i. about 2 weeks ago, i was told there's a good chance that in 5 or so years, i'll need a wheelchair.
ii. okay. i loved harry potter as a kid. i have a hypothesis about this to be honest - why people still kind of like it. it's that she got very lucky. she managed to make a cross-generational hit. it was something shared for both parents and kids. it was right at the start of a huge cultural shift from pre to post-internet. i genuinely think many people were just seeking community; not her writing. it was a nice shorthand to create connection. which is a long way of saying - she didn't build this legacy, we built it for her. she got lucky, just once. that's all.
iii. to be real with you, i still struggle with identifying as someone with a disability, which is wild, especially given the ways my life has changed. i always come up against internalized ableism and shame - convinced even right now that i'm faking it for attention. i passed out in a grocery store recently. i hit my head on the shelves while i went down.
iv. he raises his eyebrows while he sends me a look. her most recent new book has POTS featured in it. okay, i say. i already don't like where this is going. we both take another bite of ramen. it is a trait of the villain, he says. we both roll our eyes about it.
v. so one of the things about being nonbinary but previously super into harry potter is that i super hate jk rowling. but it is also not good for my mental health to regret any form of joy i engaged with as a kid. i can't punish my young self for being so into the books - it was a passion, and it was how i made most of my friends. everyone knew about it. i felt like everyone had my same joy, my same fixation. as a "weird kid", this sense of belonging resonated with me so loudly that i would have done anything to protect it.
vi. as a present, my parents once took me out of school to go see the second movie. it is an incredibly precious memory: my mom straight-up lying about a dentist appointment. us snickering and sneaking into the weekday matinee. within seven years of this experience, the internet would be a necessity to get my homework finished. the world had permanently changed. harry potter was a relic, a way any of us could hold onto something of the analog.
vii. by sheer luck, the year that i started figuring out the whole gender fluid thing was also the first year people started to point out that she might have some internalized biases. i remember tumblr before that; how often her name was treated as godhood. how harry potter was kind of a word synonymous for "nerdy but cool." i would walk out of that year tasting he/him and they/them; she would walk out snarling and snapping about it.
viii. when i teach older kids creative writing, i usually tell them - so, she did change the face of young adult fiction, there's no denying that. she had a lot more opportunities than many of us will - there were more publishing houses, less push for "virally" popular content creators. but beyond reading another book, we need to write more books. we need to uplift the voices of those who remain unrepresented. we need to push for an exposure to the bigotry baked into the publishing system. and i promise you: you can write better than she ever did. nothing she did was what was magical - it was the way that the community responded to it.
ix. i get home from ramen. three other people have screenshotted the POTS thing and sent it to me. can you fucking believe we're still hearing this shit from her when it's almost twenty-fucking-twenty-three. the villain is notably also popular on tumblr. i just think that's funny. this woman is a billionaire and she's mad that she can't control the opinions of some people on a dying blue site that makes no money. lady, and i mean this - get a fucking life.
x. i am sorry to the kid i was. maybe the kid you were too. none of us deserved to see something like this ruined. that thing used to be precious to me. and now - all those good times; measured into dust.
/// 9.6.2022 // FUCKING AGAIN, JK? Are you fucking kidding me?
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I think my fic where Xander accidentally becomes a successful novelist (largely without realizing it) is the funniest idea I’ve ever had. This guy started writing little stories to remember their adventures in Sunnydale (his last line in Chosen about “how will anyone even know about this unless we tell them” burrowed itself into my little archivist brain and won’t let go) and posts them online. He unintentionally goes viral. He thinks someone named Simon N. Schuster is leaving him voicemails. He ends up on the New York Times bestseller list.
He doesn’t even realize that everyone else thinks the stories are fiction. Xander is out here writing autobiographical non-fiction but everyone else thinks he’s a weirdly dedicated author that’s really committed to maintaining a Lemony Snicket style pseudonym/persona for the narrator of his novel. There are “Who Is Xander Harris?” articles. No one can dig up much of anything on him because he lived his whole life in a town that got wiped off the map. He keeps rejecting requests for interviews because of his stage fright. At first this drives his publicist absolutely ballistic but it just adds the the air of mystery that’s drumming up book sales so she lets it go.
He only responds to questions over email and only ever responds “in character” as his “novel’s narrator” and this baffles everyone, only adding to the supposed mystery. It’s literally not even Xander actually writing the emails 95% of the time. It’s Dawn. She has appointed herself as “Xander’s representation” even though she doesn’t really know what being someone’s representation means. She printed business cards.
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