When she [a Japanese fan] met Rupert, she was obsessed with his eyelashes. And his eyebrows and she kept wanting to touch them. It’s a very strange thing! The best part about that is if you know Rupert, like, he cannot cope with that kind of thing. He’s so struggling to keep it together at that moment and still be the polite nice person that he is and not just laugh!
- Daniel Radcliffe on The Jonathan Ross Show.
Dan has the hardest job because Harry on the page is the most difficult, the most nebulous. He’s just perfect, I think.
Rupert is just a genius. I don’t think anyone ever needed to tell him how to play Ron. He’s just known. Comedically he’s just spot on. You couldn’t teach that.
一 JK Rowling
Ron is racist - and that’s great
Ron Weasley’s character is consciously written as somewhat racist. Not as racist as Malfoy, of course - he doesn’t scoff at mudbloods and halfbloods, and he doesn’t see himself as superior at all. Still, he unquestionably accepts the inferior position of house elves (they love serving), when he finds out that Lupin’s werewolf his reaction is not only scared but also disgusted (Don’t touch me!) and he is clearly very uncomfortable finding out that Hagrid is half-giant (giants are wild and savage).
And this is brilliant. Because it demonstrates that racism isn’t only present in clearly malicious and evil people, in the Malfoys and Blacks - it’s also there in warm, kind, funny people who just happened to learn some pretty toxic things growing up in a pretty toxic society. And they can unlearn them too, with some time and effort. Ron eventually accepts Hagrid’s parentage, lets Lupin bandage his leg and in the final battle, he worries about the safety of the house elves.
Some people are prejudiced because they are evil, and some people are prejudiced because they don’t know better yet. And those people can learn better, and become better people. And that’s an important lesson. The lesson taught about discrimination shouldn’t be “only evil people do it”, because then all readers will assume it doesn’t apply to them. Instead old JK teaches us “you too are probably doing it, and you should do stop ASAP”.
yeah snape had a horrible childhood but he also
uses various racial slurs, emotionally abuses child of childhood crush for having resemblance to said crush’s husband, ((is literally a friendzoned dudebro)), flushed remus’ career down the drain over personal resentment knowing fully well he’d been homeless, jobless, all alone, and knowing fully well remus would not get another job,
abused his students ((remember the “i see no difference” to hermione when a slytherin cursed her teeth, something she was self-conscious about, instead of punishing the one who cursed her)), the students he was supposed to take care of, to the point where he was the worst fear of one of them
the fact severus snape formed when neville longbottom was supposed to see his worst fear in the boggart says a lot tbh and i know it was supposed to be a funny moment haha silly neville but to me it says a lot that despite there being dementors and ghosts and massive fucking spiders, and having his parents tortured half to death and into madness, neville’s worst fear is one of his teachers
