“No ethical, legal consumption.” FTFY
The trans thing was so weird and seemed to come out of nowhere. Before she revealed herself to be such a weirdo willing to die on the most ignorant of hills, JKR was running around telling everyone who would listen that all these Harry Potter characters were gay. Like she said Dumbledore was obviously gay and had been lovers with Grindelwald. After her embrace of gay people her punching down at trans people/women was so unexpected and seemed so uncharacteristic and especially mean considering her popularity and enormous wealth and the respect and awe she USED to generate. She ruined her own legacy by not keeping her mouth gracefully shut, which is a massive problem these days with a lot of people who have more ego than sense.
I’ll bet she went on some YouTube rabbit hole sometime in COVID times. It’s such a 180 from where she used to stand.
I re-read the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book (old book, I didn’t give her any money) and it’s all about how Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia hated Harry being a wizard because it wasn’t normal, it didn’t fit their idea of normal, and they wanted to be seen as normal more than any else, but Harry couldn’t help being who he was. It’s not hard to read a gay or trans allegory into that.
She was already a TERF way before Covid.
Anyone who was a part of it should have their work shunned forever.
I don’t get this whole drama with Harry Potter. When I was younger, I was a big fan of Ender’s Game. A few years later it came out that the author of the Ender books was a huge bigot and was using his money to promote right-wing causes. I dropped the books, didn’t buy anything else from the author, and every other fan of the series that I talked to did the same. There wasn’t really any debate about it. When the movie came out, none of the fans of the books showed up and so it flopped.
With Harry Potter, though, it’s been years since we found out what kind of person J. K. Rowling is and people are still whinging about it. Why is this still even a debate (outside of right-wing transphobic circles, of course)? Find some other books to be a fan of.
I think part of the reason is that Harry Potter is one of the more interactive Fandoms. The world in Ender’s Game is more or less closed. The story is finished, the world isn’t too big.
Harry Potter on the other hand (much like e.g. Star Trek) is way more inviting to be interactive: Which house are you, what would be your favorite class, what might the other schools look like etc. It is (by design or not) built to invite engagement and also very marketable. The special foods, the shops, all the gimicky in-world-items, the classes…
You get people so invested into this world beyond the books because there are so many details that are marketable. Other fantasy or SciFi worlds just aren’t full of fun little items you can sell. In that regard Harry Potter is more like those kids shows that are made to sell toy lines.
So most people are way more emotionally attached to the stories. It wasn’t just the books and a Halloween costume. It was years of choosing your house, learning about potions, discussing brooms, trying to cook the food, etc.
Harry Potter was a global phenomenon. Never before in history had a book series held such sway over a large portion of an entire generation of humans. Something like that is going to continue to have a place in popular discourse, largely because the average person is either ignorant of the issue or simply doesn’t care.
Also, in capitalism a moneymaker like HP simply isn’t allowed to die.
Being a right wing bigot it cool now. There’s literally nothing you can do today to get actually cancelled.
I’ve never watched or read any of the Harry Potter stuff. So I feel pretty good right now.
JK coulda kept her mouth shut and have remained as a beloved author forever. I’ll never understand what could drive someone to taint their legacy for zero gain.
She became a billionaire and has almost certainly curtailed her social network to sycophants that not only agree with everything she says, they also boost her ego. That plus not wanting to lose the attention of the world will have her respond to whatever provokes the attention of the masses.
I’m not up 100% on how this all started because I genuinely don’t give a shit about Harry Potter but I would not be surprised if she made a controversial statement as a person with a huge platform, got a bunch of flak, and then once the dust settled realized how much “engagement” (read: attention) she got from it and subsequently doubled down over and over.
A great deal of human behavior is attention maintained. We have this ignorance though that “bad” attention is not desirable. Research continually shows that attention maintained behavior is perpetually reinforced by attention, not attention of a certain quality. Eg if your child exhibits an attention maintained behavior and you say “stop doing that or you’re grounded” the likelihood is that the behavior is still reinforced (and will subsequently be more likely) because attention was still achieved. The attention may have higher reinforcement potency if it is “positive” but that doesn’t mean “negative” attention doesn’t have a potentially powerful impact.
