever as you think you are, and I have six other videos proving it. Just you guys, wait until I do Fantastic Beasts. [ __ ] spoilers. The Cloak isn't the only Deathly Hallow, though. This book goes deep into wand law thanks to the Elder Wand. And by deep, I mean it adds a bunch of new, hitherto unheard of rules that muddy the waters of using a wand and how that could ever possibly work. I know you can scarcely believe me, but hold on to your eyebrows lest they fly off your face. And let me explain.
Wandlore is a complex and mysterious branch of magic. I mean, is it though?
Kind of seems like he described the whole shtick in about 2 minutes flat. I reckon I could sum it up in seconds.
Wands choose their owners, but their allegiance can change or be one. How did I do? Allegiance might be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but it works. When Harry gets the Blackthorn wand, he isn't just feeling weird about it with less power than usual. He's actually failing to cast basic spells. The spider did not shrink. This is a pretty serious discrepancy while using someone else's wand. Someone else's wand doesn't work for you as well as your own. That's fine, but the implications for other aspects are weird. Let's be real, this is kind of a problem. What does a wand's allegiance changing really mean? Does it work less well for the person who originally owned it? If so, then this is a nightmare for anyone practicing dueling like the DA did all through the fifth book. If you get stunned or beaten, is your wand going to [ __ ] out on you? If it doesn't work like that, then maybe she just means the wand expands its white list of allowed admin users. Sure, that's fine, I guess, but it doesn't really track to the Elder Wand, does it? That wand is specifically stated to have one master at a time.
Harry becomes the master of the Elder Wand by disarming Draco. My god, the bar is so low here. Sure, whatever. This means we have to accept that either the Elder Wand works differently to all other wands, which fine, or wands changing allegiance means [ __ ] all because it never affects anyone.
Obviously, it's the first one. The Elder Wand is special. So, don't then just try and inject all of this other deep, meaningful Wandlaw stuff right here.
Just make it be the Elder Wand. Who cares? You've already injected another 20 mcguffins for this book. Just put this little detail in, too. On the subject of the Deathly Hallows, they don't just affect the plot. They seem to affect the intelligence of our characters. Hermione is so adamant that some magical artifacts cannot possibly exist. For example, something to raise the dead. This is a veil that cannot be pierced unless you become a ghost or you have a portrait painted sort ofish. Or you have a Horcrux or you get protected by your mother's death and Voldemort's resurrection. Look, I'm not saying she's an idiot, but there's a lot of [ __ ] in this series that suggests this idea is not super far-fetched. Why wouldn't he have told you? Why? Because Joanne hadn't invented them yet, Hermione.
Also, Hermione, are you an idiot? I know I said you weren't, but Dumbledore left you the book with the godamn symbol drawn in. Come on. It's so obvious it hurts, but Harry never pushes this point sufficiently because it's devastating to her argument. It's annoying because we've seen this pattern before, just last book. Can you make Harry less convincing, please? If you insist on having the others not believe him, just make him less right. Speaking of rights, let's talk about muggles.
We talked about the divide between wizards and muggles and how Joanne has artificially inflated it to serve the most minuscule of comic relief moments.
We didn't talk about how absolutely [ __ ] up life for muggles must be just because the wizarding world exists in the way that it does. They can do miraculous, seemingly endless magical things. And yet they don't because they choose, nay, insist on staying secret.
Upon the signature of the International Statute of Secrecy in 1689, wizards went into hiding for good. It was natural perhaps that they formed their own small communities within a community. Many small villages and hamlets attracted several magical families who banded together for mutual support and protection. The villages of Tinworth in Cornwall, upper Flaggley in Yorkshire, and Ottery St. Catchpole on the south coast of England were notable homes to knots of wizarding families who lived alongside tolerant and sometimes confunded muggles. So Godric's Hollow and Ottery St. Catchpole are home to wizarding communities who live alongside muggles. Sometimes tolerant, sometimes confunded, one at a time. The tolerant part seems to imply a tolerance of wizarding oddities rather than magic itself, given that it's in the context of wizards going into hiding for good. So Joanne wants us to simultaneously believe that wizards formed integrated communities within muggle villages, but they are so ignorant of muggle ways, they literally can't function in muggle society without help. It's an insult to not just the reader intelligence, but all of the characters, too. I hate this. I make this point so often in this series, but it makes all of the characters so hard to believe. I simply cannot buy into the idea of the society in the way that she's presented it. My immersion is ruined just when I was fantasizing about taking a flu powder jaunt down to the ye old slave shop. But we're left with another problem. The muggles are sometimes confunded. Oh my god, this is about to balloon into another giant rant, isn't it? So, the Confundus charm was used back in Goblet of Fire to fool the goblet itself into making Harry Potter a champion. That's a pretty powerful spell. Hermione then uses it on Cormarmac Mclagen to make him fly in the wrong direction in the Quidditch tryyouts. We even see Harry use it this book to get past some security guards at Gringots. So, what is it? Is it mind control? Is it just a confusion charm as the name implies? Having looked at other sources of information and speculation online, it seems as though it is in fact a confusion and misdirection spell. It's not like Imperio where you can get someone to do whatever you want. But you can definitely use it to make them more suggestible or perhaps to consider an idea or course of action much more than they would have otherwise. Great. It's imperior but shittier. We've established what Confundo does. So what the [ __ ] does Joanne mean by sometimes confunded muggles? Did these wizards confund entire villages just to set up shop next to them? Why? How? To steal man her point here. Maybe she just means that when they would slip up and do something magical in front of the muggles, they might have to confront them to make them think they didn't see what they saw.
