#jkr discourse

[samijami]

JK Rowling: Now, I have all of these wonderful white names, for white people..

JK Rowling: What about the nonwhite character?..

...

JK Rowling: CHO CHANG

[werewolf-cuddles]

J.K. Rowling: *declares that she will "never forgive" Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint for speaking out against her anti-trans views*

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, probably:

[curiouscarnifex]

I'd be less pissed about the continued "If you engage with HP fandom then you are supporting JKR even if you don't pay for anything" if the same standard was applied to literally anything else.

Chris Pratt goes to a homophobic mega church but no one yells about Guardians of the Galaxy fanfiction. No one says you can't torrent The Mandalorian because of Gina Carino.

Hell Disney literally funded the "Don't say gay" bill in Florida but I haven't seen anyone suggest that you shouldn't make fanart of The Little Mermaid.

Like either be consistent and call for complete boycotts of every media property with a shitty bigoted person involved or just shut up.

I'm fucking sick and tired of being constantly reminded that a billionaire want me and my community dead and the that only thing anyone cares about doing is yelling about fucking fanfiction

[vaguelyaperson]

"JKR was always terrible!" "HP ((a series written in the late 90s and early 2000s)) was always problematic ((by today's standards))!" "JKR was always secretly a racist misogynist!"

JKR is a very real example of how even a progressive ally can fail to check biases and instead be brainwashed by bigotry. More than that, JKR is a tragic example of what idolizing someone as an unfalliable progressive icon can do to someone when they (inevitably) get high on their platform and do something problematic ((the shoehorned gay Dumbledore controversy being the start, imo.))

By hooting and hollering about how she was secretly horrible all along (when she used tropes that were extremely prevalent in early 2000s media), you are distancing yourselves and believing yourselves imperviable to the same fate. That is a major mistake.

Everyone, no matter how progressive they start out, is capable of fucking up and/or getting brainwashed by propaganda. Everyone has unintentional biases they have to unlearn - failing to do so, to their own detriment.

JKR should be a cautionary tale. Not a gotcha! We unmasked you as evil all along!

The fact that so many people miss the point of this makes me very worried about the current strength and direction of progressive social movements.

EDIT: Anyone using this argument to support Hogwarts Legacy or any of JKR's current bullshit will get blocked. This is intended as a learning point that this sort of thing doesn't happen again. I fully support the boycott.

[the-official-jk-rowling]

🏳️‍⚧️

What????

[evamme]

THE ULTIMATE IRONY.

[sociallyanxiouspotter]

I hate how people straight up aren't allowed to mention Harry Potter in normal posts on here

Like people talking about books and series everyone loved as kids or how things you were obsessed with when you were a kid define you now

But Harry Potter can't be mentioned in those posts or the replies because rather than have nuance about how many queer people still exist in the Harry Potter fandom and how, even with its flaws, it's extremely important to them, people just write every HP fans off as a TERF/transphobe

Like I grew up with that series -- I was in the 3rd or 4th grade when it came out (too lazy to look it up lol), I would go to midnight book releases stay up all night reading the latest book and used to keep a counter for how many times I've read them. It was the first time I saw a fandom create world building for the existence of trans people (Gryffindor dormitory stairs validating a trans person's gender). One of the best couple of days of my life was going with my best friend to the Harry Potter theme park at Universal Studios

And I'm just supposed to never mention it on childhood nostalgia posts. Like I have to destroy every happy memory I have of it

[catgirl-catboy]

I can't believe that the main takeaway of JKR discourse is that "JKR is a bad person" (true.) "so its morally okay to harass fans" (fuck you.)

and NOT:

"one rich person shouldn't be able to influence real world politics to such a huge degree, the moral character of the rich person notwithstanding."

Like, she's a piece of shit, but she's not uniquely evil. We need to put safeguards in place before the next one comes along.

[samijami]

[werewolf-cuddles]

about the Snoot Game art tag yeah it's a serious problem and blocking the Snoot Game fan artists is the only option. some Goodbye Volcano High fans likes to compare Snoot Game with Harry Potter franchise as an excuse to defend the artists who are both fans of GVH and Snoot Game stay safe and stay strong

Honestly, comparing Snoot Game to Harry Potter is like comparing a rotten apple to an orange.

