Rubeus Hagrid is the first person from the wizarding world that Harry Potter meets, and J.K. Rowling made that choice deliberately. She needed someone who would represent everything good about the world Harry was entering: warmth, loyalty, generosity, and an almost reckless willingness to love things that other people considered unlovable. Hagrid arrives on a flying motorcycle, gives Dudley a pig's tail, and hands Harry a birthday cake that he sat on during the journey. He is imperfect and enormous and immediately, completely trustworthy.

Rowling described Hagrid in a 2005 interview as the emotional heart of the series, the character whose goodness is never complicated by ambition or strategy. Hagrid does not scheme. He does not calculate. He loves Harry because Harry needs to be loved, and he loves dragons and hippogriffs and blast-ended skrewts because they also need to be loved, even when they are actively trying to set him on fire. Dr. Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado Boulder, in his research on biophilia and animal empathy, has documented that individuals with high empathic response to animals frequently display the same unconditional acceptance toward humans, which is Hagrid in a sentence.

The Gamekeeper Who Should Have Been a Professor

Hagrid was expelled from Hogwarts in his third year, framed for a crime Tom Riddle committed, and never received a complete magical education. He was given the position of gamekeeper, a job that kept him close to the school but outside the classroom. When Dumbledore eventually made him professor of Care of Magical Creatures, Hagrid taught with enthusiasm and catastrophic lesson plans, bringing creatures to class that could maim students because he genuinely could not understand why anyone would be afraid of something so interesting.

This is Hagrid's central quality: he does not understand fear of the other. Dragons are not monsters to him. They are babies that happen to breathe fire. Hippogriffs are not dangerous. They are proud, and you need to bow first. His entire worldview is built on the assumption that everything alive deserves respect and attention, and the fact that this worldview occasionally results in serious injury does not diminish its fundamental kindness.

The Man Who Carried Harry Twice

Hagrid carries Harry to the Dursleys as an infant and carries him out of the Forbidden Forest when he believes Harry is dead. The series begins and nearly ends in Hagrid's arms, and Rowling uses this symmetry to make a quiet argument about the importance of people who simply show up and care without expecting anything in return.