Just gaslight the [ __ ] That might be the case. But what about memory charms?
I thought the standard governmental procedure was to obliviate all the people who see magical stuff go down.
Are they just preconfing people so they don't notice how [ __ ] weird and wacky they are? But if they know they're weird and wacky to begin with, why would they not fix that when they're specifically living amongst muggles? Every way you slice this, it confuses me. [ __ ] they got to me, too. Also, there's the extra hidden bonus slice of why live amongst people you have to regularly [ __ ] with?
Why not form your own specific communities where you don't have to hide? Why is Hogsme the only wizarding village in Britain? That's crazy ass banana balls if you ask me. That's asking for trouble. Enforcing the statute of secrecy must be impossible.
It's the same issue over and over and over. Joannne's ideas aren't just incompatible, they're contradictory.
She's contradicting herself here. She has the wizarding world as integrated as it can possibly be into the muggle world. They have premises for shops and services within muggle cities, sometimes inside muggle buildings. And yet, they still stand out like sore thumbs for the sake of cheap, loweffort humor. You can say I'm nitpicking, but most of what Joanne writes for wizards interacting with muggles proves Vernon Dersley right. Reckless, ridiculous, and unethical. Think on that for a sec.
While we're on the topic of Vernon Dersley, he's such a staunch conservative that he's willing to put aside the issue of magical racism in favor of licking some boots.
It was so typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the establishment, even within this world, that he despised and mistrusted. Bruh, this is so lacking in self-awareness from Joanne and Harry.
He's criticizing Vernon for wanting government protection and putting his faith in a ministry he knows nothing about. Need I explain that this is a far more reasonable position than Harry's own previous trust of the ministry he knows to be corrupt? Vernon is blissfully unaware that the Ministry tried to cover up Voldemort's return and imprison a 15-year-old. He wouldn't know that they weaponized their justice system to attempt to eliminate free or dissenting speech. He has no idea that they're locking up innocent people to give the illusion of strength, that the minister himself tried to con a teenager into endorsing this corruption. But Harry does, and he's never once gone back on his desire to be an aura, to work for the government. Harry's not only angling to insert himself into the very law enforcement system he openly mocks throughout the series, he's also proposing no change to the system whatsoever. He doesn't want to become a politician so he can enact change from the inside or suggest better alternatives once he has the power to do so. He just wants to fight dark wizards.
Maybe since last book he's had a sudden change of heart. Well, we as readers certainly haven't seen it. I have no reason to think that whatsoever. He's been able to excuse every awful thing the Ministry's done so far. Why on earth wouldn't he be able to excuse Voldemort's infiltration? Sha articulates this perfectly in his Harry Potter video. He says it comes down to the idea of there being good and bad teams in place of actual ethical conflicts. The ministry as an institution isn't corrupt. It isn't allowing and facilitating these crimes.
It's the bad people in positions of power. It isn't the power itself, just the one wielding it. It's a pathetically shallow view of the world and an unsatisfying allegory for real world governmental issues. Harry, our protagonist, is perfectly uncritical of the institution, of the way they abuse their power. It makes the ending seem not just rushed and misfocused, but also a little bleak. Voldemort has been defeated, but the status quo hasn't really changed. The bad guys dead, but we leave a plethora of social issues unressed forever more. Does Joanne think they're not worth addressing? Trick question. She doesn't even realize that they're unressed. Slavery. She thinks she addressed that by saying that the slaves like it and that they want to continue their slavery. Rampant corruption and abuse of power in the ministry. Well, Voldemort and his death eaters are out of the government now, so they can't abuse their power. They're not in power. But what about all the other things we can point to? All the issues with the wizarding world that break it apart. Joannne's even mentioned some of them in her story and just refuses to resolve them, like non-wizard inhabitants of the magical world and their unequal rights. She brings up why some species joined Voldemort and how it's a failing of her society that goblins and centaurs and half giants aren't afforded the same respect and level of dignity that wizards are. Then what? Crickets. If we had issues with her bringing things up at all in previous books, this is where it all comes to a head. She doesn't do anything with it. Why? She can't. She doesn't know how to write it. She forgot about it. It all comes to the same thing.
She's not good enough at the juggling act or the actual follow-through of writing these things. Are you planning to follow a career in magical law, Miss Granger? No, I'm not. I'm planning to do some good in the world. Hey. Whoa. Come on there, Hermione. You really got to do me like that. Magical law is an important profession, and you don't have to work for the ministry. I'm an independent magical lawyer/professor, and I think I'm doing at least a little bit of good by lambasting Jo-Ann's awful writing. Again, Joanne, I will stop for $10 million, but we might be a little far in by now. In all seriousness, this comment is treated justifiably as a critique of the Ministry who deserve harsh scrutiny and criticism. Ron laughs, but Harry doesn't really respond at all. Again, Joanne is too cowardly and spineless to deal with Harry's ambitions to become an aura. She can't have him agree with Hermione because then she'd be forced to admit that there are problems with the Ministry itself.
If she admits that, then it becomes obvious that Harry understands it and the aura thing falls apart. If Harry acknowledges systemic problems within the ministry, it forces her hand in one of two ways. One, he concedes that the system is broken, doesn't want to be part of it, and then she has to do something about it. She can't do this because she wants Harry to be a wizard cop. She also doesn't want to bother fixing her worldbuilding that much. It sounds too hard and boring, and who cares, right? Option two is that Harry doesn't actually give a [ __ ] about the system itself and still wants to be an aura without any care for what that means. This makes Harry a bootlicker. No better than an ice agent to be honest.
