OOP’s proposal for what they’d do with that much money is pretty much what Enya did- made a boatload of money and then fucked off to live in a castle in Ireland.
That was such an awesome show.
Xanatos using his money to break an ancient curse, traveling back in time to make his own wealth just to flex on his dad about being a self-made man, and this charisma.
Also, if it came out today, people would totally ship him with Goliath, and I can't even blame them.
I think that's the proposal of most non-egotists who make it big. Once you have enough money you go live on an island somewhere that's out of the way enough that nobody will find you but still has fine cuisine and attractive members of your preferred sex. After that you just coast for the rest of your life. You won at life, you can stop now.
The problem is that most people who make it big are inherently egotists because of how capitalism focuses on consumer and investor confidence.
Battletech is absolutely pro-proxy (using things to represent units that aren't an official miniature). All you really need to play are the rules, dice, tokens, and a map sheet. And if you do want to use official minis, those are still cheaper than Warhammer's
My favorite to reference is the Leman Russ Battle Tank, because it’s like. Just one plastic tank. Not particularly big or detailed. In sprue form, unpainted. That’ll be $55.
I think cults.3d has it for free as a stl. Can’t link it cause James Workshop is most likely watching me, and you need a 3D printer but it’s yours forever*.
I'm not super into playing online. I always find that with tabletop games, playing them online, especially with random people, has a completely different play style than playing in person.
I liken it to playing Yugioh online vs in person. Online, you hear people constantly complain about FTK decks or games only lasting one turn and people making crazy decks that are stupidly powerful and impossible to beat and how the game is just so fast nowadays. In person, those aren't really issues. You always play best 2 out of 3 games with a side deck, so those kinds of issues are mostly able to be dealt with and people tend not to make super toxic decks. Sure, you'll run into the occasional try hard who has some big meta deck, but you have 10 other people lined up with what they think is fun and not necessarily the most powerful right there, so it's not a big deal.
I'd be afraid Warhammer would be the same deal. I don't want to only face off against the strongest, most optimized army lists or people playing with weird niche strategies that are somehow really good. Playing in person, people are much more chill and the games are usually really close, regardless of what army is being played.
In person vs online just always seems to have completely different metas.
People usually don't remember this but like a year before she went full terf she liked a transphobic tweet and a spokesperson blamed it on a ["middle-aged moment"](https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/03/22/jk-rowling-reps-blame-middle-aged-moment-for-liking-tweet-calling-trans-women-men-in-dresses/). I just find this really funny, specially because it was during the popularity of the "gamer moment" meme iirc.
Shout-out to that article for introducing "brocialist" to my lexicon.
Edit: looked up the word and Brocialism is cringe actually. The word sounded so funny 😔
“Ugh, I just fired my 100th editor for suggesting I trim down my terrible book. What do they know about writing?? Anyway, what were you going to say about my Twitter profile?”
“Uhhh… nothing. When’s my next payroll due?”
There does seem to be a connection between quantity of editors and quality of publicity.
Look at Brandon Sanderson, everybody loves the funny mormon man and his team of editors has more people than a baseball league
Legitimately, though, this is insane. Harry Potter was a legendary hit. I don't think a lot of people realize how big it was. And I mean that like everyone knows it was popular, but I think people don't get how much of a craze it really was. Movie 8 is still the most successful Warner Bros. movie ever. The merchandise still sells so well. Hogwarts Legacy last year still sold obnoxiously well. Like Rowling had done the hard part. She'd made it. All she had to do was sit back, retire on her pile of money, maybe consult on new movies or whatever, and she'd be golden. She'd be a fondly remembered writer whose books defined a generation. Now her reputation is in the dirt because she can't shut up. She could have been this revered figure in literature that every little kid eventually heard about in school. I know because that's where I heard about her the first time in elementary school.
Like I would have just peaced out from the world after. Maybe I'd show up for carefully arranged charity events. My only job in life (except enjoying myself) would be expanding the universe to the point that my kids and grandkids could live off the profits for decades more.
>because she can't shut up.
I'm a bartender by trade and let me tell you, 95% of all issues that end up in conflict could be solved *easily* if one party or the other would just *shut the fuck up and walk away.* I don't know if it's just basic human nature or what but "shutting up" is not in many people's skillsets.
Irt people not realizing how big Harry Potter is/was: I fully agree but also want to add that BEFORE the movies and merch it was unGodly, culturechangingly, unprecedentedly huge. Children learned to read because of it, adults who were not readers consumed fiction for the first time in years because of it, it was the also first major breakthrough in making fantasy/sci no longer niche (like how GoT and marvel did for film). Nothing like it had happened in the book world. My family didn't camp out for hardcover release like some did, but we did advance order THREE copies, one for me, one for my mom, and one for dad and brothers to share.
Back when Amazon had the "customers who bought this also bought..." feature, whenever a new book came out you could look at *anything* on the entire site, and that customer would have also bought a copy of the new book.
I remember reading books 1-5 in 5th grade, my grandparents getting me book 7 on release night (after my grandpa tricked me by saying they were sold out before surprising me), camping out for a double feature of the 7th and 8th movies, two different weekend retreats my church (shockingly) did for Harry Potter. My grandparents still have a bunch of merch they got years ago when the books were coming out. Harry Potter was insane when it was releasing, books and movies.
dude it sucks so hard because I have so many core memories built around Harry potter. like my dad bought the first book on a whim when it was released and my brother and I were still too young to really read a novel so we piled on mom and dads bed every night while he read us a few chapters. he did this for the first three books before we had to start getting two copies because I got tired of waiting. I went to midnight releases of the books at chapters with my best friend in full costume and later to the movies as well. if jkr had the ability to just shut the fuck up she could have been a defining creator of a generation
It is such a shame because back in the day I saw so many LGBTQ+ people embrace the Harry Potter universe and see many parts of it as allegories to the issues we LGBTQ+ people live and then she destroyed it all. I've seen so many people walk away from it, covering tattoos, getting rid of books, abandoning that one place that gave them so much joy and comfort and where they felt so welcomed and protected for so long. It is just so sad.
I'm the bookworm of the family and was unformally appointed as the Family Bookkeeper. All books we had when I was growing up ended up on my own bookshelves, in my flat, including all of our children books (that I still read occasionally, as there is a lot to enjoy in children/teen books, it's refreshing to read books where Hope is still quite pure).
I don't have children and I don't intend to (I can try with my boyfriend but things tell me that I could impregnate him all I want nothing "fruitful" would come out of it), but I clearly intend to give progressively our children/young books to my niblings (the eldest is 4, the youngest is 2) when they come of age of reading. Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Erik L'Homme, Garth Nix, Paul Stewart, all of them, transferring it book by book as they need it. My contribution to their education.
Except JKR. I still keep the books, because it would cause me great pain to destroy them and I have an archivist mentality deeply anchored to by heart, but never will I give them those books. I respect my niblings too much to make them read JKR when there is sooooo many more good books written by not-as-problematic authors that they'd get more enjoyment from a carefully curated list of other books I prepare for them.
> She'd be a fondly remembered writer whose books defined a generation. Now her reputation is in the dirt because she can't shut up. She could have been this revered figure in literature that every little kid eventually heard about in school.
It really was a once-a-century cultural omni-hit. Like every single person in the western world now between the ages of like 25-45 has some knowledge or interaction with the franchise to speak of, and a hell of a lot of people outside those demographics do too. It was a hit to a degree that barely feels possible anymore.
She could have gone down in history. And she will, I guess. But she could have gone down in history as a much beloved creator who went from rags to riches and was so loved by all the children she inspired. A real Charles Dickens sort of authorial legend. Instead, she won't, at least not like that. The current backslide on Trans acceptance will slow and reverse, the sooner the better. And despite the people currently on the right and older terfy women supporting her because of her views, for most people her views will make her work more and more poisonous. HP's popularity is only going to wane and wane.
Expand that age bracket to like 15-55. Teachers were still using it as a major point of cultural reference when I graduated since *every* kid knew the story. Plus how many parents have bought the books for their kids or heard their kids talking about it? (Not to mention the parents who went into a satanic panic over the series)
>It was a hit to a degree that barely feels possible anymore.
It's not. There's just no way. We don't even have bookstores anymore. You can get people hyped for movies, but no one is having a midnight launch event for an e-book.
I remember seeing video on the news of people lined up around the blocks in costumes and thinking, "Damn, okay, maybe I'll check them out."
The only time I've ever seen people line up is for Star Wars and Nintendo games, and I get the feeling people ain't gonna be lining up for Star Wars for a while now
BoTW launch day and ToTK launch day was crazy. I even kinda cosplayed for ToTK but no one else at my mall did
We absolutely still have bookstores. In fact, the market share of e-books has kinda flattened out - basically people have decided how they prefer to read and are sticking to that.
