The legacy of Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone and J.K. Rowling—20 years later
The A.V. Club grapples with the idea of whether it’s possible to reconcile love of Harry Potter with disdain for its creator
Image: Graphic: Libby McGuire Aux Features Harry Potter
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone was originally published in 1997. Although the book series made a splash upon its release, it wasn’t until the film came out in 2001 that Harry Potter really began its ascent into the mainstream pop culture stratosphere. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, unknown children at time of the premiere of Chris Columbus’s film, quickly became household names. Author J.K. Rowling herself—and her rags to riches legend—was elevated to a sort of godlike figure by Harry Potter-loving diehards.
But now it’s 2021, and in the 20 years since the film’s release—and with the unstoppable rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—Harry Potter’s overarching impact of pop culture and entertainment is waning. What’s more, J.K. Rowling and her social media presence have also become impossible to ignore. Rowling continues to use her platform to make transphobic comments and spread transphobia—even after being called out on it multiple times and by multiple people.
In a roundtable conversation, members of The A.V. Club revisit Harry Potter’s lasting legacy and grapple with the idea of whether or not it’s possible to reconcile one’s love and appreciation for Harry Potter with disdain for its creator.
What do you remember about your first time watching Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone?
Matt Schimkowitz: I was very late to Harry Potter. The books dropped when I was at my most “If it’s popular, I hate it” phase. I didn’t end up reading the books or seeing the movies until the Order Of The Phoenix movie came out in 2007. I think Sorcerer’s Stone was the last or one of the last movies I rented from Blockbuster, so that’s something.
One thing that struck me about Sorcerer’s Stone was how slow it was. The book was such a breeze, but the movie seemed to stop and gawk at every detail it included. Still, some moments really were—and I’m sorry—magical. The iconic shots of the boats approaching Hogwarts, the Great Hall, Ron and Harry wishing each other “Happy Christmas”—all of it was so inviting and so lovely that they overshadowed all the film’s shortcomings—namely the pacing, the Quidditch, and the troll.
Gabrielle Sanchez: I was 4 years old when the first installment of Harry Potter arrived in theaters in 2001, so my experience watching the film for the first time most likely took place during one of the former ABC Family’s many marathons on cable. I remember being fearful of the adults in the films and grossed out by the snotty three-headed dog named Fluffy.
Shanicka Anderson: The first time I saw the film was in theaters—but there’s kind of a twist. I originally went to the theater that day with my uncle and cousins, and even though I begged them to let us see Sorcerer’s Stone, they all wanted to see Martin Lawrence’s Black Knight. I was outnumbered. When that movie finished, though, another showing of Sorcerer’s Stone was about a 1/3 of the way through. So we snuck in. It was my first (and only) time sneaking into a film.
What kind of effect has Harry Potter had on you?
Matt Schimkowitz: I’ve always been a bit of a Potter skeptic. Some entries I loved (Half-Blood Prince, Prisoner Of Azkaban), others I loathed (Chamber Of Secrets). So I wouldn’t say that it had much of an impact on me. I could live without it.
William Hughes: I’m older than some of my colleagues in this conversation, so I didn’t catch the Hogwarts Express until I was a teenager, when rumbles about the franchise started bubbling up from some of my younger friends. (Prisoner Of Azkaban had just come out, so I must have been 15 or so.) What struck me, both then and now, was how welcoming a worldbuilder Rowling was in those first few books. By that point, I’d spent plenty of time with fantasy and sci-fi novels that were obtuse, cold, and endlessly bogged down in their own minutiae; to encounter a book that was so laser-focused at inviting the reader in—with a premise that remains functionally unbeatable as far as tween power fantasies go—was more or less irresistible. My love affair with Potter didn’t last especially long. (The infamous “Long Summer” between the fourth and fifth books did a number on my enthusiasm.) But it was a special set of memories, regardless of how the franchise twisted and mutated after I left it. At least until, well, you know.
Gabrielle Sanchez: I wouldn’t say that Harry Potter (either the books or the films) has made an impact on my life, personally. It’s been something a lot of friends and family have enjoyed over the years, but I never felt connected to the series in the same way others do.
Shanicka Anderson: Harry Potter is my personal pop culture comfort item. It’s one of those things I always come back to—especially around this time of year. The moment the weather drops below 65 degrees. I’m like, “Ahhh, okay, time to go back to Hogwarts, my ancestral home.” Having the movies on (even when they’re just playing in the background and I’m not paying attention) or occasionally re-reading the books feels so much like home and the holidays. I’m also a person who’s pretty big into fandom and back in college (and even now) I met and bonded with a lot of my closest friends through a mutual love of Harry Potter. We were also really into StarKid Productions’ “A Very Potter Musical” (which featured a baby Darren Criss!), which seemed absolutely genius at the time.
How would you describe the cultural significance of Harry Potter?
Matt Schimkowitz: I would describe Harry Potter’s cultural significance as waning. It undoubtedly transformed the types of stories that were told in the 2000s, bringing in more YA-focused fantasy to the mainstream. There was some handwringing about that at the time, but I think it’s a good thing that kids were reading something they liked. Go figure.
As is the case with many franchises, its creator’s politics have profoundly affected how the culture views Harry Potter now. Rowling’s incessant transphobia has taken some of the sheen off the Hogwarts Express.
Even if you want to separate her from the conversation, the cultural nonexistence of the Fantastic Beasts series shows Rowling’s and Potter’s slipping appeal. That’s not due to so-called cancel culture; Rowling’s still able to write whatever she wants and be rewarded handsomely for it. It’s due to a lack of quality. Is there anyone clamoring for a third entry? It doesn’t seem like it. The consensus is Harry Potter is good and the “Wizarding World” spin-offs are forgettable.
William Hughes: If Harry Potter isn’t the last new thing that every single person on the planet needed to have a definitive opinion about—the MCU has given it a decent run for its money over the last decade—it’s at least in the healthy running. And as a billion self-identified Hufflepuffs and Slytherins could attest, Harry Potter isn’t just a media property; it’s a way to see yourself reflected in the world. The butterbeer and the theme parks and the godawful novelty jelly beans might come and go, but the story’s core beats—its reinvention of the classic Kirk/Spock/McCoy power trio, its iconography, even the lazy-but-it-sounds-fine Latin of its spells—has seeped inextricably into the groundwater of Western culture. But it’s the way it lives in the heads of the kids who grew up on it, in the parents they shared it with, in the friend groups that formed from it, that makes it elemental to understanding how we think and act today.
Gabrielle Sanchez: It spurred one of the largest fantasy communities and commercial enterprises, on par with Star Wars. It undoubtedly means a lot to a lot of people, allowing a form of escapism and fun.
Has your relationship with Harry Potter changed in the wake of J.K. Rowling’s transphobic comments?
Matt Schimkowitz: I was already critical of Harry Potter, and Rowling even more so. I already hated her tweeting about the pooping habits of wizards and for retconning plot points, like Dumbledore being gay. If you intended that to be a part of the book, why not include it? Instead, it read like she was either hedging or pandering.
But more importantly and alarmingly, I do think it’s abhorrent behavior, doubly so considering her social standing. To sit on high and spew such hateful, ugly, and dangerous language and then pretend that you’re the victim is despicable.
Moreover, her behavior is a betrayal to those who found strength in her work, especially in the LGBTQIA+ community. Given her reach, I’m sure there are plenty of people who found a lot of courage and comfort in Harry Potter. To have thrown it back at them like this is really gross and I hate it. So, yeah, it’s definitely soured me on her and, by proxy, her work.
William Hughes: It makes me sad, but not for myself. (Okay, a little for myself; my favorite Newswire I ever wrote, about Rowling’s utterly wack assertion that wizards used to shit on the floor and then magic it away because they couldn’t be bothered to invent toilets, is now irrevocably tainted by association.) But, seriously: I’m genuinely sad about all the kids, past and present, who gravitated to a book series that told them they could be special—and who now have to reconcile those feelings with the author taking some of them aside and saying, “Oh, but not you.” It rots the entire enterprise; it makes a lie out of every imagined Hogwarts letter that ever flew through a kid’s mental windows. It also makes any financial support of the franchise totally indefensible, at least for me; all I see when I look at a Sorting Hat now is a funnel sending money straight to a woman who’d rather double down on her own skewed beliefs than take the time to listen to the people she’s hurt.
Gabrielle Sanchez: Over the last few years, many things have soured any potential relationship with Harry Potter. In addition to her repugnant attacks against trans women in attempts to undermine their womanhood, Rowling’s been ambivalent about many other points of valid criticism against the series, including the lack of queerness and holistic representations of people of color. Her insistence on making Dumbledore a queer character retroactively made little sense to me and felt like a way to exploit a queer identity to revive interest in the books. Additionally, she continues to make money off of expanding the Harry Potter universe, which is why supporting anything new coming out is completely off the table for me.
Shanicka Anderson: I was never one of those Harry Potter fan who idolized J.K. Rowling, but her inability to stop tweeting and her constant doubling down still feels like a betrayal. So many trans and nonbinary people I care about found solace and community because of Harry Potter and for her to spew constant vitriol at this same group of people is, at best, upsetting and, at worst, extremely violent. However, because I never felt any sort of hero worship for Rowling, she wasn’t able to completely ruin the series and its characters for me. It’s just that now I’m less inclined to tell people I’m a Harry Potter fan. It’s now something I carry with more than a little bit of shame or it’s something I’ll admit it with a huge disclaimer: “Okay, yes I like Harry Potter but…” And, as my colleagues have pointed out, I’m also no longer okay with spending my own money on any officially licensed Harry Potter merch. Anything I have or buy now is strictly fan-created.
When it comes to Harry Potter and Rowling, why do you think more people are willing to separate the art from the artist?
Matt Schimkowitz: Try as we might, we can’t help but like what we like. We’re drawn to the art we like instinctively. We can refine our palate or grow more sophisticated in our tastes, but we all gravitate toward what interests us at the end of the day. And Harry Potter, for a lot of people, is where that journey began. Like Wuthering Heights or Star Wars or John Wayne movies, it was formative to how millions understand and appreciate art. Something like Harry Potter had a hand in helping millions of readers and moviegoers realize what they like. It’s not so easy to just dismiss something like that entirely.
The author, on the other hand, can be ignored. Once their work is out in the world, it no longer belongs to them in many ways. Fans can do with it what they choose.
William Hughes: There’s a point when any story—even one written by a single person—can get out of an author’s hands. So many people have poured so much of themselves into Harry Potter over the last 24 years: fan artists, fan writers, cosplayers, and just plain old fans. They have changed it through observation, and participation, bolting whole universes of meaning onto it that extend far past what Rowling ever intended, or even could have conceived. To destroy all of that beautiful scaffolding, just because the foundation has revealed itself as rotten—that’s a hard thing to do. How much you let the author affect “your” Harry Potter is a personal decision, of course. (I can’t bring myself to forget how much Rowling continues to profit from the series’ endless propagation.) But wanting to hold on to wonder is a difficult impulse to shame.
Gabrielle Sanchez: I think it’s hard to wholeheartedly reject something so pivotal to someone’s childhood and understanding of self. Some people have spent their entire lives loving the Harry Potter franchise, building community and leaning on it for support. When looking at something like films, I also think it’s easier to disassociate the artist because there’s so many other people involved. It can become more about the actors and characters versus who actually created them. Also, Rowling’s open transphobia is something that began to transpire just in the last couple of years, long after the film and book series were complete. To revisit a long existing work is different than to continue financially supporting an artist who is a known abuser and in Rowling’s case, a big ol’ TERF.
While I may not be a Harry Potter fan, I am an avid Buffy The Vampire Slayer enthusiast. Even as the allegations against Joss Whedon have arisen over the last few years, Buffy remains one of my regular rewatches, and this is something I have to regularly reckon with. As a character, Buffy means an indescribable amount to me and it would be difficult to step away from the series and never watch it again, so I do understand people’s cognitive dissonance on the subject.
Shanicka Anderson: As my colleagues have pointed out, Harry Potter is one of those series where—because the fandom is so robust and people have created so many incredible fan works—it feels like it no longer belongs to Rowling. Some of the ways we, as fans, have reclaimed Harry Potter (i.e., through race-bending, Harry and Hermione are POC in my head canon, and providing a community for so many young queer and trans kids) are more impactful than anything Rowling herself has done. As a result, it feels like Rowling doesn’t really “own” or even “deserve” these characters or universe anymore. There’s no easy way to reconcile Harry Potter with Rowling (and even if I was able to do so, as a cis person, it wouldn’t cool for me to go around proudly boasting about how I’m able to forgive and forget). The way I think about Harry Potter now is like, “Wow, look at this cool series I love that just happened to spring into existence with no known origin!” For me in 2021, “loving Harry Potter” means loving the memories, rereading and engaging with various fan works, and celebrating the very queer community I’m a part of and have built around it.
318 Comments
In hindsight, I’m really glad I never got that invested in Harry Potter and just read A Series of Unfortunate Events. I honestly wish that the HP franchise had died in obscurity and people should find other books to read that aren’t the TERF Wizard books.Discworld is fantastic.
Same here, I read one of the books when I was 12 and it was alright, but hardly a game-changer for me. I never felt any desire to read the rest and I’ve only ever seen parts of the movies, and not by choice. I’ve never really understood why it took off the way it did. I guess it opened the floodgates for more fantasy stuff becoming a bit more mainstream, though as a kid I never suffered for finding a book to scratch that itch.
A part of me thinks it’s because it was a lot of people’s first real fantasy novels they read and most of them just never got into the genre any deeper than the TERF Wizard series.
You’re being realllll condescending here. Sorry we didn’t read “proper books.” PS I do read those, too. But Harry Potter was magical, and stop acting like you’re better than others for not thinking that.
