← Critical Magic Theory: An Analytical Harry Potter Podcast
Critical Magic Theory: An Analytical Harry Potter Podcast
Prof Responds: Secrecy, Sacrifice, and the Dumbledores We Never Questioned
00:59:33
In this Prof Responds episode of Critical Magic Theory, Professor Julian Wamble revisits the Dumbledore family to examine how secrecy, sacrifice, and institutional failure shape Ariana Dumbledore’s life, and the lives of those around her.Drawing on...
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- [00:01]
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- [01:01]
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- [01:34]
Professor Julian Womble
Welcome to Critical Magic Theory where we deconstruct the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Because loving something doesn't mean we can't be critical of it. I'm Professor Julian Womble and today I am avoiding jet lag and because of that I'm gonna do a Prof. Response episode on the post episode chat on Ariana and Aberforth. Now listen, listen up. I know that some of you I won't name names were very adamant about me making sure that I had my Lizzie McGuire moment in Rome and that I didn't do any work. And I did. I didn't do any work. I did not get on a Vespa or a moped or whatever those things are called because anxiety, madness, absurdity and the fact that. And the Roman taxi drivers almost took me out and I said if I can't ride in a car with four doors and windows, there's no way you're getting me on one of those biky thingy thing, majigabobs. I'm not doing that. So I didn't all of that to say though that two things are true. One, this episode could be madness because right now my body, at least in theory, knows that it's 3am in Rome, but I'm not in Rome anymore. So I can work and I'm going to do this episode because you all are not the boss of me and I can do whatever I want. And so I'm going to make this episode and there's nothing that you can do about it. How about that? You ever thought about that? And you all brought so much to bear. Although not one a lot of comments for the post episode chat which is of course very fine, but there's a lot of rich things that were said and we're going to get a full episode out of it and I'm really excited about that. So this is serving a dual purpose. It's going to help us dive deeper into our conversation on Aberforth and Ariana while also helping me make sure that I'm not that jet lagged because it turns out that I also have to go back to work and isn't that an injustice that no one is talking about? Hmm. That I have to return back to the job that pays me. Disrespectful, nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty. But I must. And so I have to navigate the pending jet lag as best I can. And the way that we're going to do that is by recording this episode. But my whims, my woes, my problems have nothing to do with the realities of the bop. And I'm biding time because I know some of you didn't even expect an episode. So you're stretching, you're trying to figure it out. You're shook. We didn't think it was happening. And so I'm trying to give you time so that you can get your bodies ready for the bop. But I've done that now and the bop is coming in three, in two, in one. Let's bop. We do something here. Father, I hope you danced. It's 2026. You know what this game is about. We're coming up on our two year anniversary, so there's no excuse for now. I've given you so much time to get your bop together. I've given you variations on a bop. I've given you all the time that you need. We have our. What is it? Is it next week? I think next week is our two year anniversary and everyone's bopping Then there's no. There's no way around that. So if you weren't ready, then, you need to get ready now. Okay, I'm not saying. I'm just saying. I'm also saying that in the spirit of our Prof. Response episodes, we're not going to dilly and dally too long. But I want to remind you all that we do have our CMT listeners merch drop that is on our or in rather our merch store. If you go to criticalmagictheory.com and hit merch, it will take you there and you'll see the drop. And that the proceeds from this drop are going to Trans Lifeline, the Okra Project, and the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. So anything that you can give. If you can't give, feel free to share with friends, family, associates, frenemies, enemies to lovers. I don't know. I've been watching a lot of heated rivalry. I'm open to all combinations of things. You all should be very proud of me that I have not brought up heated rivalry very much in these episodes because it has consumed every part of my identity. But I'm saving you from that. If you are into heated rivalry, good for you. If you are not, also good for you know your boundaries. Stay away. It is addictive. It is a problem. I have the problem, okay? I am the problem. We're not getting into that. We don't have that kind of time. Check out the merch. It's really, really great. Beautiful work from Brit and Rachel P. Shout out to you all. And I didn't get to say this before on the episode, but also shout out to Cassie and Emma, both of whom helped me post this on on the merch store because life is hectic. I'm grateful to both of them and to Britt and to Rachel for offering their artistic gifts for us to be able to take part in the raising of these funds. You will see that there is a King Neville shirt. Long may he reign. There is a shirt with a ferret that is that says my therapist will hear about this. And then there is a this is not a Dumbledore episode. And they're all so brilliant and amazing and I just love showcasing the talent that we have here in our community and also doing so for the purposes of trying to help the world be a better place. This episode is gonna help us think through a little bit more of that. You all had a lot to say about Ariana, his and Aberforth and the way that we understand these characters. Some of us gave voice to the fact that we really love diving into the more obscure characters that we don't get to spend a lot of time with. And I'm really excited about that. Next week we are going to be talking about. Wait, let me get my list. The rest of the teachers that we haven't spoken about. Flitwick, Sprout, Pomfrete, Hooch, Charity, and Bins. I haven't figured out exactly my angle on that, but it's coming and it's going to be a good time because that will round out our teachers and then we will do a best and worst teacher episode and then we will get back to our surveys. And so we had a little bit of a reprieve, but we're coming back, don't you worry. But let's get into this Prof. Response episode.
