Harry Potter is celebrated as the brave hero of his fantasy series of the same name, but what really changed after he defeated Voldemort?

The true evils plaguing the wizarding world run deeper than one influential villain. Based on Harry’s thoughts shortly after the Battle of Hogwarts, his actions don’t seem to have solved the core of the problem.

In the last sentence of the 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, essentially serves as Harry’s personal slave. In the wizarding world, house elves are chained up and forced to perform physical labor, even though wizards could easily perform these tasks using magic.

But hierarchies are not about practical matters. They are about power. In this world, that power means maintaining the status of “pure-blood” wizards.

Voldemort used the ideology of wizard supremacy to justify his ruthless rise to power, and Harry spent his entire youth fighting to defeat him. Yet, just hours after his final victory, Harry appears to be supporting the very system that Voldemort embodied—all because he feels like a snack.

Perhaps we should be a little more lenient with Harry. After all, he was only 17 when he cast the spell that ended Voldemort’s life. And the fight – which also involved house-elves – must have been exhausting.

By the end of the series, it feels like the entire wizarding world has given in to the illusion that the war was won the moment Tom Riddle took his last breath.

To the attentive eye, however, it is clear that Voldemort was never more than a charismatic demagogue. His rise to power was a symptom of a much older and more insidious problem.

Salazar Slytherin attempted to purge Hogwarts of “non-pureblood” wizards in 990. When Harry arrived at Hogwarts 1,000 years later, wizarding society still enslaved house-elves, denied goblins access to wands, colonized centaur lands, and marginalized werewolves.

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 exploit wizard superiority to gain power. Grindelwald laid a lasting foundation for him, and Voldemort’s defeat merely prepared the legacy for the next dark wizard.

The series’ epilogue, set 19 years later, shows that wizard supremacy still exists. When Harry arrives at Platform 9 3/4 to send his children to Hogwarts, his son Albus worries about being sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts House refused to face Voldemort during the Battle of Hogwarts and seems to retain its bad reputation.

Furthermore, Ron casually admits to using a Confundus Charm on a Muggle, suggesting that it is still acceptable to deprive someone of their agency even if they are not a wizard.

The scene on Platform 9 3/4, enveloped in the steam of the Hogwarts Express, seems all too familiar.

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

Source: Business Insider