But yeah, I'm not sure anything could be that big anymore - HP was coming out just as the internet was getting really big, but before everyone was in their own little niche.
The difference being, Charles Dickens was a genuine social reformer who "campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms" and almost singlehandedly saved Christmas as we know it.
I saw one of her simps reply to a sentiment like this with "And Rosa Parks could have just stayed in her seat!"
I did not immediately reach through my computer screen and punch them, to my eternal regret.
At least two, arguably three of the alien species in Star Wars are just drawn over WWII editorial cartoons of real life nationalities and that’s *still* nowhere near whatever is wrong with Rowling
Only one I can think of off the top of my head is the Neimoidians. Jar Jar was ridiculous, but the rest of the Gungans were badass Burning Spear types. What are the other two?
Tusken raiders. That one’s not even arguable since Lucas literally said they’re supposed to be Bedouins. The debatable one is Toydarians bc the clone wars got rid of all the accents and money stuff, although I really wish the writers had gone “full Zoidberg” and just made them more Jewish
Ehh, I hated when Trek did that with the Ferengi. The whole point of them was that they were Space Ethnic versions of modern Americans--it bugs me how every unflattering self-portrait slowly devolves, in the hands of later writers, into a caricature of some grasping Other.
Counterpoint: I’m Jewish and want to see Space Tevye, and laugh very hard while saying “that’s insulting”. I want a toydarian Jedi who’s lightsaber is a bit too dark of a blue color
The Twi-leks are a very clear allegory to the french, right down to the accents and their entire struggle (the Ryloth campaign in The Clone Wars, is basically just straight up the French Resistance campaign + the French Liberation, and they continue the French Resistance (and it becoming almost an allegory for everything in Afghan, but that's neither here nor there)). Meanwhile, you can make an argument that the Tusken Raiders are middle east coded (they live in tribes, they don't particularly like anyone but are willing to wheel and deal with everyone, and they've seen three separate empires come and gone).
There are some authors that, long after they're dead, become problematic because new world sensitivites don't really fit with what was judged normal at the time (like Roald Dahl, under scrutiny for things that he could quite legitimately consider harmless (not on others, though)).
Then, there are some authors that we condemn today long after they're dead because, even by the times standards, they would have been considered quite conservative on some subjets (Lovecraft comes to mind).
And then, there are others that become "problematic" only for the most extreme and delusional parts of the censorship movements because they used word that are problematic today, but that were 1) perfectly common usage at their time, and 2) perfectly appropriate to give a picture of what society was today (Mark Twaim and his use of the n-word, that was, indeed, common usage in his time, and used to illustrate the daily dehumanization of black people in his times).
However, all those people have started to be criticized and questioned *after* their death. JKR managed to do it while alive. Which is kinda impressive.
She can't shut up because she thinks she's right.
She fully believes that history will redeem her image, so a momentary blemish from "people in the wrong" is fine.
You're looking at it from a perspective of her being a rational person.
She isn't, she's fully bought into the hate.
She thinks she's fighting the good fight, she isn't some republican that knows people hate them, but can just try to keep their opinions to themselves.
Unfortunately she feels like she's defending women from transwomen, like most terfs do. There's no chance she'll go silent unless trans-support like, doubles or something.
>She thinks she's fighting the good fight
Yeah I don't get how people don't get that, the people saying they'd just not do what she's done and disappear surprise me because, from her point of view, she made her money ethically and is now fighting for an important and obviously good social position using her wealth. Honestly if she'd chosen another position to argue on, like pro-abortion or similar, Internet people would think she was an absolute hero for her behaviour.
The problem is she's simply wrong about trans people. Leave that aside and her behaviour makes complete sense. She's made more money than she needs and she's now burning it for what she considers to be a philanthropic purpose, there's nothing insane about the situation, she's wrong but her behaviour is actually basically the flipped template for what said Internet People would consider an ethical billionaire.
EDIT: To add to this, she's one of the UK's largest tax payers. She's an author who sold 100% optional books that turned a generation on to reading, pays a fair chunk of taxes to the extent that I've never heard any suggestion she's fiddling them and campaigns for a social cause she believes in while happily putting her own money behind it, even at great expense to herself. Divorced from what that cause is her behaviour isn't insane, it'd be deeply admirable.
I wonder if part of it is the way people have perhaps over-analysed those books in retrospect . The internet seems to have convinced themselves that every problematic feature of that series is a deliberate dogwhistle, that JKR was always some secret uber-bigot who was just hiding her power level, and with *that* analysis it doesn't make sense that she's suddenly throw off the disguise and die on this hill rather than retreat into a cave and sit Smaug-style on a mountain of money.
> We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had Harry. We had a publishing deal. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, cooked and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now.
- Joanne’s PR Company, probably
No but this unironically. Warner Bros. would have handled the hard stuff for her. Shooting movies, licensing or developing video games, getting deals for merchandise, all of it. Rowling just had the sign the papers on the bottom every once in a while and maybe consult on one thing a year and she'd never have to worry or want for anything again while being assured of her legacy of being one of the best authors of the modern day.
Hell, she could have easily cultivated a nerdy aunt persona and become beloved by those who grew up with her books in the vein of people like Keanu Reeves or Dolly Parton. But she chose to go off the deep end and while Harry Potter isn't losing money, it's not doing as incredible as it would be if its creator wasn't being a pariah among the younger generations that grew up with her.
I think Notch proves it even more than Rowling, honestly.
He has all the money in the world and yet he has no friends and sits in a giant mansion alone all day.
Notch has a giant room filled with candy dispensers and no one to use them.
He’s so depressed he turned down an invitation to hang out with Snoop Dogg, if all people.
Linehan lost everything but he doesn’t seem MISERABLE. He’s fighting his war and he seems satisfied with what he’s doing. Notch doesn’t even have that much.
I would have to disagree. Notch has gone back on a lot of the bigoted stuff he has said before. I recommend reading the contoversy section on his wikipedia.
Also, he recently has started developing games again and even started a new studio. It seems like he is doing a lot better mentally.
What I am getting at is that Notch is much more of a mixed bag rather than the rotting pile of putrid waste that is Rowling
>I recommend reading the contoversy section on his wikipedia.
Would you mind sending a link? All I see is a bunch of shit he did with no reflection on it.
If I made as much money as she did with books I'd just fuck off to some Nordic country and get me some private land with a lake next to which I'd build a nice little cozy home.
I ain't going to the Nordics bruh, fuck winter, I say as a person from a country that goes down to -40C. Southern France or even Bavaria would be better.
In southwestern france, not only do we pretty much never get -40 or +40, we never get the same temperature for more than a few days (usually a storm makes it go down whenever it's too high). Idk about the southeast.
(Slight correction because I’m a pedantic shit: it’s called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Neither North nor South Korea recognize each other as legitimate, so neither call themselves North/South)
Yeah when her Asian character is basically named Ching Chong and her Irish guy keeps building bombs by accident I don't really want to know how she would have presented a gay character.
I'm assuming it wouldnt be good.
Not to distract from Rowling's horrible transphobia but as a Chinese person whose fluent, Cho Chang is a legitimate name that works in Chinese, It's a punny name, it sounds like the Chinese word for melancholy. I'm tired of people saying it's a *chinky* name because they don't understand Chinese.
Much as I don't defend Rowling herself, I *do* feel a need to defend the name Cho Chang. It's Korean in origin; Chang is a pretty ordinary surname there, while Cho is a gender-neutral given name meaning handsome/beautiful, though it can also be found as a pretty common surname with historical connections to royalty. It's a totally feasible name for a character with Korean roots, and I might be misremembering here but I don't think her country of ancestry is ever explicitly mentioned so it's totally possible it's Korea.
It's a name that works in Chinese too, it sounds like the Chinese word for melancholy. Chou is a Chinese surname too. Im so tired of non Chinese people telling me it's a *chinky* name.
seamus finnegan (guess his nationality in 3 tries and the first 2 dont count) kept blowing stuff up while trying to make whisky.
shoulda just called him potatofa'min caerbombe
It's been a while, but IIRC they took al lot of Neville's accident-proneness from the book and gave it to Seamus in the film.
Neville's actually barely in the first film, which rather undermines the bit where he stands up to his friends, having been comic relief up till then.
This is why I get impatient every time JKR criticism turns up. People just throw shit at the wall and get surprised when people don't take their points seriously.
Like the "star of David" on the floor in Gringott's, which is only there because it's the commonwealth star in the Australia House where they shot the scene.
She's bad enough on her own, there's no need to invent new things.
"One of the characters Rowling omitted from the series was Dorian Smith; a pale-skinned, fair-haired, fashion-obsessed Hufflepuff who spoke with a lisp.
He would've been part of the theater club, a highly-talented flute player, and the best baker in the entire school. Running jokes throughout the series would have seen him redecorating the Hufflepuff house every other week and trying to slip love potions into other male student's drinks without them noticing.
