Via The Mary Sue comes the news that Steve Kloves, the writer behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, initially planned to replace the duel between Minerva McGonagall and Severus Snape with a duel between Harry and his long-time professorial nemesis — but that J.K. Rowling fought to keep the scene in and eventually won the day.

I’ve always loved the way Deathly Hallows opens up McGonagall to us in a pair of scenes — it’s some of Rowling’s leanest, tightest writing. We’ve known for years that she has been Dumbledore’s ally, affectionate towards the Potters before their deaths, a tough, fair teacher even given her Gryffindor partisanship. But it’s in those two scenes that we get to see her be a Gryffindor — and a real person. First, there’s the duel, the moment when she gets to stop being patient and gets to stand up in defense of her values. We get to see her be a superior witch in a non-academic setting. And after she wins, there’s that terrific line when she explains what’s happened to the school: “He has, to use the common phrase, done a bunk.” That line alone is just perfect, her shaking off her formality and declaring her allegiance. And it’s glorious.

Then, there’s the scene when Voldemort and his cronies return what they believe to be Harry’s body to Hogwarts (which I think may have been the most botched thing in the whole second movie), and McGonagall almost breaks down. One of the things that’s interesting about Rowling’s depiction of Hogwarts, and which made her revelation that Dumbledore was intended to be gay simultaneously gratifying and a little disappointing, is that none of them have personal lives that we know of. They socialize with each other in the Three Broomsticks. Professor Trelawney may have a bit of a drinking problem. They’re affectionate toward certain students, but always in a teacherly capacity. But we don’t really see them outside of their official capacities — the revelation in Deathly Hallows that Dumbledore was someone before he was Hogwarts headmaster is surprising not just because of the contours of his biography but because it’s hard to think of him as a person at all. So when McGonagall cries out for Harry’s death, we’re seeing a veil fall away: she loves him, as a student, as a symbol, as a person. She gets to be more than a strict spinster, more than a sexless female member of a conspiracy. She gets to be a woman, even if it’s just for a moment, and she gets to be a warrior. I’ve joked that if there were Pottermore spinoffs, the one I’d most like to see is a Young Minerva McGonagall story. Because the woman is amazing. And I’m so glad that Rowling fought for her right to fight for Harry, and for Hogwarts.

The bridge is yours.

-If you’re in Washington today, go get a cupcake from Kerry Washington and support Americans for the Arts!

-Conservatives and progressives agree: Homeland is awesome. What we may not agree on: the reasons why.

-Going on vacation in fictional places.

-Using anti-gay slurs at convention presentations: probably not good for business!

-Happy Halloween! I’m giving trick-or-treaters these deleted scenes from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

Noah Berlatsky thinks it’s kind of dull when characters are singled out for no particular reason in young adult novels:

Now, in light-hearted fare like Tintin or the How to Train Your Dragon books, the fact that the unassuming main character keeps stumbling into Very Important Situations is part of the lark. Harry Potter and the Hunger Games, though, both have pretensions — and thus, inevitably, both series struggle more and more under the weight of their own preposterousness as they go along. Voldemort’s elaborate plan to enmesh Harry in the tri-wizard tournament, or President Snow’s elaborate plan to enmesh Katniss in the Hunger Games again…they both make little sense from the perspective of an actual villain who wants the protagonist dead. You want to kill someone, you kill them; you don’t construct an elaborate game which takes a whole novel to elucidate.

But elaborate games make a lot of sense from the perspective of the watching demiurge who wants the protagonist to have a chance to demonstrate his or her glorious bravery and wit and angsting. Along those lines, when Ron gets all pissed at Harry because Harry is always in the thick of everything and it’s not fair, you can’t help but feel that the kid has a legitimate grievance. It really isn’t fair — and the fact that it’s such flagrant special pleading incidentally makes it a lot less fun to read. Harry doesn’t need superpowers because he’s got the greatest power of all — that of a rolling Mary Sue ex machina.

