To read more about the phenomenon, apparently a year old now, of those who have successfully resisted the mRNA inoculations, the ‘Great Unvaxxed,’ that want to be known as “Pure Bloods,” read this Newsweek piece: Vaccine Skeptics Are Calling Themselves ‘Pure Bloods’ in Bizarre Harry Potter Reference. I believe this is known as a “own-goal” in soccer, which is to say, if you’re going to choose a Harry Potter reference as your hashtag identity, the one that is an anything but subtle pointer to eugenics and fascism is not your best bet.
I call this a ‘Shared Text’ item because the response to this nomenclature adoption has been almost universal scoffing, which is to say, everyone but the TikTok Pure Bloods seems to understand immediately the Hogwarts Saga reference. I wonder, though, if the failing of those who adopted the title to recognize how they were casting themselves as bad guys means that they certainly don’t have the Rowling novels’ nuances as a sure point of reference.
The funny thing to me is that the lockdown, mask mandates, and government and economic coercion around Covid hysteria these last several years has all been indicative of corporatism, the conjunction of capitalist and political forces once called (properly) fascism, a word now all but meaningless in public discourse. That anyone in resistance to the Pharmaceutical and Elite takeover of the country in the name of Public Health would take as their name a word pointing to the behaviors of their enemies is comic, if not pathetic, and certainly gives those in thrall to the prevalent regime one more opportunity to pigeon hole them as, well, less than intelligent.
Regardless of that humor, again, whatever your thoughts on mRNA shots, their efficacy, the social obligation to accept or refuse them, this ‘Pure Bloods’ event testifies to the Shared Text status of Harry Potter, twenty-five years since the first publications…
Thanks for this curious news! I don’t know much about TikTok (that might even be close to litotes!), but it would be interesting to see who’s doing what with this description. Speculating in my profound ignorance of details, I can imagine some users of the term might be variously well-informed about Harry Potter and being ironic in one way or another, or (with Platonic irony in mind) ‘Socratic’ in tying to provoke reflection. E.g., in the Wizarding world there are independent-minded ‘pure bloods’ in terms of descent whom the malevolent ‘Pure Bloods’ consider ‘blood traitors’; such malevolent ‘Pure Bloods’ in fact occupy places of influence in the Ministry, at Hogwarts, etc. Another aspect of provoking reflection by apparent wrong-headed or ‘outrageous’ use of the term might be to topicalize natural immunity – something going on ‘in the blood’ as it ‘purely and simply’ is, in reaction to dangerous microbes.