This is why the current social landscape of 3rd place community centers being social media, which almost exclusively give algorithmic favor to content that shows high “engagement” (read: annoying bullshit that many simple can’t resist interacting with) is probably one of the most toxic developments in the modern history of humanity. It encourages ugly behavior and reinforces disgusting belief systems. It is also why the age old advice of “don’t feed the trolls” is sage wisdom
It’s the manifestation of “all publicity is good publicity”
The clues to who she is were there all along in her writing. She couldn’t keep quiet, because she believes what she’s doing is right. Because she’s conservative.
The only major black character in the series is called “Shacklebolt”. The only Asian, “Cho Chang”. Zero LGBTQ representation in the books. Harry had the world at his feet and decided to join the police. The whole struggle of the saga is for a return to the status quo, rather than a better world. General lack of female agency, and women just being hysterical and needing to be slapped out of it. Goblins as an antisemitic trope. I could go on.
I put it to you that it was inevitable that, one way or another, her rancorous bile would have spilled out into the public debate as soon as she got famous.JK Rowling was always a liberal centrist. From an old 4Chan post:
It very neatly describes the way liberals see the world and political struggle.
Lots of people complain about the anti-climactic ending, but really I don’t think it could any other way. I’d like to imagine that there’s some alternate universe where Rowling actually believed in something and Harry was actually built up as the anti-Voldemort he was only hinted as being in the beginning of the books. Where he’s opposes all the many injustices of the wizarding world and determines to change their frequently backwards, insular, contradictory society for the better, and forms his own faction antithetical to the Death Eaters and when he finally has his showdown with Voldy. Harry surpasses by adopting new methods, breaking the rules and embracing change and the progression of history. While Voldemort clings to an idyllic imaging of the past and the greatest extent of his dreams is to become the self-appointed god of a eternally stagnant Neverland. Harry has embraced the possibility of a shining future and so can overcome the self-imposed limits Voldemort could never cross, and Voldemort is ultimately defeated by this.
But that would require a Harry that believed in something, and since Rowling is a liberal centrist Blairite that doesn’t really believe in anything, Harry can’t believe in anything. Harry lives in a world drought with conflict and injustice, a stratified class society, slavery of sentient magical creatures, the absurd charade the wizarding world puts upto enforce their own self-segregation, a corrupted and bureaucracy-choked government, rampant racism, so on and so forth But Harry is little more than a passive observer for most of it, only the racism really bothers him (and then, really only racism against half-bloods). In fact, when Hermione stands up against the slavery of elves, she’s treated as some kind of ridiculous Soapbox Sadie. For opposing chattel slavery. In the end. the biggest force for change is Voldemort and Harry and friends only ever fight for the preservation and reproduction of the status quo. The very height of Harry’s dreams is to join the aurors. a sort of wizard FBI and the ultimate defenders of the wizarding status quo. Voldemort and the Death Eaters are the big instigators of change and Harry never quite gets to Vold/s level. Harry doesn’t even beat Voldemort, Voldemort accidentally kills himself because he violated some obscure technicality that causes one of his spells to bounce back at him.
And this is really the struggle of liberals, they live in a world fraught with conflict, but aren’t particularly bothered by any of it except those bit that threaten multicultural pluralism. They see change, and the force behind that change, as a wholly negative phenomenon. Even then, they can only act within the legal and ideological framework of their society. So. for instance, instead of organizing insurrectionary and disruptive activity against Trump and the far-right, all they can do is bang their drum about what a racist bigot he is and hope they can catch him violating some technicality that will allow them to have him impeached or at least destroy his political clout. It won’t work, it will never work, but that’s the limit of liberalism just as it was the limit of Harry Potter.
My initial theory is that JK Rowling saw trans women as a threat to her status quo. At the end of the day, that’s all Centrist Liberals care about. Social progress can’t affect their status quo. It’s why Centrist Liberals will always back fascism. Fascism is designed to protect the status quo. The problem is that Centrist Liberals don’t understand that fascism requires an out group to work and those Centrist Liberals will be the out group at one point.
I want to caution about reading -isms into authors works. People often don’t really know their own stereotyping unless it’s pointed out (you, dear reader, probably have some problematic world views that no one has noticed or mentioned…). The fallout afterwards is where the problems exist, when someone doubles down on their viewpoints after being informed of them.