Harry Potter is a series that has problematic elements, but is not inherently rotten. There was, after all, a reason it resonated with so many people, and became such a massive cultural phenomenon.

(Yes, it's easy to write off the entire series as problematic now, especially now that we're almost 4 years out from JKR going full TERF, but acting like it was always bad and we were stupid for liking it in the first place is a cop-out to avoid acknowledging that sometimes good art is made by bad people.)

Snoot Game is inherently rotten to the core. The anti-LGBT themes are baked right into the game's story. It's a VN for bigots, by bigots. On top of that, it doesn't have anywhere near the same level of wide appeal as Harry Potter, being an incredibly niche "fan" game aimed at a very specific audience.

Honestly, I feel like there needs to be some serious cognitive dissonance to be a fan of both Snoot Game and Goodbye Volcano High when the former is an overtly offensive parody of the latter.

[2-late-2-the-party]

JKR’s defenders will be like “BUT YOU DONT UNDERSTAND!!!!! 😭😭😭 She created this WHOLE WORLD in her MIND!!! 🤯🤯🤯 as if this isn’t something that countless other authors, DMs, and eight year old girls at recess have also done.

[happysadyoyo]

So I made a comment on reddit where I started to sorta derail and I think the information is good enough to share here and in the trans tags for people not understanding wtf is up with all us “transandrophobia truthers.” 

This isn’t a particularly nuanced post. I left out how racism and ethnicity ties into trans men’s lives and “male privilege.” I think that’s an important part of the conversation and I’ll follow up with that in a reblog down the line. 

Anyway, context. I follow r/nottheonion, which posts actual headlines that sound like they should belong on The Onion, a popular satire news website that has an unfortunate record of their worst and most unbelievable headlines coming true. The particular headline here?

J.K. Rowling's new book, about a transphobe who faces wrath online, raises eyebrows

I’ve included the comment that I replied to for further context:

Reddit User: Did [JKR] ever say anything about trans men? I've only seen nasty things about trans women from her.

Me: Oh yeah. Reread the manifesto. About half of all explicit trans hatred is that trans men are women and girls trying to escape the perceived shackles of societal womanhood. I did a word by word breakdown of her manifesto because I got tired of being told (mainly by women) that JKR hadn't talked about trans men at all.

Plus let's not forget she showed her colors commenting on gender neutral language surrounding menstruation and pregnancy. Something that by and large does not effect trans women.

TERFs generally treat trans men, AFAB nonbinary folks, and CAFAB intersex folks as brainwashed and confused by the patriarchy and the people encouraging them to transition. They see using HRT as poisoning ourselves (T being poison is sadly such a common talking point in trans circles that I've seen young cis boys become scared of their own puberty) and top surgery as mutilation. They like to take pictures of barely healed phalloplasty scars to scare people too (nvm the fact that again, bottom surgery for men is under discussed in trans and even trans masc circles! People don't even know you can even get the necessary tools to get an erection or the other options besides phalloplasty!)

For the above group that are "too far gone" for TERFs to scare back into the closet, we are seen as monsters and gender traitors. They actively want us dead so we can't influence younger folks with our existence.

Oh and this isn't touching on corrective rape from TERFs. At all.

And as you can see there's a lot of leakage from general radfem ideology that leaks into mainstream and intersectional feminism. It's unfortunate because already trans masc folks are one of the most invisible groups in the trans community (the only other group I would consider more invisible are AMAB nonbinary folks, especially if they're not feminine and/or like masculinity). Trans men statistics are horrifically erased because they get recategorized as women.

A lot of trans men choose to disengage and "go stealth" because there's a lot of tangled up self loathing and reactivity towards masculinity in feminist, esp queer feminist circles. Of course, this leads to misconceptions like trans men have an easier time transitioning and have male privilege and completely ignores that a lot of trans masc folks can't or don't want to go stealth. And it ignores how conditional this male privilege actually is.

I'm also ignoring here how a lot of trans men disengage with queer spaces because of how unfriendly it can be. There's a variety of reasons, from people assuming they're straight (or actually being straight) to the general hostility that can be felt in the undercurrents in most gen queer feminist spaces.