Naturally, she can't do this either because dear god, that's bad. Not that much worse than what we have, but worse.
So, we're stuck. The audience can see the issues in the ministry. Even Hermione, one of Harry's best friends, can see the issues in the Ministry, but our POV character, is never allowed to acknowledge it directly in any way deeper than the superficial. It's pathetic, and it reads really strangely once you notice it. I think Joanne must have realized this because she doesn't bring up the aura thing again in this book. Of course, she doesn't. The Ministry is getting worse and worse with every passing year. But that makes Harry's lack of action or even thought unsatisfying, unfinished. He can attack the ministry for the bad things they do, for the bad people who do them, but he never once questions the system or extrapolates his information to its logical conclusion. It's predictable as hell because it's fitting perfectly within her pattern of introducing something problematic, never addressing its incredibly obvious connotations, and then dropping it like a handful of hot, uncooked spaghetti when she realizes her mistake far too late. Silence is complicity, Harry. The ministry has fallen. You know what, Kingsley? Good.
Awful pack of ghouls. The lot of them.
Get rid of them. Start again. Come up with a better government, will you? Oh, we're just going to go back to the same thing all over again after Voldemort dies. Yeah, cool. Wouldn't want anything to change now, would we? You've got my vote for Minister for Magic. You know what? That's a great point. How do they choose the Minister for Magic, the most powerful political figure in Wizarding Britain? Do they hold elections? They might. It's entirely possible. But the handovers we see don't involve any voting. It seems like the ministry internally chose Scrimure to replace Fudge and he wasn't even a deputy minister for magic or anything like that. He was just head of the magic SWAT team. H seems a bit authoritarian to me.
But then again, so is everything else the Ministry ever does. What a terrible, rotten, embarrassing institution. So they're corrupt and authoritarian far before Voldemort took over. I guess all he really did was change the statue.
They're also completely incompetent. I know I hammer this point home too much.
I'm a little like JK Rowling in that way, but the Ministry really are pathetically terrible at what they do.
Seriously, not only is what they do dystopian and awful and corrupt, but they are so embarrassingly bad at it.
The Ouras are meant to be the premier dark wizard catchers, the front line against evil forces. Dorish is a recurring character in the series. The character might be going a bit far. He's a joke with a name attached. Every time we see or hear about him, it's to say how Dumbledore's clowned on him and he's failed in his job as an aura. Now we hear about him failing again because Neville's gran apparently takes him down no diff and goes on the run. This guy's an aura, right? Oruras are supposed to get good grades in Hogwarts, go through further magical training and education to learn about fighting the dark arts, be skilled across multiple disciplines because of the nature of their work. I understand him not being able to match Dumbledore in a one-on-one duel, but the story treats him like he can't beat anyone. This guy sucks. Yeah, we see other auras who are better, like Mad Eye, Kingsley, and Tonx, but even Tonx isn't what I'd consider a prodigy or anything. The Ministry Special Force is manned by people like Dorish. He couldn't beat Gilderoy Lockheart in a duel, let alone a competent dark wizard like Bellatrix Lrange or Seis Snape.
Look, I understand the desire to have a punching bag for a running joke.
Sometimes it can work well, like in Always Sunny. Joanne already has several, though. Dudley's fat. Vernon's fat and stupid. Eloise Mijon has acne.
Gnomes exist. These people are more often than not treated as complete caricatures and vehicles for cheap humor, not substance. We already have punching bags. We don't need more. But then, why am I singling out Dorish?
because this one has much wider implications. If he's so rubbish at his job and he's a laughingtock and not very powerful, as Neville implies, then that weakens auras as a collective. It weakens the ministry as an institution, and it retroactively muddles Harry's plans to join them even further. If this buffoon can be an aura, is it really that exclusive of a club? Joanne never learned that sometimes less is more.
Almost every little detail she throws in ends up as a spanner in the works later down the road. It's the literary equivalent of Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes, except in this case, Sideshow Bob has thrown the rakes out of a train window himself and then walks back through them because the train ran off the tracks. We will revisit this in the finale, unlike Joanne who did the literary equivalent of putting her fingers in her ears and going la. For now though, I think I've made my point about the ministry. Don't make the mistake of thinking I work for those [ __ ] I'm independent and I want to bring them to justice. In fact, you can find the link to crowdfund my legal case against the ministry down below. Now, it's time for a segment I like to call magic is [ __ ] Yeah, we've done this before. Magic is hard for nebulous reasons and then it's easy for no reasons. Magic can do everything until it actually can't. My point is the power levels fluctuate so wildly it's impossible to get a handle on any one facet of the system. I don't need it overexplained as I've said before, but some consistency would be nice. I'd also like some consideration for consequences. I mentioned it up top, but she never really thinks about the consequences of adding in new spells or mcguffins. First up is the Jinio charm.
This is a duplication spell. I don't need to tell you guys that this one completely breaks the world. I get that a lot of spells do that, but this one breaks it so easily. If the layman isn't equipped to see the difference between the original and the copy, then this is an infinite money glitch. I mean, what am I saying? It's an infinite anything glitch. What does this work on?
Obviously, Hermione doesn't create another portion of Voldemort's soul, but does it work on gold, silver, diamonds?