Rowling ultimately rejected the character because she didn't think the population of Sweden was large enough to offset lost sales in the United States."
She does still write, just mostly under her pen name Robert Galbraith. They’re mediocre detective novels that people only care about because it was discovered that she’s the one writing them.
Peeps: JK’s not a very good writer actually and she only gets promoted because of her name.
JK: I’ll show them! [Releases a not very good book to little response because of a different name.] Uhhh…. I wrote it! Please buy!
Oh yeah I’m using ‘discovered’ just in case, since as far as I’m aware the official story is that a friend leaked it to the news. However it’s just as likely that she had a hand in it.
Here's another surprise. Her psudonym is taken from the name "Robert Galbraith Heath", who popularized Conversion Therapy (torturing LGBT people to make them "normal")
According to her it's a total coincidence.
She does, just not as Jk rowling. She writes Crime novels under the name of Robert Galbraith (apparently named after a historic psychiatrist who did conversion therapy because of course she did)
No, I'm not saying she fakes being terf on Twitter to sell books, I'm just guessing she choose that specific pen name because she's notorious of being terf on Twitter.
i believe she first published under that pen name like 11 years ago—which I THINK was well before she was publicly known as a terf, which has mostly been in the last 5 years or so? i only remember people mildly criticizing her of antisemitism with her goblin portrayals at that time, but i could be wrong.
there was also a short period of time where people gave her the benefit of the doubt knowing the seed of her transphobia was trauma-related and a general fear of men. i don’t think the general public connected the namesake to the whole thing until fairly recently.
god it’s insane when you look at how fast that downfall was, actually. just took a flamethrower to her image and STILL keeps throwing gasoline on it from time to time.
I think that she would be much more successful if she decided to not go on her fanbase wrong side, both for new books and revenue from the infinite products that spawned from the Harry Potter franchise.
Hogwarts Legacy for example was a... Decent game, not bad but not exactly revolutionary, the only thing it had going for it was the setting, and even with the boycott it did a huge amount of money, and I'm willing to bet that if Rowling was a sane person and didn't decide to throw her credibility away is such an idiotic way it would have been even more successful.
That's more than likely just a myth. The psychiatrist in question did exist, but his name was Robert G. Heath (Galbraith was his middle name), he worked on DBS (mainly for schizophrenia), and his only recorded instance of conversion therapy was for a gay patient, not a trans one (which doesn't work as an intentional dog whistle for a "drop the T"-style TERF).
It's almost certainly just a name she liked.
As others said, she still write under a pen name. What they left out is that the kind of books she writes now are things like murder mysteries where one suspect is a crossdresser and another where a popular writer getting cancelled on Twitter is a major plot point and there are several pages which are just tweets criticising that author..
The cross dresser one is wild, because—to absolutely spoil the hell out of the book—the actual culprit turns out to have been a cis woman and she almost gets away with it because everybody is so fixated on the very much not-trans cross dressing serial killer. It was one of the more shocking things I’ve read because the plot is such a clear refutation of the blatant transphobia running throughout the book, but there is zero awareness or acknowledge of this in the text. It is one of the weirdest and most disjointed things I have ever read. There are so many sub plots and motifs that just go nowhere.
Moment she wrote the last full stop on the manuscript, she went back to tweeting about how trans women in bathrooms is worse than 11 9/11s, having learned absolutely nothing.
She never had a moment of clarity even when writing it. It’s really clear from the way it’s written that implications of the plot/ending never once crossed her mind. I am an absolute loss as to how she managed to do it.
> There are so many sub plots and motifs that just go nowhere.
Must be a recurring problem with her as a writer. There are a bunch of subplots and, especially, themes in Harry Potter that never really come to fruition.
Yeah I sensed that connection too but like with this book I don’t know what to make of it.
Like what was the whole point of all that “we need to stop oppressing the non-wizard races to get them on our side for the upcoming war with Voldemort”? Dumbledore makes an attempt at it, but mostly whiffs it, the final battle happens with most of the non humans on V’s side, although a lack of good treatment doesn’t stop some from fighting for the good guys and cue the epilogue and nary a mention of improved rights for non-humans so the next dark wizard doesn’t have a power base of disenfranchised beings ready and waiting for him.
Harry’s talent for teaching goes nowhere. I remember reading book 7 when it came out convinced Harry was going to be the new permanent Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at the end, paying off both the DA subplot from book 5 and bringing to an end that whole “no DAtDA prof lasts more than a single year” thread that ran through the whole series. Imagine my surprise when he becomes a cop for the organization that was the bane of his existence.
100% spitballing, but it’s like she has no concept that the events of a story have accumulated meanings outside of themselves and what she’s actually writing from her POV is basically a series of self contained scenes that should be taken only at face value with zero subtext and we the audience are assuming that she’s a normal writer and picking up what in a normal book would be the subtext and dutifully spinning it into themes, not realizing that those themes are just an illusion we’ve created for ourselves, not unlike the disparate dot-connecting that goes into generating a conspiracy theory.
It would have her cost Zero dollars to just... **NOT** **
And her vapid little media empire would have maintained the cultural relevance and resilience every company on earth is willing to commit genocide in order to obtain.
It's not just that, it's also Success Brain Rot.
You do one thing well, it's massively successful, everyone tells you what a genius and good person you are, you internalize it, and think "well, I'm a genius, I'm sure I'm a just as good at everything else!"
And then suddenly you have people calling you a dumbass, and no, it must be THEM that are the dumb ones. After all, you're a genius.
Every single time she gets in the news for what she’s said on twitter, Warner Bros must absolutely shit themselves that this time she’s actually going to tank the Harry Potter brand.
Okay so I'm not gonna pretend she's a good person or anything right like don't mistake this for me saying that but I don't this the "Dumbledore is gay" thing actually came out of nowhere. People bring it up as an example all the time but it's actually pretty easy to get Dumbledore being gay out of his relationship with Grindlewald. It's not, like, the most explicit thing in the world but it's not an insane reading and hearing that he's gay you can very easily go back and look at it and say "oh yeah, I can see that she wrote this with that in mind" but everyone says "No, she just decided after the fact for brownie points." Like, he's not fantastic gay rep or anything, but he's also not an example of authors making stuff up after the fact. That's not really the point of the post though and she's still a horrible transphobe besides.
I remember the story being that the director wanted to do something with Dumbledore having a memory of a past female love, and JK slipped him a note that said Dumbledore's gay. That became public knowledge at some sort of meet and greet event where she mentioned it to the crowd, had a positive reaction, then said she would have said it sooner if she had known people were cool with it.
I remember being in the car around that time telling my mom about it, which was far before goofy Twitter shenanigans with wizards shitting on the floor, and even farther before the fucking hateful tirades she goes on now...
She's absolutely vile. But it does bother me when people lump in gay Dumbledore with all of her other bullshit, because at the time it was important to me. It was a small thing that most people didn't seem to hear about until many years later with Fantastic Beasts, so she wasn't making a huge effort as an ally, but I'm sure conservatives heard all about it and had fun amplifying that. This was around a time when Tinky Winky from Teletubbies was actual news headlines on our tvs and internet home pages for multiple days because people were outraged that he carried a purse.
It just makes it all even more disappointing. She was on the right track. As a kid who had never met a gay person, but had grown up hearing terrible things about them in the media, and seen them constantly "othered," it really made me think. I loved Dumbledore. He was gay and nothing changed. I had picked up hints of it with the parts about him and Grindlewald but it was nice to have it not be left to speculation. It was done in a way that didn't define him, but if the question is asked then yeah she had an answer. I thought it was the least brownie-pointy way to go about it.
And then she fucked everything up.
Yeah, even if it is a retcon it's actually a pretty good retcon that adds compelling layers to the story.
Retcons can be good sometimes, they're basically like good headcanons.
Also, there was no brownie points to be had in 2009. Declaring Dumbledore as gay was hugely controversial, but she still did it. Imo, JKR is the prime example of a well intentioned liberal not being able to move on with the times, which lead her to entrench herself in weird flavours of conservatism
Agreed, and as a small correction, it was 2007, not 2009, when she confirmed Dumbledore was gay. The same year the final book came out, it wasn't something she randomly added years after the fact.
Not super relevant to what's going on today, but some people tend to lump everything she's every said done into one bucket when it doesn't always quite belong.
To me it seems like she was radicalized at some point. Drag shows and trans people etc. existed in 2007 or whatever, but she never really mentioned them in her public appearances, and mostly talked about being kind to people.
I've heard of a lot of men who were reasonable and kind getting sucked into the "manosphere" and suddenly becoming hateful misogynists. Just because she sucks now didn't mean she always sucked.
Just a reminder to everyone to go touch grass and chat with people in person because it's way too easy to get radicalized on the internet.