Rowling has clearly done that and is dismissed because of it. I will avoid things that give her a platform, and the original art itself is tainted due to her continued stances; but, back to the general case, just because art might be racist or antisemitic, etc., at the time of creation, if the artist can be convinced that their views are wrong, we should celebrate that – just with footnotes and context.
I think everyone -including public figures- should be allowed to learn from their mistakes and grow. I think social media can interfere with that and make people refuse to admit error and double down for fear of being cancelled. Ideally this should change.
But, the case of Jo Rowling in particular is egregious. Not only does she refuse to engage with the possibility of being wrong, her bigotry extends beyond words, into concrete, hateful actions where she is fuelling the fire of transphobia worldwide with her influence, both parasocial and financial. That results in misery and suffering for millions. Fuck Jo Rowling.
This condemnation of her doesn’t extend to everyone. And if she one day sees the light and walks everything back, then she should get a chance to redeem herself, too.JKR is allowed to learn and grow! She just refuses to and her takes keep getting worse.
I was certainly not defending her. She is, as you say, egregious in part because when she was called out she refused to reflect. I was more talking in the general sense. The world sucks right now, but we are quick to attack people on their views without granting them opportunity to change.
I call this out because of the trend of ‘leopards-eating-faces’ kind of jokes. When the leopards eat your face, you might notice they were not friendly to begin with and the rest of civilization can welcome you back instead of mocking you; or they can mock you and you will feel isolated and defensive and the other bigots will welcome and validate you instead.
I think you’ve got s point there. Making fun of people in that way is surely going to entrench their views.
She also describes women that she wants the reader to hate as having masculine features. “Mannish hands,” a square jawline and thick neck on a teenage girl, there’s plenty in the first book alone.
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.
The only major black character in the series is
*was ;-)
It seems becoming filthy rich causes your brain to turn into a hateful goo. There is really no exception to this, just varying degrees of billionaires being more or less good at hiding how they have become insane hateful creatures.
Gabe Newell. Instead of rotting his brain on bigotry, he just buys another yacht.
Every billionaire pulls up the ladder behind them in their own special and unique way.
Hubris, mostly. The success of her brainchild went to her head and this made her open her large trap for the whole world to hear.
Personally I’m on team black mold
But yeah I’ve had same thoughts. Seems like such a weird hill to die on even when you do have those beliefs.
Well… there is one way…
One? When it comes out I will send You at least 4 links.
Aye, matey. There be a way, for those who are so inclined.
No. There isn’t.
Pirate yar har
Several comments here already that explain why this is not a good answer.
Actual consumption.
With like a fork.
There’s no fun in forking this thing if you cannot submit a pull request.
There are starving children that could be eating the show.
With these grocery prices, I will gladly eat media.
Remember: Even piracy doesn’t offer absolution.
These properties rely on popular / universal awareness to achieve network effects and cement themselves within modern culture. When this happens, the memes and concepts from the property worm their way into everyday language (“he who cannot be named”, “10 points for Gryffindor”, etc) and help keep everyone else buying.
The only answer is to treat people talking about Harry Potter as you would someone who keeps talking about the greatness of R Kelly’s music or Bill Cosby’s comedy.
Thank you! It’s been super disheartening to see people get excited about Harry Potter all over again, just as it was to see friends buy the video game a few years back. Many people who want to ostensibly call themselves allies are more than happy to engage in Nostalgia over Solidarity.
I read the Harry Potter books as a child. I enjoyed them a normal amount. I think I dressed up as HP for Halloween one year. But then I grew older and I “graduated” to other fantasy, as I would generally expect someone to do.
Now when I think about Harry Potter, I always think of Ursula K Le Guin’s comments:
Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style
UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
Ursula K Le Guin is a great author! And as far as I understand, a pretty good person, too.
It feels like that’s not really a big ask…
Yeah but this is 2026. People don’t read books anymore. So all they have is nostalgia for the one series they read as a kid.
This reeks of virtue signaling. Let me get this straight, your proposition, rather than holding the author accountable, is to demonize everyone who has ever enjoyed the stories as children?
Dolores Umbridge called, she wants her authoritarian moral policing back.
