If the books were set in the 1930s...
Mar. 18th, 2022 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslockNow that we have this shiny new Dreamwidth edition of DTCL, I thought we ought to inaugurate it with shiny new content! Well, it's new, anyway. Good comments might make it shiny ;-)
So, thought experiment time! One of Jodel’s Red Hen essays noted that if Rowling wanted half-baked WWII parallels, the series might work better if it were actually set between World Wars. The series already has a sense of “past-ness” (jolly good boarding school romps, Molly Weasley knitting and talking about “scarlet women”), and we hardly spend any time in the Muggle world anyway, so brief mentions of Muggle technology could easily be changed to accommodate a 1930s setting. But that's just a couple of surface details. What else would have to change, and would it work?
Well over ten years passed between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, but that could be worked around. Vold War I could have lasted a couple of years beyond World War I so that while Muggles were kickstarting the Roaring Twenties, wizards lived in fear somewhat longer. And if Vold War II wrapped up just as WWII started, the Muggle war could have been cast as part of the fall-out. Maybe some DEs escaped to the Continent and (accidentally or on purpose) gave a few high-ranking Nazis their obsession with occult powers. Then joining the Muggle war effort would be part of the clean-up for Harry and co. Of course, this would work better if it coincided with a shift in attitudes toward the Muggle world. Maybe not ending Secrecy just yet, but moving towards seeing Muggles as equals rather than cattle, at least.
If you can make the timeline work, it provides good reasons for everyone’s Muggle relatives to be dead: those not killed in World War I probably died in the influenza epidemic afterward. The flu epidemic would parallel the dragon pox epidemic which apparently killed off all the wizarding grandparents except Augusta Longbottom. Tom Riddle’s orphanage could have been authentically Dickensian. The brutality at Hogwarts which seems incongruous in the 1990s would probably fit better in the 1930s.
As Jodel notes, setting the story in the 1930s would make the wizarding world look progressive by comparison. A female Minister for Magic in the 1920s? A woman as the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement? Aurors and professors who are just Aurors and professors, not “lady Aurors” and “women professors”? Co-ed Quidditch teams? Full racial integration? That would make the wizarding world look like a haven to a lot of Muggle-born kids, for sure!
Magical technology would look better too. Some of it is already pretty advanced: those two-way mirrors mean that they had Magic FaceTime since at least the 1970s (and possibly much earlier), and Fred and George invented fully-immersive virtual reality stories in 1996. But imagine how much more amazing that would have been in the 1920s and 1930s. Hermione inventing primitive texting with the DA coins would be impressive for more reasons than her age. We wouldn’t have to do mental gymnastics to figure out why we never hear about Muggle-born kids missing phones and TV and central heating; television was barely invented, and some of them would have grown up without electricity or running water. Going to Hogwarts would be a big upgrade in standard of living for many.
Also, in Muggle-land, there was a Great Depression on in the 1930s. Those Hogwarts feasts would look extra-appealing when a statistically significant portion of the student body might be underfed at home. And maybe the wizarding economy was just separate enough that they didn’t have a Depression at all, so Hogwarts students could also look forward to decent employment. It’s easier to understand why they might be willing to overlook a few monsters and murderers if so.
That background would have affected Harry’s relationship with the Dursleys. In this timeline, the stock market would have crashed around the time Harry started primary school, or maybe a bit after. Maybe the Dursleys barely kept their house, and Vernon lived in constant fear that Grunnings would go under. Petunia might have been extra-stressed by taking in washing or other side jobs because they needed the extra money to scrape by. They probably expected Harry to leave school early to work so he could help pay Dudley’s school fees. Harry would have been looking at a dismal future in the Muggle world even once he was old enough to leave home, and no one would have had any sympathy, because everyone was broke. When the Hogwarts letter came, in addition to their fear of magic, the Dursleys would have been torn between relief at not having to feed or clothe Harry for most of the year and anger that he wouldn’t be earning any money to support the family either.
Oh, and consider Lily’s situation as a teenager in the 1910s. She wouldn’t be able to earn much of a living in the Muggle world even if she did catch up on her Muggle schooling, because most professions and especially most well-paying professions were closed to women. She would face stronger anti-Muggle-born prejudice in the wizarding world than anything we saw in later decades. Maybe her father died in World War I and her mother of the flu (aunts and uncles likewise), leaving her without family support. Marrying a rich asshole might have looked like her best option not for comfort, but for survival. And she’d probably have been raised at least until age eleven to believe that marrying an asshole is just something one has to put up with in life. He’s not a dope fiend and hasn’t gambled away all his money, so what’s to complain about?
Arthur and the rest of the older generations would have grown up in an era when English Muggles proudly acknowledged colonialism and imperialism. (Take up the wizard’s burden!) Eugenics was also broadly popular in the 1930s. It was usually discussed (and implemented) in terms of encouraging supposedly “desirable” people to have more children and sterilizing supposedly “unfit” people, but as we know from Muggle history, it’s a disturbingly short jump from that already-bad situation to mass murder. So a 1930s setting could have drawn a useful parallel: just as Muggles had “soft” eugenics programs which metastasized into genocide, the wizarding world had “mild” socially-acceptable pureblood bigotry which led to Muggle-baitings and then the Muggle-born Registration Committee.