- [09:34]
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- [10:26]
Professor Julian Womble
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- [10:31]
Professor Julian Womble
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- [10:34]
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- [11:05]
Grainger HVAC Technician Voice
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- [11:46]
Professor Julian Womble
The first theme that came up was one that talked a lot about grief and secrecy and socialization. And it was really built off of things that Sophie brought to bear. In the post episode chat, Sophie wrote, your children. No, not your children. Your secrets. Raise your children. Had my jaw dropped. I was especially struck by the read on Aberforth as a story of grief turned inward with forced to remain silent. Sophie goes on to say, what happens to a populace who became. Who becomes complacent from grief? And how do we drill down like Alberforth and find a way to join our own Order of the Phoenix, even when our system fails us and leaves us to perish in our own grief? One of the lines that returns to me, and it's something that I think about a lot in my own life, but also just out, you know, in general, is your secrets. Raise your children. And the more I've thought about it, the more I realize that what makes that so unsettling is that it doesn't just describe the Dumbledore household, it describes the wizarding world, broadly construed because Kindred Dumbledore's secrecy is not unusual, it's not novel, it's not even especially extreme by the standards of this world. It is in fact a perfectly rational response to the rules she has learned her entire life. And that's what makes it so dangerous. We often talk about secrecy in the wizarding world as policy, the Statute of Secrecy, the restriction on underage magic, memory modification. But secrecy isn't just something the Ministry enforces, it's something that the world itself teaches. It's a value system, a moral framework, a way of understanding what safety looks like. And that framework shapes families. Long before the Ministry ever intervenes, when Sophie described Aberforth's story as grief turned inward, forced to remain silent, and then asks a question of us. What happens to a populace who becomes complacent from grief? The question itself moves us out of the realm of individual tragedy and into a space of political theorizing. Grief is not only an emotion, it's a condition. It's an atmosphere that can be cultivated and contained and weaponized A society that teaches people to grieve privately, quietly, without collective language or structural recourse is a society that becomes easy to govern. People who grieve alone don't organize. They don't demand change. They don't demand or imagine alternatives. They endure quietly, privately, alone. And this isn't a moral failing. This is a socialized survival tactic. Kendra Dumbledore is not choosing secrecy because she is cold or misguided or overly proud, which is how we hear other characters cast her. By my estimation, she is choosing secrecy because she understands the rules of the world she lives in. She knows what happens to children who become visible in the wrong way. She knows the institutions are not designed to ask, what do you need? But rather, how do we manage the risk you pose. She is a marginalized person, despite what she wants people to believe. She is Muggle born and operates from a space as if she is not. So she is intimately aware of what it is to be a marginalized person in this world. And she learns, as many marginalized communities do, how to navigate dominant space. In her case, because of the way that magic is set up, she tries to pass. Other people are not as able to do that. Ariana is not able to do that. And so when Kendra hides Ariana, she's not acting outside the system. In fact, she's asking. She's acting in perfect accordance with it. This is what it means to say that your secrets raise your children. Because secrecy itself is never neutral. It's pedagogical, it's socialized. It teaches children what kinds of truths are dangerous. It teaches them which emotions must be managed quietly. It teaches them that safety is not something you ask for, it's something you perform. It's something that you create and curate yourself. When I was younger, I don't know if you know this about me, but. Or you could even guess this about me, but I had a penchant for the dramatic. And one of the things my mom always told me, which, you know, we can get into the, the pedagogy of this, but you've got to learn how to control your emotions. And I think I got a little too good at it, right? And I think it came from a space of safety, right? Of protection, of wanting me to feel as if I was not putting myself in a position that would draw too much attention to me, because in certain contexts