Neville Longbottom is the Hero of the First Harry Potter Book. Here's Why That Matters.

Tolkein is on record saying that Samwise Gamgee is the true hero of Lord of the Rings. As far as I can tell, J.K. Rowling has never explicitly said the same of Neville Longbottom, but it does seem like the kind of thing she would say, doesn’t it?

She’s clearly interested in Neville as a character. She made him the anti-Harry; the there-but-for-the-grace-of-Voldy stand-in; the unsung hero of the alternate seventh book that actually takes place at Hogwarts instead of random woods (free fanfic idea); the only person besides the Golden Trio and Dumbledore to actually destroy a Horcrux; and rewarded him with the true in-universe hottie, Hannah Abbott.

Truly amazing that ALL of the 11-year-old 
kids they cast grew into attractive adults.

But I’m hung up on what happens in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (British title or GTFO.)

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Now, before we begin, elephant in the room: there has been a thumbnail popping up on my Youtube suggested video feed entitled “Does JK Rowling’s Transphobia Ruin the Harry Potter series?” I don't think so, and not just because every title that is a question can be answered with the word "no."

And I do think it’s worth reading JKR’s post on her website about trans issues. Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, and I don't, there's some nuance there that binary, all-or-nothing thinking tends to miss.

But I do enjoy going back to the Harry Potter series and seeing the ways in which her political views, now made manifest, were latent in the Art. You can compare gender assignment to Hogwarts houses; you can realize that Harry grows up to be a wizard cop; you can reframe the entire series as a battle to preserve the status quo.

Or you could focus on a boy called Longbottom.

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At the end of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, Dumbledore does what is universally acknowledged to be a dick move. He allows the Great Hall to be decorated in Slytherin colors, knowing full well he is going to take it away from them in a few minutes, just to stunt on a bunch of eleven year olds. I mean, I get the impulse. I've taught middle school. But still.

But then he takes it a step further and does the whole thing piecemeal. Tantric style. Points to Harry, Ron, and Hermione, just in case we didn’t get that each of them used their respective skills to solve one of the puzzles. Almost like they were deliberately designed for that! Now, there’s clearly no established system for how to award points to houses, and there's some serious inflation later on in the series, so Dumbledore is being totally arbitrary, as usual. It's good to be King. And so he makes it so Gryffindor and Slytherin are tied. Eight-year-old me was chewing on his shirt in feverish anticipation.

Then the coup de grace: five points to Neville Longbottom because - and this is a very important quote -

"It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

I’m pretty sure this is exactly what JK Rowling thinks she is doing, like all the time. That is why, as a liberal, she spends more time criticizing the political left than the conservatives. She’s not quite a South Park both-sidesist; more of a Bill Clinton trying to have her Sista Souljah moment over and over.

Deep.

This is clear in her latest Robert Galbraith book, Lethal White, too*. It's a mystery, but there’s some politics mixed in there. The conservatives are blandly bad in predictable ways, but you can tell she had a lot more fun satirizing the leftists. They're all trust fund kids cosplaying as radicals (which is certainly not not a thing, but the glee!) 

And back to the ever-expanding Harry Potter universe, the same thing is basically going on with Grindelwald too. Whereas the original series was good ol' Manichean good versus evil, light versus dark essentialism - Grindelwald is that “new breed” of villain, along the lines of, say, Rorschach from Watchmen or President Coin from the Hunger Games series or what’s-her-name from Divergent. The one who has some interesting ideas but simply Goes Too Far with them. The Western liberal party line on communism, basically, filtered through Animal Farm.

I don’t disagree with this, necessarily. It is, of course, possible for revolutionary movements to become the antithesis of what they intended to be. But it’s not inevitable. Nietzsche didn’t say anyone who even thinks about fighting monsters thereby becomes an even worse monster.

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Back to Neville. It can’t be a coincidence that he shares a name with the Prime Minister famous for delivering peace in our time through diplomacy, which I grant probably was an act of bravery in the sense of standing up to your friends, and it's not totally his fault that the other guy turned out to be, no, like, actually, really bad.

Worth it for this alone.

As a kid, I was pissed that Neville got those 5 points. I was happy that Gryffindor won, of course, but it didn’t seem like he deserved to be rewarded for trying to stop HARRY, RON, and HERMIONE. If he had succeeded (I screamed at my book), then they never would have stopped Quirrell-Voldy** from getting the stone, and then he’d have eternal life and infinite money or something, hyperinflation be damned, and we’d all be screwed. Is that really the kind of behavior we want to encourage, ALBUS?

But looking back, it turns out Neville was right. Or at least Harry was wrong. Not just wrong about Snape, but wrong about the whole you’re-the-only-one-who-can-save-the-day thing. (As he would be again, in Book 5, and arguably in Book 7 as well. [There were no Horcruxes in the goddamn Forest of Dean - they were at Gringotts, the Ministry of Magic, and Hogwarts - you know, Significant Locations We've Visited Before.)

If they didn’t go Chapter 16 Through The Trapdoor, Voldemort would never have gotten the Stone. Dumbledore, idiot savant that he is, recognized that all his employees created traps that could be beaten by eleven-year-olds, said If you want something done right you gotta do it yourself, and actually came up with a genius, foolproof method to secure the stone. You can only get it if you don’t want to use it. (Kind of like what Douglas Adams said about the Presidency: no one who wants it should be allowed to have it.)

So the takeaway is: trust the system, trust the adults in charge, you don’t have to act, just listen to the people who are telling you to stay in bed like good little boys and girls. That’s real bravery***. That’s what it really means to be a Gryffindor. It’s counterintuitive, therefore it must be true.

Because if you rock the boat, you could be killed - or worse, expelled! 

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*which arrived in my mailbox THREE MONTHS after I ordered it online from the UK, which I understand, international shipping in the time of COVID and all - , but in an astounding coincidence, it arrived on the very day I finally decided to say "fuck it" and email the bookseller about a refund, which made me feel like i really do control the universe.

**in another not super progressive move, an image that surely inspired an entire generation to be leery of men in turbans

***this is commentary on the political-activism sphere of The Present Moment, not the COVID one, where yes, basically everything is the opposite of what it normally is, up is down, down is up, staying inside all day and only talking to people via screens is healthy, etc etc etc.