If so, the economy is [ __ ] If not, why not? Just extrapolate this idea to literally anything and you get such insane problems. Anyone selling a product in the wizarding world has to worry about duplication. Why would you ever buy anything again if you can just copy it a few times when you buy it and do this forever more? Again, I'm certain I'm looking at this through a narrow lens here. So, feel free to tell me about the most disturbing consequences in the comments below. I look forward to it. In any case, Joanne is insane for including this in her story. At this point, we can't expect her to actually examine cause and effect, but to have this as such an off-hand detail shows how detached from reality she actually is. She doesn't care anymore about how ridiculous her world is. Next up is the mirror. Sirius gives Harry the mirror, but they never get the opportunity to use it together. Harry still keeps a shot of it, however, so it shows up again here in a major way. In chapter 23, Harry's in a sticky situation. He looks into the mirror and sees Abbeforth Dumbledore's eye. He says that he's in the cellar of Malfoy Manor and he needs help. Then Dobby shows up. So, can Abfor hear Harry as well as see him? Or can he just read lips super well? Surely it has to be one of these because Dobby knows exactly where to find Harry and his friends. If Abberforth didn't know and just sent Dobby to find Harry Potter, then does Dobby know where Harry Potter is at all times? Look, buckle up for a sec. I know the story doesn't imply any of what I'm about to say, but we're going on an adventure. So, if we accept that the mirror is a smartphone, that's fine. It's dumb, but it's fine. And it closes this argument that I'm about to make. If we don't, and Dobby just finds Harry, then that's [ __ ] crazy. Either Dobby has a homing beacon for Harry Potter, or any elf can find any wizard anywhere at any time. Let's talk through these options, shall we? Why would Dobby intrinsically know where Harry is? Is it their bond? Is it some sort of friendship call that can guide his apparition to Harry's exact spot? No way. We know elves can't find any wizard anytime anywhere. We saw that it took Dobby and Creature quite a while to track down Mandungas Fletcher earlier in this book. So, I'm left to conclude that Abbeforth Dumbledore can read lips. It's the only solution that makes sense.
Sorry to take that weird tangent for no good reason. It was barely about the mirror. Still, it follows the pattern of unexplained things that don't matter in isolation, but add to her list of nebulous strange additions. Next, we'll do a much worse one. The room of requirement. That's when the passage to the hog's head opened up. Neville, you can't just drop that on me here. So, the room of requirement just created a passage out of Hogwarts. Holy [ __ ] We already knew this room was insane, but now one of the caveats I gave is gone.
You can just create a physical passageway to another location from within this one room. It appears that it basically digs a real genuine tunnel to Hogsme. You already know what I'm about to ask. It's been seven videos of this crap. What's the limit? If I tell the room that I need to get from Scotland to France, can it do it? Does it dig me a usable tunnel all the way across the channel? We don't even have to go that far for this to be wild. If I need to get into Snape's office, can it find me away? Surely so. It seems like if the students wanted to, they could navigate the school entirely from this one room.
If not, then why? The places are physically linked. Just add a giant basilisk pipe in the walls and away we go. This feature of the room of requirement doesn't break the world nearly as much as the others, but it does remove a limitation. It's no longer bound to the one place within Hogwarts anymore. Joanne seems obsessed with changing limitations. I shouldn't have to explore these consequences for her.
She should be able to anticipate some of them and create limitations rather than removing them. In fact, we get an example of her doing exactly that in this book. So, we know she can do it. My mother can make good food appear out of thin air. Food is the first of the five principal exceptions to Gamp's law of fundamental transfiguration. So, I can acknowledge that this last one is a good change. It absolutely improves the magic system and my understanding of it, as well as limiting the power level of wizards in general. So, why couldn't she do this more often? Because she's only serving the plot. She didn't actually consider real world consequences and decide her universe would be insane without this rule. She just wanted them to go hungry. So, now this law exists.
Sorry to burst the bubble. It's the same shallow rubbish we've come to expect, isn't it? At least there was some good in there. So, let's talk more about that.
There are still good things to be found even at this late stage. For example, in chapter 9, I think Voldemort's name giving them away is actually pretty great. It's interesting. It tracks with him and his supporters, and it's a chilling allegory to the idea of authoritarian crackdowns on free speech.
genuinely neat stuff as it serves as a mystery in this chapter and then comes back to hurt them again later in the book after Ron's already figured it out.
I also like Dobby's death. Not because I dislike Dobby, but because I love the bloke. His death gets me every time.
That [ __ ] hurts. Love that little slave boy. It serves Harry's character well, too. Gives him a nice turning point. In fact, there's a lot of death in this book. Lupin, Tonx, Fred, Madi, Hedwig, Snape, and Colin Crevy all die. She kills so many people here. I actually think this is the right call. People criticize her every now and then for using these deaths for shock value. And while some of them are certainly shocking for our characters, they're also completely realistic given the situations they're in. I often get frustrated at certain pieces of media for putting characters in situations where they absolutely should die, but no one does. Just look at The Long Night from Game of Thrones. There were whites everywhere, crawling all over people, smothering them, absolutely going ham on our heroes. And yet, no one really died.
The Night King had all but one, approaching Bran in the weewoods uncontested until Deasx Arya came in to slight of hand him to death. And yet, only three people really died. Beric Dondarrion, Jorah Mormont, and Lyanna Mormont. Not exactly big ticket names.
In Deathly Hallows, however, we see people suffer for the danger they found themselves in. You don't have to like it, but it's not death as a tool for shock's sake. It's a realistic follow-through of the situation itself.
I'm kind of surprised to be saying this because this is the one thing she usually gets wrong every time, but here she somehow managed to get it right.