that's not good, right? And so there's a way in which self control becomes a kind of auto protection tactic, right? The wizarding world doesn't teach people how to metabolize harm collectively, it teaches them how to contain it privately. Pain becomes something you shoulder alone. Pain becomes something that you have to navigate and pretend that you don't experience. Disclosure becomes a liability. Visibility becomes risk. This is Molly Weasley at home by herself while everyone's away at the Quidditch World cup clutching the clock. This is Tonks or Ginny or anyone worried as the battle of Hogwarts rages on. This is Aberforth. Aberforth's grief does not become an ideology. It doesn't become abstraction or some moral philosophy or strategy. It curdles inside of him. It sharpens. It teaches him to keep his head down, stay small, distrust institutions and narratives that promise protection, but deliver disappearance. When Sophie asks how we drill down like Aberforth and still find a way into an Order of the Phoenix, I think what's really being asked here is how people raised in secrecy learn to choose solidarity and community. How do you build collective resistance in a world that has taught you that survival depends on silence? When I think a lot about the idea of the bootstrap narrative that we're so often taught, I think. I don't know if this is something that's like. I'm sure every society and country has this, but in the United States, it's the notion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, right? Which is to say, do it yourself, work hard. It's this notion of meritocratic and, you know, achievement. And if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you work hard, then you'll be able to achieve, right? And there's a way in which it invites a level of isolationism because, you know, if you don't do it, someone else will, right? There's this competitive nature that also comes along with the idea of bootstrapping, of being meritocratic, right? It's hard to be in community when you're constantly competing. And I think that there is a space for us to also understand what it looks like, even amongst marginalized populations who would do well to be in community with one another, but are constantly fighting and striving to get recognized by dominant power structures. And so when it comes to the idea of grieving or surviving, it is something that we are conditioned to believe needs to be done by themselves. Because you never want to see. You never want them to see you sweat. You don't want them to see you down, right? Because it projects weakness. And so when we think about what this means in the wizarding world, the wizarding world invites this level of isolationism, and why wouldn't is itself isolated from non magical space, right? It relies on people being too tired, too isolated, too burdened by private pain and panic and fear here to challenge the structures that created all of that stuff in the first place. It relies on the idea that what hurts you personally has nothing to do with politics, that naming harm publicly is reckless and that endurance and perseverance in the face of state caused harm is virtuous, but only if you do it in silence. God, that sounds so familiar. This is why Kendra's secrecy can't be read as an individual failure of imagination, but rather a byproduct of a world that confuses silence with safety and treats visibility as a threat and containment as careful. When secrets raise children, what those children learn is not how to heal, but how to survive quietly. And the tragedy is that that quiet survival often looks like compliance. From the outside it looks like you're fine. It looks like having a breakdown behind closed doors. It looks like smiling in everyone's face and saying, oh yeah, no, it's all good. But inside you're losing it. But you don't want to let them see that. And we see so many characters in these books do that. Harry does it all the time. Dumbledore does it all the time. Aberforth isn't the only character who navigates this space and feels that they need to keep it all inside. So when we talk about the Dumbledores as a family, we can't isolate their choices from the world that made those choices legible, reasonable and necessary. Kendra is not inventing secrecy, she's inheriting it. Because your secrets raise your children, secrets raise societies. And then she passes it on to Aberforth, to Ariana, to Albus. The danger of a world like this is not only that it produces hidden children like Ariana, it's that it produces adults who believe that the best they can hope for is to endure without being noticed, that asking for more for care, for support is dangerous, and that grief loss should be born alone. And if that's the lesson that your world teaches you from childhood, then secrecy doesn't just hide harm, it produces it and then it reproduces it. Foreign.
