It didn’t skip past me, even as a kid, in the perfect age bracket to grow up with the book series.

…

Oh, fat and ugly people are always also internally, morally, unfixably flawed.

Oh, the super blonde aryan coded people are magic nazis.

Oh, a base level of magic racism is more or less normalized.

Oh, those elves are slaves but its ok because they actually really love being slaves.

Oh, the banking system is run by cariacatures of Jews.

…

I noticed all this shit as a child, and was pestered and guffawed at for pointing it out.

This is before I even knew ‘Trans’ was a thing that could and does exist, before I even knew that you could be gay or lesbian or bi.

I still was, as recently as a few years ago, poopoo’d for mentioning these problems in Harry Potter… by the … Potterhead/Disney Princess/Goes to Disneyland once a year people I used to know, who self describe as all over the gender rainbow, but aren’t capable of acknowledging that these problems exist, because magical escapism apparently requires full doublethink… and those people would also routinely hypocritically mock my own mild cisgender nonconformity.

…

Yeah, the Overton Window in the US is/was so thoroughly shifted rightward, in so many ways, that ‘we can have a story line that involves magic’ was considered widly progressive, compared to the baseline of ‘Pokemon cards are demonic because they involve evolution’ and ‘DnD is demonic because roleplaying is impossible and it makes you a Satanist Witch/Warlock’.

…

Animorphs was more progressive and mature.

Here kids, time to learn about the horrors of war, first hand, as told by a teenage terrorist group!

Things are shitty and messy and unpredictable, and the world revolves around how youand others handle morally gray, fundamentally complex scenarios, not cookie cutter, simplistic good vs evil decisions that are far less difficult to evaluate!