Perhaps because it's the simplest, most dramatic form of consequences. There you go, Joanne. Gold star for bucking the trend for this video and series. Harry's acceptance of his death is a pretty fantastic emotional passage. Big fan of his realization and his questioning, his fear, his grim, inexurable walk to Voldemort. It's a good passage that feels like a finality and a culmination of some of the mysteries we've introduced. It is undercut, however, by the fact that not a single person reading any of these paragraphs actually thought Harry was going to permanently die. Did anyone really believe that our POV main character would sacrifice himself at the end of the story? In chapter 16, I actually like how Joanne handles Harry's feelings of loss for Ron. It's not a wallowing stagnation of a chapter, but she doesn't gloss over it, and the way Harry tries to work through his feelings is relatable, realistic, and sympathetic. You feel their helplessness and the change within their dynamics as they move on as two instead of three. Genuinely, I clown on her and I say she's not a good enough writer to do this kind of thing. But every now and then, she proves me a little bit wrong. Okay, well, not wrong, but proves me as a generalizer because this is handled quite well and could only happen in this later book with these setups. Rest assured, it is one of the few circumstances when I will ever say this because I think I know why it's good where almost every other mature theme and detail is terrible. It's entirely character-based and it's contained. It's contained to only three characters, only a small section of the book, and it has no worldbuilding connotations, sort of. This kind of setup should be unable to spill out into the wider world, so it's no wonder it feels better and more grounded than the rest of her inclusions. She can't break the world with it. And finally, I'm glad we get lots of Hagrid in this first part of the book because he and Harry are friends, right? Hagrid was his first ever contact with the wizarding world.
They spend a lot of time together at Hogwarts. They correspond. They have a great mutual respect. I'm sure this will remain consistent the entire way through the book. There are other good moments and passages in this book, but these are the main ones for me. Feel free to drop your own favorites in the comments below. We don't have to be doom and gloom the entire time. But with this section out of the way, it's time to demolish some dreams.
Oh no, Snape's dead. Important character, big event, and he even left some memories for Harry. Okay, let's take a moment to be completely 100% honest about Snape, his death, his legacy, and the chapter spent explaining his tragic backstory. Snape is a fan favorite. He's the greasy slimy prick you love to hate because he's such an unreasonable [ __ ] to Harry and his mates. He's a loser, a nobody, a mid-30s high school teacher who gets off on bullying teenagers. Pathetic. However, he's also a fan favorite for being some misunderstood, tragic reformed criminal that doesn't deserve his fate. This is predicated on the twist that Snape is not really Voldemort's right-hand man.
He's not been a double agent for the Dark Lord all of these years. He's been a triple agent for Dumbledore. He's been working with Dumbledore's long master plan this whole time and secretly plotting the downfall of old Tom Jr.
That's great. really deepens his character and recontextualizes a lot of story elements. We also find out that the reason behind this is his deep unrequited love for Lily Evans, Harry's own mother. He's done all of this work protecting Harry and working to kill Voldemort because he just loved her so much. What a sweet tortured incel, right? No. Stop that [ __ ] right now. I'm sick of it. Get that picture of Alan Rickman saying always out of your head.
That's not who Snape is. You're romanticizing a character that doesn't exist. The Snape people remember post death is not the same guy who spent six books doing all of the [ __ ] I just said we love to hate him for. He didn't protect Harry. He abused him. He made his education worse. He made his classroom a less safe place to be in for Harry and everyone else. And he nearly tanked Harry's stupid ambition of becoming an aura. He showed a consistent systematic bias against Gryffindors. Is there a reasonable explanation for this?
And it's not just because he was so tortured by seeing Lily's eyes in Harry because he routinely abuses Neville, Hermione, and Ron, too. He surely can't be in love with all of their mothers.
Yeah, James was a total dick to Snape.
And maybe some of it was justified. I'm sure most of it probably wasn't, but it's completely immaterial. Snape is a grown adult who has been hired to do a job. And part of that job involves not abusing the students. It's just that [ __ ] simple. But Josh, the plan couldn't have worked if Snape wasn't a teacher at Hogwarts. Dumbledore couldn't fire him for being a dick. Okay, all the more reason not to be one then. Like, you maybe want to whip this guy into shape, Dumbledore, if you have to keep him around. God, Snape and Dumbledore.
They really deserve each other, don't they? Also, let's not pretend that this guy's love for Lily was so great and commendable in the first place. He fell in love at like 11, called her a racial slur at 15, and presumably didn't speak much after that. They weren't pen pals until her death at 21. They weren't on again, off-again lovers. They weren't even friends. He was infatuated with a woman he couldn't have and never got over it. Yes, we can acknowledge it would be very difficult for him to know he led to her death, but that doesn't excuse anything else. We can all sympathize with his plight, his sadness, the role he had to play in the plan to bring down Voldemort. But don't invent reasons to pretend he was ever a good guy. He simply wasn't. That brings me to the [ __ ] name, Albus Seis. Harry must have taken one look at that child and just hated its guts. To name him after two men who damaged his childhood so much, who caused him and his friends so much pain, who literally got him killed.
That's wild. Seis. Seis. He [ __ ] hated you, Harry. You don't have to do this. What's wrong with you? Brun Potter would have made a legitimately better, more emotionally satisfying name. [ __ ] off. I never meant to call you mud blood. Yeah, sure. Good defense, you little creep. Snape has been redeemed by way of his actions against Voldemort.