The house-elves’ situation would fit right in, especially since some older wizards could potentially remember the days when openly enslaving humans was legal too. It would be clearer that Hermione’s anti-slavery stance was due to her being Muggle-born and thus culturally out of step with the wizarding world—she might have learned how Britain boycotted slave-produced sugar and then outlawed slavery in Muggle history classes and identified this as a sign of how great and noble Britain was, while the oldest wizards would go, “What are you talking about? Enslaving lesser beings shows how strong and awesome we are and is totally moral. It’s in the Bible!” (Hermione would have her own Bible verses to counter theirs.) And her paternalistic attitude toward the house-elves would be what she had learned was the right and proper way to behave toward such unfortunates. I bet even in canon, that awful Fountain of Magical Brethren was commissioned in, say, the 1890s.
On the other hand, if the story were set in the 1930s, we’d expect the Muggle world to actually matter. Ending with the characters dusting their hands and going, “Too bad about this new Muggle war starting, but it’ll probably be over by Christmas as long as we cast a few judicious spells where no one will notice” would not play well. Not when we know what actually happened. Even a hint of their usual indifference to Muggle suffering and death would make the characters’ supposed (secondary) goal of protecting Muggles look even less convincing than in canon. We’d still want the immediate threat of Voldemort removed, but a lot more readers would probably be rooting for the Muggles and the goblins to team up against the remaining wizards before the dust had settled. Setting the story in more-or-less-contemporary times instead let Rowling keep the Muggle world firmly in the background. (Not that bad things didn’t happen in the 1990s, but they weren’t “massive global war which killed tens of millions of people” bad.) If she couldn’t or didn’t want to handle the interaction of the magical and non-magical worlds with any real depth, glossing over it by setting it in the present when we don’t know what’s going to happen next was probably a better choice than setting it in the 1930s, when there would be no ignoring the world war-sized elephant in the room.
Plus, if Vold War I and Vold War II took place in tandem with World Wars I and II, what would the Grindelwar be? The Franco-Prussian War? I would be money that your average young viewer has never even heard of it. Which might be fine in the books since Grindelwald’s war is barely relevant anyway. But it wouldn’t do well at all for the ridiculous prequel movies, which rely more heavily on viewers’ seeing parallels to the run-up to World War II to create a sense of looming disaster. Not that losing those movies would be a huge tragedy…
What else might work if the series were shifted to this era? And what else might not work? In addition to hypotheticals, I'm sure some of you know of fic that could provide some concrete examples.
So, thought experiment time! One of Jodel’s Red Hen essays noted that if Rowling wanted half-baked WWII parallels, the series might work better if it were actually set between World Wars. The series already has a sense of “past-ness” (jolly good boarding school romps, Molly Weasley knitting and talking about “scarlet women”), and we hardly spend any time in the Muggle world anyway, so brief mentions of Muggle technology could easily be changed to accommodate a 1930s setting. But that's just a couple of surface details. What else would have to change, and would it work?
Well over ten years passed between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, but that could be worked around. Vold War I could have lasted a couple of years beyond World War I so that while Muggles were kickstarting the Roaring Twenties, wizards lived in fear somewhat longer. And if Vold War II wrapped up just as WWII started, the Muggle war could have been cast as part of the fall-out. Maybe some DEs escaped to the Continent and (accidentally or on purpose) gave a few high-ranking Nazis their obsession with occult powers. Then joining the Muggle war effort would be part of the clean-up for Harry and co. Of course, this would work better if it coincided with a shift in attitudes toward the Muggle world. Maybe not ending Secrecy just yet, but moving towards seeing Muggles as equals rather than cattle, at least.
If you can make the timeline work, it provides good reasons for everyone’s Muggle relatives to be dead: those not killed in World War I probably died in the influenza epidemic afterward. The flu epidemic would parallel the dragon pox epidemic which apparently killed off all the wizarding grandparents except Augusta Longbottom. Tom Riddle’s orphanage could have been authentically Dickensian. The brutality at Hogwarts which seems incongruous in the 1990s would probably fit better in the 1930s.
As Jodel notes, setting the story in the 1930s would make the wizarding world look progressive by comparison. A female Minister for Magic in the 1920s? A woman as the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement? Aurors and professors who are just Aurors and professors, not “lady Aurors” and “women professors”? Co-ed Quidditch teams? Full racial integration? That would make the wizarding world look like a haven to a lot of Muggle-born kids, for sure!
Magical technology would look better too. Some of it is already pretty advanced: those two-way mirrors mean that they had Magic FaceTime since at least the 1970s (and possibly much earlier), and Fred and George invented fully-immersive virtual reality stories in 1996. But imagine how much more amazing that would have been in the 1920s and 1930s. Hermione inventing primitive texting with the DA coins would be impressive for more reasons than her age. We wouldn’t have to do mental gymnastics to figure out why we never hear about Muggle-born kids missing phones and TV and central heating; television was barely invented, and some of them would have grown up without electricity or running water. Going to Hogwarts would be a big upgrade in standard of living for many.