This isn't to say that trans women don't have it worse. Hyper visibility and hyper invisibility are just two sides of the same coin at the end of the day, and this toxic mindset around men and masculinity hurts trans women just as much, if in different ways. But I hate seeing the hatred TERFs spew at trans men getting boiled down to nothing more than infantilization. Because while yes that is a lot of it and it's not something trans women get a lot of (because they're seen as men, so violent and dangerous and predatory), there's so much more and it's all just as bad as what women are getting day in and day out from TERFs.

To end on a more humorous note, my favorite instances of TERFs getting owned are when they're shown a celebrity photo and say "oh that's definitely a man" when... Nope. Just a woman. Showing they can't actually tell who is and isn't transgender

[vergi1ius]

Been sitting on this a while, but after watching Shaun's vid on Harry Potter, it feels to me like the best Pratchett analogue for the house elves are not his goblins, but rather the Golems.

In each case, you have a race that enjoys manual labor, and doesn't really need or want to be in charge of things.

The difference is that Pratchett recognizes that the enslavement of the Golems is an abhorrent practice easy to abuse, and so seeks solutions for them beyond "well if everyone were just nice to each other..." The Golems have an awareness of their situation and the potential for abuse, and so seek systemic justice for it. They will work tirelessly 24 hours a day -- but they will take one day off a week, to remind everyone and themselves that they are more than tools, more than servants.

[the-official-jk-rowling]

help what do i do my dog got out earlier and it ran into the road bc it saw the squirrel and got hit by the down with the cis bus! the trans agenda has gone too far!!!

A dog too?! The trans agenda is horrendous!

[metvmorqhoses]

This is a letter submitted to me by the previous anon. I was left nothing short of appalled by it. In a few paragraphs this person managed to take everything I ever said on this blog about art, literature, gender, ethics, or even myself as a person, twist it to their own biased and, quite frankly, worrying perspective and use it to accuse me of being, at best, a Nazism and antisemitism apologist.

I’m very open minded, I’m able to understand most point of views even without sharing them, but this is another matter entirely. This is being unable to read reality correctly anymore. This is dangerously and hurtfully spinning things out of proportion. This is being unable to form a pure critical thought in a reality that is already mad and confusing enough.

I read extensively in the past few years about the plummeting of comprehension of the written word among all demographics, but that an educated peer of mine, mirror and parrot of too many others, could genuinely reason like this will always be beyond me.

Anon, you are right. I wouldn’t normally publish or entertain such profound drivel, but the things you just accused me of are not only absurd, but beyond serious and grave. You cannot throw such ideas and words so lightly at another human being, especially not inventing yourself every single reason for doing it.

So I’m going to answer, word to word, in the hopes to make you, or at least someone else, wake up from the horrors of a brainwasing this society is, at this point, irremediably affected by.  

“i do not think that your response to me displays “good disposition”, so i will be sure to match you in tone. you do not have to answer this, or even read it; i hope that you will read it though, if only to momentarily consider someone else’s perspective. quoting you verbatim from a previous ask/answer, “I absolutely hate to contradict the canon”. you’re right, the original books don’t glorify nazism, mostly the new content does. however, you say voldemort is the true hero. he is driven to exterminate specific groups of people for his personal gain. whatever depth you want to give him, that is still canon. you don’t deny it. you might not find it the most interesting part of him, but it is still there, and you still call him hero.

i and many others will never know most of our families because of a man and his followers who worked exactly like that. so don’t think of this as me trying to cancel you. i will not be reaching out to your friends or trying to get you banned from anywhere, that’s not what i’ve come directly to you for. i’d like to know what it is about two blood supremacists that you see not only so much inspiring complexity in, but yourself in as well.”

Honestly anon, considering what you are accusing me of, the hinting of which I had already perceived in your previous ask, my disposition towards you was and still is way better than it should be. I’m taking pity of your way of thinking and still hoping to somehow help you understand how wrong this is on every possible level.

I’m very glad you seem to agree the Harry Potter books are no Nazi hymn, but I unfortunately have to contradict you right away. I never, ever, glorified Voldemort’s figure or called him “the true hero of the story”. If you had taken the time to actually read the things the person you are accusing of terrible and very real things has always written about that fictional character, you would have noticed the whole point of my metas is, on the contrary, to underline his twistedness, his monstrous and yet very present humanity, his unfillable voids, his abysses in negative with still a wisp of something else enduring nonetheless.