His conscience is clear in the grand scheme of the wizarding war. It had to be done for the greater good. He can never be redeemed for all the other [ __ ] he did because he's dead now and never once expressed any desire to change his ways were he not. He's not the same guy he was as a teenager. I get that. He's not going around using slurs anymore.
He's putting himself in harm's way for others. That's great. It also has nothing to do with his terrible, abusive teaching style. What a [ __ ] Why does he even want to be a teacher if he clearly hates it so much? I wasn't sure what JK Rowling's personal thoughts on Snape were. So, I Googled them. Shocking that I had to do that and I wasn't force-fed her opinion on it like I am with everything else, but here we are.
She agrees with me. Thank God that Snape's heroic deeds against Voldemort do not discount his abject villain for the rest of the series. She does however defend Harry's choice to name his [ __ ] child after the man. Believe me, we will come back to the names, but I cannot fathom this. Just admit that you got overzealous about Snape. Just admit that you didn't put in as much thought as you should have. Just admit it's [ __ ] cringe and it makes Harry look like a goddamn [ __ ] Why can't you do this? Again, it's proof that she can't face the consequences of her own writing. There are implications that using this name brings, but we're left to speculate on them ourselves. Let's do a bit more speculation, shall we? Into the tactics of the Battle of Hogwarts.
While Harry is searching for the lost item of Ravenclaw, we get a bunch of passages from every character we've ever been introduced to telling us how they're helping the defense of Hogwarts.
We also get this banger from Mr. Longbottom. Mandrekes. Going to lob them over the walls. They won't like this.
Great idea, Neville. throw those mandrekes over the wall so they can scream because everyone knows their cries are fatal to anyone that hears it.
They literally kill whoever hears them scream. Forgive me, but this isn't like hurling grenades into enemy lines. It's like detonating a car bomb and hoping it only gets the passengers, not the driver. This is going to be devastatingly effective against the Death Eaters. Lots of them are going to die very quickly. It's insanely brutal, but effective. There's no way to stop it being effective against all the defenders. as well though. Presumably, they also possess ears, and unless they know to wear ear muffs, they're going to die just as easily as the Death Eaters.
So, I have some questions that I think are fairly pertinent. How loud is a Mandre? How far do they have to throw them over the walls to not hear them?
How high are the walls? How long does a Mandre scream for? These are all considerations that arise from this one exchange. Now, we have no information on the exact decibel levels of Mandrekes because that would be insane. We have no exact figure for the height of the Hogwarts walls either. We don't have to have answers to these questions, so we're probably safe to assume that Joann's intentions did not involve extreme collateral damage to the barely adult wizards in Hogwarts castle. That being said, we have no boundaries for the other assumptions, do we? I think we can all imagine scenarios where this tactic backfires spectacularly. We can all imagine defenders on lower floors throwing open a window to fire off some spells, then keeling over in a classroom because they accidentally heard a mandre having a winge. I guess I'm saying mandrekes are insane and Hogwarts shouldn't have them. If they insist on having them, they definitely shouldn't be throwing them willy-nilly over the walls like this. Moving on to a different issue. How is this any better than the killing curse? Can't they just stand up on the walls and fire off a Vaticanas into the dead eaters below?
Fine, maybe they don't have the necessary evil in their hearts to do that, but just use bombarder or something. It'll still kill them. I know magic is supposed to be cool and creative and whatever, and you don't want people just using the same three spells over and over, but then don't make them overpowered as [ __ ] then.
Also, don't pretend it's somehow more moral to throw instant death plants at the death eaters instead of just killing them one by one, especially when you could have catastrophic collateral damage to your side. Imagine thinking about the consequences of the things you write. Couldn't be Joanne. Okay, I have one last thing to raise before we move on to the epic finale, right? So, what's up with portraits? How much of the person do they really contain? Because here we see Dumbledore talking about his plan with Snape. Not only that, but he's keeping secrets from Snape. He still has secret parts of his plan that he doesn't dulge with Snape, but he does know and presumably remembers from when he was alive. Is a portrait like an unwilling ghost? Could Harry commission a painting of Sirius and just hang out with him? Can anyone do this? Can you do it to the living?
The rules are non-existent and the limitations are impossible to know. They work very strangely and it kind of undermines death a little, doesn't it?
Ghosts already did that, but you had to choose it. Nick makes it clear in book five that it's a pretty rubbish existence. Paintings get made for you, right? Dumbledore dies and that's a huge deal, but he can still chat with Snape and give him all the necessary information at the right times. Just because there's a painting of him in the office feels like a bit of a copout to me. And that's part of the reason why she never goes into detail about these things. She can't. If she explains how a portrait works, then it becomes like Veritus serum or time turners, by which I mean stupid. The edge cases get exposed. All the potential but untapped uses get clowned on. The plot canyons it creates get lampshaded. So, it's left nebulous, making it confusing. Make no mistake, this is the better choice out of the two. If I had to choose between overexplaining portraits or just leaving them how Joanne did, I would do what she did. But if we expand the choice, I would probably just change them. Maybe they don't retain memories, only personalities. It's just insane to me that there are so many plot devices and mcguffins that weaken the themes of her own story. She can't keep getting away with it. Again, the series is over. She already got away with it. But my point still stands. Portraits don't make sense, and they knock the other pins down when Joanne throws her bowling ball of misguided pros. Way to remove tension from literal death. All right, are you ready, guys? It's time for the epilogue.
There's a surprising amount to unpack in this epilogue that is actually quite short. So, let's start with the obvious.
