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Mom says stfu or we’re not going to Dairy Queen

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first 5 faceless emojis are how your summers gonna go

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Incredible things happening on tumblr

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got my new boyfriend from Ikea. Unfortunately he's made of particle board and with a single thrust of my hips I broke him into five pieces

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I kind of love it when websites both display relative timestamps for an unreasonably long span of time before switching to absolute timestamps and use unreasonable units for the span in question. "This post was made 37 weeks ago" under what conceivable circumstance is this a useful way to communicate that?

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i'm curious, what's everyone's Default Outfit? like what would you be always drawn wearing in a cartoon? mine is concert tee + mid length skirt

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a grown adult just came into the nature center and left a fish carcass on a table

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I love very specific cakes

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Okay, let's talk - really talk - about the "problematic stuff" in the actual Harry Potter books: a rant

I always love when someone finds one of my posts like this one about how to do a Harry Potter boycott, and reblogs it with something like "um actually no, liking HP at all is NOT ok, have you considered that those books themselves are problematic?" Uh yeah Miss Zoomer, I have, because I was ten years old when Goblet of Fire came out and in the midst of a U.S. Civil War obsession, so the way that the house-elf slavery was portrayed in that book wigged me out without any adults telling me to feel that way. I picked up on the weirdness of it all on my own! Somehow I wound up liking the book anyway despite not liking that one subplot, just like plenty of people enjoy Star Wars overall while disliking the Ewoks. Also, elementary-school Rose was reading books by people like Roald Dahl, L. Frank Baum and fucking C.S. Lewis - as in, fantasy novels that had significantly more examples, and ones baked deep into their themes sometimes, of the kinds of bigotry that people decry J.K. Rowling's work for!

And you'll say, "But cardassiangoodreads, those are older works!" But here's why Gen Z keeps disproportionately falling for this argument: because every true Millennial lifelong-bookworm knows that even by the standards of fantasy of its own time - and particularly children's fantasy - a lot of the bigotry people zero in on in Harry Potter books is not very remarkable at all! Even works that remain far more beloved by progressives today, like, say, Tamora Pierce's books, are chock-full of stuff like Orientalism and heteronormativity. Some of the tropes that people decry in Harry Potter like misogyny toward female characters' life choices (another thing I noticed that no one wanted to hear me talk about on online fan forums in the 2000s) or using gender-deviance / fatness / ugliness as signs of moral decay, were also incredibly common in children's books at the time - I don't care about what that Ursula K. LeGuin quote said, sure she's entitled to her opinion about the books' mean-spiritedness but HP was not unique in those ways at all, "fatness associated with being a bully" is all over 90s and 00s children's lit. And the antisemitism of the goblins and, yes, the racism of the house-elf slavery, is the kind of "regurgitating something you saw in canonical fantasy fiction that you didn't realize was rooted in bigotry" that was also incredibly common in all fantasy of the time. (Did you really think she came up with the goblin antisemitism all on her own? Opera buff says lol #cantrelate) Hell, authors of both adult and children's fantasy are only starting to get heat for that! Even though there are whole subgenres of fantasy and horror that are based in fear of specific human Others, for instance.

(IMO what makes JKR different from the Tamora Pierces and, yes, Rick Riordans is that she's been unrepentant about this stuff, whereas they have IIRC both apologized for some of the dated aspects of their earlier works. A British author being a bit clueless about how the house elf stuff would read to an American audience that is much more sensitive about slavery was defensible for JKR at the time Goblet of Fire came out - it's not so much when she specifically set out to depict "Magic in North America" after a decade and a half of mega-fame and wealth and the increased scrutiny and responsibility that comes with it, and wrote a bunch of racist and colonialist garbage that clearly didn't consult any indigenous people or even consider that as a thing she might want to do. That said, some of it is also that HP is as popular and as much of a cultural juggernaut as it is. I don't think people would feel as betrayed if either of those authors turned out like she did - contrast the way people talk about S.E. Hinton's or even Orson Scott Card's homophobia. And theirs are not obscure works!!!!)

So saying kids shouldn't read Harry Potter based on the books' "problematic content" is intellectually dishonest. They're almost certainly going to encounter at least some of the other media I mentioned - in fact, you probably think some of that's a good thing! I've earnestly seen people recommend Lewis's Narnia series, books that are thematically apologetics for both fundamentalist Christianity and the British Empire, and whose textual misogyny is so bad Rowling herself has criticized it on those grounds, as a "less-problematic alternative" to HP - which is just, are you fucking kidding me? Could you make it any clearer you're getting all your opinions from the Internet with no critical thinking of your own applied? Or at least that you haven't read your supposed "recommendation" recently enough for it to mean shit? And I don't hate those books or anything or think kids shouldn't read them, I don't think that about anything and I enjoyed plenty about that series as a kid - but come on, if you actually took issue with anything "problematic" in HP you'd be way more bothered by the much more of it in in those books!

It is, in fact, never too early for kids to learn the lesson about how to engage with problematic media that they otherwise like. Believe me, I had already learned that lesson by the time I encountered the Harry Potter books - I grew up in a household where TCM was always on, ffs, and again, Civil War phase, don't you think I'd seen Gone with the Wind by that point? I'd even read Uncle Tom's Cabin, an earnest anti-racist book that is nevertheless famously.... "extremely dated" is generous, by modern standards, in the way any book about racism by white people from that era is. All that being said, I think it's especially important for them to read stuff like Harry Potter which is much more recent and much more engaging to modern kids, and learn how to spot and grapple with the bigotry that is still there. I think they'll be better for it, even! I certainly feel like I am! At the very least, it'll prepare them for being able to spot that in media they encounter on their own. Maybe some of you wouldn't need a discourse post to tell you about the problems with those books if your parents and teachers had done that for you a little better?

TL;DR - the reason you take issue with Harry Potter is J.K. Rowling's transphobia, plain and simple. And that's perfectly legitimate. So don't buy your kids official Harry Potter stuff and tell them why. That'll set up for a much better, more productive conversation than pretending it's about some other thing in the books themselves, and then being totally fine with plenty of other media that contains that same thing.

TL;DR II - any standard by which Harry Potter is "too bigoted" for today's kids would also effectively ban most media from before a few decades ago, and do you really think that's good for kids, to just completely cut them off from the entire history of human art and media before the last half-century? Or is it instead better to teach them how to grapple with that work, how to navigate the foreign country that is the past?

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*offers you a cigarette except out of a crayon box and it's a crayon*

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mark, my words. *mark brings me my dictionary* thank you mark

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Have you ever finished a book that was over 800 pages?

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To make sure their accents were accurate, the child actors in the Harry Potter movies were forced to grow up in England

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i have nothing in common with people whose favorite color is purple

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I don't like it when you post body horror

my blog is called lustcannibalism by the way

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