You would also have noticed that I’m utterly uninterested in and rarely mention the blood-purity movement, not because I think there’s something literary wrong in constructing fictional evil after Nazism (nor, again, do I think there’s anything wrong in finding Nazism intriguing as an historical event and as a study of human nature), but because, as I previously tried to make you understand, I find it psychologically uninteresting in regard to him and not what his character is fundamentally about.

You also just took an ask in which I said I’d have liked to rewrite Harry Potter with Voldemort as the real protagonist (protagonist, not hero, the difference is huge - I linked it for you), and twisted it to construct this huge delusion about my preaching the bloodthirsty ideology of an evil wizard from a fairy tale. Voldemort went around even repeatedly trying to kill a child, why not accusing me of seconding infanticide too, since you are at it? Or seeing antisemitism everywhere is your main fixation since it touches you closely?

I would never call Voldemort a hero, and you know why? Because it would be incredibly dull. Voldemort is a villain. I appreciate him precisely as such. I’m not interested in finding his actions (at least not his monstruosities) correct or admirable, it wouldn’t be riveting. What makes villains compelling is their darkness. And this is because, most importantly, unlike all the people you are mentioning, Voldemort is the bad guy in a children book. Voldemort is not real. His darkness has no consequence whatsoever.

As for why I find Voldemort and Bellatrix compelling, if you had bothered to read my writings before accusing me of absurdities, you’d already have your answer. You’d know that it’s their character as people and mutual relationship that I find intriguing, not their ideology.

As to why I said I see myself in them, those are personal reasons I would never disclose to someone who cannot seem to count to ten, let alone understand utter complexity of certain childhood circumstances or unusual personalities, but (even if it’s obvious, even if I stated it multiple times for the thick idiots in the back) it’s obviously not their fictional murderous/blood-purist/unicorn-blood-licking tendencies I see myself, a real person, in.

I equally see myself in Dorian Gray, Heathcliff and Catherine, Frankenstein’s monster. I trust no sane person would believe I’m inciting the masses to make deals with the devil, traumatize children or set the world on fire out of spite towards human nature (even if the latter is tempting and people like you are making it even more so, I would admit).

“i am not always just an anon on the internet. i am a real person with a real family, real experience with antisemitism and racism in my everyday life. real books i like to read, real foods i like to enjoy, real fears and angers and excitements about the changes i’m seeing in politics and in the public these days. i am, in real life, affected by the ease with which some of my own friends can tell me “jews control the media” just because they’ve heard it on tv enough, from movies or talking heads or whoever.”

As it so happens, I’m a real person just as well. You don’t know anything about me. You for example don’t know that my grandmother spent World War II with real Nazis invading her very home, robbing her of everything and using her farm as a militar base. You don’t know the story of my family, you don’t know that I share many, too many, concerns and fears about the world we are currently living in too and I’m genuinely sorry about what you have to go through, because even without being Jewish I know something about it first hand. But this doesn’t give you the right to behave how you are behaving. You are in fact being just part of the big cultural problem you are denouncing. You are going after innocent people, judging them out of invented nothing. Even if you are surrounded by ignorant and racist people for real (I wonder to what extent, since you seem to highly exaggerate things), this doesn’t mean you have to blindly assume the whole world conforms to it by default, twisting everything you see to make it about you and your current, perhaps justified, fixations.

“consider also that you are a woman. you’ve said you don’t feel very strongly about any part of your visible identity, which is fine. but others around you likely perceive you as a woman. you will be treated differently by different people based on how they perceive you. you have to exist in the context of the world around you whether you want to or not. do you call it activism or wokeness to tell someone off for treating you poorly because you’re a woman, or do you call it standing up for yourself? now what if that person is andrew tate or jordan peterson, whose sexism reaches and influences many, many people around you? telling them or their parrots to think before they speak is not being woke. that’s recognizing a lack of respect and responding to it appropriately to shut it down before it gets worse.“

Again, you took something I said and completely failed to understand its meaning. I never said “I don’t feel very strongly about any part of my visible identity”. I actually feel my womanhood deeply, to extents you couldn’t imagine. What I said is that I don’t care to conform to this, in my opinion quite pathological, trend of labeling everything you are and put it on display for the world to see and use, in the hopes of creating an ever-more vacillating sense of identity, belonging and validation. I firmly believe everyone has the absolute right to be true to themselves and I have no problem embracing anyone who wants to intruduce themselves with a ten minutes-long list of pronouns, gender, sexuality, heath-status, ethnicity and religious beliefs, but this is not something I’ll be ever taking part of, nor the kind of circus I’d like the world to turn into, merely because for some reason I feel like this is more a show (a dangerous one, too) than a real quest towards inner truth.