I never said they weren’t proper books. In fact I said that they were a lot of people’s first real fantasy novels.
I enjoyed the books, for the most part, but it wasn’t a huge part of my identity or anything, I think because I was already a reader. The impression I get is that the kids who really bought in were the ones who hadn’t read much fantasy prior to HP, because for them all this stuff really was new, whereas I had other things to compare it to.
Seconded. It’s comparing apples and oranges, of course, but I think loving the Discworld books definitely made me resistant to Potter hype at the time. For example, I remember getting really steamed at all the praise for Rowling’s ‘clever’ use of cod-Latin when Terry Pratchett had done that (and so much more) first and better. Nunc Id Vides, Nunc Ne Vides.
Also Sir Terry seemed to have a much more complex message than TERF Wizard Writer. Like Going Postal is a clear condemnation of companies holding monopolies over utilities because they can basically charge outrageous prices for poor services and Hogfather is an exploration in why kids believing in Santa can be a good thing because they need to believe the little fantasies so that they can learn to believe the big fantasies (ie Fairness, Justice, and Purpose). All the TERF Wizard Series got is “Wizard Hitler Bad!” and “Slavery is ok if the Slaves are Happy being Slaves!”.
Yeah, the Discworld books had a really humane, inquisitive, tolerant perspective that took on all kinds of issues. Small Gods was always my favourite, but Hogfather was a regular seasonal read for me for a good few years. Maybe it’s time to dig out a copy again.
Someone made a reference to Dobby on some youtube show my husband was watching, and I had to explain the reference to him, which basically ended with “and everyone seems to still be mostly ok with it, but I don’t really get how?”
you can actually just use the names of the writer and the series, it’s faster that way and makes you not look like a dipshit
Yeah, Sir Terry definitely had a lot of stuff to talk about starting around the third Discworld book, where Rowling’s messages and themes seem to be largely incidental (she sort of understands she’s talking about racism, unless your name is Cho Chang) or a muddied mess (everything with the house elves).
Please don’t forget the Jew-I mean the greedy and untrustworthy Goblin bankers who get what they deserve at the end.
“Also Sir Terry seemed to have a much more complex message than TERF Wizard Writer….”One of the things that a lot of people liked about HP was that it wasn’t particularly didactic. I love Discworld but it is rather didactic (pretty much always in a way I agree with!), and grousing that children need to read more edifying books is an old hobby. Also, the messages were usually not particularly complex.The House elf thing is weird, but honestly as far as the TERF bit I’ve read my daughter Dahl and Nesbitt who both had their fair share of, how shall we say, hot takes.
There’s a glory to how stupid “FABRICATI DIEM, PUNC” is.
I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard at a Pratchett joke as the mission motto Rincewind came up with. I don’t remember the Latin, but when pressed he admitted it translated to, “We who are about to die don’t want to.”
Better not listen to that Lolita podcast or your views on Daniel Handler might just change a bit …But that’s a different story.Anyway the art is the art. The artist isn’t the art. I know some people can’t separate art from artist. That’s fine, that’s their prerogative.But as someone who also has never read Potter (am also big on Snicket. Think the show is a great adaptation too), if people can find joy in the work there’s nothing wrong with that.
HP is like a knockoff Dark is Rising except Susan Cooper is, by all accounts, a nice lady.
What’s worse… Harry Potter or South Park?
Discworld is mostly a bit much for children though, no? I mean aside from the handful of entries specifically aimed at younger readers. Otherwise, I think even though they’re lighthearted to a grownup reader, they’re chock full of complex cultural references and otherwise heady concepts. But yeah, Discworld is fantastic. I haven’t read them all (really, who has?) but my favorite is “Small Gods”. Hands down the best and funniest and deepest book (non-fiction included) about religion that I’ve ever read.The Harry Potter series was near and dear to my heart throughout my childhood and adolescence and I’ll always be grateful for that. I know what I appreciated about it and it wasn’t stupid or shallow. In light of recent events, I have found that saying goodbye to it wasn’t hard to do at all. I am more than happy to move on to new fictional worlds and epics. At the end of the day, it’s just not that important.
I think nothing gets to be Harry Potter big, especially with children, without a hook that can be squeezed onto a postage stamp, like “Magic boy goes to Magic School”.
I mean, that’s hard to know, since no children’s book has ever been Harry Potter big, except for Harry Potter. But you’re not wrong about that being a considerable factor in what made it so big.
Agreed on Discworld being too much for the original Harry Potter demographic – namely, 10-12 y.o. non-bookworms. Discworld is wonderful and clever, but it scares off readers who aren’t ready for it. Harry Potter was easy and fun and welcoming. Basically, it was a perfect primer for future Discworlders.My interest in HP waned pretty drastically after Azkaban (and I always viewed it more as a fun guilty pleasure to look forward to rather than quality fantasy), but I’ll always be grateful that it got a whole generation of young kids reading.
Pratchett was a British, intelligent, left-wing person who moved in the circles of academia and journalism. Despite what his daughter says, its possible he might have had the same views as many TERFs, having much the same background.
Based on his work, it seems he was at the very least tolerant of trans people if not an outright ally. Plus there’s the fact that both his daughter and Neil Gaiman both attest he was not a TERF.
There was also a Discworld story that includes trans characters in a positive light. He wasn’t a raging bigot and I don’t need assurance from his daughter. His writings say as much.
Seriously, the entire plot of Monstrous Regiment is about being freed of gender roles and constraints and even identification, and people wanna lump in Terry Pratchett with the likes of Rowling?
Utterly ludicrous. I don’t need his family and friends to defend his name, I have 40-plus books that told us what he thought. And mostly what he thought was, be kind.
Thats the story I was trying to remember. It starts off as a silly riff on Mulan and ends up being fairly profound about gender and identity. There is no goddamn way a terf would write something like Monstrous Regiment.
I’m not speaking for him or saying that would be the case but a lot of his peers have gone that way. One thing’s for sure, he was an optimist and saw the best in people and it would be great if he was still with us writing today.
How about instead of not “speaking for him” you actually read his work?
I’ve read almost all his work. And I am not speaking for him. I’m doing as you are and judging him on the public personality. Is that a problem for you?
Was he a self-identified feminist? Or are we just using TERF as another generic word for transphobe now?
The rampant misuse of TERF as a phrase is truly ironic given how often it’s thrown out there in arguments about how words (particularly pronouns) really matter.
+1
I find it hard to believe that the man who wrote Cheery Littlebottom, a character who asserts her gender identity in the face of a society that’s hostile to her doing so, would have held trans-exclusionary views.
Given some of the analogs in Discworld (most obviously Cheery Littlebottom and the openly female dwarfs), I don’t think Sir Pterry was transphobic.
Pfffft you read books! nnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrddddddd!Me likey picture on screen with big sounds and words that go boom and straight into me heart. 😉
One of my kids has been asking to watch the Harry Potter movies so we watched them all together and I just can’t understand how this series became the defining IP juggernaut of the early 00’s. Of the eight movies maybe like 3 of them are at all memorable. I just don’t get the appeal.
The books. This article is badly mistaken in stating that the books were not a huge deal until the first movie came along. There’s a reason Sorcerer’s had to be so slavishly adapted from the novel. Four of the seven books were published before it came out and there were already those massive midnight sale events where people lined up on the sidewalks to buy the next installment. There were well over 300 MILLION copies of these books sold – the fan base was huge and devoted.
It wasn’t the movies that made it popular, it was the books. Cos I agree, at best 3 of 8 are worth watching.
The context that’s easy to forget is that, with both the books and the movies, you have kids who literally grew up with these characters, since for a while they were coming out one a year. I was the same age as Harry for the first few books, and that sense of ownership kept me invested (despite the frustration) way longer than it should have if we’re only looking at quality.
Discworld is amazing and its a great loss that Terry isn’t around anymore. I’d trade him for Rowling in a heartbeat.
I adore Discworld — I’m in the process of re-reading all those books now — but it scratches a very different itch. Even the Tiffany Aching books, which come very late in the series, and are the closest to a Harry Potter-style book, are much smaller in scale and ambition.
If there was no Harry Potter, there would need to be another YA series to take its place, but it’s hard to see what that would have been, given how the series distorted that market so badly for years.
Is Discworld fantastic because of Sir Terry being generally regarded as a nice person, or is that not relevant to the quality of his work?I would argue that it isn’t really relevant to his work because you don’t need to know the life of Sir Terry in order to be able to enjoy his books.
No one asked you or cares
I’ve never read the books, and I think the movies are just all right, but I don’t get this reaction. Why celebrate that you never got into something after learning that the creator is a bigot?The point is that other people found meaning and comfort in Harry Potter, and it sucks that Rowlings has sullied it. At the same time, I do think we give her too much power by linking the author so closely with her novels when they have been claimed by so many over the world. If you’re lucky enough that nothing you’ve enjoyed has been tainted by an awful creator, then great. But I assure you it doesn’t reflect anything other than simple luck.
Thank you.
“I’ve never read the books, and I think the movies are just all right,
but I don’t get this reaction. Why celebrate that you never got into
something after learning that the creator is a bigot?”
That really irks me too. It’s like people claiming (and yes, I’ve seen this) that “they always knew there was something wrong with her” and patting themselves on the back.
I feel this except I was more of an Animorphs kid. I mean I liked HP and did read them but they weren’t the series with the most impact on young me
I can’t imagine how I’d feel if Terry Pratchett, who more or less wrote my adolescence, turned out to be a transphobe. Luckily, he seems to have been the good man we’d all hope he was.
I’ll recommend the first three Shannara books for any younger readers looking for fantasy. Definitely Tolkein-light. Immensely more readable for young’uns and not nearly as boring for adults. (And for anybody wanting to blah blah blah how Brooks ripped off Tolkein, yes. He has basically admitted that as it is what a publisher asked him to do when he was a newb author.)
Who’s Harry Potter?
Some kids book written by a TERF.
Ew! I hope large numbers of grown adults don’t base their personalities and lives around these children’s fantasy books!
At least it’s a good quasi- personality test indicator:You know to stay away if they base their identity around what Hogwarts house they’d be placed in at all if they identify as Slytherin
I feel the same way about anyone who’s super into their Myers-Briggs result.
I’ve got some bad news for you…
Several hundred, or maybe several thousand, very real people whose lives suddenly got very awkward when meeting anyone new about 20 years ago.
I really feel for all the Chris Browns of the world.
Bugs’s magickal cousin?
No I think it was the name of the protagonist in Troll.
The second colonel from MASH.
Is his given name “Harry” or is that short for “Harold” or “Harris” or something? I always assumed it was a nickname, but I only saw the first film and after that it became too big of a thing to ask questions like that about.
His full given name is, indeed, “Harry.”
‘e’s named aftah roayalty ‘e are!
According to JKR his given name is Harry. Which. Drives. Me. Crazy. Since Harry is a known British nickname for Henry.
‘e’s a wizard!
“I’m older than some of my colleagues in this conversation, so I didn’t catch the Hogwarts Express until I was a teenager”My god. I am so fucking old. I was in grad school when the first movie came out. As a result, I care very little about Harry Potter. I was taken to the Prisoner of Azcaban movie by a friend. I know that isn’t how it is spelled but I don’t care enough to look it up. And I was like, “Harry is STILL pining away for his parents he never met?” I tried to watch the first film when it was on TBS or something at some point but I couldn’t make it through. I read the first book in like 2015 because I felt I should. It was meh to me. I have no interest in more Potter especially since JK is such a terrible person.
Nah, you’re not old. I was 33 when I took my 4 year old son to see the first movie in 2001. It’s a shame they didn’t have anyone to represent the older viewpoint within this discussion, although I personally don’t really have anything extra to offer. My family enjoyed all the books and movies but we’ve moved on with our lives and we’re less interested in staying involved with this universe because the newer FB movie series SUCKS, although I agree that Rowling seems to only open her mouth to change feet at this point. It’s also hard to reread the books or rewatch the movies and not pick at plot holes, or question the whole logic of how their magic works: do you need to say the spell out loud or not? why can’t they just disapparate out of any difficult situation? or turn the bad guy into a goldfish? etc
“ And I was like, “Harry is STILL pining away for his parents he never met?” I mean, I don’t think it’s a stretch for a child orphan raised in an abusive family to yearn for any kind of parental love.
Yeah, really? That’s your take—that the abused orphan should somehow get over the loss of his parents by the age of 13? Oooookey-dokey.
Yet here you are commenting on it for some reason.
We aren’t allowed to comment on things we don’t like? Fuck that noise. I was also in grad school when Harry Potter came out and I thought the first book was far worse than “meh.” I thought JK Rowling was a lousy writer.
Why do you say JK is a terrible person? What did she say or do?
Good for you. Have a cookie.
The first four books/movies were fine and charming. Starting with Year 5, however, things dove right off a cliff. Instead of the world expanding, as the visitors from the other schools during Year 4 promised, the story shrank, with most of Year 7 being a boring slog of an isolated camping trip, culminating in a absurd tangle of wand ownership bullcrap at the same damn location almost the whole series was set in. In The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and Sam finally reach Mount Doom, there’s an incredible feeling of accomplishment and paths traveled. At the end of Harry Potter, the protagonist and villain face off in… the main cafeteria/courtyard. Boring.Ergo, nearly half of the books, and exactly half of the HP movies (to say nothing of the completely unnecessary prequels), are straight-up fails at a story level. And no saga in which half the story is bad can credibly be called great. Yeah, the movies had an ideal cast and didn’t fail the material. But the material failed them.
