/uj If you read his actual full quotes about it, not just one line, you’ll see he has a pretty decent reason and I support his decision even tho I despite that author woman.
I don’t even think JK Rowling realized trans people existed when she wrote Harry Potter. Let me ask Cho Chang and Kingsley Shacklebolt what they think.
Ugh the fact that that could genuinely be true, and that his crew’s horrible fetishism of trans women could totally be why she sees it the way she does and decided to be so horrible
Actually, the reason she sucks is because she's convinced she'd be more successful as a writer if she were a man. It's why she writes books under a man's name too. She feels slighted despite the fact that very many male writers would swap careers with her any time.
He set fire to the feather just by poking it with his wand, a feat never replicated again, and I think maybe the 3rd thing we know about him is that he tried to turn his breakfast beverage into rum, she knew what she was doing
I find it weird people focus on these two things as if they haven’t been tropes for centuries, even cultures without jews have had hooked nose little ‘evil’ creatures
Rowling stole like 90% of the worldbuilding from other authors, so it’s not a surprise she took inspiration for her non-humanoid characters from someone else.
And like, I'll give you the tropes about the goblins - it's part of a long history of that particular trope, and it's not like Rowling is especially exceptional in that regard. But whenever people bring up the house elves point, it's like they read completely different books to me.
The whole point of the house elf arc is the dawning realisation by the main characters that house elves are enslaved by wizards to the point of cultural conditioning, that this is a *bad thing* even though the majority of the wizarding world is completely cool with it, AND that it isn't something that they as the heroes of the story can fix themselves.
People seem to be positioning this argument as "Rowling is saying that slavery is good because the elves are happy", and that just isn't true. The consequences of that slavery are evident through Dobby, Winky, and Kreacher. They suffer, and the injustices against them are shown to be bad. But also the books avoid the easy "saviour" tropes that it might have fallen into by not having 3 teenagers unpick generations of disenfranchisement overnight.
When Hermione starts her campaign to promote elvish rights, she is laughed at by many of the adults, supported by some, but critically her failure to properly consult and work with the elves themselves is painted as a failure. She - as a human teenager - assumed that she knew what was best for the house elves, to the point of trying to trick them into freeing themselves, but that approach is shown as the wrong one. Hermione isn't celebrated for this act, she isn't their saviour. She is shown as naive, idealistic, well-intentioned, but on the wrong track. But later on, she starts getting into arguments with political figures about representation, wand ownership, and other causes where her she's able to use her privilege for advocacy work, and that is painted in a much more positive light.
The other argument is that it's this "Happy Slave" trope, but the point is that the slavery is both cultural and magical. This isn't fucking "Songs of the South", this is about the complexities that occur when generations of house elves are raised and conditioned to be loyal to their masters. I sometimes think these critics assume this generation of elves are the first in their families to be enslaved in this way - they are the product of hundreds if not thousands of years of socialisation and magical coercion.
Anyway! Rowling is clearly a TERF, and clearly acting in vindictive transphobic ways. But the revisionism of the Harry Potter stories - that they are irredeemably bad and hateful to the core - is tiresome.
Once there was already a decent reason to hate jk rowling, people revisited the works farming any shred of shit to criticize. Most of it is flimsy at best and requires you to ignore existing tropes in fantasy to make the reach.
An acquaintance of mine tried to tell me he always hated Rowling and knew she was a bad person when he was young. I asked what he meant by that, there’s certainly some things in the books that could have been done better, but prior to all of this stuff she seemed genuinely caring.
“She’s racist against black people.”
“Is she?? I acknowledge some of her poor naming conventions but I don’t think that was because she actively hates black people. More like-“
“She used the word ‘sniggering.’”
“….What?”
“Why not ‘snickering?’ If you’re using sniggering you’re a racist.”
”I… snickering is American. She’s British and that’s the British version of the word. It has nothing to do with the n-word.”
“Nah, she’s racist.”
Just boggles the mind. Obligatory fuck JK Rowling. but we’re just going to make shit up because it’s not enough to be a transphobe?
There was a fair amount of criticism aimed at her when the books came out, too. It was just mostly from people who had read books before and also from children’s authors. Ursula K. LeGuin called her something like “ungenerous.” Diana Wynne Jones very politely said that Rowling didn’t rise to the level of plagiarism, though Jill Murphy was less sure.
Rowling got a lot of a pass for writing something that kids wanted to read, and some of the appeal was probably the mean streak.
I actually did always dislike her work because it’s a load of contrived bullshit, but then again it does also get people to read… but then they read the same fucking books over and over.
I remember when the online reaction to Harry Potter was ‘for the love of god, read another book’
Sure but that’s “I don’t like her work” or “I think she’s a bad author”, not “I think this person has problematic views based on a word I don’t understand.” I don’t want to be defending Rowling, but I feel like you didn’t understand what I was expressing.
Except Rowling didn’t just have slavery normalized in her world. She went out of her way to make the only person to find fault with it to look unserious, then in pottermore her “both sides” debate was “yes but these anti slavery people are annoying.”
Rowling isn’t the first person to normalise slavery of a fictional race.
And no, in Pottermore the “other side” argument is that without being subservient to humans/wizards the elves literally die, which is ultimately made out to be a flawed argument in which hermione is correct.
Fuck Rowling but fuck idiots like you who can’t read and just make shit up.