- [24:38]
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- [25:38]
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- [26:13]
Professor Julian Womble
One of the other things that really stood out in the the post episode chat for this for the last episode, was the conversation surrounding institutions like St. Mungos, fenty wrote. I hadn't considered St. Mungos like that an institution rather than a place of healing, although they do some of that there. It really does sound like post VL diva. The whole structure of the wizarding world needed to be entirely rethought from top to bottom, nadia wrote. How do we reconcile the use of Obliviate, which seems to be the standard response to accidental exposure to the magical world, with the dangers they are seemingly protecting children like Ariana from, because this would not have helped her at all. Yet again, the youngest and most vulnerable members of this society are not protected by the mechanism this society has in place. Does the Statute of Secrecy actually achieve what it intends to achieve, even if the intent is made more clear by examining what happened to Ariana? It's my turn. I forgot that we had to do those transitions. One of the things that becomes impossible to ignore once we try to connect themes one and two is that the secrecy of the wizarding world doesn't just organize institutions, it organizes blame. Secrecy is not neutral. There's always an object, and very often the object is the person or persons who have been harmed. For Ariana, secrecy functions as both the sword and the shield. It is the reason she's attacked in the first place, because Muggles are kept Ignorant of magic and given no framework for understanding what they are seeing. Ignorance turns curiosity into entitlement, entitlement into demand, and demand into violence. That's the sword. But once Ariana is harmed, secrecy becomes a shield, because now disclosure itself becomes dangerous. At that point, Ariana's injury is no longer treated as wrong. That demands repair. It's a liability, something that threatens the broader societal goal of concealment. And when harm is treated as liability rather than injustice, the system's priorities become exceedingly clear. And this is where the logic starts to resemble patterns we know all too well from our own world. In many systems surrounding violence against people's bodies, what we see is that the usage of pre existing ideas about these individuals informs whether they're believed or not. It informs the perceived plausibility of their stories. And on average, these individuals are disbelieved because believing them would require accountability. It would require interrogating structures and institutions that allowed the harm to happen in the first place and then left no recourse once it occurred. If harm were not a liability, healing would be possible. But if healing threatens the system, then harm must be managed instead, or ignored. And many of us are living through a time right now where we are seeing the rise of certain ideological perspectives that have been laying dormant or operating in secret, or living in a space that does not require the vast majority of people to know. And the systems that exist in the world allow for this to persist despite the projection of societal progress. And I think that this is the bind that Ariana is caught in. Her trauma is not her fault, nor is her magic. The instability that she begins to experience with her magic is not the result of her own or anyone's negligence or recklessness. It is the predictable outcome of violence followed by isolation. And yet, in a secrecy based world, her healing would require visibility. And visibility is dangerous. So the system quietly shifts the question. It's not what happened to this child, but what would happen if people found out. Once that shift occurs, Ariana is no longer the victim of violence. She is the problem. And this is the most damaging and damning part of the Statute of Secrecy. Not that it hides magic, but that it redefines harm as disruption. And when harm is disruption, the person who is harmed becomes responsible for managing it. This is why institutions like St. Mungo's and Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic have to be understood together as institutions. Because yes, on the surface, they do important work. Hogwarts educates, St. Mungo's, heals certain injuries. The Ministry regulates daily Life. These functions are real, but underneath them all is a shared maintain secrecy at all costs. And that imperative means that some forms of suffering can never be fully addressed, only contained. Ariana's experience is exactly why these systems exist in the first place. Her story becomes proof that secrecy is necessary, that ignorance must be preserved, exposure is dangerous. Yet her reality cannot be reconciled with the institutional logic that her suffering is used to justify. And that's the cycle. The system creates the conditions for harm. The harm is then used to justify the system, and the person harmed is left with no avenue for repair, reconciliation or reparation. And this is what it means to say that secrecy keeps the people who are harmed, harmed. If Ariana were healed, truly healed, the system would have to confront its own role in producing her suffering. It would have to admit that ignorance isn't safety, that concealment is not protection, and that the violence done to her was not an anomaly, but a foreseeable outcome of the world as it is. And that's what the wizarding world wants to avoid. So instead, Ariana is hidden, managed, isolated. Her pain is privatized, shoved away. Her instability is treated as an unfortunate but inevitable reality, and everything around her remains unchanged. Her world, the immediacy of the world around the Dumbledore shifts, but nothing else does. And when we think about structural inequality, that's what it is. When there are harmed populations who have no recourse in a broader population because a dominant group is uninterested in engaging with this reality of a marginalized population, you can't be healed in a system where your healing threatens the goal structure of the system. It's the paradox at the heart of Ariana's life, that the very thing meant to keep the magical world safe makes it impossible for her to be whole. Because her suffering is not a deviation from the Statute of Secrecy. In some ways, I would argue it's the most honest expression. And until the world that she was a part of is willing to treat harm not as a liability, but as an indictment of its own design. The cycles continue, not just for Ariana, but anyone whose pain cannot be neatly hidden without consequence. Bettering your business takes working with the best. With the James Hardy alliance, you gain access to leads, trust, training, networking, and.
