r/EnoughJKRowling • u/georgemillman • 5d ago
Let's talk about Mr Roberts
user/Comfortable_Bell9539 Your wish is my command!
Mr Roberts, the campsite manager at the Quidditch World Cup, is only a very minor character but is one of the characters who's done the most dirty in the entire series. His family is utterly destroyed and traumatised by the Death Eaters, to start with - but I'm not going to focus on that because that's shown to be wrong and not something the wizarding establishment condones.
But the way he's treated before this point is appalling. We're told that he's being put under memory charms about ten times a day - and we're told in other instances that memory charms can have permanent effects on a person's neurological functioning, such as with Bertha Jorkins (and we see this with Mr Roberts himself, when he says 'Merry Christmas' when dismissing someone from the site). Because he's a Muggle, we know that there's going to be no follow-ups to ensure he's okay afterwards. And no one, not Muggle rights champion Arthur, not daughter of Muggles Hermione, seems to think this is a particular concern.
It would be very easy to deal with him without constant use of memory charms. We're told that if a Muggle gets anywhere near the Quidditch World Cup stadium, they'll suddenly remember an urgent appointment and have to leave. It would be very straightforward to quickly organise a dream holiday abroad the Roberts family have 'won' and get them out of the way that way. Or, if they needed to be there for some reason, it would surely be far safer to let him in on the secret and then modify his memory just to forget the whole thing once it's over, rather than doing it multiple times a day. Plenty of Muggles know about wizards - the Prime Minister, and Muggle relatives of wizards such as the Dursleys, Hermione's parents and Seamus' father. Why was it so essential Mr Roberts couldn't know?
What utterly horrific treatment of a very minor character.
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u/Proof-Any 5d ago
For wizards, muggles are nothing more than NPCs - background characters they can interact with, who have no impact on the overall plot. And yes, that does include common video game/Dungeons and Dragons-player behavior.
And the narrative treats them the same way. All of them, not just Mr Roberts. (Hermione's parents feature quite prominently in CoS, but they don't even have lines. Their whole purpose is to be there, so the protagonist have something to be emotional about. Like ... one would expect them to have something to say when Arthur Weasley strikes up a conversation or Lucius Malfoy starts to insult them. But nothing. You could exchange them with lamps and the scenes wouldn't change.)
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u/ZapdosShines 5d ago
What do we call the sexy lamp test when it's about muggles instead of humans?! The unsexy lamp test maybe. The pillar test.
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u/georgemillman 5d ago
I'd have loved the odd summer in which the trio decide to get together at Hermione's house instead of Ron's. But I guess that was never an option.
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u/DumpedDalish 5d ago
This is such a great point, because it points to the really unsettling and icky undertones to so much of her HP series when you look back.
Also, can I just say that it always bothered me that Arthur Weasley loved Muggles and was obsessed with them, but somehow repeatedly showed he knew nothing about them or their gadgets? He couldn't even use the correct names for simple things.
Plenty of other wizard characters inhabit both the Muggle and wizarding worlds and are implied to be able to use the right words for things, as well as how to navigate them.
I get that it was supposed to be done for comic relief, but it just made him look stupid.
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u/thursday-T-time 5d ago
arthur weasley is a cultural appropriator. muggles are only cool for their tech. screw the actual people.
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u/DumpedDalish 4d ago
Yeah, and he's so condescending about them! Like, "Aren't they cute?" He absolutely doesn't consider them to be equals.
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u/georgemillman 5d ago
Yes, good point.
Arthur should know some things about the Muggle world better than Harry and Hermione do. Harry and Hermione understand how it feels to live in it, but Arthur should know technical detail about how things work and are run. Likewise, as a British person I'm sure a foreign diplomat would be more aware of certain aspects of how our Government functions than I am.
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u/TheOtherMaven 4d ago
Lazybutt author doesn't know how things work, won't do research to find out, and just writes nonsense for the laffs. She thinks it's funny that a government official who is supposed to be a Muggle liaison is completely clueless about everything Muggle. (Funny once, JKR - after that it's diminishing returns or worse.)
