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Comment by DiggyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

It depends on whether you see everything as political or not. Let’s choose a children’s story. What about Harry Potter?

“Of course it's happening inside your head, Harry, but why should that mean it's not real?”

The Harry Potter where the villains talk about racial purity, kill people who mix magical and non-magical blood, take over the government and use it to oppress people? That non-political Harry Potter?

(Yes, also the Harry Potter where one of the black characters is named Shacklebolt, the goblins are essentially a loosely tied pile of Jewish stereotypes, and plenty of other problems as well)

You know you've gone off the deep end when you start thinking of Harry Potter as something that contains intentional political messaging instead of something that overuses convenient off-the-shelf tropes for villains and everything else but manages to tell an engaging tale in spite of it.

I think that if you think those tropes are just tropes and not intentional political messaging, then there is no longer any point in discussion with your level of reading comprehension.

In a perfect world, "racism isn't bad" wouldn't be a political message, it would be a common sense belief that everyone shared, but America and plenty of other places are still in a point where that's controversial and significant portions of the voting base are proud of their bigotry.

*is bad.

What a typo to miss...

> convenient off-the-shelf tropes for villains and everything else

You know how people say 'not making a choice is a choice'? Same thing here.

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