- [35:34]
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- [35:35]
Professor Julian Womble
Siding in North America. Achieve new levels of success by joining the James Hardy alliance today. One of my favorite things about this community is that I am constantly learning from you all. And in this iteration of things that Prof. Didn't know, but is learning fridging which I had no idea what that was, but I learned from the comments today and that the idea of fridging is a trope where a woman character is harmed in a way that is seemingly gratuitous to motivate a male hero. And I did not know that was a thing. And that's patriarchy at work. Okay, but this came up in the post episode chat because Brittany said, not gonna lie, I'm a little disappointed. I'm a little disappointed we didn't get into the fact that Ariana was fridged. Listen, y', all, I can't get into things I don't know about. And baby, I've never heard of anybody's fridging of any kind. Again, patriarchy at work. But now we're getting into it. So take that patriarchy. Britt also wrote, I'll shout from my heel that Ariana, Kendra and Lily were all fridged to further Albus's story and give him motivation. And that really needs to be discussed. Conceal, don't feel. Or in this case, conceal, don't heal. That's for those of you who don't know, although I'm sure many of you do. That is a reference to the one and only Frozen. I would sing it for you, but I'm a little jet lagged. My voice isn't quite what it needs to be. And I'm only giving you the best vocal that I can give you. And this idea of fridging is really fascinating. And Andrea, or Andrea, I. I don't know which variation it is. I'm hoping it's one of those two. If not my apologies. As we. My mom always says, charge it to my head and not to my heart. But Andrea, Aunt Andrea wrote Ariana's story struck me as a painful example of how girls, bodies and magic are often treated as commodities. They are something others feel entitled to use and control. And magical society is more interested in hiding the harm than addressing it. It's my turn. It was okay. All right. It wasn't the best vocal I've given, but something. And one of the things that I want to be careful about here is not to replace one assumption with another. We often talk about Ariana as if she never spoke, as if her trauma rendered her entirely voiceless. But the reality is that the canonical text never actually tells us that. What it does tell us is that we never hear her. And I think that that distinction matters here. And when we're thinking about the purpose of Ariana's narrative and this idea of fridging and who are the people who tend to be affected by fridging and who are the beneficiaries of it? This distinction really does matter. There's nothing in the books that definitively says that Ariana is nonverbal or incapable of communication. What we know about her comes almost entirely through memories, interpretations and emotional reckonings of others, primarily Albus and Aberforth. That means Ariana's silence is not necessarily about her inability to speak. It is about the fact that her story is always mediated. Right? So in statistics, there's. There are two different ways in which we can understand relationships, right? There's an outcome, and then you can have a mediation, which means that the relationship that you're looking at between variable A and variable B is informed by something that's happening, an intervening variable. We'll call it variable C. And so that the outcome variable, variable B, a certain percentage of that outcome, is informed by variable C. Right, that. That's mediation. And so what's happening here, right, is that Ariana's narrative, which would be the outcome, her story that we get as readers, is mediated, right, by the who's telling it, either Aberforth or. Or Albus. In this case, we don't get anything from Ariana directly. We get Ariana filtered through fear, guilt, grief. And that mediation happens inside a much larger structure because a person can speak and still not be heard. A person can communicate and still not be understood. They can advocate for themselves and still not be seen as anything other than a problem. And failures in listening are not random. They're shaped by the world around us. They're shaped by our own understanding of whose voices deserve to be heard, whose narratives deserve to be interpreted versus just given to us as they are. And in the case of the Dumbledores, Ariana's voice, whatever form it took, existed inside a family that had learned secrecy as survival, A family that understood visibility as danger. A household operating inside a much broader magical society where disclosure invited intervention and intervention meant removal. So in many ways, even if we did hear Ariana speak, even if she tried to express fear or pain, confusion, need, that expression would have still been constrained by the same logic governing everyone else. Keep it contained. And this is where the Obscurial lore complicates our assumptions in important ways. As I was flying to Rome, I started watching the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the first movie. And we're introduced more fully to the notion of Obscurials, children who are forced to move their magic inward because of some traumatic event that's occurred to them, and it becomes volatile and destructive. And in the first movie, we meet Credence Barebone, and what we realize is that experiencing this profound trauma doesn't erase the person's ability to move or speak or