Calling out idiocy is not being woke, anon. I confirm. Not agreeing with powerful people spreading dangerous ideas is one thing, making up the 99% of those terrible crimes in order to have a scapegoat for your witch hunts is another thing entirely.

“so why can’t i criticize your purposeful decision to deify a character who can all too easily become a model for others who want to take their hero worship of people like him further than tumblr?”

Because you are making this “deification” entirely up, anon. And the fact that you cannot seem to understand this simple fact is very concerning. If I preached Voldemort’s blood-purity ideology, you would have every right to criticize me. You are even totally entitled to have opinion about others tastes. You are not entitled though to make things up to further your own ideologies and worldviews and you should actually be capable, fairly educated as you are, to understand what you read.

“i guess i am not judging you for the art you enjoy, but the way in which you talk about it. people who are actually affected by these views have to be most wary when decent, intelligent people begin to repeat and think them. unfortunately, for my family, this was indeed the way real life worked in the 30s/40s. their kind, smart, beloved neighbors could still turn on them after being exposed to enough nazi propaganda, to films and papers and gossip. and now i have to feel like this in the present day because it is media like this, which “minorities” like us have always, always made our worries clear about (you can’t tell me discussion of cho chang’s name or the subtext of sex-aware staircases is new, because i was around to see when it began), which seeps into good people’s brains and creates opportunities for them to turn on us. this is why white supremacists and fascists use dogwhistles, why they won’t speak the quiet part out loud and will use whatever media they can to further their message under the radar.”

“The way I talk about it” is not at all what you are describing lol If you had actually taken the time to read what I wrote you would have (I hope) noticed.

Oh, yes. Calling a character “Cho Chang” is a terrible crime against humanity. Entire generations of children are traumatized. Also, oh my! Sex-aware staircases! Call the police!

No, anon. Good people don’t let anything seep into their brains and “turn on you”. Good people are good people. People that out of the blue, only because society validates them, turn against fellow human beings, for whatever reason, weren’t good people in the first place. Ideologies give permission for the real self to show, they don’t create anything from scratch.

“analyzing media is about opening your eyes to the context in which it sits. i’m afraid, and i think you’ll agree, that critical analysis skills are degrading on a mass scale these days.“

Yes lol I deeply and absolutely agree.

“i’m afraid that these books have always contained subtle problems, but those of us who were affected by them did not have such a free internet to express ourselves and were otherwise shouted down by fans at the time. i’m afraid that these books have always existed in a context in which antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia have only been on the rise. i’m afraid that someone like you, who is writing a novel, who has some reach now and who may gain even more of a following in the future, who touts herself as not only intelligent but a lover of ethics, may end up contributing, whether you intend to or not, to the mass of people who will turn around to hurt people like me.

i can understand the notion that voldemort simply used a preexisting Other that he despised anyway to further his own drive for power. lots of scholars would say hitler did the exact same thing. my question for you is not even why you see yourself in that, because i suppose it is understandable as a strategy to get yourself support for something by finding like minds already headed the same direction. but the key point there is like minds. no, my question is, why do you call him the hero?

not protagonist. not something akin to humbert humbert per nabokov’s original purpose.

hero.

a: a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability

b: an illustrious warrior

c: a person admired for achievements and noble qualities

d: one who shows great courage

at this point, it isn’t the harry potter books that praise nazi ideology and strategy. it is you. even if you don’t see it that way, i’m here to tell you that i can interpret your words this way, and if i can, then others can too.”

Apart from telling you, again, you are completely making up this way of mine of praising Voldemort as a hero and that you should probably read other people’s writings before judging them, allow me to “tout myself as intelligent” once again, and enlighten you with a banal fact.