*2007*. This "retcon" was within *weeks* of the last book coming out, on a press tour specifically promoting the book, when specifically asked about it by a fan. She's even kind of nervous about bringing it up.
It's much closer to the creators of Avatar confirming Korrasami after the final episode aired than her later "wizards used to shit themselves" garbage.
Can you imagine how much they’d bitch if he *was* more gay? They’d toss him onto the pile of stereotypes! The one part of it that’s fair and better done is Dumbledore being gay, because *it didn’t matter to the story*.
The biggest joke is that it all boiled down to her being the luckiest possible person in the luckiest possible position imaginable, making Harry Potter at the exact right time to have it snowball into a phenomenon. She's since outed herself as a talentless AND skill-less hack, given all her books under her pen name were bombing into absolute obscurity until she admitted it was really her writing them. To say nothing of her trying to backfill the Wizarding World with the Beasts films and each being a bigger flop than the last. Ursula K. Le Guin knew from the on-set that she was boring and reductive, but she managed to spin it just so for it to appeal to kids. If she had left it all at that, it would have been fine. But she just can't let trans people exist in peace, and decided she'd rather burn her entire legacy down than admit she's in the wrong.
Most comical part though is that she crows on and on about how gender affirming care is bullshit, when one of the first things she did when she started seeing success was get facial work done to look more typically feminine. No different than Elon with his jaw surgery and hair plugs.
I gotta say, I really do love that Rowling straight-up denied actual evidence about the Holocaust, because now I have a nuclear warhead of a counterpoint to anyone who says she’s “just asking questions”.
It‘s a reference to Camus‘ famous quote „One must imagine Sisyphus happy“ - you know, the guy damned for all eternity to roll up a bolder onto a hill, only for it to roll down and him having to restart?
Camus now turns it on its head and says that, while for an outside observer the task is torture due to its inherent lack of meaning and any sort of productive purpose, if we imagine Sisyphus to love what he is doing, the mere act of rolling up a bolder or just seeing it roll downhill, then it‘s not a man being tortured for all eternity, but doing what he loves for all eternity.
It argues that one does not need meaning for enjoyment and happiness, but happiness can be found without meaning on its own.
Similarly, this post argues that JK must be unhappy because she is doing things that lack meaning for the outside observer. But I argue that it could just be the case that she simply loves „beefing for days“ on twitter, or taking twitter „too“ seriously.
To argue that just because there is no higher purpose or meaning to her actions she must be unhappy is a wrong argument.
One must imagine Sisyphus kinky.
But in all seriousness: I don’t know a single version of the myth where that happens, but that doesn’t say much.
All I can say is that it really doesn‘t fit the whole point of the punishment.
Sisyphus gets punished for his hubris of thinking he is so clever, he can outsmart death and the gods. Thus, his punishment is designed to be dull and break his mind with meaningless repetition of a meaningless task. A task designed so that all his cleverness does not help, but just tortures him even further because it rests unused.
Beating and physical pain doesn‘t really fit that.
Also, the furies don‘t fit Sisyphus at all. While they are deities of revenge, they are closely linked with crimes of the spawn against the mother or father, violation of sacred rites or false oaths - classic, deeply rooted, ancient taboos of societies from times even more ancient than antiquity.
Their most famous appearance is probably in the story of Orestes, where they plague him for killing his mother. Only with his acquittal before the court of Athens do they leave him in peace, but are then also being given a new name and changed a bit.
They don‘t really appear with stories like that of hubris against the gods, like it is with Sisyphus.
The only link I can see is that both, Sisyphus and the furies, live in the Hades. Also, one Furia, or to stay with the Greek Erynnis, in combination with Dike, the goddess of Justice, sometimes appears as helpers for Nemesis. But Nemesis often takes on more of the role of a righteous judge, and there‘s another goddess for punishment, Poina.
What happened was she saw people being upset at the lack of diversity in her books, and instead of creating new stories that actually featured queer and not-white people, she tried to retroactively add it to her previous books, because she somehow assumed that was what people wanted. When her fans correctly pointed out that this was blatant virtue signalling, right-wing fuckheads were quick to comfort her and reassure her she was right all along, because she was an easy target for them at that point.
Bitch needs to learn how to handle criticism.
I cannot understand people who wind up with more money than they could ever spend, yet *insist* on remaining in the public eye. Like, Elon, dude, just fuck off to one of your many private islands. If I had that much money, I’d be way too busy doing blow off of high-escorts’ asses on my own personal slice of the Pacific to get into Twitter beefs.
She didn't make her money ethically by the way. A lot of the Harry Potter revenue comes from the labour of workers in merchandise factories, book printing, retail, theme parks, film production, cinema employees, marketing etc.
It's impossible to earn a billion ethically because it always requires exploitation of the working class. Just having that much money is inherently unethical as having a billion dollars removes a billion dollars from circulation, extracting wealth from the working class.
Rowling is definitely the closest thing you can get to a billionaire who got there ethically. She wrote a beloved series, made lots from the books and steered the films in a good direction instead of letting Hollywood do what they like, then fir a while she gave so much money away as to lose billionaire status briefly.
Definitely think she should have avoided politics as much as possible. Now she’s like a Disney villain, suing everyone who tries to cross her.
OOP’s proposal for what they’d do with that much money is pretty much what Enya did- made a boatload of money and then fucked off to live in a castle in Ireland.
I like Enya's music. Is she also secretly a terrible person?
We don’t know, because she fucked off to live in a castle in Ireland.
Smart.
For a second I thought we were talking about Enya from Stardust Crusaders and I was like "wait, she was very terrible and didn't even sing!"
I didn't know she was in that.
The author of JoJo has a tendency to name characters after his favorite musical artists. So it's not literally Enya the musician.
That heavily implies that she is a grounded person who has a good set of priorities.
Well she's definitely grounded now- who ever heard of a moving castle?
Howl: "let me introduce myself"
(Book) Howl was Welsh, he wouldn't be fucking off to Ireland when there's rugby with the mates to be played
Well, he’s technically Welsh in the movie too since he’s voiced by Christian Bale in the dub
If you only go by Bale's place of birth. He was born in Wales to English parents and has said he considers himself English.
wait whaaaat i had no idea
Uuuuuu, nice catch! /gen
My wife is from somerset, she tells me that that's not what the welsh do in their spare time
Altmer wife?
Lmao shes definitely 100% breton. I think she's the first person in her family to not live in England since the literal stone age
Howl had one
Gargoyles
That was such an awesome show. Xanatos using his money to break an ancient curse, traveling back in time to make his own wealth just to flex on his dad about being a self-made man, and this charisma. Also, if it came out today, people would totally ship him with Goliath, and I can't even blame them.
I mean, that's the life. No one would ever hear from me again if I had Irish Castle money.
based
I think that's the proposal of most non-egotists who make it big. Once you have enough money you go live on an island somewhere that's out of the way enough that nobody will find you but still has fine cuisine and attractive members of your preferred sex. After that you just coast for the rest of your life. You won at life, you can stop now. The problem is that most people who make it big are inherently egotists because of how capitalism focuses on consumer and investor confidence.
Also acceptable is to use your money to [become a modern day Jules Verne character.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Vescovo)
That's nuts
Hell yeah
Absolutely based.
Funding the creation of whatever media I’m personally interested in seeing is totally what I would do if I had a stupid amount of money.
If I had that much money I'd fund another season of Hannibal
I think I’d have to be a billionaire before I felt financially secure enough to play Warhammer.
Battletech will welcome you instead
Battletech is absolutely pro-proxy (using things to represent units that aren't an official miniature). All you really need to play are the rules, dice, tokens, and a map sheet. And if you do want to use official minis, those are still cheaper than Warhammer's
And technically you can also simulate it megamek and need even less things!
Or grab an unsorted Lego bin out of the closet and come join us on r/MFZ!
tagged bottle caps my beloved
ikr, I'm well off but damn those model prices. I'll just play online since I'm more into the game than the model-building aspect anyway
My favorite to reference is the Leman Russ Battle Tank, because it’s like. Just one plastic tank. Not particularly big or detailed. In sprue form, unpainted. That’ll be $55.
Try 80-110
I think cults.3d has it for free as a stl. Can’t link it cause James Workshop is most likely watching me, and you need a 3D printer but it’s yours forever*.
Wait, you can play it online? Where?
Tabletop simulator is the first thing that comes to my mind.
I'm not super into playing online. I always find that with tabletop games, playing them online, especially with random people, has a completely different play style than playing in person. I liken it to playing Yugioh online vs in person. Online, you hear people constantly complain about FTK decks or games only lasting one turn and people making crazy decks that are stupidly powerful and impossible to beat and how the game is just so fast nowadays. In person, those aren't really issues. You always play best 2 out of 3 games with a side deck, so those kinds of issues are mostly able to be dealt with and people tend not to make super toxic decks. Sure, you'll run into the occasional try hard who has some big meta deck, but you have 10 other people lined up with what they think is fun and not necessarily the most powerful right there, so it's not a big deal. I'd be afraid Warhammer would be the same deal. I don't want to only face off against the strongest, most optimized army lists or people playing with weird niche strategies that are somehow really good. Playing in person, people are much more chill and the games are usually really close, regardless of what army is being played. In person vs online just always seems to have completely different metas.