relate. Yes, Credence is constrained and abused and silenced, but he's not absent. He is an active participant in so many of the things that are going on in that first movie. And as I was watching it and thinking about the episode and whether or not I would do a Prof. Response, I thought to myself, wow, there's a lot here for us to think about as it pertains to Ariana, because we actually don't know what Ariana's capacities were. We don't know how or if she tried to communicate. We don't know what she asked for or whether those requests were heard. We don't know whether or not these outbursts were the only way that she had to express herself, or simply the only ways that were remembered and thus communicated to us later on. This is the problem with fridging, right, is that when your narrative and your story and your trauma are only used for the purposes of moving along the narratives of the dominant society, the nuances are lost. So all Aberforth and Albus remember are these big, explosive moments. The moment they lose their mother, the moment they lose their father. And that's reasonable and understandable, but what about everything that happened in between? Do you lose your sister and who she is even after the accident, because all you focus on is the parts of her that are no longer what you think they should be or are the parts that you have to hide? And so, because you're so used to secrecy and hiding things, the only thing that you can think about are the things that you're hiding. And I don't think it's because Ariana lacked an interior world. I just think it's because there isn't one that's given to us. Her whole story is told through people who were afraid of the institutions, of exposure, what her pain and power might unleash. And that fear shapes how her behavior is interpreted, what parts of her are remembered, and which parts are set aside. So Ariana becomes someone who is managed rather than cared for. Her unpredictability is documented. Her danger is emphasized. The interiority is left completely and utterly uninterrogated. And that pattern mirrors exactly what we've been talking about. Institutions. Just as the Ministry reframes harm as liability, the family reframes expression as risk. Just as institutions manage instability rather than heal it, the narrative presented to us about Ariana manages her rather than listening to her. Secrecy operates here not just as a policy, but a lens, one that determines what kinds of voices are legible and which ones are inconvenient. I think about this a lot. One of the things I was going to do if I didn't record this new episode was I was going to post a bonus episode that I did for the chronic overthinkers and the deep divers on the history of magic. And we spend a lot of time talking about history and talking about, you know, the victors go, the spoils go to the victors. Right? And that the narrative that you get to understand about a person is based on who gets to. Who gets to. To tell the narrative, who is privileged enough to be able to tell the narrative. And Ariana's narrative is one that she doesn't get to tell. And that is in and of itself telling. And that's why I want to be clear. Ariana's silence is not proof of incapacity. It's evidence of a world and a family that did not know how to hear her without endangering themselves and. Or a group of people whose unresolved trauma, in navigating her trauma, meant that they centered themselves in a narrative where they were on the outside and in doing so, removed her from the narrative altogether. And this is the violence of mediation, because Ariana's suffering is real, but it is also always understood through what it did to others. We learn how it shaped Kendra's fear and Percival's rage, how it shaped Albus's guilt and Aberforth's resentment. But we don't learn how it shaped Ariana herself. And when a victim's experience is entirely filtered through the consequences they produce, what gets lost is not just their voice, it's their humanity. And so the tragedy here is not just that Ariana had nothing to say. The tragedy is that everything about the world she lived in, societal, institutional, familial, was structured to ensure that whatever she said, if she said anything at all, would remain contained in, translated, and ultimately unheard. And that's what secrecy does at its most intimate level. It doesn't just hide the harm. It also teaches us which voices are safe to listen to and which ones remain inside the bubble. We've now come to the part of the episode where I am going to reflect. I want this reflection to be one that invites us to sit with Percival and Kendra Dumbledore not as symbols of anything, not as moral foils, but as people doing an extraordinary amount of work inside a world that gives them no real viable options. Because one of the things that becomes clear once we take away all of the sheen and shine and kind of what we're putting out into the world so that people leave us alone. What we see once we take it all seriously, is that Percival and Kendra are not responding to one crisis. They are responding to a stack of systemic failures. Institutional, social, cultural, all at once. So let's start with Percival. Percival's retaliation against the boys who harmed Ariana and is often framed as an emotional excess, as a man who let his feelings get the better of him and paid the price. But that reading only works if we assume that the Ministry of Magic would have done something meaningful had he not acted. And there is no reason to believe