I did a reread a couple years ago, had to have been my first in a decade. I’d basically reread the series before each book came out, then never revisited after 7. Book 1 was breezy but rough around the edges and simple, 2 was downright horrible, 3 was quite good, 4 is the peak imo and a perfect mix between expanding the world and keeping the focus on a contained plotline.Then I hit 5, the one where Dumbledore decides to just not talk to Harry and Harry yells at everyone for six hundred pages. I couldn’t do it with 6 and 7; the appeal was in the coziness of Hogwarts and the Scooby Doo mystery solving antics, and while I know Rowling needed to give things a big finish, an explicitly anti-war wizard war is not really fun or cozy.
Agreed. Book 5 stopped the narrative dead and felt like a huge step back.
I’m worried Harry’s getting bullied at that ‘wizard school’.
One thing that always cracked me up about the books was the million ways the students could end up dead or severely injured.Oh, you know that forest right next to the school? There’s about 50 different magical creatures in there that will straight-up murder you so stay out.
Okay!
And every night at dinner, all the chicken nuggets jump up and run around the table.
Say what you will about Harry’s abusive foster parents, at least they weren’t likely to literally kill him.
Cold take: we should leave the books in the past. No coffin for them, just wet, wet mud.
Hot take: even before enriching Rowling made the movies a toxic proposition, they were never good
I loved the books. I think the first book came out when I was ten, so I literally grew up with Harry. I still think Rowling is very skilled writer, and purely in terms of plotting, characterization, worldbuilding and dialogue, the books hold up. Politics-wise…yeah, they’re problematic. I still have no idea what Rowling was attempting to convey with the “house elves just prefer to be slaves” subplot, and I found Rowling’s relentless fat-phobia off-putting even as a kid. (Seriously, not all evil characters are fat, but all fat characters are evil—or at least petty, weak-willed, and/or cowardly). I think the lack of POC and queer representation criticism is fair, but I’m also willing to chalk up some of that to Rowling being a sheltered white British lady writing in the 90s/early aughts. Her more contemporary stuff—written when she theoretically should know better—is way more problematic.
She’s a fantastically successful writer but her “worldbuilding” was clearly half-baked. How much time do you think she spent on the rules for quidditch?
Eh, you can quibble over plenty—a monetary system in which 29 Knuts=1 Sickle and 17 Sickles=1 Galleon sounds like a mathematical nightmare—but I still think she manages to make the wizarding world feel very inviting and lived-in.
Have you seen the British money system prior to decimalization?
It’s much more sensible than that, as it’s based on numbers with lots of factors for easier division.http://lloydianaspects.co.uk/opinions/imperialHuzzaMetricPah.html29 & 17 are both prime numbers, the worst possible type for this purpose. In that video he does ding his own country’s history for the concept of the “guinea” worth 21 shillings, which is at least divisible by 3 (something decimal/metric systems have trouble with), but a pound was 20 shillings (adding up to 240 pence, again divisible by 3) so that’s just an annoying way to be more expensive.
Yes, the wizarding money system is definitely intended as a parody of the old British imperial system of pounds, shillings and pence with its crazy, counter-intuitive math of 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound.
I love the random whimsy of the wizarding world. It’s one that the movies excised. On film, it’s probably for the better. But in the books, it is so much part of the charm. =)
I remember when Fantastic Beasts came out and I pointed out on io9 that having a Magical Congress of the United States in the 1600’s before the very idea of their being a United States was bad worldbuilding. Like, as far as the white people were concerned, they were still English subjects. Like individual colonies had their own legislative bodies, such as Virginia’s House of Burgesses, but the idea of a United States didn’t even become a thing until the mid-18th Century. I got so much shit for that.
I guess I shouldn’t expect a limey to know much US history 🙂
There are rules for quidditch?
Yeah and the rules are slightly above Calvinball in terms of logic and coherency.
I don’t recall much biting or the ripping off of testicles, but as I’ve said I never read past Goblet of Fire.
When I was vacationing in Edinburgh, I was trying to figure out why people kept taking pictures of the front of the building I was staying in. It turned out the flat we were renting was over the coffee shop where JKR wrote the first book, and tons of people would come by every day, basically on a Harry Potter pilgrimage – first, the shop where the first book was written, then on to the cemetery where, if you look enough, you can find tombstones with names like “Tom Riddle” in it. It was a bit baffling – I wonder if that sort of thing has died down as people idolize her less?
Twitter != Real World
The vast majority of people have maybe seen one headline or two that say: “Rowling Repeats Anti-Trans Sentiment on Twitter” and thought, “well so what?”
Also, what’s considered anti-trans today is MASSIVELY, MASSIVELY, MASSIVELY different to what was considered anti-trans in 2007 when Deathly Hallows was published.
I feel like shouting this at the TV every day. “Social media is blowing up over XYZ, with more than 50,000 [insert appropriate action here – retweet, whatever] already!”Out of eight billion people on the planet, and 330 million here in the U.S. These teapot tempests are mostly a whole lot of nothing. I’m not talking about Rowling or her views, I mean in general.
Sure, but the hardcore fandom is very online – but, the kids who’re being newly introduced to HP, less so.
People aren’t idolizing her less, much to the chagrin of some.
My biggest problem with calling her a good worldbuilder is the utter dearth of any non-Gryffindor main characters (except for the “Evil House but people still want to be in it because…” trio). She sets up a school with 4 houses and then we get the Gryffindor Show with special appearances from 2d cartoon evil.Another terrible choice is how she did Madeye Moody. The entire Barty Crouch (? it’s been a while) subplot is gratuitous, and at the end we’re left with a Moody we literally know nothing about.
I feel like even more of a fun-ruining ass than usual, and the conversation is interesting – PLUS I would imagine that the author didn’t exactly know that this was teed up to run after another article about the movies (I mean, also, it’s the anniversary so what are you gonna do) but IDK. Two kinda back to back articles about the series just didn’t feel great in spite of the discussion here.
I continue to just really struggle with “don’t worry, we’re reclaiming it through fandom” takes. I think it feels dodgy, personally. Rowling clearly feels that any involvement in her series is essentially an approval of her acts. I think that’s very shitty of her as a creator and very unfair as a burden to put on anyone who just wanted to enjoy some wizard shit, but at this point… I don’t know, I just don’t really think even cozy discussion pieces about how conflicted everyone feels does much other than continue to amplify a series that already gets plenty of amplification. Even the folks on my FB feed who lament her transphobia still can’t stop posting HP memes and it’s puzzling. I was a huge fan; every book of hers went in the dumpster, as did many collectibles from the 90s onward.
I generally just try to skip over HP discussion unless it’s explicitly about her TERFdom because why yell about it but I’m saying it here specifically because of the subject matter. As a trans/nonbinary person, I kinda just don’t want to have to fucking talk about her in our community at all anymore.
The thing about “I just want to enjoy some wizard shit” is that there’s SO MUCH non-Rowling wizard shit out there to be enjoyed. Hell, Potter isn’t even the only famous literary wizard named Harry. There’s absolutely no reason for folks to keep on with this shit except that They Just Want To. While I can’t agree with that viewpoint, I also can’t argue with it.
But “Harry Potter belongs to us, not her” is a bad and unhelpful stance to take when it literally belongs to her. It is, in my opinion, a blindfold to slip on so one doesn’t have to see oneself handing her one’s money.
Damn. Sucks when people keep talking and talking.
I was basically the ideal age to absolutely adore the books as I graduated high school the year book 7 came out so literally “grew up” with both the characters and the books. They were my first introduction to real online fan spaces and while I’m not one of those people who acts like Harry Potter shaped their entire personality, the books meant a huge amount to me, even as an adult rereading them who was able to see how Rowling’s unpleasant tendencies came through in the books a lot more clearly.Even before Rowling’s TERFiness was public I had no interest in any of the ~expanded universe~ stuff and I haven’t touched the books in years. But they mattered a lot to me and it fucking sucks.
What sucks?
It’s definitely possible to separate the artist from their art, especially if the former is particularly heinous. The hatred that Rowling spews has forever altered my perception of her books, of the movies that came from them, and any other piece of media HP is related to. I’m done with it, because I’m done with her.Is it difficult to put a huge part of my childhood behind, because its creator’s behavior has ruined it for me? Definitely; there is no way to reclaim those memories that I had reading the books every summer and feeling transported, they are now permanently shaded in my mind, and that’s tough to admit. But it’s worth it to not bury your head in the sand and support horrible people through their art. Find something less well known made by someone who isn’t a piece of shit, it’s definitely possible.
News Flash. There are plenty of people you like that are pieces of shit and you don’t even know it. Blocking a major part of your happy childhood memories is pretty sad.
Yes. It’s possible. Next question.
I was 31 when the first movie came out. I have not seen any of the movies. I remember my co-workers (fellow lawyers no less) praising this series which looked like a rip-off of Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman. I also knew many who people my age who went to the movies. I finally read the books when I was 39 and I actually thought they were pretty good. I liked the way they got more sophisticated as the character aged every year.
I was never planning to watch any of the movies anyway, so proclaiming I won’t is kind of meaningless. However, her regressive beliefs have no effect ion my enjoyment, just like OSC’s actions have no effect on my enjoyment of the Seventh Son series or Ender’s Game. And Chinatown is still one of the greatest movies ever.
I hope no one here likes L Frank Baum or Roald Dahl
I’m definitely not a Dahl fan; I grew up in an area where Baum was pretty big but I literally handled newspapers with his anti-Native op eds when I worked at a museum so yeah. Very aware he sucks. But I mean, we also all make individual decisions about what we do/don’t engage with and part of the argument with Rowling is that she not only sucks but PROFITS while sucking.
Isn’t Baum in public domain?
All of Baum’s books are in the public domain at this point
Not only does she profit, but she writes op-eds and supports other transphobes. An anti-trans American politician quoted her in support of his ideology. She’s actively trying to cause harm to trans people right here and now.
I’m perfectly willing to separate art from artist, but for better or worse both of those authors are long dead. Roald Dahl isn’t going to tweet something shitty about Jewish people tomorrow, and he’s no longer in a position to directly profit if I buy my niece a copy of Matilda for her birthday. It is a bit of a different calculus.
The AV Club bringing up the MCU in every single article is getting really annoying. These movies were around at the same time. It’s completely unrelated to the rise and fall of HP.
Are they never allowed to mention it? Because they were only comparing it’s cultural influence which is completely fair.
I just don’t think it was relevant here at all, and it gets a snide mention every other article on this site whether relevant it not. The waning of HP influence was tied the release of the last movie adaptation of the book series followed by them trying to milk every last penny out of the property with shoddy output like Fantastic Beasts. The same thing happened with the Hobbit movies ruining the legacy of LOTR. It’s not even the same audience, as far as I know. Why not compare with the Hunger Games?
Okay, it just seems weird to be mad that a pop culture site would compare two huge pieces of pop culture that have been influential in the last few years.
Hunger Games is very much not the same that collapsed after it’s second movie for the most part and was not on the level of Harry Potter or Marvel. If anything Hunger Games is closer to the Harry Potter rip offs and could probably classified closer to something like Divergent.
I’m amused by people saying they came late to Harry Potter meaning they first encountered the series in their teens. I first encountered it in my late 30s, when I had a child who had just gotten old enough to ask me to read it to her. Later that year the Order of the Phoenix movie came out, and after that, the final book, but by then I had read 1-6 in the space of a single week. THAT’s late to the party. I was hooked from page one, and I have still not found anything better to listen to on long car rides (and I mean really long, like, 12-hour car rides).The experience of reading the final book (the day it was released) was particularly interesting, because I realized that millions of people all over the world were reading the same book as me, in many different languages, at exactly the same time. That’s pretty darn unusual for a book. I would be surprised if that ever happens again, with any book. A bunch of people seeing the new MCU movie in one weekend is not the same.
I was traveling the day that book came out, and every other person in the airport was toting a copy. If a movie/show depicted that many people reading the same book I’d say “yeah right,” but there it was.
Do you read Sutter Cane?
Blank it.
I’ll wait for the movie.
Funny you should mention Sutter Cane, I’ve been writing a story where he and a group of college conservatives try to use the Necronomicon to unleash eldritch monsters.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/33999979/chapters/84563314
Cool concept, looks good!
Lololol.
Oh Bravo.Magnificent work.
The novel that everyone everywhere is reading at the same time…My experience with this phenomenon: I was slow to catch on to learning. I just didn’t get WHY I should do this. Why, what’s the point of learning to recognize and order this vast jumble of stuff? But two things happened: 1. I was put into a class of slow readers, where the reading curriculum emphasized STORIES (I know, right?), and simultaneously 2. EVERYONE WAS READING JAWS!! Everyone, everywhere. In grocery stores. Walking down the street. In the lobby of CHURCH! And I got it – oooh, READING! Everyone is reading! Because of Stories!
I pretty much locked myself in my dorm room and had the final book delivered to me the day of release. No way I was gonna risk getting spoiled after the viral (in 2005!) spoiler video at the midnight release of the previous book
I can’t remember if I just hadn’t gotten around to reading them yet, or just didn’t view that spoiler as a huge surprise, but I thought that particular drive by spoiling was one of the most hilarious things I’d ever seen.Later when book 7 came out, my girlfriend at the time and I bought one copy to share. She read it first, and proceeded to announce deaths as the happened while I waited for her to finish. Brutal.
I’m glad I wasn’t spoiled before I read HBP, so I could enjoy the millions of YTMNDs that spawned from that drive-by spoiling.
I have still not found anything better to listen to on long car ridesI’ve heard that the audiobook is really well done, but I have a hard time imagining it can surpass Wizard People, Dear Reader which is outstanding car drive listening (though if I had been driving I would have almost certainly driven off the road in laughter).
Broadway actor Jim Dale did the audio books. They’re very good.
I was in college when the first movie came out; my roommate and I read the first four books in a big hurry during Winter Term one year. I had Dumbledore’s death spoiled for me on LiveJournal for pete’s sake. So I was younger than you, but still an adult. And it was definitely a Thing even among 20 and 30somethings for awhile. But yeah, Rowling has soured me on the whole thing – we still have the books and the movies, but I don’t randomly watch them on TV anymore (even though the actors have all disavowed her views) and I won’t give her any more money.