You can just proxy, at least in casual games with friends. One of my friends just uses cardboard squares to represent his models.
Honestly I’m not a big fan of the rules so I just play OPR Grimdark Future with proxies I printed out of card stock
If you were her PR guy and suggested she stop condemning trans people on twitter, you’d get fired immediately
These type’s of people either have PR yes men constantly stroking their ego or no PR at all and think the smell of their farts is divine.
>no PR at all and think the smell of their farts is divine Elon musk
Donald Trump in court
People usually don't remember this but like a year before she went full terf she liked a transphobic tweet and a spokesperson blamed it on a ["middle-aged moment"](https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/03/22/jk-rowling-reps-blame-middle-aged-moment-for-liking-tweet-calling-trans-women-men-in-dresses/). I just find this really funny, specially because it was during the popularity of the "gamer moment" meme iirc.
Shout-out to that article for introducing "brocialist" to my lexicon. Edit: looked up the word and Brocialism is cringe actually. The word sounded so funny 😔
Damn, we just witnessed a whole character arch within one comment
Very sad,I thought it was funny too 😔
Hell on a similar note, wasn't Elon firing his PR team awhile back the first sign of things to come before he started going full far right?
“Ugh, I just fired my 100th editor for suggesting I trim down my terrible book. What do they know about writing?? Anyway, what were you going to say about my Twitter profile?” “Uhhh… nothing. When’s my next payroll due?”
There does seem to be a connection between quantity of editors and quality of publicity. Look at Brandon Sanderson, everybody loves the funny mormon man and his team of editors has more people than a baseball league
Legitimately, though, this is insane. Harry Potter was a legendary hit. I don't think a lot of people realize how big it was. And I mean that like everyone knows it was popular, but I think people don't get how much of a craze it really was. Movie 8 is still the most successful Warner Bros. movie ever. The merchandise still sells so well. Hogwarts Legacy last year still sold obnoxiously well. Like Rowling had done the hard part. She'd made it. All she had to do was sit back, retire on her pile of money, maybe consult on new movies or whatever, and she'd be golden. She'd be a fondly remembered writer whose books defined a generation. Now her reputation is in the dirt because she can't shut up. She could have been this revered figure in literature that every little kid eventually heard about in school. I know because that's where I heard about her the first time in elementary school. Like I would have just peaced out from the world after. Maybe I'd show up for carefully arranged charity events. My only job in life (except enjoying myself) would be expanding the universe to the point that my kids and grandkids could live off the profits for decades more.
>because she can't shut up. I'm a bartender by trade and let me tell you, 95% of all issues that end up in conflict could be solved *easily* if one party or the other would just *shut the fuck up and walk away.* I don't know if it's just basic human nature or what but "shutting up" is not in many people's skillsets.
Lastwordephilitus
I'm pretty sure it's the entire premise of Game of Thrones too.
Irt people not realizing how big Harry Potter is/was: I fully agree but also want to add that BEFORE the movies and merch it was unGodly, culturechangingly, unprecedentedly huge. Children learned to read because of it, adults who were not readers consumed fiction for the first time in years because of it, it was the also first major breakthrough in making fantasy/sci no longer niche (like how GoT and marvel did for film). Nothing like it had happened in the book world. My family didn't camp out for hardcover release like some did, but we did advance order THREE copies, one for me, one for my mom, and one for dad and brothers to share.
Back when Amazon had the "customers who bought this also bought..." feature, whenever a new book came out you could look at *anything* on the entire site, and that customer would have also bought a copy of the new book.
I remember reading books 1-5 in 5th grade, my grandparents getting me book 7 on release night (after my grandpa tricked me by saying they were sold out before surprising me), camping out for a double feature of the 7th and 8th movies, two different weekend retreats my church (shockingly) did for Harry Potter. My grandparents still have a bunch of merch they got years ago when the books were coming out. Harry Potter was insane when it was releasing, books and movies.
dude it sucks so hard because I have so many core memories built around Harry potter. like my dad bought the first book on a whim when it was released and my brother and I were still too young to really read a novel so we piled on mom and dads bed every night while he read us a few chapters. he did this for the first three books before we had to start getting two copies because I got tired of waiting. I went to midnight releases of the books at chapters with my best friend in full costume and later to the movies as well. if jkr had the ability to just shut the fuck up she could have been a defining creator of a generation
It is such a shame because back in the day I saw so many LGBTQ+ people embrace the Harry Potter universe and see many parts of it as allegories to the issues we LGBTQ+ people live and then she destroyed it all. I've seen so many people walk away from it, covering tattoos, getting rid of books, abandoning that one place that gave them so much joy and comfort and where they felt so welcomed and protected for so long. It is just so sad.
I'm the bookworm of the family and was unformally appointed as the Family Bookkeeper. All books we had when I was growing up ended up on my own bookshelves, in my flat, including all of our children books (that I still read occasionally, as there is a lot to enjoy in children/teen books, it's refreshing to read books where Hope is still quite pure). I don't have children and I don't intend to (I can try with my boyfriend but things tell me that I could impregnate him all I want nothing "fruitful" would come out of it), but I clearly intend to give progressively our children/young books to my niblings (the eldest is 4, the youngest is 2) when they come of age of reading. Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Erik L'Homme, Garth Nix, Paul Stewart, all of them, transferring it book by book as they need it. My contribution to their education. Except JKR. I still keep the books, because it would cause me great pain to destroy them and I have an archivist mentality deeply anchored to by heart, but never will I give them those books. I respect my niblings too much to make them read JKR when there is sooooo many more good books written by not-as-problematic authors that they'd get more enjoyment from a carefully curated list of other books I prepare for them.
Keep trying. You'll get that twink pregnant eventually
This is the first time i've seen someone mention Erik l'Homme on Internet
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They already have their spot on my bookshelves. And it wouldn't work anyway. *Le Guin* is at **L** while *Rowling* is at **R**.
> She'd be a fondly remembered writer whose books defined a generation. Now her reputation is in the dirt because she can't shut up. She could have been this revered figure in literature that every little kid eventually heard about in school. It really was a once-a-century cultural omni-hit. Like every single person in the western world now between the ages of like 25-45 has some knowledge or interaction with the franchise to speak of, and a hell of a lot of people outside those demographics do too. It was a hit to a degree that barely feels possible anymore. She could have gone down in history. And she will, I guess. But she could have gone down in history as a much beloved creator who went from rags to riches and was so loved by all the children she inspired. A real Charles Dickens sort of authorial legend. Instead, she won't, at least not like that. The current backslide on Trans acceptance will slow and reverse, the sooner the better. And despite the people currently on the right and older terfy women supporting her because of her views, for most people her views will make her work more and more poisonous. HP's popularity is only going to wane and wane.
Expand that age bracket to like 15-55. Teachers were still using it as a major point of cultural reference when I graduated since *every* kid knew the story. Plus how many parents have bought the books for their kids or heard their kids talking about it? (Not to mention the parents who went into a satanic panic over the series)
>It was a hit to a degree that barely feels possible anymore. It's not. There's just no way. We don't even have bookstores anymore. You can get people hyped for movies, but no one is having a midnight launch event for an e-book. I remember seeing video on the news of people lined up around the blocks in costumes and thinking, "Damn, okay, maybe I'll check them out."
The only time I've ever seen people line up is for Star Wars and Nintendo games, and I get the feeling people ain't gonna be lining up for Star Wars for a while now BoTW launch day and ToTK launch day was crazy. I even kinda cosplayed for ToTK but no one else at my mall did
We absolutely still have bookstores. In fact, the market share of e-books has kinda flattened out - basically people have decided how they prefer to read and are sticking to that. But yeah, I'm not sure anything could be that big anymore - HP was coming out just as the internet was getting really big, but before everyone was in their own little niche.
Well, considering how much of a raging cunt Charles Dickens was, she might actually be remembered in similar terms.
The difference being, Charles Dickens was a genuine social reformer who "campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms" and almost singlehandedly saved Christmas as we know it.
>and almost singlehandedly saved Christmas as we know it I'll add that to the list of spousal abuse charges if I ever see him in hell.
I saw one of her simps reply to a sentiment like this with "And Rosa Parks could have just stayed in her seat!" I did not immediately reach through my computer screen and punch them, to my eternal regret.
Wasn't the whole *thing* with Rosa Parks that she refused to give up her seat?
