Just follow the spiders and they're sure to lead you into the forbidden forest. This promises to be an extra long segment today, dear

listeners, as I am angry about a lot of stuff to do with bodies and otherness in the

Wizarding world.

So one of the themes that's really important in this book is that of bullying.

The book brings it up a lot.

When Black is confronting Peter The book brings it up a lot.

When Black is confronting Peter Pettigrew,

he refers to Voldemort as the biggest bully in the playground,

for example.

Harry uses the verb bullying to describe how Snape is treating his students, particularly

Neville.

And there's a lot of interest in the sort of the problem of the bully and this interesting sort of metaphor where the way that

children treat each other on a school yard the way that Malfoy treats the other

kids the way that Malfoy is treating Harry or trying to is essentially equivalent to the way that

Voldemort treats everybody, right? Which is just that it's a form of bullying. But what's really interesting is that the book itself is enacting this really troubling form of bullying at the level of how it talks about characters.

And that is with regards to fatness.

This book hates fat people.

Yeah.

And we've talked in the past about the way that Rolling falls back on

problematic tropes to describe characters that may not be intentionally hateful,

but that doesn't matter when it comes to falling back on offensive and problematic

tropes. And her use of fatness as a way of characterizing

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