J.K. Rowling, the author of the beloved Harry Potter series, has given most of us a wonderful adventure in a world where magic was real and everything could pe possible. For some of us, Hogwarts and Hogsmeade felt like a second home, especially if you grew up with Harry Potter. Not to mention that the golden trio, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley, felt like something made out of flesh and bone instead of being printed simply on paper.
Life lessons were hidden among it's pages, showing kids all around the world that friendship, or love, can get you through everything, though sometimes it hurts and everything might not be the way you wanted. However, in a series that is popularly donned as "perfect", there are some huge and little flaws among it, though often overlooked for the sake of Harry Potter staying flawless.
The first major flaw that struck me was the fact that the main girls within the series (Hermione Granger, and Ginny Weasley), treated effeminate and bubbly girls badly, almost cruel, just because they were and acted "girly". For example, among the fans of Harry Potter, there still is a hate towards Lavender Brown, a student who is predominantly kind, cheerful, and loyal, though at times she can be needy and clingy. Not to mention Hermione's treatment of Fleur Delacour, another brave, pretty girl who willingly entered herself in a competition where she could die, and afterwards worked a part-time job at Gringott's to improve her English, meeting her future husband: Bill Weasley. She stayed a time at The Burrow to meet Bill's family, causing Ginny to nickname her "Phlegm", showing how cruel the girls could be to other girls if they weren't smart bookworms, or talented tomboys, demonstrating sexism where it could have been avoided.
J.K. Rowling is famously known for declaring many things about her infamous series after the epilogue, such as Dumbledore being gay and Hermione being black, which would have been great if only had she said it on the orginal books with much more development and emphasis. Instead, Dumbledore ended up being the stereotype of an old man with a repressed sexuality, ultimately dying alone after the failure of his relationship with Grindenwald, which doesn't show much empowerment towards the LGBTQ+ community like Rowling intended. Hermione, a girl with frizzy brown hair and cartoonishly large front teeth was set in the wizarding world as black, which does not count if it's not mentioned explicitly in the books. However, if the vague descriptions of frizzy hair and large front teeth counted, they would be extremely racist as the details sound like the main details of racist and crass comic strip depicting a black person. And, let's not forget that in Goblet of Fire, Hermione tried to fix her attributes with magic to become "beautiful", making her hair straight and her teeth average. What kind of message does that send to the kids reading the books now?
Instead, what I would like to see would Rowling mentioning that Harry Potter was indeed set in a whitewashed 90's world, instead of her trying to add diversity like it's an afterthought, and stating that she is trying to do better than she did back when the book were published.