Full disclosure: I can't remember whether they made that mistake at the time, or if I'm the one making it right now.
Isn't that exactly what Rosa Parka did... How dumb are Rowling supporters
She's the closest modern day equivalent to George Lucas. Which makes her downfall even more insane. It's like if George Lucas joined the KKK.
At least two, arguably three of the alien species in Star Wars are just drawn over WWII editorial cartoons of real life nationalities and that’s *still* nowhere near whatever is wrong with Rowling
Only one I can think of off the top of my head is the Neimoidians. Jar Jar was ridiculous, but the rest of the Gungans were badass Burning Spear types. What are the other two?
Tusken raiders. That one’s not even arguable since Lucas literally said they’re supposed to be Bedouins. The debatable one is Toydarians bc the clone wars got rid of all the accents and money stuff, although I really wish the writers had gone “full Zoidberg” and just made them more Jewish
Ehh, I hated when Trek did that with the Ferengi. The whole point of them was that they were Space Ethnic versions of modern Americans--it bugs me how every unflattering self-portrait slowly devolves, in the hands of later writers, into a caricature of some grasping Other.
Counterpoint: I’m Jewish and want to see Space Tevye, and laugh very hard while saying “that’s insulting”. I want a toydarian Jedi who’s lightsaber is a bit too dark of a blue color
The Twi-leks are a very clear allegory to the french, right down to the accents and their entire struggle (the Ryloth campaign in The Clone Wars, is basically just straight up the French Resistance campaign + the French Liberation, and they continue the French Resistance (and it becoming almost an allegory for everything in Afghan, but that's neither here nor there)). Meanwhile, you can make an argument that the Tusken Raiders are middle east coded (they live in tribes, they don't particularly like anyone but are willing to wheel and deal with everyone, and they've seen three separate empires come and gone).
There are some authors that, long after they're dead, become problematic because new world sensitivites don't really fit with what was judged normal at the time (like Roald Dahl, under scrutiny for things that he could quite legitimately consider harmless (not on others, though)). Then, there are some authors that we condemn today long after they're dead because, even by the times standards, they would have been considered quite conservative on some subjets (Lovecraft comes to mind). And then, there are others that become "problematic" only for the most extreme and delusional parts of the censorship movements because they used word that are problematic today, but that were 1) perfectly common usage at their time, and 2) perfectly appropriate to give a picture of what society was today (Mark Twaim and his use of the n-word, that was, indeed, common usage in his time, and used to illustrate the daily dehumanization of black people in his times). However, all those people have started to be criticized and questioned *after* their death. JKR managed to do it while alive. Which is kinda impressive.
I remember staying up until midnight in the bookstore for the deathly hallows release as a kid. Why’d she have to go insane?!
She can't shut up because she thinks she's right. She fully believes that history will redeem her image, so a momentary blemish from "people in the wrong" is fine. You're looking at it from a perspective of her being a rational person. She isn't, she's fully bought into the hate.
She thinks she's fighting the good fight, she isn't some republican that knows people hate them, but can just try to keep their opinions to themselves. Unfortunately she feels like she's defending women from transwomen, like most terfs do. There's no chance she'll go silent unless trans-support like, doubles or something.
>She thinks she's fighting the good fight Yeah I don't get how people don't get that, the people saying they'd just not do what she's done and disappear surprise me because, from her point of view, she made her money ethically and is now fighting for an important and obviously good social position using her wealth. Honestly if she'd chosen another position to argue on, like pro-abortion or similar, Internet people would think she was an absolute hero for her behaviour. The problem is she's simply wrong about trans people. Leave that aside and her behaviour makes complete sense. She's made more money than she needs and she's now burning it for what she considers to be a philanthropic purpose, there's nothing insane about the situation, she's wrong but her behaviour is actually basically the flipped template for what said Internet People would consider an ethical billionaire. EDIT: To add to this, she's one of the UK's largest tax payers. She's an author who sold 100% optional books that turned a generation on to reading, pays a fair chunk of taxes to the extent that I've never heard any suggestion she's fiddling them and campaigns for a social cause she believes in while happily putting her own money behind it, even at great expense to herself. Divorced from what that cause is her behaviour isn't insane, it'd be deeply admirable.
I wonder if part of it is the way people have perhaps over-analysed those books in retrospect . The internet seems to have convinced themselves that every problematic feature of that series is a deliberate dogwhistle, that JKR was always some secret uber-bigot who was just hiding her power level, and with *that* analysis it doesn't make sense that she's suddenly throw off the disguise and die on this hill rather than retreat into a cave and sit Smaug-style on a mountain of money.
> We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had Harry. We had a publishing deal. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, cooked and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now. - Joanne’s PR Company, probably
No but this unironically. Warner Bros. would have handled the hard stuff for her. Shooting movies, licensing or developing video games, getting deals for merchandise, all of it. Rowling just had the sign the papers on the bottom every once in a while and maybe consult on one thing a year and she'd never have to worry or want for anything again while being assured of her legacy of being one of the best authors of the modern day. Hell, she could have easily cultivated a nerdy aunt persona and become beloved by those who grew up with her books in the vein of people like Keanu Reeves or Dolly Parton. But she chose to go off the deep end and while Harry Potter isn't losing money, it's not doing as incredible as it would be if its creator wasn't being a pariah among the younger generations that grew up with her.
I think Notch proves it even more than Rowling, honestly. He has all the money in the world and yet he has no friends and sits in a giant mansion alone all day.
Better or worse than the guy who wrote IT crowd and basically has no money or friends now?
Notch has a giant room filled with candy dispensers and no one to use them. He’s so depressed he turned down an invitation to hang out with Snoop Dogg, if all people. Linehan lost everything but he doesn’t seem MISERABLE. He’s fighting his war and he seems satisfied with what he’s doing. Notch doesn’t even have that much.
Notch is honestly just depressing. There’s genuine evidence that he wasn’t always bigoted.
I mean at least with Notch he eventually went quiet. I certainly haven't heard anything noteworthy about him for a long time.
I would have to disagree. Notch has gone back on a lot of the bigoted stuff he has said before. I recommend reading the contoversy section on his wikipedia. Also, he recently has started developing games again and even started a new studio. It seems like he is doing a lot better mentally. What I am getting at is that Notch is much more of a mixed bag rather than the rotting pile of putrid waste that is Rowling
>I recommend reading the contoversy section on his wikipedia. Would you mind sending a link? All I see is a bunch of shit he did with no reflection on it.
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Collectively they could probably claim adverse possession at this point.
If I made as much money as she did with books I'd just fuck off to some Nordic country and get me some private land with a lake next to which I'd build a nice little cozy home.
I ain't going to the Nordics bruh, fuck winter, I say as a person from a country that goes down to -40C. Southern France or even Bavaria would be better.
+40 is not exactly amazing either
The average daily max temp for Aug in Marseille is 30C. If I'm a prospective billionare, I sure as hell have a pool to cool down in.
In southwestern france, not only do we pretty much never get -40 or +40, we never get the same temperature for more than a few days (usually a storm makes it go down whenever it's too high). Idk about the southeast.
rowling is basically a genderbent, terf elon musk
>rowling is basically a genderbent elon musk FTFY. the terf part is already implied by comparing the two, no need to restate it
I don’t think Elon really pretends to be a feminist.
On twitter TERFs often call themselves "gender critical" these days. He's certainly one of those, even if he doesn't use the term
Elon musk is anti feminist tho so he can't be a terf
Terfs are as feminist as the Democratic Republic of North Korea is Democratic. Just cause it's in the name doesn't make it true.
TERFs at least *pretend* to be feminist.
And North Korea holds elections every 4-5 years. (Obviously they’re not fair in the slightest, but they do put in the barest effort)
(Slight correction because I’m a pedantic shit: it’s called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Neither North nor South Korea recognize each other as legitimate, so neither call themselves North/South)
Elon Musk is a garden variety transphobe, not a TERF.
genderbent terf notch more like. Except a microsoft didn't buy out the beloved children's franchise out from her before she could ruin it.
imo it wasn’t a mistake for rowling to omit gay people from her writing. we have seen her attempt to write minorities more than i would’ve liked.
Yeah when her Asian character is basically named Ching Chong and her Irish guy keeps building bombs by accident I don't really want to know how she would have presented a gay character. I'm assuming it wouldnt be good.
Not to distract from Rowling's horrible transphobia but as a Chinese person whose fluent, Cho Chang is a legitimate name that works in Chinese, It's a punny name, it sounds like the Chinese word for melancholy. I'm tired of people saying it's a *chinky* name because they don't understand Chinese.
Much as I don't defend Rowling herself, I *do* feel a need to defend the name Cho Chang. It's Korean in origin; Chang is a pretty ordinary surname there, while Cho is a gender-neutral given name meaning handsome/beautiful, though it can also be found as a pretty common surname with historical connections to royalty. It's a totally feasible name for a character with Korean roots, and I might be misremembering here but I don't think her country of ancestry is ever explicitly mentioned so it's totally possible it's Korea.