That was me also. Daughter was in second grade when the first movie premiered, she had just gotten interested in the books (there were 3 at that point). One of the second grade teachers was friends with the owner of the local movie theatre and got them to have a special showing for our school at 9am (the “official” first showing was at noon). Daughter still loves to tell that story😂😂And I know what you mean about the final book. I also read it the day it was released, well, the next day😂. I was on a train, and about half hour later someone sat across from me and pulled the book out. I actually said “no!!!” at one point, he looked up, I said “sorry”. A little later he said “no!!!”, I looked up, we both said, “hedwig”, and went back to reading. It was kinda surreal😂😂😂😂😎
I brought the book with my to a birthday party my daughter had to attend (this would have been Sunday of that weekend), the other parents all looked annoyed that they had not thought to do the same thing. What else were we going to do at Gymboree? Anyway, I started to cry when Dobby died, and then quickly went outside. They were all like “Who, who is it??” but I did not want to spoil it for them. I still cry when he dies. Every, Single. Time. He was the best.
Interesting thing, I *really* dislike Dobby, but still got choked up when he died (in the movie as least). I got a thing for sidekicks sacrificing themselves I guess
That kind of reminds me of an episode of the animated show ‘Dr Katz, Professional Therapist’. Patton Oswalt is talking to Dr Katz about Star Wars and saying, “It was my generation’s Kennedy assassination. Everyone remembers where they were when they first saw ‘Star Wars’.” Dr Katz replies, “Weren’t they all in the cinema?”
My generation’s Kennedy assassination was the Challenger disaster.
I was the original HP generation, but even for us, that last book release was surreal. My friend and I went to a release party, and it was so cool seeing a couple hundred college students let go of their angsty ‘I’m an adult now’ shells and just being excited 12 year olds again, and knowing that virtually everyone we grew up with would be feeling the same sense of imaginative joy for the next couple of days.
“I still have not found anything better to listen to.”Translation: “I’m not very smart and have terrible taste.”
Lol—I wish Rowling mattered as much as this discussion seems to imply, but I don’t think she does. We’re too inside the peak of Harry Potter fandom and despite Hughes being slightly older, there’s still too much time left for legacy to be considered effectively. That temperature of fandom was never going to be maintained. Anderson’s final statement—the idea of a fandom and head canon separated from the artist is the relationship and legacy of a work—charitably an assertion of the power of the fans and also a convenient disassociation—is a common thing that we all do wholehearted and ambivalently. What is a legacy in this context—just how do we feel about this intellectual property right now? What do we compare it to—other corporate properties whose life is evolving with other creators while still being shepherded like Star Wars? Is it the MCU, built on decades (recent decades!) of exploitation and work for hire contracts? Tolkien, who’s legacy is every single fantasy created in the mold and in opposition, a burst of counter culture fame, a decline with the counterculture, a re-emergence as pop? Dune’s steady steady almost the biggest star position? Speaking of Brits who’ve lost it, Morrissey and the Smiths?Maybe you need to be a fan (which I’m not) to see more, but it’s not like Star Trek where scientists claim that often. Boarding school admissions did go up. This doesn’t feel like a discussion about legacy but rather what we think of a very current relationship.I mean, I’ll hazard my dumb opinion—the legitimacy and prominence of YA-oriented literature. That starts with the book being published. A burst of works by other people that follows and has been good and bad and that has continued to evolve even while Harry Potter, for the most part hasn’t except as a IP. Enough money poured into a category that is bigger than before. Beginning the discussion with the movie is beginning with a movie franchise and effects is a less notable discussion of legacy possibilities in my opinion. A theme park, a play, etc… all have a lot of contemporaries.JK Rowling, okay, a real-time very public discussion of the artist/audience relationship. I see the word parasocial popping up all over nowadays and we’ll see how much that affects how we first interact with properties, because if it continues to be mostly reactive–I like this until I discover I don’t or don’t want to like this anymore–than that feels like the same old fandom.
Boarding school as an ideal was a weird aspect of HP that became popular in the US:https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2017/02/06/getting-your-owl/
I don’t really see anything in that article that suggests boarding school became more idealized, just that university tours used led by 19-year-olds who had read Harry Potter as middle and high schoolers used that as a “fun” “connection” point with 17-year-olds who had also read Harry Potter as middle and high schoolers.
The idea is that at one time teens wanted to get the hell away from highschool. Even British boarding schools were regarded as hellish by Pink Floyd, Lindsay Anderson & C. S. Lewis. The op-ed didn’t describe it as a “fun” “connection”, but part of a sales pitch inviting these young adults (now older than the target audience of “young adult” novels) to live out a fantasy of being students at Hogwarts.
I dunno–the realities of the British “public school” system and how traumatizing it’s been for so many people have been out there for a long time. And yet, N American kids fantasizing about boarding school life existed long before Harry Potter…
They were? I wasn’t aware of N. American kids holding it up as an ideal before then.
There was a weird early 80s thing with being “preppie” which was largely fueled by an entirely satirical book called “The Preppy Handbook” which was a massive bestseller. The novelty, satirical, jokey book was taken very seriously as a handbook by many people who followed its guidance on how to dress, behave and which were the best boarding schools. I dunno, maybe it was just me. Anyway, I never did get to boarding school or get that signet ring.
Maybe it was a Canadian thing 😛 Don’t get me wrong, Harry Potter bumped it up ten fold (particularly as it was one of the first major examples I can think of set in a co-ed boarding school) but… I mean my dad talked about reading (or maybe seeing the much more modern movies) Tom Brown’s School Days and how appealing that all seemed to him as a kid.
Canada was the destination for American colonists opposed to independence.
Oh well, it’s worked out for us OK in the long run.
I think there is something to be said for the generation of young readers fantasizing about boarding school as a result of the Harry Potter books. I definitely did. When I eventually became an exchange student when I was 16 years old a huge draw for me was that I got to attend boarding school for free for a bit.
As someone who grew up with the series it’s fascinating how much damage Rowling did to it even before opening her mouth about people of colour and transpeople. The continued forcing of new addons that take away from the original novels, the incessant retconning to deal with plotholes (having the Hogwarts Express in book one for long-distance travel only to then add literal teleportation by book six), the desperate attempt to Americanise the franchise further and further, and just trying to claim any popular fandom interpretation as her own (see Hermione as a person of colour).As for art from the artist, I really hate that mindset as while it’s cuddly and nice to think you can just enjoy it by itself it’s frankly impossible to pretend her, as an adult looking back, incredibly socially conservative views aren’t embedded into it. The complete incapability of showing teenagers having any form of romantic relationship, the use of antisemitic stereotypes to represent bankers, the extreme “respect for authority” slant even when said authority is shown to be untrustworthy.
Not to mention the fact that the wizarding world is, as a whole, totally ok with using slave labor, and Hermione’s attempts to reform are consistently used as a source of humor.
You’re soooooooooooo brave
It’s a good thing your opinion doesn’t matter
IIRC you can’t teleport in or out of Hogwarts, though.
(Unless you’re Dumbledore, of course!)
It’s fascinating to see how little damage you & your ilk are able to do to her.
I haven’t read the HP books and probably won’t, but if they’re good, they’re good. There’s the art and there’s the artist. If the art is fine, it doesn’t become less fine when the artist’s shortcomings are revealed. Otherwise, we’d have to throw out a ton of books, paintings, movies, music. Miles Davis and Herman Melville beat their wives, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were antiSemite racists, and if Shakespeare were revealed to have been a notorious grabass, we’d have to burn the plays and sonnets. Art escapes into the wild. If a thing is beautiful, we’re going to look at it, listen to it, read it. Not to do so punishes not the artist but ourselves. If we don’t want to financially reward a living artist, use the library.
I can’t see Shakespeare NOT being a notorious grabass. Tolkein is a good example of Fair For His Day, but also leaned into some slightly problematic tropes about royal blood and fantasyJews (though he loudly rebuked Hitler) Then there’s George Lucas, and even the AVClub dorks aren’t too cool for Space Wars
Dammit, guess I’m not a dork then.
Well now I just see Shakespeare as a notorious grabass- thanks a lot! Although I always envision Shakespeare as 90s Joseph Fiennes, so that softens the blow a bit.
I mean he bagged an engaged rich girl who looks like Gwyneth Paltrow, so he was doing something right.
For me, it depends on how separable the artists’ issues/faults are from their art. Like, it seems impossible to separate Woody Allen from the dozens of movies he’s made about neurotic older men and the attractive younger women who fall for them, but tons of LGBTQ+ kids saw a message of acceptance in the HP books, so they can just collectively decide to pretend that Britney Spears wrote the books instead and forget Rowling if they want to. I’m in a sort of middle ground wrt Buffy – after learning what I did about Whedon, when I revisit Buffy episodes sometimes I still enjoy them and see the empowering elements, but other times I catch undertones of faux-nice-guy male whining that I missed originally, but stand out more in context. Art is art, but it doesn’t exist in a bubble, and context can and definitely does color how we view it and process it. It exists in the world, not in a vacuum.
True! But the world changes constantly, and not every reader/viewer/listener attends to the thing in context. If the thing seems to you infected by the artist’s flaws, then of course there’s no reason you should take it in. My concern is the idea that we’re morally obligated to turn away from the art. We might be morally obligated not to enrich the artist, but if the thing created is beautiful, we have every moral right to love it.
There aren’t any “LGBTQ+ kids.” Let kids be kids.
Specific to this article, that is especially true when talking about authors and works that don’t comment one way or another on the issue at hand. With Rowling you’re not going to read the books knowing what you do now and find hidden transphobia.
It depends a lot on the art. If you liked Marylin Manson, learning that Brian Warner is a sick and depraved asshole probably isn’t going to change your opinion of the music. But if similar allegations had been made against Mr. Rogers, it’d be very hard to look at his neighborhood the same way.
So this is a roundtable on Harry Potter by a group of people who mostly don’t give a shit about Harry Potter? I know J.K. Rowling sucks now and deserves nothing, but what was the point of this?
An exercise in teeth sucking.
what was the point of this?-The AV Club
de gustibus and all that, but I would have gone withThe AV Club
a group of people who mostly don’t give a shitActually, why not both?
Well, it does give those who wanted only to poop on the books and movies to do so and then “wizard it away.”
Yup, this article is squarely from the perspective of childless adults (not judging, I’m a childless adult), specifically people who’ve experienced the arc of the initial bandwagon, and the self-souring of Rowling’s reputation. Plenty of the less-online aren’t even aware of Rowling’s transphobia, so while I think maybe there are a lot of childless folks in their twenties and thirties who have grown out of it and understand the ickiness, most of the people I know with kids are still steeped in Harry Potter. It’s maybe not currently a phenomenon at the level of Marvel, but it’s chugging along there at maybe just below the level of pokemon.
Yup – enough new kids are discovering and reading the books that my niece had a Harry Potter themed party this summer. I think it’s still going pretty strong.
My daughter is reading them with her mom right now. It was her mom’s favorite book series growing up. Again, Rowling sucks, but she already bought the books so whatever.
Childless or not, adults who were kids in the 90’s – early 2000’s are the perfect people to discuss this because they were the target audience for HP back when it was a bona fide phenomenon. Whereas modern kids mostly seem to regard it as a nostalgia property or something their millenial cousins are way too obsessed with.
I don’t disagree that it’s a specific perspective that spans the breadth of Pottermania, but three of the four panelists’ reaction to Harry Potter is a shrug. It’d be like asking me about Blue’s Clues; I’ve seen it and know the deal, but I was aged out of the target demographic and really don’t have much to say about it.And I’d disagree that modern kids treat it as a “nostalgia property;” my 10 year-old nephew barreled through those books and the whole family went as Potter characters a couple Halloweens ago, and it definitely wasn’t due to his parents trying to recreate their own experience; they were in grad school by the 00s and could care less. Kids have very little patience for stuff that doesn’t appeal to them, and will check out of your favorite childhood book or movie if its only appeal is your personal relationship with it.
I have teenaged kids and they all have read these books multiple times. The series remains a great way to encourage diving into longer books since after the second one they turn into doorstops. I’m sure popularity will continue to wane as time passes, but they’re not chopped liver just yet.
Nah, kids are still into it. My six year old son found it this year and loves it – we read the first book, he’s seen the films (we rewatched the original at the cinema this past weekend), plays the Lego games, has a Lego Knight Bus and will wear his costume whenever he has a chance. And none of that is down to me trying to push my own childhood love of it onto him (and believe me, I’ve tried to do that with other things) because I don’t *have* one – I was 18 when the films started to come out and only started to read the books then. I like it and have happily shred his experience with it but it’s something he’s fallen for himself.Sure, the millennials are very loud about it because it was their childhood and it can seem that they’re the main audience for it (and have a huge voice in popular culture). But it’s still got mainstream appeal for modern children and I imagine it will for a while – because at the centre of it all are very popular, well-told stories set in an imaginative world that children enjoy a lot.
Yeah, I’ve got kids who have moved through Harry Potter fandom and one who is in the process of getting started on it. I have had to figure out how to engage with the material with them.
A blanket prohibition on Harry Potter seems unrealistic — there are sleepovers and streaming channels they will encounter HP through. I think it’s better to address JKR as a problematic-at-best creator and view the works in context. (Honestly, the moment they start asking about many of the musicians I listen to, that conversation has to come up anyway.)
(Honestly, the moment they start asking about many of the musicians I listen to, that conversation has to come up anyway.)Yeah, I listen to a shit-ton of 70s classic rock, so you hit the nail on the head with that one.
I guarantee you the vast majority of people don’t have the first clue about Rowlings’ gender politics, and TBH most wouldn’t care even if they did.