That’s really not what they’re saying at all; I get the feeling that you may be taking this too personaly. It’s a reasonable argument that engaging with the cultural phenomenon, even if not financially supporting it directly, still signals support or at least tolerance of the controversies so closely associated with it these days. You may disagree of course but I think calling it “a demonization of everyone who ever enjoyed the series as a child” is a gross misrepresentation of their position. It is, at most, a condemnation of those who would continue engaging with it since then. (And, ironically, likening them to Dolores Umbridge is engaging in the very type of cultural normalization that they were arguing against. Although if you disagree with them I don’t suppose you’d feel that matters anyway.) Anyhow, that’s enough arguing on someone else’s behalf for me today. I just can’t stand seeing arguments misrepresented like that.
lol
it’s literally just the same story again too, for the 3rd time
if you’re willing to throw trans people under the bus to watch a remake, you’re genuinely fucking pathetic at this point, like do something else with your life jfc
What if I pirate it, talk to no one about it (not by choice but still) and then destroy all memories of it through aggressive drug use?
Congrats, you’ve found a way of having your cake and eating it too… though by eating it and vomiting it back into your hands.
Why not just skip to the drug use phase?
You just want to do drugs
Skip the extra steps and go straight to the drug use, that’s what id do.
Very enjoyable reply to lazy ortography. excellent service. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Thank you kindly for the opportunity to play :)
Don’t go for the aggressively drug use, every 1.5 months go for an LSD or MDMA trip (3 months between each). Don’t heavily mix with alcohol (I like to have a beer mit trip but that’s all). Look up for different kind of electronic music parties, you’re going to find one that match your vibe.
I’d pirate it but I find the story just not interesting or worth my time.
I read Philosopher’s Stone about 25 years ago as a teenager and wasn’t impressed. Didn’t read any other because that one already felt like wasted time. Went to a movie in 2007 (no clue which one that was) and again forgettable. Not bad, in fact I still remember Die Hard 4 that I also watched back then because it was so bad. That HP movie? No idea about plot or anything. Another one? Thanks, I’m good.
Even if Rowling wasn’t a disgusting person, I feel like what I’ve seen of her work is just not great. It’s not terrible, but I don’t care for it at all.
But also, she can get fucked.
Behold! I give you: woman.
A featherless biped with egg laying equipment then
Do I need to pluck the hen? Cause I can pluck the hen.
Just pluck her
And broad flat nails.
Technically, chickens are hatched, not born. So not “born with egg-producing equipment”.
Still doesn’t rule out literally every female mammal except for platypi and echidnas…
Also a few rare reptiles and fish that give live birth!
That includes goldfish, doesn’t it?
2007 was Order of the Phoenix, which is the most boring and also does not make any sense at all out of context. Strangely enough, that movie was also my first experience with Harry Potter, because a friend invited me to go see it. I did read the books later, which were decent enough, but like all global phenomena, it’s not really about being the best of the best, but being in the right place at the right time.
The fandom was fun though, the discussions on Tumblr, the theories, the fanfics, the comic cons. I never see a wizard robe these days, even though it’s such an easy costume. I think Joanne killed the fandom.
The only ethical consumption of the original Harry Potter Movies is to watch it with the gleefully unauthorized Wizard People Dear Reader soundtrack/overdub.
Anyway, we were at a bar and were getting a good laugh at a guy who was playing pool all by himself while wearing a hoody over his hat, sunglasses under that and headphones on the outside of all of it. So we started riffing on “What could he possibly be listening to?”. Someone who I don’t think was me said that he was listening to a book on tape of Harry Potter. And out came the Wizard People narrator. I joked that night that I was going to rush home and record an entire misinformed book on tape of The Sorcerer’s Stone, because I had not and have not ever read any Harry Potter books. Once I started making notes for it I realized that an audio track alone could get boring, so I decided to sync it with the movie. Then I took a week or two and made the damn thing. I love it.
I’ve always found Harry Potter universe to be quite campy. But I also never got into Lord of the Rings and thought Game of Thrones was awful so my opinion on television media may not be average or popular.
Lord of the Rings is second to none. The amount of development that went into it is staggering. It’s as grand and epic as any of the ancient works of mythology, and that’s what it was intended to be.
Meh. It’s a bit slow.
I’ve thought for a while that Tolkien was a great world builder but a meh storyteller. His big thing was breaking that new ground. Not that I would do any better, but many other authors since have.
Rowling doesn’t have the breaking new ground. I don’t get why her shit got so popular in the first place. I lost interest when the first movie was basically going down a list of pre-Tolkien fantasy tropes like it was a checklist.
