this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Wasn't there one Irish guy, and he had an experiment blow up in his face?
Never gave a shit about the series but remember hearing about token characters having a dose of racism to them.
Not just that, he was also obsessed with turning drinks into alcohol. As a 15 year old kid. I'm pretty sure he also tried to blow up multiple things as well, I don't think it was a one time thing.
We Irish weren't really bothered tbh.
Maybe not, but it's definitely a symptom of a larger problem. Taken on its own, having the stereotypical Irish IRA member/drunk kid is a gag, but when you look at that plus the black kid named after slavery, the Asian girl named two single syllable last names (practically named Ching Chong), and a number of other semi-racist stereotypes in the books, it points towards somebody who is uncreative enough to avoid basing her characters on generic stereotypes or doesn't do any research before writing a character at best, and somebody who actually views those people that way at worst - a racist.
Could you be overthinking it?
Less overthinking it and more that people have seen her political opinions in the past decade or so, and looked back at the books to realize "Oh, in hindsight there's so much of her politics in these books."
There's so much stuff in there, naming a Korean girl two Chinese last names is just scratching the surface.
What's weird about that character is that the explosions and turning water into wine were (as far as I can recall) movie additions. In the books he was just another classmate.