35
Monthly StatsJune Traffic and Fundraising Stats
As always, thank you to our donors! We wouldn't be running without you.
56 ovarettes subscribed to donate or continued to subscribe to donate.
25 ovarettes made one-time donations.
6 people made donations via our Substack.
Our site funding goal was $1,000 and you donated $1,066.
Here are our traffic stats from our 35th month:
Users: 8,201
Posts: 87,906
Comments: 1,315,950
Upvotes: 14,818,290
Downvotes: 365,621
Circles: 36
New Users: 135
New Posts: 2,165
New Comments: 34,838
New Upvotes: 432,228
New Downvotes: 9,049
New Circles: 0
Site activity this month:
429 users made posts
1,112 users made comments
1,472 users voted
Site visitors:
16,690 IPs per day for the last week
67,455 unique IPs per week for the last month
We starting using an analytics service this month. I don't know if we will use it every month, so I may not include stats from it regularly. But in June, it logged 244,834 unique visitors. About 80% of our traffic comes from people who are not signed in.
I think you’re overthinking it.
She needed a generic cast of thousands to do the cooking and cleaning, thought of the folklore about pixies and brownies cleaning dairies and houses in exchange for a sauces of milk, and went “right, house elves, cool”, then later she’d thought it through and realised that it wasn’t viable for them to be part of the economy (they hugely outweigh the number of wizards and would skew it), thought “bugger, I’ve accidentally put slaves in the books” and had Hermione get worked up about it to show she didn’t condone it.
But then I think people overthink a lot of things about HP!
I agree. The books are really not that deep.
I think there's a lot of symbolism in the Harry Potter books. Yes, they aren't deep at all in some sort of groundbreaking philosophical sense, but they definitely do have layered meanings. Positively packed with symbolism. For example, the first thing Snape says to Harry in book one has a hidden meaning that is perfectly useless to the plot and readers wouldn't understand until book seven (although they don't ever need to understand it).
The books are clever, that's one of the reasons they're entertaining. I just don't think JK Rowling put as much thought into her worldbuilding* as her fans do. At a certain point you have to be doing a symptomatic reading of the text, not looking for her motivations and judging them as such.
One particular example I can think of is that Seamus Finnigan is always exploding things. Irish readers noticed that because they're used to English people associating them with bombs. There's no way Rowling would have done that intentionally, but you can't rule out an unconscious association on her part.
*I was frustrated as a teen reading these books because the worldbuilding didn't hang together for me. Like, why do the racial minorities at Hogwarts seem to resemble the British empire so closely? Are Padma and Parvati Muggleborn or did British wizards colonize wizard India in their parallel world?
Sorry to be replying so long after, but if you look at the 1991 census for the UK, Harry’s year at Hogwarts matches the ethnic make-up pretty perfectly.
It’s entirely consistent with magical people being evenly distributed through the population regardless of race. Why would there need to be a separate wizarding colonisation of India?
That's my point, though. The parallel wizarding world has the exact same ethnic make-up as the UK, and the UK's ethnic make-up is a direct product of its colonial history. Given that wizards live in a parallel world, have their own history/culture/economy, and rarely take much interest in Muggles, it doesn't make sense that they would have the exact same immigration patterns as Muggles.
I think it does make sense if you assume wizards are equally distributed through the population, and the muggle and wizarding worlds are much more mingled than the purebloods we meet like to pretend. And why wouldn’t Indian and Pakistani wizards immigrate to a country with strong links to their own?
But I also agree that Rowling is writing more as a satire on British society (and school stories) than as a fantasy writer seeking to create a parallel world, and we probably should be reading the books more through that lens.