would it be weird to ask about the thesis of the Harry Potter Vs Series Of Unfortunate Events Narratives Of Abuse paper???
not at all!
i dunno if i could boil it down to a thesis right now, but it goes something like, oh, cw abuse by parents:
harry potter and the baudelaires are both orphaned and sent to live in abusive homes. (the orphan thing isn’t worth examining closely - getting rid of the “real” parents to substitute “fake” parents whose abusive behavior makes more sense to the audience is a really old storytelling tactic. think “coraline”, evil stepmothers in fairy tales, etc. of course has nothing to do with actual real-life adoptive parents and step-parents, but.)
what interests me most, i think, is what happens when the children ask for help.
because the baudelaires ask for help immediately! they go to the only other caretakers they have, mr. poe and justice strauss; these adults tell them “i don’t believe you, and even if i did believe you, there’s nothing i could do to help you.” almost every book of asoue revolves around the baudelaires not being believed about something very important.
harry potter, on the other hand, is believed. more than believed– he doesn’t have to tell the adults in his life that the dursleys are abusive, because they already know. they know he’s physically prevented from accessing his education. they know they’ve put him in a cupboard under the stairs– they address an envelope to the fucking cupboard. they know.
they just choose to leave him there.
and then, after years and years, we finally discover: harry has to live with the dursleys. they hurt him, and they don’t love him, and they abuse him, but without them– well, who knows? the dark wizards might find him. voldemort might have tried to come after him, those eleven years harry never knew he was a wizard. harry has to stay in an abusive home, because he can’t handle the world outside.
which is a shitty narrative. it just is. it’s very similar to a lie that abusers use to keep victims close to them. not only is no one going to get you out of here, but if they did, you’d crash and burn.
the baudelaires, meanwhile, immediately set to work learning everything they can to help themselves. and the book makes it clear– very clear– that they shouldn’t have to! that this isn’t their job! that mr. poe should be getting them out of this house, justice strauss should be getting them out of this house, the fucking police should be getting them out of this house
but they aren’t, because sometimes adults fail you. and you shouldn’t have to survive this– but y’know what? it turns out that you can.
anyway. i love harry potter more than i love asoue, because that is just the way my childhood shook out. and there’s a whole aspect here that i didn’t talk about even a little, namely: hagrid, sirius black, the weasley boys in the flying car, the various people who physically removed harry from the dursley house and got him somewhere safe– even if they always returned him in the end.
but lemony snicket and jk rowling told very different stories about abused children, and snicket, i think, ultimately gets how to do it in a way rowling doesn’t.