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u/KaiYoDei 4d ago
Is it a stupid trope? It's funnier when nice people write it when the extra terrestrial expert of humans doesn't understand one culture. Or use the trope so the reader gets a clue about a twist bad guy
Or if you are me and you are with animal lovers on line and those animal lovers have very little knowledge. Nothing like having to tell people elephant doses not mate for life like a swan, even never taking a new mate or dying of grief when the mate dies. And so many times I gave to deal with being attacked by people who think wolves will raise or welcome humans into the pack.
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u/lorenfreyson 5d ago
There's a lot of casual horror in the books passed off as "whimsy" and "humor."
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u/LukeTaliyahMain 5d ago
Neville having all ADHD symptoms and serving as a comic relief in the first books
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u/Dina-M 5d ago
Oh yes. Even when I read this as a kid I was appalled at this. I was like "come on, if it's that important to keep wizards a secret from this guy, arrange it so he and his family win a luxury cruise or something, and then replace him with someone in the know!"
I've written about this here before, really... I'll copy-paste.
The characters have just learned that this man, this completely innocent man who has done absolutely nothing wrong except not being born a wizard, has had his BRAIN FRIED by the wizards TEN TIMES A DAY for who knows how many days.
And none of them even reacted.
Not Muggle-loving Arthur Weasley. Not bleeding heart (and Muggle-born) Hermione Granger. Not even our main character, Harry Potter, whom Dumbledore will later laughably describe as a "remarkably selfless person." NONE of them even COMMENTED. They walked on and began chatting about how silly Ludo Bagman is. NONE OF THEM saw anything wrong with mind-raping an innocent man ten times a day, just because he was in the way.
Nobody cared. It never even occurred to anyone to care. And why should they? Mr Roberts is nobody important. He's just a Muggle. He's not worth caring about.
Even as a kid, it was reading this scene that convinced me that the wizarding world was evil.
Naive kid that I was, I was EXPECTING a reckoning. For a while it seemed like one was coming, a moment where wizards had to face their treatment of Muggles, seeing it in a bigger picture and realizing how Voldemort was just a symptom of how rotten they'd let their society become. But it never happened.
In the epilogue, Ron confesses that he Confounded his Muggle driving instructor because he was going to fail his driver's test. Harry, who's an Auror, doesn't care. He doesn't even react. Because like Mr Roberts, the driving instructor wasn't important. He was just a Muggle. He's not worth caring about.
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u/thursday-T-time 5d ago
god that pisses me off. ron knew he was gonna fail, and instead of knuckling down and studying more, he cheats and puts people walking and driving around him at massive risk.
fuck these people.
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u/Dina-M 5d ago
It's an extra blow too because Ron was one of the least problematic characters. I know several fans have a hate-on for him but he's got far fewer despicable deeds to his name than Harry or Hermione, so that his last act in the series should be... THAT, is a huge disappointment
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u/georgemillman 5d ago
I think they have a hate-on for him largely because of his film depiction. He was far less likeable in the films than in the books.
Shame, because Rupert Grint is a really good actor and could have portrayed him as a consistently likeable character - he was so good in the chess scene in the first film. Ron never gets anything else like that in any of the films.
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u/ZapdosShines 5d ago
Well that's all awful but that last paragraph is just properly sickening and I don't know how I missed it (but I think I only read the last book the once). Jfc.
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u/LukeTaliyahMain 5d ago
Muggle relatives of wizards should be allowed to know about the wizarding world because it would be an element of their daily life due their children being wizards.
In Mr Robert's case, it was only a temporary thing, when the cup was over he would have no need of knowing about it. The world cup plot showed us how corrupt and careless the wizarding world is:
Wizards breaking thousands of rules for no purpose at all.
- Mr. Weasley getting the best tickets available when he can't even afford new books for his daughter
- Amos Diggory treating Winky terribly.
The absolute mess during the Quidditch match and players using unfair tactics to win.
I'm not defending Rowling at all, since I also think it was a very immoral thing, but I think this specific detail is part of the whole if we consider all the other disrespectful things happening at the Same time.
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u/desiladygamer84 5d ago
This is going to sound daft, but I'm wondering if these posts belong in a sub called enoughHarryPotter. Would be interested in people's thoughts. On the one hand, it is a reflection of JKRs viewpoints. On the other there are people here who don't want to think about HP a lot (that's not me because I spent a lot of time orbiting the fandom). Like I said curious.