It’s funny you say that because my 6-year-old daughter’s twin obsessions at the moment are Pokemon and Harry Potter. I’m not especially interested in giving Rowling any money, but on the other hand, shopping at Amazon (which I also do sometimes) probably does more material harm than adding to one dumb transphobe’s coffers. That said, Rowling is so frustrating because it would be so easy for her to just shut the fuck up! I’m not saying we shouldn’t reckon with the horrible things some artists say or do, but I am saying we have way too much access to those things. So many artists have so many terrible opinions and all they have to do to stay off my radar is NOT share them with the world!
I did enjoy Sanchez’s repeated “why am I even here?” responses.
At least 25% of the roundtable was made up of an actual fan of the property. So it had that going for them, which is nice.
“by a group of people who mostly don’t give a shit about Harry Potter?”Thus accurately reflecting how the general public feels about Harry Potter in 2021.
That sounds like you either have a very hermetic social circle that resembles the AV Club staff, or are engaging in wishful thinking. Despite Rowling’s chronic foot-in-mouth disease, and the Chappelle special putting a spotlight on her views recently, there were a surprising number of Gryffindors trick or treating last weekend. AV Club isn’t dedicating a week to the 20th anniversary of the movie series because people mostly don’t give a shit about it.
“Your personal anecdotal experiences mean nothing! But MY personal anecdotal experiences are absolute proof of whatever I want them to be!”
I’m sorry your self image is so incredibly fragile. I really barely nudged it and it seems to have come apart. I was just pointing out that the AV Club doesn’t spend a week writing about things to which the public is completely indifferent.
the AV Club doesn’t spend a week writing about things to which the public is completely indifferent.Well, not anymore (oh, for the days of that sweet, sweet Laurel Canyon sound)
What the hell is this guy talking about? All I did was point out that him looking at trick or treaters doesn’t equate to scientific research and now he’s trying to psychoanalyze me.
I never claimed it was scientific research, just that even that small anecdote (and my point about AVC) was much more evidence than you provided (which is none, three comments in!). Anyway, I’m sorry for distressing you and making you feel unsafe. You might want to try a weighted blanket to make you feel more secure.
Probably because I was obviously making a snarky one-liner (like 2/3rds of the comments on this site) and not writing a scientific paper. And now you’re on your third post of being angry about it because you can’t take a joke (although I did provide plenty of evidence in another post in this same thread, because there are other people in this comment section who are worth going to the trouble for. You’re just not one of them.)
…and now you’re projecting. Maybe you should talk to your therapist about this.
You are really, REALLY trying to make it seem like this poster is getting upset but they aren’t and you’re coming off as insane
What is this, sock puppets now? Honestly I was just doing a bit, but it’s worth mentioning: the weighted blanket might look expensive, but if you consider it an investment in your wellness, it’s actually quite a bargain.
That’s a real stretch, buddy. They were right. You used an anecdote to show how another anecdote was incorrect.
A blank statement of your own opinion is not an anecdote.
you still read the articles?
As someone who’s never been invested in Harry Potter, I have a question: is the response to her Twitter hate/stupidity different because those books are for kids? Eric Clapton’s abhorrent views, to what I’ve seen, seem to be viewed almost with…humor – David Mamet’s newfound conservative views are met in almost the same way. Orson Scott Card’s abhorrent views are grappled with in more of a “sigh, it is what it is but I still love Ender’s Game” way. David Bowie had a big Nazi phase but is idolized (maybe that was performance art and maybe that wasn’t, but he never disavowed those statements or iconography). Pretty much every 70s rocker probably committed statutory rape – I think it was Jimmy Page who locked a teenage girl in his basement. Obviously you have the Michael Jackson scenario. Roald Dahl was a big anti-semite, as is Alice Walker, who believes in insane fucking conspiracy theories. Even Jerry fucking Seinfeld dated a 17-year-old girl when he was twice her age. But it feels like none of those are met with the same attitude as Rowling at the present moment. Is it just because she continues to tweet? Or because the books were so formative for so many people? Just interesting coming from the outside – I grew up as an insanely huge MJ fan and had to grapple with that so I get what people are going through, but I also think grappling with that has made me care far less about what authors of famous works actually say/think, while totally understanding those who do care. It’s a tricky line we’ll probably never quite understand.
Eric Clapton gets shot and the adaptation of Ender’s Game failed miserably. 17 is the unqualified age of consent in NY.
Eric Clapton got shot??The adaptation of Ender’s didn’t fail because of Card’s views it failed because no one liked it and it looked dumb.I never said the Seinfeld thing was illegal, but it’s weird as fuck.
That should have been “shit” Mea culpa.The vast majority of the fan base chose to stay home from Ender’s Game. OSC is treated no differently than Rowling. The only reason you hear about Rowling more is that OSC chooses to keep his mouth shut.
There’s a new Ender book coming out in two weeks so we will see if OSC does any press. It’s not one of the random small books the past few years, it’s the culmination/combining of the Ender and Bean stories. I can’t help myself, I’m going to read it (I didn’t say pay for it). But I get it. Telling people I’m a fan of the Ender books is not something I really do anymore
The way I heard it he shot the sheriff.
No, you’re thinking of the sheriff.
I mentioned above, for me there’s a couple different elements. For starters, I can listen to most of that music and never think about the problematic elements (although there are some songs I definitely skip quickly), but Ender’s Game was really tainted for me, specifically because there were bits in the book that stood out as more troubling after what I learned about him. Re: Rowling, I think it’s specifically the sense of betrayal, because a lot of LBGTQ+ saw themselves in this world, and thought its message of acceptance was for them, and how that message is being retroactively rescinded. So, it’s a little because it’s for kids, because the kids who read her books back in the day are feeling betrayed, and because her books were such a formative influence for them. Roald Dahl is an interesting one for me, because it’s pretty much the same as Rowling, except that he’s no longer alive and saying new awful things, so it’s easier to ignore. But, his books are beloved because of their messages about acceptance of outsiders, much like Rowling’s (only, you know, better).
Thanks! This was a helpful comment. I felt the same regarding “Ender’s” – it’s hard NOT to see once you know his worldview. With MJ I can obviously still listen to Jackson 5 stuff, I can generally listen to pre-”Bad” stuff (except for PYT), and then “Bad” and after gets tricky, both because that’s when it seems like he started grooming kids AND it’s where his songs get…weirder, for lack of a better word. And so many of those songs involve kids, like “Heal the World”, where I have no desire to separate.Are there elements in Potter now that feel similarly to you as with Card and Ender’s? From the outside it seems like Rowling was preaching a general message of tolerance and acceptance for outsiders, and with money and fame and being cloistered her views started warping. So one could argue that the Rowling was arguing something different from modern-day Rowling. But are there elements in the books that now read a lot differently?
Well, I was never a Harry Potter megafan, but there’s bits of her books that always bothered me – the bankers are a whole bunch of anti-Semitic stereotypes rolled together, a lot of the wizarding world relies on slave labor (which is evidently ok because the slaves like it??), and lots of people seem to think that Snape’s childhood issues with Harry’s parents excuse him being outright abusive to Harry, for starters. I always saw it as a fun but flawed series that didn’t end as strongly as it started. I have, however, noticed a lot of things in Buffy that I missed the first dozen times around that really bug me after recent revelations about Joss Whedon, such as things involving Xander that get excused because he’s a “nice guy”.
Snape was abusive toward everyone and an abysmal educator to boot.“You know that chemistry teacher who blatantly played favorites and only gave A’s to his favorites? Who openly berated and belittled you for years and drove your friend to tears on multiple occasions?”“Oh, yeah, fuck that guy. He was awful.”“Yeah, well, it turns out he was in love with your mom and your dad was kind of mean to him.”“Really? That changes everything! I must name my second-born child after him!”
“Yeah, well, it turns out he was in love with your mom and your dad was kind of mean to him.”“Really? That changes everything! I must name my second-born child after him!”Isn’t it more that in addition to being a horrible person Snape was also really brave for spying on Voldemort?
Ha, I know the US is having a rough time with this right now, but I feel like you can always count on the Brits for some good old-fashioned anti-Semitism.From the movie I always thought the idea of the sorting hat and the personality/genetics-based houses was pretty icky. What’s crazy is that actually become so accepted and pervasive – I feel like modern life is all about categorizing yourself. And I don’t mean gender and sexual identity in this, I’m more talking about the rise of astrology, personality tests, online quizzes, etc. People on dating apps legit will include their Harry Potter house! I wonder if the sorting hat was a legitimate cause of that since the books/movies were so influential, or just part of a general shift that would’ve happened anyway.
Ah, anti-semitism!
Ravenclaw. How you doin’?
The sorting hat thing is supposedly more about personality, not genetics, but as an adult I also really dislike the idea of binning people like that, particularly because, with the way it’s presented, they’re explicitly telling some kids that they’re bad, and they’re giving other kids the idea that they’re inherently better than others.
“I have, however, noticed a lot of things in Buffy that I missed the first dozen times around that really bug me after recent revelations about Joss Whedon, such as things involving Xander that get excused because he’s a “nice guy”.”
One thing that helps me deal with something like Buffy–and this could very well just be my justification–is just how many people were involved in it. By the time I really most loved it (not to mention Angel) a lot of the major plot elements weren’t even Joss’ but other writers. But with a book writer, while they work with editors, etc, it’s much more just one person’s voice. If that makes sense.
I haven’t rewatched Buffy in ages, but it’s interesting that so many people bring up Xander now as newly problematic-seeming (or just discomfiting) in light of Whedon’s horrible behavior, because I always thought that the show was impressively unsparing about Xander being pretty lousy. He’s initially positioned as the type of wiseass/nerdy “nice guy” who typically isn’t as hunky but turns out to be worthier for the heroine…but the show repeatedly shows him being (a.) not that smart (he’s a Milhouse-style nerd who isn’t that great at school!), (b.) not that nice, and (c.) never even remotely considered a romantic possibility for Buffy, who is still the POV character. (I feel like there are times we’re meant to feel bad for Xander, but never really prompted to wish that Buffy would date him!) That’s impressive fortitude in a lot of ways! I’m sure there are episodes where Xander is supposed to be more sympathetic than he really is, and maybe he doesn’t get told off as often as he probably should, but he leaves Anya at the altar, and often is placed in conflict with Buffy over Angel or Spike (who are both presented at least as sympathetically at times, especially Angel), and seems to be a genuine annoyance to Giles, who the show generally frames as smart and sensible. I feel like, if anything, there’s a fair amount of what I imagine to be self-loathing coming from the characterization of Xander. Doesn’t mean we should cut Whedon (or Xander) a break, but I do think the show was often weirdly ahead of its time in its treatment of that character.
You’re right, there is more nuance there than many acknowledge – I was being a bit lazy in using Xander as my example, because I was trying to be brief. The longer version is that it’s just lots of little things that didn’t jump out to me originally but that now cause cringe moments. I still love the show – the positives definitely outweigh the negatives, but a book review site I follow was doing a buffy rewatch (foreveryoungadult.com/tag/buffy-rewatch), and it was so surprising how often we realized that there were bits that had flown under our radar originally, but had aged very poorly. There’s also a bit of Schroedinger’s favorite show – if I don’t rewatch and notice things that upset me now within the larger context, I can still remember it as a show I love wholeheartedly. Which is a bit silly, but *shrugs*. Also: you guys should do some sort of inventory/recommends list of shows that people who are burned out on bad news & stress can watch (the Ted Lassos, British Baking shows, etc). I need new feel good tv recs! 🙂
I can definitely see the Harry Potter books getting the Dahl treatment in 30-40 years (or however long it takes Rowling to die).“Oh, yeah, Harry Potter. I loved those books as a kid. My dad gave them to me to read.”“You know the author was a huge transphobe, right?”“She was? Ah, shit.”
Also: to the troll who I’m not going to help get un-greyed, yes, there absolutely are LGBTQ+ kids – not everyone figures stuff like that out when they’re young, but some do, and to pretend otherwise is a hateful erasure of people who already often feel unseen or like their truth is invalidated by the culture at large. Shame on you.
I think a lot of it is that Rowling’s work and public persona were so steeped in “niceness.” Her whole thing was about being an outsider and accepting all kinds of people, so her turn towards TERF-dom felt more jarring.The other people you mention have reputations that don’t rely so much on being kind and accepting. It’s like Ellen. The accusations against her would not have been such a big story if she wasn’t the “Be Kind” (TM) lady.
This makes a lot of sense too. The Ellen comparison is a really good one.
What’s a TERF?
Steeped in niceness but also a special kind of performative inclusivity. As the piece points out, the fact that Rowling wanted to retcon Gay Dumbledore or Black Hermione always felt a bit disingenuous because she wanted a big pat on the back for it… But those weren’t the characters she created. The terfiness but also her insistence on standing behind Depp’s casting in Fantastic Beasts felt like her revealing her true colors.
The response to Rowling has been different largely because of Twitter. I don’t mean that in the “Twitter sucks” sense —although that too— but in the, “Now a person can shout loudly into the void all day every day, and the void shouts back” sense. Most of those other people are old news. Mamet’s conservatism is three presidents old, Card isn’t dead but I had to look him up to check, and not a whole lot of those 70s rockers are out in public a lot today.There’s definitely been a shift in the behavior and words we find acceptable from our public figures in the last twenty odd years. The younger generations especially are simply unwilling to accept most of the bullshit that our parents allowed, from the people we know to the people on the tv. But even so, the reaction to Rowling has been on par with the reaction to Clapton and Seinfeld in their most recent fuck ups, if not their earlier ones, and that’s because Twitter allows people to deal with their stupid shit in real time. Plius the fact that Rowling is constantly trolling on Twitter, rather than Clapton occasionally and Seinfeld never (I’m actually not sure about either of those two, but I think that’s probably right) means that more time and attention is paid to her on the whole.
