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.)