I agree that it becomes tiresome after a while when a villain just can’t finish a fairly vulnerable hero off. But the reason I singled Katniss and Harry out in the post Noah’s responding to is that I think chosenness is one of the biggest strangenesses of our political system. Whether it’s the fact, as Ian Millhiser wrote last week in what should be a must-read post, that our judicial nomination process is designed to prevent people with actual opinions and prior substantive work from reaching the highest benches in the land; the fact that our presidential candidates are more products than they are people, the relationship between merit, experience and ascendency feels distorted and irreversible. Characters like Katniss and Harry help us reckon with the arbitrary events that elevate our leaders, and reconcile ourselves to the idea that sometimes the best we can do is mobilize hard behind what we’ve got.

David Liss, whose Benjamin Weaver novels are favorites of mine both as introductions to economics and stories about badass Jews in London, has a wonderful meditation up at io9 about how magic became elite and inaccessible, at least in fiction:

In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan. Anyone could learn magic as long as he or she had access to the knowledge or could make a connection with the right supernatural entity. The important point is that in theory, the gates of magic were open to everyone, and what I find most interesting is how that has changed in popular culture. [...]

Magic has gone from being an open system to a closed one. Their massive popularity make the Harry Potter novels and films the most glaring example, but it’s everywhere, and has been for decades now: TV shows like Charmed and Wizards of Waverly Place, books like those of Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. More often than not, magical practitioners are born, not made. Magic is an exclusive club. You can watch and be envious, but you can’t join.

I wonder if a sense of biological magic also correlates to a sense of unease about how much power we have to impact our lives and to change the world. Believing that you can put the evil eye on someone, or that you can summon the devil, means believing in your own capacity to learn, hold, and wield power. Biological conceptions of magic are a way of explaining your own powerlessness. We can’t change our lives — but we’re also not responsible for changing the world — because we’re not Harry Potter, or the Slayer, or the Halliwell sisters. And as entrancing as our magical worlds are, we also tend to put our magical elites through a lot: both Harry and Buffy die and are resurrected, lose parents, and have to give up their first loves in the name of perfecting the world. The Halliwells die, marry the Source of All Evil and become Queen of the Underworld, give birth to demon babies, and experience various other misfortunes. Better to be ordinary — and safe. There’s something conservative in that acceptance of our own powerlessness, but I think it speaks to very real anxieties especially in an age defined by terrorism and recession.

-Are Nazis terrible movie villains?

-It’s not like I thought the Paradise Lost movie was going to be good, or anything, but this concept art looks uniquely unpromising.

-This is not a good week for video games moralism.

-Wener Herzog loves Comic Con.

-Snape says it gets better:

I’ve enjoyed the spate of articles praising Hermione Granger as a total rockstar that have come out as the Harry Potter series have come to a close, though I think Sady Doyle goes a little overboard in chastising J.K. Rowling for writing under her initials and choosing to have Harry as a main character. Harry’s respect for Hermoine, and the fact that they manage to forge an extremely durable friendship without any awkward will-they-or-won’t-they questions is a really useful argument for the idea that boys should value girls and women for multi-dimensional reasons. Not every story has to be about girls to be feminist, and in fact, some kinds of feminist arguments might be better delivered by male protagonists.

But more to the point, I think Doyle misses the point of Rowling’s series. Both the Harry Potter series and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books are about what happen when you use young people as mascots and as instruments for larger causes. The reason Harry Potter is the main character in the series isn’t that he’s awesome — to the contrary, he’s a fairly average kid, and Snape’s assessment of his overall abilities as a wizard is probably correct. The idea that he’s extraordinary — and really, that extraordinary things can happen in the cause of righteousness — inspires other people to rise to and above their potential. Harry provides a motivating impulse for the Order of the Phoenix, and for Dumbledore’s Army. The most interesting moment in the entire series is when he’s presented as dead to the people who have been fighting for him — and they keep fighting, in particular Neville Longbottom, who exists as an illustration of the arbitrariness of Harry’s prestige, and who rises to the occasion, killing the hell out of Nagini even when he’s been set on fire. Ron dashes down to the Chamber of Secrets and just pretends he knows Parseltongue, and it works: again, Harry’s not magically special, but the special things he does inspire people to try crazy and unusual things. Hermione Granger might have been the smartest witch of her age even if Harry Potter had never come to Hogwarts, but Harry and Ron encourage he to become something more than an academic know-it all with rigid behavioral rules. All the characters need each other. It’s not a matter of Rowling having chosen the wrong main character, it’s understanding how that character functions.