I thought Card was treated like Rowling now too. At least usually when I see people talk him about him online it’s about what a terrible person he is. I loved Ender as a kid, but the rest of his books are not the best and it’s incredibly easy to not support him too. The Ender’s Game movie was just bad.
It’s because Rowling clearly wants to be seen as a woke feminist but then goes on to spew hate towards trans people so in addition to being hateful she’s also a massive hypocrite.
A big part of it boils down to the type of kid that the Potter novels appealed to (not just people who enjoyed the books or movies casually, but those who became big fans.) The first novel is about an emotionally abused, misunderstood kid who feels out of place in the world and whose parental figures don’t understand him and refuse to try. Then he’s whisked away from all that and sent to a hidden world where the same thing that made him an outcast among normal people makes him an admired celebrity and a hero. This is a really indulgent kids’ fantasy, and it speaks ESPECIALLY strongly to kids who were bullied by their peers and abused by their families…which LGBT kids are much more likely to be.So they grew up projecting their childhood woes unto Harry, a lot of them thinking that maybe there was an intentional metaphor for queerness in the subtext of the books. And then when we get older, we discover, NOPE, there is no clever metaphor, it’s all surface-level cheese, and the author not only didn’t mean to include queer subtext, she actively and maliciously HATES a huge segment of queer people.
It’s a lot to deal with. Harry Potter’s popularity among LGBT kids is hard to overstate, so there was a sense of betrayal when Rowling went full terf. It’s forced a lot of 90’s and 2000’s kids to reevaluate some things about their childhoods.
Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if a big reason why the franchise’s popularity has greatly declined in recent years is because Rowling stabbed her most passionate fans in the back. That and, you know, the fact that every single Harry Potter spinoff has been poorly-written crap.
Yeah it’s that sense of betrayal that’s felt different from other prominent people with shitty actions/pasts/views. I guess that is then pretty directly correlated with the work itself.
Is there any evidence that the series has greatly declined in popularity, though? (At least, any more so than would be otherwise expected for a franchise that’s over twenty years old that this point.) Harry Potter stuff still seems to be selling pretty well, people are still talking about and, well, it seems like if the series’ popularity had crashed in the way that you’re suggesting we wouldn’t need to be writing and reading articles about whether or not the series can survive in light of Rowling’s TERF-dom in the first place, since the answer would presumably be a pretty clear “No.”
It’s because the online trans community are completely fucking mental. Seriously, the reaction to Rowling’s comments (which, let’s be honest here, were pretty tepid and heavily qualified) was simply deranged. Hundreds of thousands of tweets (hell, maybe millions at this point) snarling and hyperventilating and threatening suicide, all because one woman voiced her reservations about transwomen being given access to certain single-sex spaces, reservations which are both common and certainly far from groundless.Then there were the death threats, the rape threats, the misogynistic sexual abuse (“SUCK MY GIRLDICK YOU FUCKING TERF CUNT!” etc…) – literally thousands of them – all of which served to demonstrate that, actually, Rowling kinda has a point. For some strange, unaccountable reason, a lot of transwomen seem to struggle with toxic masculinity. It’s no wonder some women have reservations about letting them into their locker rooms, prisons, and rape-crisis centres.The only fair way to describe the online trans community’s reaction to Rowling’s comments is performative fury. There’s no evidence whatsoever – none – to suggest that Rowling’s comments have in any way translated into any amount of real-world harm to anybody. That’s an uncomfortable fact for the online trans community. So, in the absence of harm, they’ve been forced to manufacture the appearance of harm by treating Rowling’s twitter feed as some kind of existential threat. It’s a grift, and a transparently obvious one. Playing on one’s own minority status is a convenient shortcut to political power, and the online trans community is exploiting that fact for all it’s worth.That’s all that’s happening here. And there’s no mileage in trying to do the same to Eric Clapton. That’s why the reactions are different.
“I have a question: is the response to her Twitter hate/stupidity different because those books are for kids?”The response is different because Rowling’s target is white, male investors who are bankrolling the “trans” assault on women and children. The hate and stupidity are coming from the investors’ collaborator brownshirts.
It’s because the Harry Potter fandom is Extremely Online, as they say. As long as Michael Jackson’s music gets airplay, everything else is sticking around.
Not only was David Bowie a part-time Nazi, but he allegedly also nonced it up with the same underage girl as Jimmy Page – Lori Mattix.There’s separating the art from the artist then there’s Bowie’s inexplicable squeaky-clean halo.
I didn’t know that – yeesh.
I think it’s all of the above. It’s the fact that these are kids books that are built on at least a nominal message of acceptance and standing up against oppression; the fact that both she and her fandom are Extremely Online; the fact that Twitter affords us every opportunity to be disappointed in our heroes; the fact that Harry Potter was (and still is) such a huge cultural moment; the fact that Rowling cloaks her transphobia in feminist language; the fact that we’re having a very public reckoning right now about transphobia in a way that’s we’re not about, say, antisemitism (which is very front-facing in the books, whereas you have to read between the lines to get at any of the gender essentialist stuff). That, I think, is the biggest factor—that’s it’s happening Right Now and isn’t something we can file away or treat as before our time like you can do with Dahl, for instance.
It’s because there is a rage machine made up of a very thin majority of failed artists that prefer to judge rather than create. Of course these supposed crimes are on a scale aren’t they? MJ raping children is many times worse than Bowie heil hitlering one time in a haze of coke. Human beings are flawed – it’s a bit precious to expect an artist to somehow be in line with every fan’s view-point. And having “a viewpoint” is not the same as a malevolent action. Though there are a couple jokers here, and elsewhere who think that words=violence. Those people are also mentally deranged. Of course this very comment will reside in the AV unpublished zone. Not a big deal to me, since the lack of nuanced commentary is what spells the end of this once great site.
I mean I’ll ungrey you. I agree with the problem of the rage machine, which is a subsidiary of the social media machine, which makes us all crazy and is going to lead us down a pretty bad path (and has already). I agree that we should differentiate scale of actions – I was only pulling other possible “cancellable” celebs off the top of my head, because for this post, I was specifically interested in why that machine seemed to treat Rowling differently than other people who also had varying degrees of shittiness in their past and present (and got some great answers!). I think calling people mentally deranged, regardless of how much you disagree with their views, is probably also rage-based by the way and a product of that machine, so something to think about. Personally, I don’t think words are violence generally, especially in casual conversation, but certainly powerful people with influence can wield words irresponsibly or dangerously. History would suggest as much. I think the words=violence thing perhaps came to be because we do shorthand everything now (thanks Twitter!) but words definitely have real power and I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater just because people use that too rigidly.
First of all: Thank you.Second: Seems there is more inherent “violence” in silencing voices, instead of debating the issues where dissenting voices that might unnerve some people. It’s deranged, in my view, to muzzle someone while decrying the content of their view – especially without giving someone that same opportunity to express their position.To state “I don’t think JKR is transphobic,” and to state the reasons is not an act of violence. That person could very well be absolutely wrong, but that’s what a debate determines. Incorrect views should be allowed to be expressed, within reason.
I think this is all a reaction to an unhealthy and often unnecessary amount of speech we’re given access to on a day-to-day. People are addicted and sensory overloaded and act irrationally (I’d rather use that word than deranged here). And people on all sides do it. But I think we need to rethink just what “speech” is regarding social media. Not saying it shouldn’t always be protected legally, I’m just saying socially, it’s very different from an in-person conversation, and it makes sense that the reaction would be different too. It’s far more similar to publishing: every SM post is like publishing a mini-article or mini-commentary (sometimes not-so-mini), and that’s how they’re received. And what’s the point? When one boils it down, it’s really just a narcissistic or addictive pursuit. Texting or messaging is a legitimate extension of interpersonal, native speech (perhaps AV Club commenting a bit less so!) but “posting” is essentially giving every person a mini-publishing platform. There are lots of conversations I’m comfortable having in person, and I enjoy disagreement. But regarding posting, I now think, “Would I have published an article or book under my name giving commentary on this topic before SM” and the answer is almost always “Hell no.” I’m generally pretty left-wing, but I think that oftentimes people who aren’t left-wing have a gut reaction to things that’s actually pretty intuitive, moreso than folks on the left. But they then go the wrong way. Men’s Rights Activists are a great example of this. They correctly identify things like men not being able to show emotion or cry and the damage it does, among other things. But they then decide to essentially blame women/feminism for this, rather than understanding that women are their natural allies in that fight. Similarly, I think many people’s reactions to the rage machine are pretty intuitive! But the instinct, as always, is to blame people on the other side: the “woke mob”, “cancel culture,” etc., which I think is mostly bullshit. The real problem is SM itself, and it must be dealt with before we deal with anything else. I firmly believe it’s the modern Wargames: “The only way to win is not to play.”
Really great points. Unfortunately, this where the conversation lies. All the marketing, propaganda, nuanced discussion, and idiocy all distilled into once place: SM. Where perhaps people would discuss these issues in person, we have this lazy way of pretending to try to understand each other. So the conversation is seasoned with a litany of targeted ads and posts meant to make us angrier and more fearful. And fear is a great motivator to get people to purchase things.Still – if this where the conversation is, it’s our responsibility to engage – because SM is where ideas – good and very bad- are disseminated – and translated to action in the real world.
I think the case of Rowling hits different for long time fans like myself because the message she gave us as kids reading her books was that diversity and equality matter and should be celebrated. Her anti-trans statements feel like a personal betrayal of everything she taught us to believe in from a young age. I was 11 years old when I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 1999. Reading the series was like the best Christmas, birthday, and adventure day of my life wrapped up into one, for years as each proceeding book came out! Rowling was foundational to be beliefs in equality and she chucked it all away with this TERF nonsense. I can’t forgive her for that. I still love Harry Potter because it exists in my mind and heart separately from her. She created it but when it was unleashed on the world something truly magical happened that is far bigger than Rowling as a person.
I think we’re still trying to figure out how to be humans whose voice in society lies in the money we spend when there’s no such thing as ethical consumption. Every store we buy at, meal we eat, item we buy, book, song, or movie we read watch or listen to supports some terrible person or cause.I think for a lot of people they’re past the target audience age and time when they’ll get the most enjoyment out of J.K. Rowling’s work, so Harry Potter is an easy thing to let go of and take a stance against… and they can feel slightly better about themselves while shopping at Amazon, watching Netflix, listening to David Bowie, eating Californian almonds, wearing fast fashion, eating non fair-trade chocolate, and driving their Teslas or filling up at a BP gas station.To be clear, I hate JK Rowling’s views. I think they’re despicable, and I don’t want to do anything to give her the money or power to help her support her fellow TERFs.But I also don’t want to support 90% of the other things I support with my money. Again, though, there’s no such thing as ethical consumption.Even thinking about books specifically, whether I like it or not, other books I buy pay for the advances of books of people like Bill O-Reilly, Mike Pence, and Tucker Carlson. Which means a lot of books I buy potentially support transphobic pieces of shit.People can boycott Harry Potter if they want, but also buying a Harry Potter book isn’t the worst thing you could do for the world and I don’t think anyone should beat themselves up over buying something that brings them happiness just because it may incidentally support a bad cause. Again, you’re probably supporting someone or something terrible every single day, and there are a lot of people and companies that money supports besides Rowling and Rowling spends her money on things besides TERF causes. She even spends some of her money supporting actually good work and charities.
Honestly, I also think we have to stop ourselves from fucking up people’s enjoyment. I’m not a “let people like things” person – I love good criticism. But I feel like it’s become a bit of a badge of honor these days if a friend’s friend’s girlfriend who knows very little about online issues says she likes a book to go “You know that author’s problematic.” What does that do? Life’s hard enough, it ruins someone’s enjoyment of something that was making life a little better in that moment. And I don’t think most people are being altruistic in that moment, I think they’re just scoring moral points. After Alec Baldwin shot the DP, I got multiple texts from people going “Did you see Alec Baldwin killed someone?” And I couldn’t help but think, why? Why are you sending this to me? I’ll likely find out on my own, and if I’m doing something fun at the moment (I was!) and see that news, it’s just going to bring me down. But it’s just like an instinct now that we have to share bad things with people. And I’m not against boycotts by the way! I don’t judge either side on the art v. artist debate. But people doing the boycotts shouldn’t judge those who don’t participate – and again, we’re talking boycotts against an author, not like boycotts against a company for supporting anti-vax or anti-gay legislation or something.
Harry Potter became “a thing” in my consciousness round about when the third book came out and people at work were going on about it. I bought those initial books and eventually got round to reading them, when I was visiting family in Barbados during Christmas 99/technically not the actual new Millennium.I was at least 10 years too old to be reading them, but I thought the stories were okay. As a bit of a luddite it taught me some cod Latin, which wasn’t such a bad thing.I agree with those who say that the books (and by default the films) became a slog after The Goblet of Fire. JK needed to be reined in, but the whole thing became such a cash cow nobody bothered to try.
I guess I’m lucky that I stopped reading after Goblet of Fire, and never watched past the first film.
Many of my favorite authors and artists were terrible people, so I’m old hat at separating my opinion of a creator from my love for their creations. Of course, in my case, those people are usually dead, so it’s easier I suppose to ignore them as people and focus on their work. It must be harder for folks who have grown up obsessed with Rowling’s books and their adaptations when she’s still around, actively saying awful things. Maybe, decades from now, when she’s passed away, young people will be able to enjoy her books again without feeling like they are supporting something they don’t agree with.