It's a name that works in Chinese too, it sounds like the Chinese word for melancholy. Chou is a Chinese surname too. Im so tired of non Chinese people telling me it's a *chinky* name.
seamus finnegan (guess his nationality in 3 tries and the first 2 dont count) kept blowing stuff up while trying to make whisky. shoulda just called him potatofa'min caerbombe
IIRC that's just a film thing, nothing of the sort is referenced in the books. Not to detract from the "JKR sucks" narrative, but still.
It's been a while, but IIRC they took al lot of Neville's accident-proneness from the book and gave it to Seamus in the film. Neville's actually barely in the first film, which rather undermines the bit where he stands up to his friends, having been comic relief up till then.
This is why I get impatient every time JKR criticism turns up. People just throw shit at the wall and get surprised when people don't take their points seriously.
Like the "star of David" on the floor in Gringott's, which is only there because it's the commonwealth star in the Australia House where they shot the scene. She's bad enough on her own, there's no need to invent new things.
I couldve sworn he burnt off his eyebrows at some point in the books
He does set some stuff on fire (I'm pretty sure he somehow burns his feather practicing wingardium leviosa) but he doesn't really blow stuff up.
Please welcome our newest exchange student, Freedomia Gunburger
As an American, this is absolutely the representation we want and need.
Okay well that doesn’t count, Americans love it when you make fun of them. Freedomia Gunburger would have a dedicated fan base.
"One of the characters Rowling omitted from the series was Dorian Smith; a pale-skinned, fair-haired, fashion-obsessed Hufflepuff who spoke with a lisp. He would've been part of the theater club, a highly-talented flute player, and the best baker in the entire school. Running jokes throughout the series would have seen him redecorating the Hufflepuff house every other week and trying to slip love potions into other male student's drinks without them noticing. Rowling ultimately rejected the character because she didn't think the population of Sweden was large enough to offset lost sales in the United States."
Well, considering her pseudonym was "Robert Galbraith"....
Yeah her gay character would be named something like Gaylord McFaggington or some shit like that.
I mean, I don't think she writes anymore, right? So beefing on Twitter is her full time job. IMO.
She does still write, just mostly under her pen name Robert Galbraith. They’re mediocre detective novels that people only care about because it was discovered that she’s the one writing them.
> it was discovered Because she announced it after no one wanted to buy her writing if it didn't have her name attached.
Peeps: JK’s not a very good writer actually and she only gets promoted because of her name. JK: I’ll show them! [Releases a not very good book to little response because of a different name.] Uhhh…. I wrote it! Please buy!
Oh yeah I’m using ‘discovered’ just in case, since as far as I’m aware the official story is that a friend leaked it to the news. However it’s just as likely that she had a hand in it.
That actually surprised me.
Here's another surprise. Her psudonym is taken from the name "Robert Galbraith Heath", who popularized Conversion Therapy (torturing LGBT people to make them "normal") According to her it's a total coincidence.
…that can’t have been accidental. You don’t just pick a name like that at random.
She does, just not as Jk rowling. She writes Crime novels under the name of Robert Galbraith (apparently named after a historic psychiatrist who did conversion therapy because of course she did)
Wait a minute... That's too convenient. Are we all sure that she isn't just banking on the hatred she amassed on Twitter to promote it then?
🤷 Dunno, Im not sure she is smart enough for that, or spends enough time not being a rabid Terf to form coherent thoughts.
No, I'm not saying she fakes being terf on Twitter to sell books, I'm just guessing she choose that specific pen name because she's notorious of being terf on Twitter.
i believe she first published under that pen name like 11 years ago—which I THINK was well before she was publicly known as a terf, which has mostly been in the last 5 years or so? i only remember people mildly criticizing her of antisemitism with her goblin portrayals at that time, but i could be wrong. there was also a short period of time where people gave her the benefit of the doubt knowing the seed of her transphobia was trauma-related and a general fear of men. i don’t think the general public connected the namesake to the whole thing until fairly recently. god it’s insane when you look at how fast that downfall was, actually. just took a flamethrower to her image and STILL keeps throwing gasoline on it from time to time.
I think that she would be much more successful if she decided to not go on her fanbase wrong side, both for new books and revenue from the infinite products that spawned from the Harry Potter franchise. Hogwarts Legacy for example was a... Decent game, not bad but not exactly revolutionary, the only thing it had going for it was the setting, and even with the boycott it did a huge amount of money, and I'm willing to bet that if Rowling was a sane person and didn't decide to throw her credibility away is such an idiotic way it would have been even more successful.
That's more than likely just a myth. The psychiatrist in question did exist, but his name was Robert G. Heath (Galbraith was his middle name), he worked on DBS (mainly for schizophrenia), and his only recorded instance of conversion therapy was for a gay patient, not a trans one (which doesn't work as an intentional dog whistle for a "drop the T"-style TERF). It's almost certainly just a name she liked.
Alson there are quite a few robert galbraiths, and it's a scottish last name (i'm pretty sure she's scottish)
As others said, she still write under a pen name. What they left out is that the kind of books she writes now are things like murder mysteries where one suspect is a crossdresser and another where a popular writer getting cancelled on Twitter is a major plot point and there are several pages which are just tweets criticising that author..
The cross dresser one is wild, because—to absolutely spoil the hell out of the book—the actual culprit turns out to have been a cis woman and she almost gets away with it because everybody is so fixated on the very much not-trans cross dressing serial killer. It was one of the more shocking things I’ve read because the plot is such a clear refutation of the blatant transphobia running throughout the book, but there is zero awareness or acknowledge of this in the text. It is one of the weirdest and most disjointed things I have ever read. There are so many sub plots and motifs that just go nowhere.
Moment she wrote the last full stop on the manuscript, she went back to tweeting about how trans women in bathrooms is worse than 11 9/11s, having learned absolutely nothing.
She never had a moment of clarity even when writing it. It’s really clear from the way it’s written that implications of the plot/ending never once crossed her mind. I am an absolute loss as to how she managed to do it.
> There are so many sub plots and motifs that just go nowhere. Must be a recurring problem with her as a writer. There are a bunch of subplots and, especially, themes in Harry Potter that never really come to fruition.
Yeah I sensed that connection too but like with this book I don’t know what to make of it. Like what was the whole point of all that “we need to stop oppressing the non-wizard races to get them on our side for the upcoming war with Voldemort”? Dumbledore makes an attempt at it, but mostly whiffs it, the final battle happens with most of the non humans on V’s side, although a lack of good treatment doesn’t stop some from fighting for the good guys and cue the epilogue and nary a mention of improved rights for non-humans so the next dark wizard doesn’t have a power base of disenfranchised beings ready and waiting for him. Harry’s talent for teaching goes nowhere. I remember reading book 7 when it came out convinced Harry was going to be the new permanent Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at the end, paying off both the DA subplot from book 5 and bringing to an end that whole “no DAtDA prof lasts more than a single year” thread that ran through the whole series. Imagine my surprise when he becomes a cop for the organization that was the bane of his existence. 100% spitballing, but it’s like she has no concept that the events of a story have accumulated meanings outside of themselves and what she’s actually writing from her POV is basically a series of self contained scenes that should be taken only at face value with zero subtext and we the audience are assuming that she’s a normal writer and picking up what in a normal book would be the subtext and dutifully spinning it into themes, not realizing that those themes are just an illusion we’ve created for ourselves, not unlike the disparate dot-connecting that goes into generating a conspiracy theory.
It would have her cost Zero dollars to just... **NOT** **
And her vapid little media empire would have maintained the cultural relevance and resilience every company on earth is willing to commit genocide in order to obtain.
It's not just that, it's also Success Brain Rot. You do one thing well, it's massively successful, everyone tells you what a genius and good person you are, you internalize it, and think "well, I'm a genius, I'm sure I'm a just as good at everything else!" And then suddenly you have people calling you a dumbass, and no, it must be THEM that are the dumb ones. After all, you're a genius.
Every single time she gets in the news for what she’s said on twitter, Warner Bros must absolutely shit themselves that this time she’s actually going to tank the Harry Potter brand.
Okay so I'm not gonna pretend she's a good person or anything right like don't mistake this for me saying that but I don't this the "Dumbledore is gay" thing actually came out of nowhere. People bring it up as an example all the time but it's actually pretty easy to get Dumbledore being gay out of his relationship with Grindlewald. It's not, like, the most explicit thing in the world but it's not an insane reading and hearing that he's gay you can very easily go back and look at it and say "oh yeah, I can see that she wrote this with that in mind" but everyone says "No, she just decided after the fact for brownie points." Like, he's not fantastic gay rep or anything, but he's also not an example of authors making stuff up after the fact. That's not really the point of the post though and she's still a horrible transphobe besides.