If we understand Harry as a mascot whose function is ultimately to surrender, it’s interesting to consider The Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen in the same terms. Katniss, who is a totally badass hunter, is probably more talented by the standards of her society than Harry Potter is in his. But the elevation of her as a mascot for rebellion against the leadership of Panem actually illustrates the weaknesses of the movement that elevates her. Despite her talents, Katniss is unsociable, and basically an unstable person. The leadership of District 13 never does a particularly good job of getting her on board with their specific program: they mostly just aim her and hope things come out okay. She’s good at being a general motivator, but at the end of the day, Katniss doesn’t fall in line when the movement really needs her to, and she ends up being cut out of future conversations about reform.

In the end, both of these stories are about what happens when political movements choose pretty vulnerable figureheads. It turns out that surrounding that figurehead with a strong educational system like Hogwarts and a mentor like Albus Dumbledore is a safer bet than forcing kids to work for a living and giving them a drunken veteran of a kill-or-be-killed contest. The anti-Voldemort movement has a more limited task — it’s easier to keep someone from rising to power than to topple and entrenched government — but they also do a much better job of organizing for it over the long term than the District 13 folks, who are isolated from most of Panem, hindering long-term insurrection planning, and who end up choosing Katniss kind of on the fly. Movement-building’s hard work. And in both of these franchises, but especially with the Hunger Games books, I’m actually more interested in the people who plan the grand architecture of insurrections rather than those who are the public faces of them.

-Adam Serwer on Harry Potter‘s goblins and Jewish stereotypes.

-Karen O is going to write an opera.

-We may be getting crazy amounts of Game of Thrones and America Gods adaptations, but Hollywood apparently draws the line at a multi-platform Dark Tower project.

-I’m always down for Big Idea Sci-Fi.

-The new Spider-Man: same as the old Spider-Man

As sometimes happens when pieces from this blog make their way into the wider universe, some folks got verklempt about the idea that there could possibly be political meaning in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. This is sort of entertaining, given that Rowling has talked explicitly about the impact of working at Amnesty International on her fiction, written scathingly about class and Tory policies, and, as Zack Stentz points out, modeled the Black sisters on the Mitford sisters and Dobby the House Elf on the friend of Jessica Mitford’s who recruited her into the Communist Party. But I think there’s a larger issue here, the fact that some people are quite uncomfortable with the idea that art is political.

Andy Daglas, with whom I was discussing this, said he thinks that’s in part because “I think some don’t like the idea of politics having a moral dimension, which storytelling brings to forefront.” And the AV Club’s Rowan Kaiser agreed, saying, “I think a not insignificant number of people view politics as sports, and either are on one team or hate both.” There’s an extent to which that’s true, but I also think with works like the Potter series, or the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books, which draw an explicit line between capitalism and violence against women, folks who don’t share the politics of those authors have a choice between acknowledging those works’ politics and as a result enjoying the works less, or rejecting the idea that a specific piece of art or all art is political. Of course, that’s something that works in multiple directions. I love Gone With the Wind, even though its racial politics are awful*, but I can’t deny what’s in front of me for the sake of my own comfort. I find China Mieville’s nihilism in Perdido Street Station profoundly disturbing, in that I think it becomes an argument against struggling for justice, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate his world-building, and that frustration made me feel the climax of the novel intensely, even if it meant I was angry.

As Rowan put it later in the conversation, “I’m fascinated by the potential motivations of people who deliberately reject concepts of interconnectedness.” And that’s something Rowling herself addressed in her Harvard Commencement address when she said, “Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.” She was speaking about politics and empathy, but I think it’s true of fiction. If you pretend the scenes of torture in the Harry Potter novels are abstract, or that J.K. Rowling may dislike poverty but has no opinions on its actual effects and the policies that would ameliorate it, you may delay a reckoning with your own beliefs and the impact they have in the real world. But you’re also denying yourself the great moral and emotional force of the novel. Art isn’t grown in a vat to wander neutral into the world and retreat from it untouched and untouching.

