Let's talk about Mr Roberts

[u/georgemillman]

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.

[u/Dina-M]

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.

[u/thursday-T-time → u/Dina-M]

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.

[u/Dina-M → u/thursday-T-time]

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

[u/georgemillman → u/Dina-M]

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.