At PEDESTRIAN.TV, we independently choose and write about stuff we love and think you’ll froth too. We have affiliate partnerships so we might get a bit of money from any purchase you make based on our recs, cool? Cool. FYI - prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

With the Harry Potter: Return to Hogwarts fresh on wizards and muggles minds alike, folks on Twitter are breaking down all aspects of the films that stuck with them – including the batshit racist names author JK Rowling gave her non-English characters.

If you’ve been living under a troll lately, the cast of the Harry Potter film franchise – Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Tom Felton and more – reunited to commemorate twenty years since they warmed our hearts in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

The spell-binding takeways? Watson revealed she once had feelings for Felton and was on the verge of quitting at one point, meanwhile Radcliffe shared that he had a crush of his own on co-star Helena Bonham Carter. Next to all the cute moments between the cast and nods to those we’ve lost or couldn’t attend, there was a lot to love about it.

READ MORE
Producers Are Rushing To Edit The Harry Potter Reunion After A Fan Spotted A Fkn Hilarious Error

Now fans on Twitter are looking back on the series and some of its more, uh, problematic aspects.  Need we forget to mention Cho Chang – the only Asian character both in the entire school of Hogwarts and eight films who is also named after two surnames of different Asian communities? As YouTuber Freddie Wong pointed out on Twitter, “frankly, this was the first red flag we should’ve seen it”.

Chang’s name is honestly full-on microaggression by the TERF in the dungeon towards all Asian people. It’s also worth touching on here given the impact playing Chang had on actress Katie Leung.

Speaking on the Chinese Chippy Girl podcast, Leung said that she not only copped racist abuse from so-called fans when she was cast but was allegedly discouraged by publicists to talk about it.

“I remember them saying to me, ‘Oh, look, Katie, we haven’t seen these, these websites that people are talking about,” she said on the pod via The Independent UK.

READ MORE
Ranking Harry Potter Characters By How Racist I Reckon They Would Be To Me IRL

“‘And, you know, if you get asked that, just say it’s not true, say it’s not happening.’ And I just nodded my head.

“I was like, ‘Okay, okay,’ even though I had seen it myself with my own eyes. I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, I’ll just say everything’s great.’”

Oh and while we’re here, let’s not forget the anti-semitic imagery of “beak-nosed greedy goblins that work in a bank”. Or the time Rowling retconned the lack of Jewish representation at Hogwarts and ended up being more racist when they told a fan there was a Jewish wizard in Ravenclaw named Anthony – wait for it – Goldstein.

Who could forget the sole Black character being named Kingsley… Shacklebolt? Or Seamus Finnigan, a character with a name that’s basically the Irish equivalent of John Smith? It truly baffles me that a series that means so much to so many people also has a criminally racist subtext.

Anyway, here are some of the other best reactions around the internet.

If you want to relive the Harry Potter: Return to Hogwarts for the fourteenth time today, you can catch it on Binge.

More Stuff From PEDESTRIAN.TV

Image: Warner Bros. / Twitter [@fwong]