I couldn’t get through Tolkien. I tried reading the Hobbit but gave up when it started talking about blue beards and gold belts. It felt too arbitrary to hold my interest.
But the LotR movies are needlessly slow. It’s Peter Jackson’s directing style, which only works in that very specific context where a large portion of the audience is ready to fill in the blank spaces, and the rest of the audience forgives it because they expect it to be a rambling epic.
Every shot is one second too long. You could cut an hour from the runtime just by cutting out the lingering reaction shots. Every time Sam or Frodo says something, it’s followed by two seconds of them staring longingly into each other’s eyes. There are so many things to love about those movies, but they’re basically unwatchable to me.
As for Rowling, I think her success is mostly due to accessibility. They’re easy reads in a way that fantasy books almost never are. The reader doesn’t have to put in any work to get to the world building.
She follows a classical plot structure. She establishes motifs early and only subverts them when subverting them becomes the obvious choice. There are many blue beard/gold belt moments, but they’re propped up by easy-to-understand structures like the house system.
But yeah, then there’s no depth to it after that. I always thought it was overrated.
Yeah I get it and I dont deny that. Having never read the books though, I find the movies to be somewhat difficult to follow and with the exception (probably) of the first movie, I simply dont find them memorable or ranked high in my own mind as something I want to re watch.
The story in the movie was good but lacked the ethereal fae quality and a lot of the quiet beauty in the book.
I highly recommend the books, if you can find time to read. I know a lot of people have trouble settling down to read these days (myself included). I wish I read more!
Time to read yes
For me its the attention amd focused I’ve got time, just not tje attention and motivation (I fantasize but procrastinate)
I have been the 3rd or 4th dune book for about a year now (I have been on the last 50 pages or so for probably 6 montjs)
I have resd the first half or so of Don Quixote about 3 times
I habe now started to read Herodotus Histories for the 2nd time (didn’t finish last time stopped around half way thru Book 2)
And I made the (fortuitous?) mistake of starting Hitch hikers Guide to the galaxy twice now and I did really enjoy it right off the bat, so that one might rise to the top of the list lol
I have also begun reading Amadis of Gaul due to interest in Medeival Chicalry novels and I’ve yet to finish King Arthur (Mark Twain) whereat I only have maybe 100pgs left. (Not a good book, TBH but it gives some background to Quixote as does Amadis of Gaul
LOTR is definitely also in this ridiculous list of want to reads. As is
Divine Comedy Aeneid Decameron Pilgrims Progress Infinite Jest Grapes of Wrath Something by Ishiguro Metamorphosis etc etc etc
I should make a post about this so.I can properly.vent instead of ‘hijacking comments’
Divine Comedy
Get yourself a quality translation, mine was kinda ass, don’t remember whose it was though.
I’m so over HP. It was a popular book decades ago. I’m 41 (5 years older than the first HP actor) and I remember the “controversy” over the fourth book being so much longer than the others. I’ve read many other books since then that were better.
If you want grown up magic school stories check out The Magicians. One of the rare cases where the show is better than the books.
If you’re looking for an adult novel about English magicians (and you looove lore dumping), read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell you’re gonna thank me on that one.
The TV show was quite good as well.
I’m a massive fan of the audiobook versions of the Magicians series, which I consider to be among the best narration performances from the hundreds of audiobooks I’ve listened to. I gave up on the tv series halfway through episode 1. Should I give it another shot?
It’s different, it’s more of an ensemble show whereas the books are more Quentins story. It got a bit silly towards the end but it was still a fun watch. I suggested it to my BF (huge Buffy fan, mild HP fan) he binged the whole thing in a week.
Sometimes you bounce off shows the first time. It isn’t a faithful retelling of the books but it’s got most of the major notes.
Thanks!
The Magicians is a book series!?
Yep. Three books by Lev Grossman. They focus more on Quentin, the show features the other characters more.
Kingkiller Chronicles is a good one. Though who knows if he’ll ever finish it.
No this series deserves to be boycotted simply because he refuses to finish it. Authors should never ever start a series that requires an ending if they haven’t already sketched out that ending.
Wait a minute, I always fucking hated Harry Potter!
<insert relevant screenshot from Boondocks here>