If you go back in time far enough or wait long enough you will fine reprehensible behavior from all artists. Popular artists today will be outed a villains some point in the future. There were great artists in the past what were complete dirt bags. And there are artists that we love and respect that were very bad people but we will never know. If we ever allow ourselves to enjoy art of any kind. (book, movie, painting, sculpture, music, dance, whatever) we will absolute need to separate the art for the artist. The way I am helped through tis problem cam from an art curator from a local large modern art museum that said that once the artists is dead and or you no longer give money to the artist that is a decent point to have “death of the author”. I want to love LOTR, Renaissance painting, rock music, and yess even HP. I need a way to love what I want and not support clearly active stupid stuff from the artist. Do you turn off the radio when a song from some one that was a horrid person in 1965 is on? I am active in the HP fan community, with podcasts and monthly book clubs. I think JRK is an idiot TERF that should just be smart enough to shut it. I will no longer give her money. Our Harry Potter book club is lead by 2 pastors that have a great deal of experience with a problematic text called “the Bible” I am not a believer but if people are on HP books for bad stuff and then hug the bible sunday mornings….
“I think JRK is an idiot TERF that should just be smart enough to shut it”- The social media world in a nutshell. Some people just don’t know how to shut. the. fuck. up. Who wanted this woman’s views on trans identity in the first place?
Other people. Lots of ‘em. Why don’t YOU shut the fuck up?
I just can’t get over that THIS is the hill she wants to die on. Her feelings about Trans people mean SOOOO much to her, that she just can’t drop it or move on (not saying that’s what she should do and all would be forgiven, but what more does she think she can add to her “points”?)
Seriously. First step: stop digging.
“I think JRK is an idiot TERF that should just be smart enough to shut it.”What do you mean?
If she would have just keep her opinions to herself she would be making even more money.
“
I want to love LOTR, Renaissance painting, rock music, and yess even HP.”I don’t think you can really put Hewlett-Packard in the same category, because they only turned evil AFTER Packard died.
Unless the artist in question is a criminal and has done criminally horrible things to people, I think its not that hard to separate art from artist. JK Rowling might be terrible, but fact is that Harry Potter is delightful fiction. Roald Dahl’s works are beloved as well and people don’t hold his anti-Semitic views against his books and people are still making different versions of Willy Wonka. Similarly, people can recognize that Harry Potter is a really enjoyable book and movies series and that Rowling is a capable author, while acknowledging that her comments are very problematic. I think there are a whole bunch of people who are envious of Harry Potter’s popularity and use this separation of art and artist argument to put down Harry Potter.
Also Rowling is NOT “terrible”, just demonized for her mild defense of sex.
Haha, I had no idea there was a long three year gap between HP books. By 2003, I was already waiting too long for book 4 of A Song of Ice and Fire. Poor Harry Potter darlings, having to wait so long.
I hear Winds of Winter is coming out any day now…
It’s a good thing I preordered it in 2011 dollars.
I google the book every couple months and just sigh.
What is cod latin? Just converting modern phrases to (almost certainly poorly conjugated) latin?
Disdain for its creator, who said nothing wrong and wants to protect women and girls. Indulging male fantasies is not more important than women’s safety.
JKR turned into a combination of all her best villians. The vanity of Gilderoy Lockhart, the obtuseness of Cornelius Fudge, the passive aggressive cruelty of Dolores Umbridge. Whether she was always like this (probably: house elves and goblins said the quiet part out loud in all her books) or perhaps, like Tom Riddle, each new million in the bank split her soul further, I don’t know, and it’s unfortunate that she’s revealed to be or became such a piece of shit. I loved those books, and still find them enjoyable to read (and look forward to introducing them to my kid), unlike the films, which outside of the supporting cast of the UK’s finest Shakespearean actors are practically unwatchable now.
This is such a perfect encapsulation of her whole thing that I may steal it.
yes shout it from the rooftops
OMG that is an amazing take. I would add the arrogance of Voldemort and the desire to live forever by constantly changing her own canon and asserting author’s privilege over EVERYTHING. Also there is the discrimination against trans people…
“Revive interest in the books” made me laugh. So there’s that.
I can’t go back. Rowlings has forever tainted the series for me. The same goes for Father Ted and IT Crowd knowing what a piece of shit TERF Graham Lineham is.
I’m a pro wrestling fan on top of a “Potter” fan, so at this point, art-from-artist is basically part and parcel of being both. Chris Jericho is a great performer, so I have to bury the fact he’s a very close, public friend of Don Jr. and shares many of his viewpoints if I’m going to enjoy what he does.I agree with Daniel Radcliffe’s take: that if the books means something to you, that’s sacred enough to hold onto even if JKR’s real-life views say otherwise. If something one took away from those books makes that person feel more comfortable in their own skin, that supersedes the stuff that is said outside that “world” even if it’s fiction. I think Shanicka hit on everything else I feel about it in the present day.
Jericho is THE most frustrating human. He donates so much money to every wrestler that falls on hard times, whether he worked with them or not (he gave thousands of dollars to Kamala when he fell on hard times & got his legs amputated). The phrase “good of heart, dumb of ass” has never been more apt.
I never liked the franchise when I was younger. I just didn’t think Rowling was an impressive writer. The movies were okay, I never really warmed to Emma Watson or Daniel Ratcliffe. It was a thing I watched with friends. I thought less of Rowling from all her random fun fact trivia and retroactive progressiveism, and yeah you know, I can’t say I support the terfist terf on terf island as a trans woman. While I’ve never had a soft spot for the franchise, my heart goes out to people who do adore it and have to deal with Rowlings abhorrent beliefs. It sucks having to associate something you love with something that hates you, I really understand.
I’m in a similar boat to Shanicka. When I got the first two books as a birthday present, I was a 12-year-old short, scrawny, pale boy with messy dark hair and my mother’s green eyes, and who really did not fit in. (It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized I’m on the spectrum, but like many undiagnosed autistic kids I could really relate to feeling simply different for reasons I couldn’t understand or articulate at the time.) I connected strongly with the books, and they helped shape me and define my childhood. I never enjoyed the films (despite loving most of the cast), in part because my relationship with the books was very personal to me, and honestly still is. Those books gave me a place where I felt comfortable at a time when I needed it, and helped show me how to be a fundamentally decent person and treat others with respect in a way that made sense to me (when most of the world didn’t make much sense). They demonstrated why being different could be, well, magical. My childhood basically ended when the last book came out, and they remain intensely important to me.Which is precisely why I’m not letting rowling fuck that up for me. I still can’t help but hope that one day she takes a page out of her own character’s book (bad pun intended) and learns the error of her ways, even though I know it’s probably never going to happen. But in the meantime, I don’t want to give her and her bigotry the power to ruin something that important to me, or to undermine the important lessons I gained from it. Like the AVC staff, I’m not giving her any money and subsidizing her bigotry (the wand I bought last year was fan-made), and I’m now very careful about talking about HP publicly, since I don’t want to harm the people who now find it triggering or otherwise upsetting. But my relationship to the books will be what it always has been – personal and vital to my identity – and one day I hope to introduce my children to it (albeit with context). rowling doesn’t get to change that.
“I don’t want to harm the people who now find it triggering or otherwise upsetting.”That gets more difficult as the bar is lowered. Good luck.
I feel ya. I got into the books as a teen unaware I was suffering from clinical depression from feelings of isolation, so the story of a kid feeling lost in his world before finding his own really spoke to me, and it’s always going to even as the author vomits some bad-take bile.
Same. Harry Potter was a safe and magical place for me as a deeply sad and lonely kid that did not fit in at school or in my own family.
I love everything you wrote! I feel very similarly.
I was late to the Hogwarts Express, but not by much. One of my oldest memories of it was skipping to the last few pages of Prisoner of Azkaban, as my sister owned the book and for whatever reason it was passed along to me to read. Also, I feel as though we were able to go to an early screening of Sorcerer’s Stone. But by the time of book 5 or 6 I was already caught with the story, and by 7 due to the viral “Snape Kills Dumbledore” spoiler I got Deathly Hallows opening night and sheltered myself for the weekend so I could finish the book unsoiled.For that reason, I still consider myself a fan of the series. I’ll catch the movies on TV sometimes when nothing else is on, but I’ve never bothered re-reading any of them. I got into the series at the right time, and nothing can really change that.For what it’s worth about the pooping habits of wizards, you could argue we forced her hand. It certainly didn’t need an answer, but with the fan base the way it was they were quick to point out that canonically bathrooms were added to Hogwarts many years after it opened, leading to the obvious question “Where the hell did they shit?” So in a bizarre attempt of filling in plotholes…here we are. Probably the least offensive thing related to her on Twitter.
“I would describe Harry Potter’s cultural significance as waning.”As a fifth grade teacher, I can assure you that this is wishful thinking on your part.
Best post all week. Thanks man.
I was a hardcore fan and I have to admit that JK Rowling’s recent choices have just made it…less fun. I used to watch Harry Potter weekend every time the movies popped up and now it’s just like “Oh…” It’s not even a conscious thought of wanting to not support her. It just adds too much noise.I also will say that I don’t think the choices made with Fantastic Beasts has helped at all. Questioning why the wizards didn’t intervene in WWII was not a thought I needed.
I think a lot of this is conversation is a bit misdirected. Rowling’s books are popular in part because they seem to carry none of her problematic thoughts. In fact, this article points out the betrayal that certain communities felt because of that dichotomy of an accepting world created by a TERF author. This isn’t like Lovecraft writing explicit racism into his stories or the fundamentalism of the Left Behind series.The bigger question is, and always has been, if it is okay to consume/support/pay money to an artist who has shitty views even if their art does not reflect it. And everyone comes down differently on that one, especially those who consumed that art or got something out of it before Rowling’s views were widely known.
WTF is this TERF thing?
Usually the best thing a waning franchise can do is a reboot/continuation bringing back the original creator, a la John Carpenter returning in some capacity to the new Halloween movies. In Harry Potter’s case, the best thing would be a reboot that proudly says J.K. Rowling is not involved whatsoever, then cast the entire thing with trans actors and POC. I know Rowling would still make money from it, but I’d feel better about watching it.
Of course its cultural significance is waning among younger adults who grew up with Harry Potter. They’re adults now. I was out trick-or-treating with my kids last weekend and there are still plenty of Harry Potter costumes. The children don’t read JK Rowling’s deranged tweets. Most parents don’t discuss whether or not Harry Potter is now… problematic before buying the costumes or streaming the old movies for their kids. This is an issue that only certain very online people are aware of and it doesn’t really translate to the broader culture.
Go to the Wizarding World section of Universal Orlando. First of all, it’s truly astonishing. But every kid there has robes, a wand, and running around all excited to be at Hogwarts or in Hogsmeade.
Do those kids know they’re caping for a rich transphobe?
I completely missed Harry Potter when the books/movies first came out, being a single guy in my early/mid 20’s and interested more in sex than a book about child wizards. Fast forward 15 years and my 9 year old son won a set in a raffle and we plowed through the whole series of books and movies over the next year. Just in time to feel like a fool when I’d post on Harry Potter boards and get ridiculed for not knowing there are other books out there. Yet another case where fandom nearly ruined something good for me and my kids.
Really would have helped if you interviewed a trans person for this article.
Harry Potter belongs to the people. You can’t let this billionaire bigot ruin your fond memories of it. But I don’t actually care about HP personally, I just really agree with the last thing Shanicka Anderson just said.
I was the right age to read the Harry Potter books when they first started coming out in the late 90s. As a huge book kid, they great, easy reads which were always entertaining.Rowling, for all her bullshit, did something that a lot of other fantasy writers fuck up – She made her new world accessible to readers without alienating them or just flooding the fucking pages with total gibberish.My excitement for the whole thing peaked in late 1999/2000 when Prisoner and Goblet came out. They both were such a step-up from the first two books and it felt like the future of the books was great.Unfortunately, there was then a three-year wait for the next book and, in-between 2000 and 2003, I had got back into comics and was enjoying Marvel’s early 2000s renaissance with some great, edgy Grant Morrison issue, plus the adults line over at Wildstorm, gone from being 13 to 16 and had fallen in love with Scorsese movies and spending a lot of time watching Tarantino, Tarantino knock-0ffs and Kevin Smith films.Plus, the Lord of the Rings was out.Comparatively, the early Harry Potter films felt hopelessly juvenile and dull.
Order of the Phoenix fell flat for me and even upon re-reading it, it came across as a book which had a shitload of fat which could have been cut, as well as lots and lots of wheel-spinning to pull back from the situation set up at the end of Goblet.Half-Blood Prince felt similarly inert, plotwise. When it came out, I was midway through my first year of university and comparative to the books I was reading by that point, it was just there.Deathly Hallows I read and thought it was a bit better in the sense that things actually happened but the magic, for lack of a better word, was gone.I got given the box set of the films some years ago but I’ve never seen beyond the Goblet film.
I will always love Harry Potter, and nothing JKR does is going to change that. The books are there, they’re timeless, and I feel that magic anytime I open a cover. Yeah, her comments suck, but people need to be able to separate the artist from the art. Nothing will ever change about that; it’ll always be happening in my head, and that’ll always mean it’s real.
You either like Harry Potter or not.
IF I liked Battlefield Earth, I liked it (I didn’t). I wouldn’t go through mental backflips on whether I agreed with the writer or Scientology.
The problem with calling anyone who doesn’t buy into males being women on their say so, transphobic, is that the trans community is getting exposed. Being called that is going to get old because probably 90% of people don’t buy into the notion.
The trans community wants to consistently beat folks over the head that transwomen are women and the majority aren’t budging. The ironic thing is that this wasn’t a huge issue until the LGBT lobby made issues out of it and people started giving pushback.
The trans community, if you think about it, lacks empathy themselves.
Think on the most basic logic level. Someone comes up to you and is male. Everything about exhibits maleness but they tell you they are a women and the entire world has used and still uses women to mean adult human female.
So this person disagrees and bam, they’re labeled transphobic.