*I think there is an argument to be made that the entire novel is a juxtaposition between slaveholders and people who do their own labor in the capitalist system, with Mitchell ultimately arguing that the latter are more suited to a modern era, making the novel a rejection of Confederate nostalgia. After all, Melanie Wilkes dies, and Scarlett ends up disgusted with Ashley and in love with Rhett, while her Cause-crazed Atlanta neighbors end up becoming more flexible, tough people when they start their own businesses. But I digress.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and the movies based on them have been the most important ongoing pop culture event in the world for the last decade and a half. As I wrote in the Atlantic, I think the reason they’re a permanent part of the canon is that Rowling achieved something really unusual in writing a moral novel that feels particularly applicable to contemporary politics, but that is timeless not just by dint of quality but by design.

1. Torture is wrong. J.K. Rowling’s adamant that torture and indefinite detention are morally wrong and counterproductive. Barty Crouch, Jr. is a nut, but he’s clearly radicalized and made even crazier by his experience undergoing psychological torture at Azkaban. Sirius Black is imprisoned there without a trial — can you imagine what the punitive damages would be in a wrongful imprisonment case if there were dementors involved? Bellatrix Lestrange’s addiction to torture warps her morally — and she doesn’t get any useful information out of Hermione when she tortures the younger woman at Malfoy Manor. Harry tries torturing people several times, but can’t do it, and in the end, his preference for less coercive tactics helps him beat Voldemort.

2. Universal health care is pretty much a necessity. Can you imagine what Neville Longbottom’s financial future would be like if he had to pay for his parents’ long-term care at St. Mungo’s? Magic’s an incredibly dangerous business, and whether you’re getting all the bones accidentally removed from your arm or getting bitten by a giant snake, it’s lucky that St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries appears to operate along the same lines as the National Health Service.

3. Bureaucrats are heroes. Whether it’s Mr. Wealsey’s unheralded service in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, or the lessons of Kingsley Shacklebolt’s time as an auror that made him a strong leader of the Order of the Phoenix, and later, Minister of Magic, bureaucrats are often heroes in Rowling’s universe. When the bureaucracy’s corrupted by people like Dolores Umbridge under Voldemort’s rule, it’s a genuine tragedy.

4. Rita Skeeter is Rebekah Brooks. How much easier would it have been for News of the World to carry out its phone hacking scheme on a grand scale if it had just employed a bunch of Anamagi with low morals. In between the Quibbler, which doesn’t have enough credibility to carry the day when it’s right, and the Daily Prophet, which is badly in need of a public editor, the Harry Potter universe needs a magical equivalent of the New York Times.

5. Good intelligence makes good policy. Cornelius Fudge’s dithering as Voldemort rose is one of the most profound political failures of the novels. His distrust of good intelligence, suspicion of people who operate in good faith, and failure to act once he’s convinced of the truth directly enable Voldemort’s rise. If Fudge had been willing to act, he might have had to do ugly things to forestall Voldemort’s rise, like arresting Death Eaters on flimsy charges (and even then, Azkaban might not have held) until he could have built more substantive cases against them, denying Voldemort key allies. But at minimum, Fudge could have gotten the wizarding world ready to defend themselves.

6. Inherited wealth can be corrupting. Clearly, the obnoxiousness of the Malfoys is crying out for a good, hard progressive taxing. On the other hand, can you imagine Voldemort at a Tea Party?

7. Good domestic policy can be protection against and invasion. Hermione’s lonely quest to get people to treat house elves like the sentient beings that they are turns out to be mighty handy when Hogwarts comes under attack. Who know that treating tremendously powerful magical beings like something other than bony little punching bags might win their loyalty so they’ll fight on your side when their former masters show up, determined to destroy you.

8. Albus Dumbledore is a wizarding George Washington. Okay, so he never took the Minister of Magic post in the first place. But knowing when to walk away from power when you could hold on to it is one of the only things that preserve democratic governments. Dumbledore’s self-knowledge and self-control turns out to be one of the more admirable things in the novels.