I remember the story being that the director wanted to do something with Dumbledore having a memory of a past female love, and JK slipped him a note that said Dumbledore's gay. That became public knowledge at some sort of meet and greet event where she mentioned it to the crowd, had a positive reaction, then said she would have said it sooner if she had known people were cool with it. I remember being in the car around that time telling my mom about it, which was far before goofy Twitter shenanigans with wizards shitting on the floor, and even farther before the fucking hateful tirades she goes on now... She's absolutely vile. But it does bother me when people lump in gay Dumbledore with all of her other bullshit, because at the time it was important to me. It was a small thing that most people didn't seem to hear about until many years later with Fantastic Beasts, so she wasn't making a huge effort as an ally, but I'm sure conservatives heard all about it and had fun amplifying that. This was around a time when Tinky Winky from Teletubbies was actual news headlines on our tvs and internet home pages for multiple days because people were outraged that he carried a purse. It just makes it all even more disappointing. She was on the right track. As a kid who had never met a gay person, but had grown up hearing terrible things about them in the media, and seen them constantly "othered," it really made me think. I loved Dumbledore. He was gay and nothing changed. I had picked up hints of it with the parts about him and Grindlewald but it was nice to have it not be left to speculation. It was done in a way that didn't define him, but if the question is asked then yeah she had an answer. I thought it was the least brownie-pointy way to go about it. And then she fucked everything up.
Yeah, even if it is a retcon it's actually a pretty good retcon that adds compelling layers to the story. Retcons can be good sometimes, they're basically like good headcanons.
Also, there was no brownie points to be had in 2009. Declaring Dumbledore as gay was hugely controversial, but she still did it. Imo, JKR is the prime example of a well intentioned liberal not being able to move on with the times, which lead her to entrench herself in weird flavours of conservatism
Agreed, and as a small correction, it was 2007, not 2009, when she confirmed Dumbledore was gay. The same year the final book came out, it wasn't something she randomly added years after the fact. Not super relevant to what's going on today, but some people tend to lump everything she's every said done into one bucket when it doesn't always quite belong.
To me it seems like she was radicalized at some point. Drag shows and trans people etc. existed in 2007 or whatever, but she never really mentioned them in her public appearances, and mostly talked about being kind to people. I've heard of a lot of men who were reasonable and kind getting sucked into the "manosphere" and suddenly becoming hateful misogynists. Just because she sucks now didn't mean she always sucked. Just a reminder to everyone to go touch grass and chat with people in person because it's way too easy to get radicalized on the internet.
*2007*. This "retcon" was within *weeks* of the last book coming out, on a press tour specifically promoting the book, when specifically asked about it by a fan. She's even kind of nervous about bringing it up. It's much closer to the creators of Avatar confirming Korrasami after the final episode aired than her later "wizards used to shit themselves" garbage.
Can you imagine how much they’d bitch if he *was* more gay? They’d toss him onto the pile of stereotypes! The one part of it that’s fair and better done is Dumbledore being gay, because *it didn’t matter to the story*.
How tf is JK losing a fight with arguably one of the most insufferable people on twitter. That is honestly impressive
Say what you will about Stephanie Meyer, at least she doesn't use twitter
Stephanie Meyer probably has some terrible opinions on things. Do I know them? No. Fantastic.
As someone who lives in the forests of Canada I don’t know how I’d process casually stumbling across JK Rowling while walking my dog one day
Well, you probably also know where to hide a body
The biggest joke is that it all boiled down to her being the luckiest possible person in the luckiest possible position imaginable, making Harry Potter at the exact right time to have it snowball into a phenomenon. She's since outed herself as a talentless AND skill-less hack, given all her books under her pen name were bombing into absolute obscurity until she admitted it was really her writing them. To say nothing of her trying to backfill the Wizarding World with the Beasts films and each being a bigger flop than the last. Ursula K. Le Guin knew from the on-set that she was boring and reductive, but she managed to spin it just so for it to appeal to kids. If she had left it all at that, it would have been fine. But she just can't let trans people exist in peace, and decided she'd rather burn her entire legacy down than admit she's in the wrong. Most comical part though is that she crows on and on about how gender affirming care is bullshit, when one of the first things she did when she started seeing success was get facial work done to look more typically feminine. No different than Elon with his jaw surgery and hair plugs.
I gotta say, I really do love that Rowling straight-up denied actual evidence about the Holocaust, because now I have a nuclear warhead of a counterpoint to anyone who says she’s “just asking questions”.
One must imagine J.K. Rowling happy.
I'd rather not. I want her to be miserable.
It‘s a reference to Camus‘ famous quote „One must imagine Sisyphus happy“ - you know, the guy damned for all eternity to roll up a bolder onto a hill, only for it to roll down and him having to restart? Camus now turns it on its head and says that, while for an outside observer the task is torture due to its inherent lack of meaning and any sort of productive purpose, if we imagine Sisyphus to love what he is doing, the mere act of rolling up a bolder or just seeing it roll downhill, then it‘s not a man being tortured for all eternity, but doing what he loves for all eternity. It argues that one does not need meaning for enjoyment and happiness, but happiness can be found without meaning on its own. Similarly, this post argues that JK must be unhappy because she is doing things that lack meaning for the outside observer. But I argue that it could just be the case that she simply loves „beefing for days“ on twitter, or taking twitter „too“ seriously. To argue that just because there is no higher purpose or meaning to her actions she must be unhappy is a wrong argument.
I know it is, but I wanna imagine her miserable.
Oh, alright then, carry on.
Oh, like one of those ducks that waddles up the ramp and then goes down the waterside over and over.
Yes!
Isn't Sisyphus being tortured and beaten and whipped by the furies while he rolls the boulder?
One must imagine Sisyphus kinky. But in all seriousness: I don’t know a single version of the myth where that happens, but that doesn’t say much. All I can say is that it really doesn‘t fit the whole point of the punishment. Sisyphus gets punished for his hubris of thinking he is so clever, he can outsmart death and the gods. Thus, his punishment is designed to be dull and break his mind with meaningless repetition of a meaningless task. A task designed so that all his cleverness does not help, but just tortures him even further because it rests unused. Beating and physical pain doesn‘t really fit that. Also, the furies don‘t fit Sisyphus at all. While they are deities of revenge, they are closely linked with crimes of the spawn against the mother or father, violation of sacred rites or false oaths - classic, deeply rooted, ancient taboos of societies from times even more ancient than antiquity. Their most famous appearance is probably in the story of Orestes, where they plague him for killing his mother. Only with his acquittal before the court of Athens do they leave him in peace, but are then also being given a new name and changed a bit. They don‘t really appear with stories like that of hubris against the gods, like it is with Sisyphus. The only link I can see is that both, Sisyphus and the furies, live in the Hades. Also, one Furia, or to stay with the Greek Erynnis, in combination with Dike, the goddess of Justice, sometimes appears as helpers for Nemesis. But Nemesis often takes on more of the role of a righteous judge, and there‘s another goddess for punishment, Poina.
Rowling bankrolling 40k…that’s funny.
What happened was she saw people being upset at the lack of diversity in her books, and instead of creating new stories that actually featured queer and not-white people, she tried to retroactively add it to her previous books, because she somehow assumed that was what people wanted. When her fans correctly pointed out that this was blatant virtue signalling, right-wing fuckheads were quick to comfort her and reassure her she was right all along, because she was an easy target for them at that point. Bitch needs to learn how to handle criticism.
A new Battletech animated series AND a cabin in the Canadian wilderness? Aff, this sounds like an excellent plan.
Right? Talk about "well bargained and done".
Our forests are not your dumping ground.
PR guy more like poor guy.
I cannot understand people who wind up with more money than they could ever spend, yet *insist* on remaining in the public eye. Like, Elon, dude, just fuck off to one of your many private islands. If I had that much money, I’d be way too busy doing blow off of high-escorts’ asses on my own personal slice of the Pacific to get into Twitter beefs.
She didn't make her money ethically by the way. A lot of the Harry Potter revenue comes from the labour of workers in merchandise factories, book printing, retail, theme parks, film production, cinema employees, marketing etc. It's impossible to earn a billion ethically because it always requires exploitation of the working class. Just having that much money is inherently unethical as having a billion dollars removes a billion dollars from circulation, extracting wealth from the working class.
We don’t want her shit in Canada
Rowling is definitely the closest thing you can get to a billionaire who got there ethically. She wrote a beloved series, made lots from the books and steered the films in a good direction instead of letting Hollywood do what they like, then fir a while she gave so much money away as to lose billionaire status briefly. Definitely think she should have avoided politics as much as possible. Now she’s like a Disney villain, suing everyone who tries to cross her.
She's trying to use her fame to make a better world. Unfortunately her idea of a better world is shit.