that the Ministry's response to harm committed by Muggles is not justice. It's literally erasure. Obliviate removes evidence, but it doesn't repair the damage. And this is a theme that we keep coming back to, and we've been coming back to for Dumbledore, for Snape, that having an understanding doesn't change the outcome. And in this case, removing a memory doesn't change what was done. It doesn't name the wrongdoing. It doesn't acknowledge the victim. So when Percival acts, he is not stepping outside of a functioning system. He's responding to institutional abandonment. Several of you pushed me to rethink this moment. Not as revenge, but as diversion. What if Percival didn't lose control? What if he made a choice? In the Discord, Eric brought up a really interesting set of points about his own relationship and understanding about why Percival did what he did. And I think that there was a time where I too thought, why wouldn't you make a better choice for your family? You had to have known that you were going to pay the price for this. You had to have known that there was a really good chance that in attacking these non magical children that you were going to be the one that was going to pay the price. Eric wrote. Historically, I have hated Percival Dumbledore. I always viewed him as a man who let his emotions get away with him and sought petty revenge and got thrown in the ban when his family needed him most. Now, I'm not sure this episode invited me to read Papa D as actually truly trying to protect his daughter specifically, and his family more broadly. The idea that Ariana would have been institutionalized if the Ministry learned of her condition is a dark one. What if the attack on the Muggle boys wasn't about revenge or justice, but protection. What if P dumby attacked those boys to cover up what happened to his daughter and just how traumatized she was. What if he chose the ban for himself to keep his daughter out of St. Mungo's? What an amazing thing for us to consider here. Because if the ministry is focused on Percival, they're not looking into Ariana. If he becomes a criminal, she doesn't become the case. If he absorbs the visibility, then she gets to remain hidden, she gets to be a secret. And suddenly the ban doesn't look like failure, it looks like a sacrifice. And that doesn't make what Percival did good, but it makes it legible to us. It becomes one of the tools that we have to see a parent who believes that the institutions will not protect his child. And again, I don't want this to kind of come off as a thing where it's like. And that justifies everything. I don't believe that. But I do think that if we look at it through the lens of an understanding of the system, there's something about that that I think resonates with anyone who has been in a position of caretaker and a recognition of what it means now that your daughter is a marginalized person, a victim, and you don't have faith in the system. And I think about this a lot, right? Like I think about the idea of, you know, what it is to exist in a space where you have a very clear understanding that no matter what the institutions say, you know what they're about and what they're not about, and you know what they do, what they will do and what they won't do. And I think Percival understands if you want justice for your kid, you have to do it yourself. Because everyone else is operating from a place of fear and not a place of justice, not a place of protection. And now you've realized what's happened to your daughter, you've got to protect her from these boys, from the government that's going to just lock her up and throw away the key. And now let's talk about Kendra. Because in my mind, Kendra is doing a different kind of work. A more quiet, constant and deeply gendered kind of work. She's a Muggle born woman in a society structured by pure blood supremacy. She understands this. She understands how reputations stick. She understands how easily shame becomes your future. She recognizes that visibility is not neutral, but it is dangerous. And so when Ariana is harmed, Kendra does what the wizarding world taught her. She manages the secrecy. But she is not just hiding her daughter's trauma. She's juggling multiple overlapping risks. Ariana's unstable magic, Ariana's absence from Hogwarts, her own Muggle born status, the future of Aberforth and Albus, the family's social standing now that Percival's in the band, and the Ministry's gaze. This is not just what some might call a maternal instinct. This is a structural labor. This is an intimate and deep understanding of the world around you that really only comes from being marginalized. The unpaid work of compensating for a world that doesn't know how to care for you or the people that you care about. One of my favorite moments in the series is at Bill and Fleur's wedding when Auntie Muriel is drunk off her. Well, anyways. And she starts divulging all the secrets about the Dumbledores that she knows that she's read about in her anticipation for Rita Skeeter's new book. And she recounts a version of events where Ariana is believed to be a squib. And it's interesting because what matters is not whether the story is actually true, but why it sticks. And the reality that the community of magical people know that something's not wasn't right. They knew something wasn't right. They knew something was being hidden, and they filled in the gaps with what made sense to them. Trauma is complicated and abuse can be destabilizing. De what? Destabilizing. But