Harry Potter names his children like someone with no impulse control who just read Harry Potter and is also 17 and also has no friends or family to tell them not to do that and also hates their child with a passion. James Sirius is totally fair and reasonable and expected. Two important figures in his life. I see no issue with that. Jinny would surely see no issue with that.
Lily Luna is a bit weird. Luna's great and all, but not only is she still alive, I feel like there are other people you might want to honor first.
How about Lily Molly? Lily Nymphodora.
Okay, not that one. Maybe Lily Luna isn't that bad, but did she have to have both names be other characters, too?
Albus Seis is a [ __ ] travesty. God awful, bizarre, cruel, and incredibly [ __ ] up. We already talked about it a little bit before, but we're doing it again. Deal with it. Albus, as a first name, is fine in universe. Dumbledore was an incredibly powerful and influential figure, and he was very important to Harry. I get it. It's still weird from a meta narrative standpoint because he was a piece of [ __ ] who owned slaves and loved to put kids in danger, but I could forgive it if it weren't for the middle name. Seis Snape does not deserve to be honored in this way. In other ways, sure, he did a very brave series of things, in this personal way.
[ __ ] off. Not a chance. It's a very easy thing to do, but let's just go through some other names that would have meant more, been more reasonable, and wouldn't have drawn so much controversy in and out of universe, shall we? Fred, Jinnie's brother, Harry's mate. He died, too, and he was pretty cool, apart from the date rape stuff. [ __ ] why is every character so terrible? Rubious. Hang is one of Harry's best friends throughout the entire series. He's a constant presence, a genuinely good guy, and always stands up for what's right. [ __ ] him, I guess he doesn't make the cut.
Reis, bit of a weird one, but it fits the scheme with Albus, doesn't it? Plus, he was somewhat of a parental figure for Harry and a great teacher as opposed to a piece of [ __ ] terrible teacher. Nob brainer. Alistister. Harry didn't love Mad Eye, but he certainly liked him more than he liked Snape. Stan, you know, for Stan Shunpike. It's not great, but it's still better than Seis. Tom for Tom Riddle. He wasn't a great guy either.
But let us not forget it was he who killed Voldemort. I could go on for hours and list basically every name under the sun because regular names that have nothing to do with Harry Potter characters would also be better than Seus. Call him Albus Steve. It's a terrible [ __ ] name and it should never have entered Harry's brain, let alone made it to the birth certificate.
Elon Musk is better at naming his children than Harry Potter is. This is an annoying, stupid writing decision by Joanne just by itself. But I touched on another issue in that list as well. What about Jinny? What if she doesn't want to name her kids after people Harry randomly remembered on the day? Did she get a say in this? There's absolutely nothing to say that she didn't, but I sure as [ __ ] wouldn't consent to name my kid Albus Seis if I was her. It's kind of crazy, and it goes to show that Joanne has no self-restraint at all.
Unhinged behavior. Now, this next point is more of an observation than a complaint. But they all marry their high school sweethearts. Hermione and Ron get together at 17 and stay together. Harry and Jinny get together at like 16 and 15 and stay together. Lily and James, Molly and Arthur, how cute, how adorable. I mean, it's not out of the realm of possibility at all, and I mean, no offense, but y'all are losers. Thank god you inherited your mother's brains.
Look, I'm not going to go fully into it here and now, but this definitely plays into Joannne's oddly eugenicist views on inherited traits. Seriously, look up her comments on Muggleborns and Magic Jeans and tell me you don't get eugenicist vibes from it. That brings me to the actual meat and potatoes of the epilogue, the cottage pie, the bangers and mash. The purpose of this chapter is to serve as a capstone for her series. A neat little wrap-up for all of her important characters. She didn't just want to leave off after the battle of Hogwarts. She wanted to show how perfect the world is now that Voldemort's dead.
Except it's not perfect, is it? Harry's happy. Ron, Hermione, and Jinny are happy. The kids are presumably all happy, too. That's great. But it's all very small picture. If her series had always had this tight, small focus, then this would have been the exact kind of ending the series needed. Given that it ballooned outwards and got tied up in issues of bigotry, politics, corruption, the very nature of evil, so on so forth, this can never be enough. It fails to address the issues Joanne deliberately and inadvertently brought up in her series. The story treats Voldemort's defeat and the settling of all societal issues in the wizarding world as one and the same. The scar had not pained Harry for 19 years. All was well. Those are the last two lines of the entire series.
And it's obvious that these concepts are being conflated. By the time you read that last line, you'd be forgiven for being unsatisfied, for feeling upset that this is where she leaves off. It's almost a little insulting, isn't it? To the attentive reader, this statement cannot be true. All was well. Not for the slaves, surely. Not for the oppressed races and the people burdened by the broken system and the children torn apart by the wizarding war. What if we reframe it back to a limited character focus? Just Harry and his point of view. Maybe all was well for Harry and that's what she meant. Well, those issues didn't disappear. So, are we to believe that our hero, the one we've been sympathizing with and following for seven entire books, simply doesn't care about justice? To put it simply, yes. All the evidence points in that direction. He's never cared about Elfish rights. He's never cared about ministry overreach and the systems that allow their overt corruption. We don't get much in this epilog, but he probably [ __ ] works for the ministry. The bootlicker. We'll talk about the cursed child at some point in the future if you all are interested in that, but I won't bring it up here. Strangely, some points in this actually would have helped the finale of the series, but we'll get to that. My point is this. That last line can only be true or believable if you're not paying attention. And if you accept it as true for Harry, then you must also accept that he is now no better than a lofty, pretentious white neolib who chastises you for noticing injustice rather than the person perpetrating it.