Sorry but people don’t switch off their logic because of YOUR feelings. JK Rowling speaks to thoughts most of us already have, including those in the LGB community and it’s NEVER going away.
What’s more, J.K. Rowling and her social media presence have also become impossible to ignore. It’s easy for me to ignore it. I don’t have twitter or the like, and although I’ve heard of stuff she said… I don’t care too much. She’s got some awful opinions, she might well be a horrible person. There are other authors I read who also have awful opinions and are horrible people. I don’t read them because of their opinions or horribleness. Maybe if I hadn’t read the Potter books already, I wouldn’t start them if I’d listened to Rowling yammer on, but I can’t unread the books.
What’s wrong with separating art from the artist? It’s the logical thing to do.Is making less money going to change her views? No.Is she using her money to harm trans people? No. She posts on the internet for free like the rest of us.So what’s the point in a boycott? What does it accomplish? What difference does it make whether or not Rowling has more or less money? The money isn’t the issue.
“Although the book series made a splash upon its release, it wasn’t until the film came out in 2001 that Harry Potter really began its ascent into the mainstream pop culture stratosphere.”This sentence is factually inaccurate. Those books were the biggest things going in the late ‘90s. It was a full-fledged phenomenon. The movies were the end result of a huge bidding war among the studios, and JK Rowling was given a fairly large degree of control early on. I think Robbie Coltrane being cast as Hagrid was a condition of the deal.EDIT: I don’t know why Kinja is editing my comment so the fun part of the sentence comes first. Oh Kinja, you nut.
Yeah, the movie rode the wave of Goblet of Fire’s anticipated release the previous year (with the book hiatus to follow) that really broke it into a true phenomenon. The movie came right when the property’s iron was reddest of hots.
Ugh Kinja loves to do that. But yeah, Harry Potter was massive in a way I don’t remember any other book series being at that time—a part of the zeitgeist even for people who would never read a book (and like I said, I was 16 when it came out–Philosopher’s Stone here in Canada like the UK– and felt I was too old for it, but it was hard not to be at least somewhat aware of it). The movies weren’t what made it massive.
I think they were comparing anticipation of Goblet of Fire to Dickens – whose work was such a phenomenon that masses of people swarmed the NYC docks where the next issue of Colliers was coming in to find out if Little Nell lived or died. It was being credited with getting children to read.
Good point—although when I was researching Victorian serials (though my focus was on Wilkie Collins and sensation serials) I read many sources that said that story about New Yorkers demanding to know the fate of Little Nell is somewhat apocryphal. But yeah, before Potter I’m trying to think if there were other examples of people lining up at midnight for the new book of something.
I’ve read that one of her conditions was that it be cast will all British actors.
I forgot but yeah. She got a huge amount of approval for an author. The only person I can think of off hand with similar sway is Stephen King, and he doesn’t care most of the time.
I’m fine with HP and think JK can piss off. Multitask.
I’ve never read a Harry Potter novel—I think it hit just at the wrong (right?) time for me—I woulda been 16 and it would be a couple more years where I’d consider checking out a YA fantasy series. If I was ten years younger, I’m sure I would have lapped it up just like I did Oz and Narnia. But a lot of my friends my age were fans even back then— I’ve seen the first two movies in TV (Sunday hangover television) and did see the third in the theatres cuz friends were going and I liked Cuaron. And after getting my MA in English in my thirties—with mostly much younger fellow students and now teaching first year English lit, Harry Potter is such a common frame of reference for students that I feel like I know everything there is to know.
And I’d happily go on the rides at Universal—but that’s more about being a theme park geek (I would also happily visit the Avatar rides at Walt Disney World and have never seen the movies…)
I think Rowling is an idiot and I can’t believe this has become the hill she chooses to die on, but I admit I don’t resent anyone who chooses to still indulge their Harry love. I admit part of that is I don’t think her vitriol, while destructive, is enough to influence anyone’s opinion (am I naive?)
If I only enjoyed art made by people whose views/actions I agreed with, I’d never watch/read/listen to/view anything.
I was in my mid-20s when Book 5 came out, and I remember taking the subway to Harvard Sq with my now-wife to pick up her copy at midnight, and watching everyone on the train back reading their copies. I ended up reading the first 5 books and seeing the first 4 films over the next couple of years, and then read the remaining books and watched the remaining films as they were released.I don’t have kids, but it’s been great watching my nephews and nieces get into them as readers and then watching the films. We’ve been re-watching the films with my 12-year-old nephew as he reads the books, and it’s been really enjoyable. That being said, I’m glad I was able to consume the series in full before I became aware of Rowling’s grotesque views on the trans community.
“But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.” —JK Rowling
We live with evil creators all the time, and always have. Like Mary Poppins? R.L. Travers was a terrible racist. Like Peter Pan? J.M. Barrie enslaved young boys he adopted for sex, after they were released by court action, the boys committed suicide because they couldn’t live with the debauchery they had suffered. I could go on for pages and pages.I despise J.K. Rowling and everything she stands for. Just loathe her. But, just like Poppins and Pan, Potter perpetually and perennially pleases the populace. In time, Rowling’s evil will be forgotten just like Travers and Barrie and many, many more.Welcome to humanity. This is what humans are. Sadly. So, we must try to enjoy our tainted treasures despite the scum that invent them, I think. Because if we reject every work of art created by a terrible person, we will be left with blank walls, empty shelves, bland food, and gray, colorless clothing.This does not mean we excuse anyone. It does mean we have to accept humans fucking suck, and then live on as if things weren’t so ghastly.
“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.” —JK Rowling
Gave me so much fun and wonder in my teenage years that i can’t hate on it. This retcon on how Harry Potter isn’t really important is just lazy. Didn’t Harry Potter increase literacy rates?I don’t know why you can’t disagree with someone and not hate them.
I was always an enormous Harry Potter fan. My mom picked up on the Harry Potter hype when the fourth book was released in July 2000, and bought copies of them all, even though I had just turned seven that summer and my reading level was still at the Junie B. Jones/Magic Treehouse level.I still remember the shelf she put them on in the living room bookcase, and taking them down every so often just to awe over the covers, full of bright colors and magical creatures and a plethora of intriguing characters (The Goblet of Fire cover was my favorite). I dreamed about the day I’d be old and smart enough to finally read them.My elementary school had two classes for each grade, and that year, the other class’s teacher read them Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. They got a massive amount of AR points and talked about it nonstop at lunch and recess, so I convinced my mom to help me read it. We alternated chapters before bed each night. It was the last book I ever needed help reading. When it was time for the second book, I read it quickly by myself. When I finished the third at school, I went to the front office during recess and somehow convinced them to let me call my mom at work to request that she bring the fourth one to me before lunch so I wouldn’t have to wait to read it until I got home. For some reason, she actually did.I went to the midnight releases of every subsequent book, back when I was still young enough that staying up to midnight felt like a monumental feat and I would fall asleep before I could read it anyway.When we were evacuating for Hurricane Katrina, a few months before the fourth movie came out, I decided to bring Goblet of Fire with me. I still considered it an enormous book, and thought it’d be able to fill a couple of days at a hotel. I ended up rereading it multiple times before we were allowed to come back home, and drew a lot of strength during a very hard period by comparing myself to Harry. He was a kid handling problems that adults should’ve been handling, and during that time, so was I. If he could fight Voldemort after watching his friend get murdered, I could get through anything going on in my life. My senior year of high school, when the last film was released and the “era” of Harry Potter was ending, I made a deal with my parents that I would go to a cheaper (free with my scholarship) state university instead of a more prestigious (and costly) school as long as I could do an entire year abroad in the UK. I majored in creative writing, knowing all my life I wanted to write children’s books.I went abroad my sophomore year, and made as many Harry Potter related pilgrimages as possible. I went to King’s Cross in London, the Elephant House in Edinburgh, the brand new HP studio tour in Leavesden, and I even met JK Rowling at a book signing for The Casual Vacancy at a literature festival in Cheltenham. In college, I didn’t reread Harry Potter as much—busy with other books for a literary degree—but I started listening to Harry Potter podcasts and, mostly, I pirated multiple JK Rowling documentaries, and I would watch and re-watch them for inspiration as I dreamed the life and success I would have as a writer myself. Finally, I decided to read The Casual Vacancy, and even though I enjoyed it more than I thought I would after struggling with the first few chapters, I recognized a cruelty in the way JK Rowling described people that I’d never really clocked in all of my re-readings of the Harry Potter series. It was a mean book. So were her next novels, her detective novels, were full of cruel descriptions of people’s ugliness, neediness, stupidity, fatness. Even their femininity. Her new books were… horrible. On the occasions I did return to Harry Potter, I still loved the books, but saw the same cruelty more clearly. Only villainous women wore pink. Dudley’s weight was in direct correlation to how much we were supposed to hate him. Ugliness didn’t make you evil, because almost everyone was ugly, but if you were bad, your ugliness needed to be brought up every time you appeared. By the time JK came out as a TERF, I’d long since aged out of idol-worshipping my role models. And I already disagreed with a lot of her choices (I never even touched Cursed Child, hated her defenses of Snape and the way she characterized house elves as slaves who really loved being slaves, so it’s okay not to free them, and rolled my eyes at all of the twitter antics). It was easy to set her aside as even a role model. I’ve struggled a bit with how to be a fan of Harry Potter nowadays, and honestly, I’m just going to be a fan I was before. I still love the books and enjoy the movies. It still holds a special place in my heart. I won’t spend more money on the series or do more pilgrimages to Harry Potter holy sites. Otherwise I’m on the same trajectory I was before. I’d long ago unfollowed Rowling on twitter and started reading Harry Potter more critically and less often. When I was younger, I thought of loving Harry Potter as part of my personality, and the reason for a lot of my interests, but as an adult, I’ve come to view my love for Harry Potter as a result of my personality and interests. Before the summer of 2007, I already wrote single-page books for fun, and obsessed over any book that mentioned witches or Halloween or magic. I’d already dreamed of the UK with stories of my dad’s childhood as an army brat when my grandpa was stationed outside of Cambridge. I’m pregnant with my first child now, and I’m planning a magical creature themed nursery that will probably have some Harry Potter vibes without involving any trademarked content. Honestly, though, not wanting to support JK Rowling anymore is probably the reason it won’t have at least a couple pieces of HP merchandise.I’m still planning on reading them the books, like my mom did with me, and if they love it, that’s cool, and if it doesn’t interest them, that’s cool too. I will, however, do my best to have discussions about the problematic aspects of the books, as well as the ones about how cool it’d be to fly on a broomstick or live in an enchanted castle.
Uh, so I already commented along these lines, and again, it’s obvious that a whole series of 20th anniversary articles are planned and of COURSE HP is still enough of a cultural icon regardless of Rowling to end up with a discussion like this but I really have to ask:
When this article was bandied about amongst the writers as a thing to be added, did y’all basically realize that running a series of articles about HP meant you would have no choice but to grapple with her legacy and, as such, considered this article to be a sort of “elephant in the room” discussion piece that you could lob in, then proceed as usual?
Because I get what your intent might have been but that feels *incredibly* shitty, actually. It doesn’t feel like writers reckoning with Rowling’s dangerous viewpoints – which again, as you even state, causes demonstrable harm to trans people in the UK – it feels instead like someone remembering to add an asterisk so everyone can feel comfortable engaging fully in HP fandom in spite of it. As I said, it’s not that I expect AV club to be mum about the anniversary, and I don’t know that I have a great solution here, but more and more this article seems to feel like a very threadbare attempt at a conciliatory gesture made in only one area while still indulging fully without hesitation otherwise.
As I said in my other comment: I was a huge HP fan. I’m not even clicking the other articles nor commenting there; why be shitty there? But it completely fucking sucks and I feel like this article is even more a fumble than I originally thought now that I see more coming up in AV club.
What do you remember about your first time watching Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone? Not only had I not read the books, but I had never even heard of Harry Potter until a girl who liked me pushed it on me. I knew people wouldn’t shut up about this thing, so we rented the DVD a little bit before the second movie came out and I gave it a shot. And it was like the food critic scene at the end of Rattatouille. Even though I was in my late 20s, I felt transported to the kinds of kid adventures I loved as a child. The kinds of movies they don’t make anymore. Absolutely magical. Instantly became one of my favorite movies of the past few years. The cast was excellent, especially the young stars, and the universe of it was enchanting. Chris Columbus did an amazing job getting the world to fall in love with this IP. Yet he and this incredible franchise debut take a lot of shit for being bad for some reason.
What kind of effect has Harry Potter had on you?I read more. Over the years, I would start picking up the books with the same excitement as everyone else. But the more I read them, the more I found the movies didn’t live up to them. Not that Rowling is some brilliant writer or anything, I just get that way about adaptations. The storytelling economy needed for movies just takes alot away from the little details, which I think is what I like most about these stories, rather than the plot itself. The films became checklist-y, especially when David Yates’ took over, and I just liked them less as they went on. The series peaked for me somewhere in the middle.
How would you describe the cultural significance of Harry Potter?Well, HP’s long-running ass is partially responsible for Franchise Cinema taking over Hollywood for the past couple of decades, so yea that kinda sucks. As much as the MCU feels like a tv series drawn out on the big screen, Harry Potter felt like that first. At least it was the one character, and not a sea of several. I never minded all the copycats that came in its wake, but I think that’s because they mostly failed, so there was nothing to mind. Had they been successful… (*chills*) the flood of YA fantasy as the only major movies, topping the box office and breaking all the records would be as insufferable as comic books are getting to be for me right now.Has your relationship with Harry Potter changed in the wake of J.K. Rowling’s transphobic comments?Not really. As much as I enjoy Harry Potter, I’ve never thought much of her, anyway. Please, no more Rowling questions.
When it comes to Harry Potter and Rowling, why do you think more people are willing to separate the art from the artist?This interview is over!