Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Buckle up my friends, I have some things to say about Prisoner of Azkaban. While it introduces some of my favorite characters (Lupin! Sirius!), it also puts some of JKR’s worst prejudices on display. I’m going to focus on two primary areas - what the treatment of Lupin shows about her LGBT biases and how unexamined assumptions led to an all too real allegory for prioritizing police over community. Fair warning - I’ll be referencing stuff we learn in future books below, as well as discussing the ending of this book.
Lupin
“Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS.” - JK Rowling
JKR has said in multiple interviews that lycanthropy = HIV/AIDs. You can read more about the history of AIDs here, but the short version is that when it first came to the US it hit gay communities first. It was known as the ‘gay plague’ and it killed most of a generation of gay men. Its not much of a stretch to assume then that werewolves in Harry Potter are Rowling’s analogy for gay men. In a few aspects this works - Lupin is shown to be a kind and capable teacher who loses his job purely due to bigotry. (Don’t ask don’t tell in the military, teachers losing their jobs when parents find out their sexual orientation.) However, Rowling reinforces the idea that even ‘good’ werewolves such as Lupin pose a reasonable danger to their close friends and loved ones with the scene leaving the shrieking shack. This is doubling down on the stigma surrounding HIV, not reducing it. At the end of the book, Dumbledore accepts Lupin’s preemptive resignation without protest. This too is reinforcing the idea that while its ok to be gay, its not ok to be gay publicly. Lupin was fine until being outed - let’s connect that back to real world events such as the Don’t Say Gay bill that was just passed in Florida. Its aim is to outlaw any discussion of LGBT+ in classrooms below a certain age and limit any discussion beyond that to ‘age appropriate content’. This is explicitly designed to frighten school districts and teachers into avoiding the matter entirely to avoid going viral in right wing circles as a target. We’re going to see Lupin’s arc play out in real life - qualified teachers will be outed as LGBT+ and their jobs will be placed at risk. If a first grade teacher isn’t allowed to discuss anything relating to LGBT+, how can they live openly as a member of the community?
Similarly problematic is the backstory on how Lupin becomes a werewolf. This wasn’t bad luck or a result of decisions he made as an adult. He was attacked as a child by a werewolf named Fenrir who was known for targeting children. Why does this matter? There are well-known stereotypes and unfounded fears that consider gay men to be predatory, or even pedophiles. This is the root of the ‘gay panic defense’ we see in courtrooms. (A defendant claims to have become so scared of finding out someone was gay that they temporarily lost their mind and lashed out violently.) The implication we see throughout the books is that while Fenrir is one of the worst werewolves, Lupin is by far the best - no real argument that werewolves as a group are safe or deserving of integrating with broader society as in the end both were a danger to the people around them.
I want to reiterate that these connections are not disputed by JKR - she’s been very clear about werewolves as an allegory, and each negative stereotype I’ve listed above is well known. By offering such strong examples that feed into each negative stereotype without really combating them in the books, Rowling has only reinforced the pervasive idea that children can never truly be safe around LGBT+ people, and that they should be hidden from the public sphere as much as possible. More than anything else in the series (at least so far/to my recollection), this is the reason to walk away entirely. At minimum, always borrow or get the books used - supporting Rowling financially by buying anything Harry Potter new is supporting her ability to spread these views.
Police and Public Safety
This one is a little trickier, as it wasn’t purposefully written as a parallel the way Lupin’s story was - Rowling has stated in interviews that the dementors were supposed to represent depression. That being said, it was impossible to read about them patrolling Hogwarts and Hogsmeade Village without connecting it back to the number of police in (American) schools and the increasing militarization of police across the country.
We’re first introduced to the dementors on the train to Hogwarts. They enter the compartment with no warning to the students, and there’s a strong implication in the scene that if Lupin hadn’t been there to drive them off, they would have done real harm to Harry. Many of the students ended up receiving chocolate to recover from their own encounters. What can we learn from this? On the surface, I give Rowling full credit - to this day, dementors are one of the scariest monsters I’ve read. Underlying this, however, are some serious unexamined assumptions about how the world works.
Violence as a problem solver - Why are the dementors patrolling civilian areas? Why are they on guard at Hogwarts? Dementors are state-sanctioned violence at its purest - they have two settings, mild harm or fate-worse-than-death. They regularly push back against the rules set for them (disrupting the quidditch match for example), and act as a threat against law-abiding villagers in Hogsmeade if they’re simply out too late. To me this mirrors an overfunded police force that has poured millions of dollars into advanced weaponry and anti-terrorist/gang training, while neglecting equivalent commitment to learning de-escalation tactics or other methods of solving problems. Did you know that at last count, there were armed police officers stationed in 72% of high schools? By contrast, only 17% of schools meet the recommended student: counselor ratio. If you’re given a really big hammer, pretty soon all of your problems are going to look like nails. Harry’s interactions with the dementors mirror this perfectly - their reaction to him escalates with each encounter. First they meet him within the bounds of their duty as they search the train, but linger too long, forcing Lupin to drive them off. Then they break the restrictions to come onto the grounds of Hogwarts, leaving only when Dumbledore himself intervenes - after Harry has fallen from his broomstick. Pause here to remember that while Harry is constantly up to something, the Dementors don’t know that. For all they know he’s just a random kid. They do find him breaking curfew and with Sirius at the climax, but again - they don’t know the circumstances. For all they know Sirius was trying to kidnap Harry. So the fact that their immediate response was to act as judge, jury, and executioner for both Sirius and Harry is wildly problematic. Sound familiar? Every week in the US we get more news of traffic stops going horribly wrong, or no-knock warrants being executed on the wrong house but ending in death for the homeowner. In both worlds we’re seeing a system working as intended. A force designed for violence focuses on punishment over all else, and is primarily aimed at populations that don’t have the resources to advocate for themselves. Those populations are then blamed when interactions between the two go wrong. (Why didn’t he just use his blinker/have his car registration up to date/obey orders?)
System working right vs as intended - Let’s look at Azkaban itself for a moment. It’s the only wizarding jail we ever hear about in the books. As far as we ever learn, wizards may be fined, warned, or sent to Azkaban. We know wizards are faced with a trial at the Ministry of Magic if they’re accused of a particularly serious crime, but must represent themselves. Separately, we learn of veritaserum, an extremely powerful truth telling drug. What’s interesting to me is that veritaserum is not once brought up in conjunction with investigation into crimes. It is only mentioned in unethical moments such as Snape or Unbridge threatening Harry for their own gain. (Books 4 and 5, respectively.) But when an innocent such as Sirius is accused of mass murder, no serum. When Hagrid is sent to Azkaban for opening the chamber of secrets in book 2, no serum. When well-connected members of wizard society such as Lucius Malfoy are accused of being Death Eaters… no serum. To me this shows that Rowling has unconsciously mirrored the real world in her fantasy, a world where race and socioeconomic status matter far more than the facts.
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