Wow, I’m just realizing the deeper meaning behind gringotts being run by specifically goblins. I kinda knew the big-nosed people running a bank was rather stereotypical, and not in the just lazy way, but it made sense to me that fantasy goblins would hoard treasure, and never connected the two facts.
I was aware of the high amounts of tokenism, with that one irish character, that one black character, that one vaguely asian character, but that’s easier to rationalize away as using stereotypes to communicate things quickly. It’s all over fantasy; Lando is the one black guy, Gimli is the one Dwarf, Hagrid is the one (half-)giant. Looking back on it now, these tokens are pretty shallow, but at the time it was fairly standard. It’s when you get into the lore of these peoples that things get ugly. Often fantasy races are there for splashes of colour, or a simple analoge for some kind of politics, but the reasoning here is heinous, and everyone is just ok with it.
By the time these flaws surfaced, we were already invested in the decent storytelling, and the deep connections never got made. Then the author detonated and it’s only with that context can we see the signs that were right there.
It’s too bad that these stories were built on a bed of such horrible ideas. Some of them were nice.
Hey now, there were at least 2 black characters!
And Dean Thomas is the only example in the book of a child whose dad left his mum to raise him alone.
Smashed it JK.
I think she’s since tried to walk that back by saying he left to protect them and was eventually murdered by death eaters.
Maybe put that bit in the book eh?