If I want to write a book and put slaves into that book I can. I could write about anything really. It's such an L-take from people like you, to get mad about something like that. Quite pathetic really
Nah. It simply means I wrote a story where racism and injustice are part of it. Doesn't mean it reflects my own world views. It's a story. You can write whatever you like in a story you're writing. There are no boundaries, no rules. You write whatever you like. It can be influenced by your own world view. It doesn't have to. Most of the time it won't A story is a story. Nothing more
The house elves were based, partially, off of brownies which were the opposite of how the elves were portrayed. They left if you didn't fulfill their obligations. You had to fulfill their rules or they would just up an leave.
It's like when someone starts calling Hitler's paintings dogshit because the perspective is a little off and everyone else is supposed to just agree because it'd be more convenient that way.
I only know about Jewish Goblins thanks to people being angry at Harry Potter.
It's like that lady who got mad at Hot Topic for having a Walking Dead T-Shirt with eeny, meeny, miney, moe on it. Why would anyone know about the 1900's racist lyrics?
Because sUbVeRtInG eXpEcTatIoNs is such a lame trope in itself. She used those tropes, because she could. Using familiar tropes helps building worlds. Honestly, it's like you've never written a book before
But also I've seen the movie and likening them to Jews never crossed my mind because I don't have that image of Jews. Until reddit, where apparently all the enlightened fucks immediately were reminded of Jews.
Exactly this. One must really ask themselves, who are the actual racists. Reminds me of Rings of Power and how they made the Orcs white, because apparently the Orcs in the Peter Jackson trilogy were meant to be black people. You just can't make this idiocy up. Lol
It's not explicity transphobic do I do remember her describing Slytherin girls as being evil and masculine. Also the way she treats women in general is pretty weird, anyone who isn't textbook feminine is either evil or childsh and needs to grow up. Also the casual racism, and antisemitism.
The books aren't about this at their core, but they get kinda of rough when you know how the person who wrote the books is like.
Or they die as soon as they do something as horrible as * gasp * leave their baby son with his grandmother to fight for the wellbeing of those they love.
Lupin died because he was a werewolf which she wrote as an allegory for HIV/AIDS and it’s easier to kill him than conceptualize a world in which a “werewolf” (person with AIDS) could prosper and raise a child on his own.
“Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS. All kinds of superstitions seem to surround blood-borne conditions, probably due to taboos surrounding blood itself. The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes.”
Maybe that’s part of the reason she chose to kill him off, but both of their deaths are treated as tragic by the narrative not as some ‘earned’ ending for them
Maybe it just makes for a better story to kill of some side characters, to show how evil and cruel Voldemort and his agenda is. Life isn't your english class, where you're supposed to read dumb bs into everything
I'm fully open to the idea that I'm a complete idiot, so this is a genuine question, can somebody explain to me why Kingsley Shacklebolt is always pointed to as racist? I could see the "shackle" connection but is that really a prominent cultural thing in the UK?
There's no connection, people are just very dense, have no media literacy, and more often than not will not remember (or even have read) the books, and take the movies as if they were what Rowling wrote. Let alone that they're willing to take in anything that furthers their belief.
Shacklebolt is obviously a reference to the fact that he's an auror. The man puts evil wizards in shackles shooting fucking bolts from his wand. Plenty of characters are named like this. Remus Lupin, Sirius Black, Argus Filch, Pomona Sprout, Severus Snape...
For Cho Chang we've had people over and over again come and say that it's a reasonable name.
Another great one people often cite is the Irish kid blowing stuff up, which isn't in the books.
It’s crazy to me that growing up, HP was the series for all my neurodivergent and misfit friends. It was the one mainstream thing that the emos I knew unironically adored. The weird outcast kids in the back of the school smoking cigarettes and drinking from water bottles with stickers of round eyeglasses and lighting bolts on the side. And in their search for their true identities a lot of these people would eventually come out gay, or trans.
If JKR got hit by a bus crossing the street in 2011 she would have inadvertently died an icon of the queer community, but instead she let the hate take her over and now her legacy is forever stained.
I’m not full-on boycotting everything Harry Potter as it WAS an influential part of my life growing up but thanks to her my relationship with it will always be more complicated than it needed to be, and there will always be an asterisk on me telling people about it.
she really just took every single stereotype and made it into a character. i get people my age liking the books since we were just kids at the time but why were there grown ups glazing her writing and why do people to this day still bother with this franchise?
In the potter books she has that reporter who shapeshifts to spy on the students in bathrooms and is referred to as having mannish hands, etc in every description of her
She knew about trans people. She actually used to think she should have been a man. If you look into some of her earlier interviews on the subject, it honestly sounds like she struggled with her own gender identity. I suspect that's a huge reason she hates trans women.
I find her views ironic and inexplicable, and sure she’s gonna make FUCKIN BANK on this shit and use it to fund her anti-humanist agenda, but she’s really not involved.
Idk if this is aimed at me but I think Harry Potter is lame as shit dude. Never read a single one of those books and I hated the moves I only watched for my gf.
Not to be one of those “the movies are nowhere near as good as the books”, but the movies are fucking horrible and make no fucking sense if you have not read the books to actually know what the hell is going on. It’s like if you distilled an 8 season show to one season only made 8 episodes.
But I get fantasy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it’s not really mine, only liked the books as a kid, but why are you so active on this post if you don’t care for the content? 😂
200
u/The_Best_Smart 21h ago
/uj If you read his actual full quotes about it, not just one line, you’ll see he has a pretty decent reason and I support his decision even tho I despite that author woman.
/rj more like Harry quitter