Media, fiction, art is for the most part a mirror of who is consuming it. The fact that you can interpret, as you are doing, my words completely wildly, incorrectly, insultingly, tells a lot more about you than about me. If a person isn’t able to apply critical skills to what they are reading, again as you are doing, they are going to find exactly what they want to find in anything. Mind creates reality and you are a marvelous example of it.

It’s the same old debate about morality and amorality in art. Not very intelligent people keep bringing it up again and again through the eras, but the truth about it doesn’t change. I can use a knife to surgically save a life, cut bread or kill a person. None is inherent fault or merit of the knife, but of the hand who wields it.

I remember distinctly when Hannibal came out, the woke police wanted it cancelled because it romanticized murder and cannibalism. Everyone was afraid people would have gone out eating each other. What happened instead is that no raise in cannibalism was detected. Cannibals became cannibals regardless, perhaps feeling a little more represented in media. Decent people remained decent people. I hope you get my hint. Nazism didn’t become Nazism when writings of the Golden Dawn came out, talking about the superior race. Nazism became Nazism when a government used those writing as the mass excuse to unleash the most basic and terrible instincts of humanity to further its own political and economical ends.

I guess your vision of the world, in which the big evil blogger on Tumblr is going to write a new novel without perpetually denouncing every other word everything problematic anyone could possibly read in it and the good people around you will suddenly turn to eat you against their will because brainwashed by my subtle suggestions, could be a quite childish way to justify somehow a world that terrifies you, in which evil isn’t banal and everywhere, but has a tangible and therefore preventable reason.

I’m sorry, but the roots of persecution are as old as human nature, and you actually could even find something really akin to them in your own behaviour if you look very closely.

“in your response to me, you have strung together many lengthy ways of telling me what a brainless lemming i must be for having concerns about how people analyze media, but you couldn’t manage even the simplest ‘i do not support nazism’ after saying you find the history interesting. it’s not your interest that concerns me, but your inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to just confirm that interest is where it ends. unless you deliberately, explicitly, and vehemently deny this, others will continue to misinterpret you. you might be tempted to say that this will only be an issue with people who aren’t as smart or literary as you. let me inform you now that i am at least “a normally intelligent and educated person”, as you put it. we’ve read all the same books. i enjoy a lot of the same media you do. yet i am still not confident you will clearly denounce nazism even now that you have been asked. now imagine that you have even one follower who cannot be described with your above quote. it only takes one misguided person to be the next john hinckley jr., or robert gregory bowers, or dylann roof, or so on. you care not about morality, but about ethics. consider the ethical ramifications of this kind of public hero worship of a character who so easily maps onto a real life perpetrator of genocide without some sort of discussion about him ultimately being wrong. do i think we should all have to disclaim that we don’t condone what villains do? no. do i think you should have to say it every single time you talk about the subject? no, of course not. but if i cannot find it anywhere on your blog, then it has to be said somewhere.”

I’m sorry anon, but after everything you just said I cannot help but conclude those same books on you had very little effect. Maybe try to read them again. I dread what you might have made out of them.

[thoughtofadumbteenprotagonist]

okay I’ve seen too many fuckin illiterate idiots using “tHerE’S No EtHiCaL ConSumPtiOn UnDeR CapiTaLiSm” to justify buying Antisemitism: The Game so i feel the need to say yes, you are illiterate, and yes, you are an idiot - because you are //completely ignoring the context and nuance of that phrase to serve your own selfish goals//

The concept of no ethical consumption under capitalism is specifically about those in low income households/poverty who cannot afford the luxury of sustainability and ethical purchasing because that shit is expensive af and having the best quality of life possible, in relation to your situation, is far more important than having a heppy over using Amazon or not

So that is to say, the new (overpriced) HP game does not fall under any of those perimeters, and your money is actively going to support a TERF and her ideologies (ideologies that are capable of turning into fucking legislation in the UK) along with a host of writers who apparently thought freeing a enslaved race counts as a bad ending

So yeah, feel bad about buying and playing the game, and listen to the accounts of our trans family and Jewish friends because, shockingly, they know what they’re talking about when it comes to discrimination

Edit: once more for those in the back not getting it LISTEN TO YOUR TRANS AND JEWISH FRIENDS/MUTUALS/WHATEVERS ABOUT THIS, THEY ARE THE AUTHORITY ON THIS MATTER