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RE: Harry Potter and the Light the World Campaign. Day 14: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
HP has serious continuity errors and some pretty bad moral messages for kids if you see them from an adult perspective.
i don,t think so. my friend
Well, so does just about every Disney princess movie out there. Take Little Mermaid, for instance. She's fully 16 years old, constantly disobeys her father, swims to the surface, messes around with humans, gets deeply involved with a witch, sells her soul, wants to get married before she's fully developed her prefrontal cortex, and forces her own father to make a choice between his kingdom and his own belligerent child. And it was my FAVORITE movie as a kid. And I still love it. And so do my kids. I mean, how can you NOT love Ariel?
I think the BIGGER question is: where are all the mothers in these Disney movies? And why don't the fathers pick better second wives? Or get rid of them when they find out how evil they are? Or figure out how evil they are to begin with?
Little Mermaid: no mention of a mother. The only mother figure in Ariel's life is an evil sea witch.
Snow White : mom's dead. Dad married an evil narcissistic maniac murderess
Cinderella: mom's dead. Dad married a wicked gold digger
Frozen: The parents' heads are in the ground. They isolate their children from one another and abandon both of them emotionally. They need to grow a pair and help their children cope and develop their abilities in a healthy way.
Tangled (one of my favorites...): Where's mom? Oh, that's right? Out of the picture. In her place is an evil, manipulative, self-serving witch of a woman pretending to be the mother.
Aladdin: No mom. Just a dopey King-dad.
Beauty and the Beast: No mom. Just a sweet, oblivious father
Hansel and Gretel: mom's dead. Dad married a wicked woman and drove the children to run to the woods and nearly get eaten by a witch.
Harry Potter: BOTH parents dead. Replaced by stupid wicked relatives.
It's interesting that the majority of our heroins have no mother, several of them disobey their fathers, and ALL of the fathers are made out to be either oblivious and dumb, or oblivious and unkind.
Harry Potter is replete with bad behavior--if my kids did some of the stuff those kids did, they'd be on the coals.
But these make the BEST kind of stories! Orphan-esque children, breaking the rules to change something important and set precedent for their society. And we love the kids. They are OUR kids, and our neighbors' kids. And we want them to break the rules, because WE want to break the rules, because breaking the rules--the right ones anyway--sets precedent for bigger and better things.
I'm not worried about my kids turning into hoodlams from watching and reading Harry Potter, or obsessing about Disney Princesses when they were little. These are great stories of good vs. evil. Triumph over our demons and monsters. Faith in something bigger than ourselves so we can conquer things that are bigger than we are. Determination to be on the right side. Harry Potter is the best for that.
My BIGGER concern is how much quality time we are spending with our children, what are WE teaching them, what do they see US do all day, how do WE treat others, do WE obey the law and respect others, serve and be kind, etc.
If so, I think we're going to be in good shape, as will our children.