• At the end of “Harry Potter,” the title character has not saved the wizarding world from all its evil.

• Harry’s last thought before the epilogue of the series is whether a house elf will make him a sandwich.

• 19 years after the Battle of Hogwarts, wizarding supremacy seems to be alive and well.

Harry Potter is praised as a brave and successful hero of his fantasy series of the same name, but what actually changed after he defeated Voldemort?

The true evils plaguing the wizarding world run deeper than one powerful villain. And according to Harry’s thoughts immediately after the Battle of Hogwarts, his actions did not address the root of the problem.

Harry’s final thought in the final chapter of Deathly Hallows proves how limited his success was

In the last sentence of “Deathly Hallows” before the epilogue of the series, we learn Harry’s thoughts after the Battle of Hogwarts:

“He turned away from the portraits and thought only of the four-poster bed waiting for him in Gryffindor Tower, and wondered if Kreacher would bring him a sandwich there.”

Kreacher, a house elf, is essentially Harry’s personal slave. In the wizarding world, house elves are imprisoned and forced to do manual labor, even though wizards could easily do these tasks by, you know, Magic.

But hierarchies have nothing to do with pragmatism. They have something to do with power. In this world, that means maintaining the status of “pure-blood” wizards.

Voldemort justified his brutal rise to power with ideals of wizard superiority, and Harry spent his entire youth trying to defeat him. Yet, just hours after his final triumph, Harry supports the very system that Voldemort embodied… because he wants a snack.

But perhaps we should give Harry a little more leeway. After all, he was only 17 when he cast the spell that ended Voldemort’s life. And the battle – in which the house-elves also took part – must tiring.

The defeat of Voldemort did not magically end all notions of oppression and wizard superiority

By the end of the series, it seems as if the entire wizarding world has succumbed to the illusion that the war was won the minute Tom Riddle took his last breath.

Yet for those of us paying attention, it is abundantly clear that Voldemort was never more than a charismatic demagogue whose rise was the symptom of a much deeper, much older, and much more insidious disease.

Salazar Slytherin tried to rid Hogwarts of “non-pure-blood” wizards in 990. When Harry arrived at Hogwarts 1,000 years later, the house-elves in wizarding society were still enslaving the goblins, denying the goblins access to wands, colonizing the land of the centaurs, and driving werewolves out of their jobs.

Despite the strained relations between wizards and magical creatures, the Fountain of Magic Brothers at the Ministry of Magic depicts a centaur, a goblin, and a house elf admiringly looking at a wizarding couple. When injustice becomes the law, propaganda becomes the duty.

Voldemort wasn’t even the first villain to use wizarding superiority to amass power. Grindelwald created a lasting blueprint for him, and Voldemort’s defeat merely created a legacy for the next dark wizard.

Not surprisingly, wizard dominance is still alive 19 years later.

In the epilogue of the series, Harry arrives at Platform 9 3/4 to send his children to Hogwarts, but his son Albus is worried about him being sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts House refused to face Voldemort during the Battle of Hogwarts and apparently still has a bad reputation.

Ron also casually admits to using a Confundus Charm on a Muggle, so apparently it’s still okay to incapacitate someone even if the person isn’t a wizard.

The rising steam of the Hogwarts Express fills the scene and everything seems a little too familiar.

As the train pulls away, I imagine Albus and James Potter settling into their carriages and pulling out the food their parents packed for the journey. Despite my best efforts, I can’t help but wonder: who made their sandwiches?

This story was originally published in November 2021 and was last updated on August 23, 2024.

Read the original article on Business Insider