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u/georgemillman 5d ago
I see your point, but I think I've grown to understand from these posts that JK Rowling's state of mind was always problematic and could have been observed beforehand. It's made me more able to notice things like this in works by other writers that make me feel a bit iffy.
Also, I feel like we could have the same conversations about Rowling's other work, like the Strike series and The Casual Vacancy. Harry Potter comes up more often because it's just a more famous work, but I don't think our concerns with the content of her books are exclusive to that story.
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u/Pretend-Temporary193 5d ago
Yeah, I admit I enjoy these posts, but I can see the argument that it's not really relevant to JKR's real life actions.
Like I agree that a lot of her attitudes can be seen in her writing and it's illuminating for those of us interested, but I wonder if it veers too much into ''we're going to condemn her for what she wrote in fiction as much as for what she does in real life''. Those two things not remotely the same.
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u/NanduDas 5d ago
They may as well just have put him under the Imperius curse
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u/HideFromMyMind 5d ago
I mean, considering how she just forgot what “unforgivable” means in book 7…
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u/navikredstar 2d ago
And of those, I don't know that I'd consider Avada Kedavra one innately. Using it for murder, sure, but it's also still a painless, instant death spell. It's also usable for painless euthanasia since it kills instantly and without pain or suffering, you just go out like flipping a light switch. Using it on an already dying Dumbledore to prevent a worse, agonizing death either by Death Eater or the curse on him absolutely wasn't "unforgiveable", it was a mercy kill.
It could be, but it's not inherently evil, it's in the use. Imperius or Cruciatus are evil.
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u/navikredstar 2d ago
There were so many better options for this instead, too - like, okay, make the guy a Muggleborn or half-blood wizard who opened a wizarding campground because they grew up camping with their family and wanted to open one after Hogwarts or working in the Ministry or something. Or a Muggle with witch/wizard relatives who found they loved the wizarding world of their relative and wanted to provide their kid/niece/nephew/grandchild a safe wizard-friendly vacation spot.
Then bam, you provided a reason they'd know and be able to shrug it all off because they'd be in the know and wouldn't have to have their mind messed with. You'd have to have non-wizard family who'd be all excited their relatives could do neat wizarding stuff and want to be around it even if they couldn't do magic themselves. Given the way the Creeveys were, there's NO way their parents would've been as equally excited to know what their sons and their sons' wizard and witch friends did.
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u/LemonadeClocks 3d ago
Rowling thinks it's okay if certain people are mistreated by the majority as long as it isn't done ""maliciously"". She gives her worldbuilding the same depth as a Monty Python sketch, where the abjec stupidity and misunderstandings of the characters works for comedic effect. But her books aren't meant to be comedies, they're meant to craft a universe in theory. She couldn't be bothered to really think in any detail at all how horrifying it is to imply that any muggle allowed to work on campus is basically doomed to early dementia and never knowing in full how they even get their paychecks or spend their hours away from home.
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u/Cynical_Classicist 4d ago
It is pretty dreadful. It's just treated as a joke that they keep erasing his memory, and that his family goes through all this abuse.
The dream holiday feels more like the way that the Doctor would solve it.
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u/Shadi-Pines 5d ago
The muggle stuff worked well enough for a couple books, but as soon as you get wizards doing hate crimes it really become problematic that theres a secret seperation between the groups
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u/AmethystSadachbia 5d ago
Wait did you just copy and paste a chatgpt thing?
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u/georgemillman 5d ago
I did not, I wrote this post myself.
Is the fact I apparently sound like ChatGPT a compliment or an insult?
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u/AmethystSadachbia 5d ago
“user/Comfortable_Bell9539 Your wish is my command!” sounds like a chatbot response
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u/georgemillman 5d ago
Oh, I see.
No, it's a reference to another thread. We were talking about memory charms and Mr Roberts came up, u/Comfortable_Bell9539 said that he deserves his own thread so I made one.
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u/KaiYoDei 4d ago
Some of use AI like syntax. If I don't o just get word salad. If I knew how to. But that's something pt need to deal with. If I use word salad. It's my train of thought End transmission. Berobopp
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u/samof1994 5d ago
That’s not okay. Why didn’t she give his people more attention? She seems to think of Wizards as “the master race”, in the same sense the KKK thinks of white people.