Also, in Muggle-land, there was a Great Depression on in the 1930s. Those Hogwarts feasts would look extra-appealing when a statistically significant portion of the student body might be underfed at home. And maybe the wizarding economy was just separate enough that they didn’t have a Depression at all, so Hogwarts students could also look forward to decent employment. It’s easier to understand why they might be willing to overlook a few monsters and murderers if so.
That background would have affected Harry’s relationship with the Dursleys. In this timeline, the stock market would have crashed around the time Harry started primary school, or maybe a bit after. Maybe the Dursleys barely kept their house, and Vernon lived in constant fear that Grunnings would go under. Petunia might have been extra-stressed by taking in washing or other side jobs because they needed the extra money to scrape by. They probably expected Harry to leave school early to work so he could help pay Dudley’s school fees. Harry would have been looking at a dismal future in the Muggle world even once he was old enough to leave home, and no one would have had any sympathy, because everyone was broke. When the Hogwarts letter came, in addition to their fear of magic, the Dursleys would have been torn between relief at not having to feed or clothe Harry for most of the year and anger that he wouldn’t be earning any money to support the family either.
Oh, and consider Lily’s situation as a teenager in the 1910s. She wouldn’t be able to earn much of a living in the Muggle world even if she did catch up on her Muggle schooling, because most professions and especially most well-paying professions were closed to women. She would face stronger anti-Muggle-born prejudice in the wizarding world than anything we saw in later decades. Maybe her father died in World War I and her mother of the flu (aunts and uncles likewise), leaving her without family support. Marrying a rich asshole might have looked like her best option not for comfort, but for survival. And she’d probably have been raised at least until age eleven to believe that marrying an asshole is just something one has to put up with in life. He’s not a dope fiend and hasn’t gambled away all his money, so what’s to complain about?
Arthur and the rest of the older generations would have grown up in an era when English Muggles proudly acknowledged colonialism and imperialism. (Take up the wizard’s burden!) Eugenics was also broadly popular in the 1930s. It was usually discussed (and implemented) in terms of encouraging supposedly “desirable” people to have more children and sterilizing supposedly “unfit” people, but as we know from Muggle history, it’s a disturbingly short jump from that already-bad situation to mass murder. So a 1930s setting could have drawn a useful parallel: just as Muggles had “soft” eugenics programs which metastasized into genocide, the wizarding world had “mild” socially-acceptable pureblood bigotry which led to Muggle-baitings and then the Muggle-born Registration Committee.
The house-elves’ situation would fit right in, especially since some older wizards could potentially remember the days when openly enslaving humans was legal too. It would be clearer that Hermione’s anti-slavery stance was due to her being Muggle-born and thus culturally out of step with the wizarding world—she might have learned how Britain boycotted slave-produced sugar and then outlawed slavery in Muggle history classes and identified this as a sign of how great and noble Britain was, while the oldest wizards would go, “What are you talking about? Enslaving lesser beings shows how strong and awesome we are and is totally moral. It’s in the Bible!” (Hermione would have her own Bible verses to counter theirs.) And her paternalistic attitude toward the house-elves would be what she had learned was the right and proper way to behave toward such unfortunates. I bet even in canon, that awful Fountain of Magical Brethren was commissioned in, say, the 1890s.
On the other hand, if the story were set in the 1930s, we’d expect the Muggle world to actually matter. Ending with the characters dusting their hands and going, “Too bad about this new Muggle war starting, but it’ll probably be over by Christmas as long as we cast a few judicious spells where no one will notice” would not play well. Not when we know what actually happened. Even a hint of their usual indifference to Muggle suffering and death would make the characters’ supposed (secondary) goal of protecting Muggles look even less convincing than in canon. We’d still want the immediate threat of Voldemort removed, but a lot more readers would probably be rooting for the Muggles and the goblins to team up against the remaining wizards before the dust had settled. Setting the story in more-or-less-contemporary times instead let Rowling keep the Muggle world firmly in the background. (Not that bad things didn’t happen in the 1990s, but they weren’t “massive global war which killed tens of millions of people” bad.) If she couldn’t or didn’t want to handle the interaction of the magical and non-magical worlds with any real depth, glossing over it by setting it in the present when we don’t know what’s going to happen next was probably a better choice than setting it in the 1930s, when there would be no ignoring the world war-sized elephant in the room.
Plus, if Vold War I and Vold War II took place in tandem with World Wars I and II, what would the Grindelwar be? The Franco-Prussian War? I would be money that your average young viewer has never even heard of it. Which might be fine in the books since Grindelwald’s war is barely relevant anyway. But it wouldn’t do well at all for the ridiculous prequel movies, which rely more heavily on viewers’ seeing parallels to the run-up to World War II to create a sense of looming disaster. Not that losing those movies would be a huge tragedy…
What else might work if the series were shifted to this era? And what else might not work? In addition to hypotheticals, I'm sure some of you know of fic that could provide some concrete examples.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-30 05:33 pm (UTC)