squibness fits into the hierarchy neatly. What would Kendra be having to hide her daughter for if not embarrassment? In a world where no one was recognizing the role that trauma played in your magic, it stands to reason that people are going to go to the thing that would make them feel the most embarrassed and say, that must be what's happening here. And so in that regard, they're not. Instead of asking, what happened to the child, they're asking, why are they hiding her? What is she lacking? What's wrong with her? And what's more interesting here, and I recognize that Kendra is very proud, but we don't get a lot of a sense of people from the community, except for maybe Bathilda Bagshot, checking on her. And the logic then becomes, if Kendra isn't using the resources available to her, then there must be something scandalous to hide. And that does an outlandish amount of damage because it shifts responsibility away from institutions and onto the family. It reframes the withdrawal from society as a confirmation of wrongdoing and allows the magical world to avoid a far more uncomfortable question. Why don't they have the tools to help this child? This is a world that can recognize squibs. It can recognize dangerous, dark, bad magic. It recognizes rule breaking. But a child whose magic has been altered by violence, that possibility barely registers. Everything that happened to Ariana happens in the 1880s. And by the time we get to the Fantastic Beast series, which I believe is taking place in the 1920s, there are not a lot of cases of Obscurials. I think, if I remember correctly, there are two that had happened, like, in a century. So this means that there's a lot of inexperience with this particular part of the magical population, which means that Ariana doesn't just fall through the cracks. She literally exists outside of the imagination of an entire society. Which means they don't have the mental wherewithal to even be able to provide the kind of care that she would need, because they don't even know what that care looks like, because they don't know anything about her. And when a society cannot imagine a form of harm, it can't respond with compassion. It responds with rumors and stigmas and distance instead. And this is where I think Percival and Kendra's choices converge. They are not making opposite decisions. They are responding to the same impossible structure from different angles. Kendra absorbs silence, Percival absorbs blame. And regardless, the cost is catastrophic. Ariana is hidden, Albus is burdened, and Aberforth is trapped in secrecy. Percival is removed and Kendra dies, holding everything together. But also inside, no one is protected. And that, to me, is the final indictment. This is not a story about bad parents or flawed individuals. It's a story about a world that requires families to absorb the cost of its failures and then punishes them for how they do it. And this is where I want to end by bringing it back to us. Because the wizarding world treats Ariana in a way that is not unfamiliar to many of us. In our own global society, victims are routinely blamed, not because their stories are implausible, but because believing them would require us to shift our own understandings of what it means to be in community with each other. It would require us to interrogate the structures that allowed harm to occur. So instead, we'll ask things like, well, why didn't they say something? Why aren't they getting the help that they need? Why aren't they using the resources that are available to them? We look at them, and if they withdraw, we're suspicious. We treat their silence as guilt and we treat their harm as liability. And in doing so, we replicate the same cycle. The people who are harmed remain harmed, while the systems that failed them remain intact. Ariana's story is devastating, not because it's unique, but because it isn't. It shows us what happens when a world is more invested in preserving order rather than providing care, and more comfortable with rumors than responsibility. When there's a higher level of comfort in managing the narratives of victims rather than simply listening to them. And if we take that seriously, then the question this episode leaves us with is not just about the wizarding world. It's about whether we are willing to build systems that recognize harm even when it's inconvenient, and whether we are willing to treat victims not as problems to be managed, but as people with voices that need to be heard. Because until we do secrecy, we'll continue to raise children and keep failing them. Too. Foreign. This has been another episode of Critical Magic Theory. I am Professor Julian Womble and if you like today's episode. First of all, thank you. Please feel free to like rate, subscribe and do all the things that one does where pods are cast. Please, please please check out our listener merch drop criticalmagictheory.com hit the merch button. It will take you there. It's amazing. Let's support these charities, Trans Lifeline, the Okra Project and the Palestine Children's Relief Fund with as much as you can. Please feel free to share it. If you can't give with your own finances. Completely understandable. No pressure, no condemnation. I'm so grateful that we are back. Next week we will be having our two year anniversary. I don't know. I don't know what I'll do. Who's even to say? There will be a post episode chat for this episode and I can't wait to see what you think. Until then, be critical and stay magical my friends. Bye.