Go ahead, refute the claim. Spoiler alert, you can't because it's exactly accurate. On that vein, it's not anti-semitic to criticize Israel.
Justice for Palestine. Call me crazy, but I think it's pretty disappointing to end a series without addressing any of the issues you brought up. She's far more concerned with showing you the names of her protagonist's children than she is with actually capping off any of her story threads. Pathetic. It would have been easy to fix some of this, too.
First, get rid of the epilogue. Just get it out of here. Second, have someone at the end of the previous chapter, anyone mention that rebuilding will be difficult. Things need to change for the better and they can't get complacent now that Voldemort is gone. Maybe have some representatives of the oppressed groups be involved. Mention their own wants and needs. Maybe have some acknowledgement of past sins. Some combination of these would have taken a few pages at most and would have contributed much more to a sense of finality and satisfaction. They would have also retroactively improved many of the issues with the previous books. You're [ __ ] welcome, Joanne.
Use a mega time turner and go fix it. In our timeline, Joanne didn't fix it. In fact, she didn't just fail to mention or address many of these systemic issues in her second to last chapter. She brings them back up in their original context.
So, even if we remove the epilogue, we've got a disaster on our hands. In the last sentence of chapter 36, Harry wonders where the creature might bring him a sandwich. Are you [ __ ] kidding me? Is this a joke? Not only do we get nothing about the important changes that need to happen, but one of the last lines after Voldemort's defeat is Harry Daydreaming about his slave making and bringing him food. You're going to keep the slave? What? Merlin's bleached [ __ ] Joanne, I really can't think of a better way for you to finish this chapter for my video, but there were infinite better ways for you to do it for your book. Any way you slice it, Joanne has fumbled massively at the end.
I get that this kind of story must have a happy ending, but the happiness levels are so unearned, I feel like I'm going crazy. It's not just me, right? She didn't address anything. She doesn't have to resolve every story thread in existence. But why keep bringing them up and doubling down on them if you're not going to do anything with them? She's chickened out because I think she knows the pressure is too much. She simply must keep her wizarding world looking as good as she possibly can and just doesn't really know which details do or do not add to this. The result is hollow. Anyone with a mild sense of media literacy can see the gaping holes in her story, but she can't. Let's move on to why that is and why these videos can never be harsh enough.
Joanne is an awful, disgusting person.
She's an oligarch, plain and simple.
Seriously, she's a billionaire who is directly funding political groups and advocating for political change based on her bigotry and prejudice. She wields massive influence using her platform and money to spread hate, fear, and disinformation about trans people, mostly trans women. You know, an already incredibly marginalized group of people.
How utterly deplorable. How pathetically naive. Joanne and all of the other turfs like her are so completely unwilling to engage with reality and much prefer the confines of the tiny worlds they've built for themselves. In case you've somehow made it this far and aren't clear, trans rights are human rights. If you have any problem with that statement at all, go [ __ ] yourself. In fact, if you have an issue with any of the statements I've made about Joannne's vile attempts to erase trans identities and repeal women's rights, go educate yourself. We as a society have no time for the people who spout such vicious, bigoted hate and no use for the people that enable it. She's not a serious person. Her views are not to be taken seriously. I'm not a political genius, nor am I particularly highly educated on politics as an intricate subject, but I don't think it takes a genius to see that Joanne has completely lost the plot. None of the evidence agrees with her vapid ramblings. None of her imagined victimhood justifies the way she acts and spends. [ __ ] JK Rowling.
That's my rebuttal to anyone suggesting that I'm reading too far into it or I'm nitpicking her too hard. I enjoy ripping her to shreds cuz she sucks ass. If you don't, that's fine, but I think we can all agree that she's not really losing out on much because I, a tiny YouTuber, have made some videos on a book series she released 20 years ago. In any case, that brings our journey to an end. I've made seven videos about seven books. And while I'm not breaking any new ground, and I'm certainly not breaking any viewership records, hey, editing Josh here. This part was recorded before the series blew up. I'm incredibly grateful to everyone watching and commenting and quite surprised at the level of viewership I'm getting here. I hope you all enjoy this part and all future Harry Potter and non-H Harry Potter videos.
You guys are the best. Thank you. I've had a really good time and I hope that you have enjoyed listening to me dismantle Joannne's terrible writing. If anyone's interested, I will be editing all seven videos into a giant like 6-hour mega cut so you can even fall asleep to the duet tones of my rage or just enjoy a really giant video if you ever wanted to rewatch these for some strange reason. Why would you do that?
Regardless of viewership, which I expect to remain small, I intend to keep this Harry Potter train going. I'm going to look at the movies next. I'm going to do one video about all of the movies and see what problems they fixed, what problems stayed the same, and which they may have made worse. Who knows? I guess we'll see. I'm also then going to jump into The Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts after that. So, there is plenty more Harry Potter content on the horizon if that's the kind of thing that you're into. And if it's not, I have other things cooking in the works, too. I've got some gaming videos, some film videos, even some literary videos potentially. It's all coming along. As always, a huge thank you to everyone watching, especially everyone that watched all the way through to the end.
I really appreciate it. I genuinely it it warms my heart to know that some of you are actually watching this stuff. I know I don't have a huge audience, so it's really nice to see when people do come back and comment and engage with my content. This was probably a bit repetitive. Joanne does make the same mistakes over and over and over, but I hope that it was at least a little entertaining. You are all now graduates of my magical law class, so please like and subscribe and have a good one.
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