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J.K. Rowling Opened Up About Hogwarts Demographics

by Alanna Bennett

I love J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series with all my heart. It had a huge, perhaps disconcerting hand in shaping me as a human. It's the greatest. One of its flaws, though, has always been in the realm of representation. It teaches readers a lot about tolerance, and the story is full of beautiful allegory, and yet Hogwarts wasn't the most representative Wizard habitat, whether it's issues with Cho Chang's name or the argument that Dumbledore's gayness never being mentioned in the books doesn't exactly count as LGBTQ presence.

Blame it on Scotland, blame it on whatever you want; a series that so many varying kinds of people looked up to so much is always going to come up against criticisms that not everybody reading is present in the story. Those criticisms aren't unfounded, wrong, or automatically "right," but what they are is an understandable side effect. But hey, at least on Tuesday we got a little Twitter time from Rowling herself as she talked a tiny bit about Hogwarts' denominations.

She didn't go into detail, and her "revelations" mainly revolved around what religions were and were not present in the Hogwarts she dreamed up in her head. First off, she offered a nice Hanukkah gift to many when she revealed that Hogwarts did indeed have some form of a Jewish population:

Granted, this is only proof that one lone Jewish student existed at Hogwarts. Must have been lonely.

But she went on to sooth some other people's representation fears.

I wonder what the wiccans are gonna say about this.