So they took the whole elf shit out of the fourth movie. They took a lot of shit out of the movies (kids notice it all) but that shit really struck me.

I'm obviously late on this whole thing and have been just trying to see how many others caught it, and indeed it does seem to have a decent amount of blogging. But no one really puts any fault on Rowling for her presentation of the issue. There's one quote from her about how it came out in book two which, i don't know, it's kinda disturbing to me:

“Hermione gave me a lot of trouble! She was really misbehaving. She developed this big political conscience about the House elves. Well, she wanted to go her own way, and for two chapters, she just went wandering off. I just let her do it and then I scrapped two chapters and kept a few bits. That I liked. That’s the most trouble anyone’s ever given me, but it was fun so I gave her her head.”–J.K. Rowling

From a writer's perspective I understand how this happens. You create a circumstance and as a consequence of it a character has to do something. So she created houseelves and they end up being the backbone to the school. Hermione finds out and has to respond to it. But that wasn't the author's intent.

In this case I wonder if the character isn't herself revealing something about the author's ambivilance ot the issue. She want's to do something but ultimately she *wouldn't*. It's not the point of the series anyway, pushed to the side.

But in so doing she's created the literary environment where it's unresolved and dismissed as well. I recently had a talk with six kids including two of my own about it and everyone from their reading on the book was just like "well they like it, they don't want to be free" and then quoting all indications of this from the book. I of course continued the conversation and got them to see how fucked up it was. But that raises the question was I just doing my fatherly duty to follow up on my kids reading or should the author be held accountable for not dealing with it.


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Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."