the stupidest thing in the entire harry potter series was when they go down to the slytherin dormitory and it’s all dark and slimy and freezing and shit. as if lucius malfoy would let his son live in squalor like that. the house with the highest concentration of spoiled purebloods are happy to live under the goddamn lake? no.
wow this is the #1 best harry potter criticism i have ever read
Actually this is much more realistic than you might think (and not remotely in a good way).
The British upper class have long since had a reputation for sending their kids to terrible boarding schools to “toughen them up”. And to put it mildly, uh… for those kids who found themselves swept up in the grand tradition and packed off to boarding school like their fathers had been… things far worse than squalor were there, and parental intervention was usually rather low. The boarding school horror story is virtually an entire subgenre of British literature, they were that bad. So despite the privileged background of the Malfoys, oh yes, I can absolutely believe that Lucius would let his son live in a dungeon, because Tradition and Discipline and Stiff Upper Lip and all that nonsense.
(In recent years, unsurprisingly, there’s been an absolute explosion of abuse stories coming out of elite and prestigious boarding schools, which is why I know any of this, it’s always on the news :( )