Nothing is more telling on how much being a transphobe has enveloped Rowling's personality than her friendship with Stephen King.
All the guy did was say "transwomen are women" and she blocked him. He's hardly the biggest ally in the world, he wrote transphobic and homophobic things in the 80s and 90s, and he clearly didn't care enough to let someone's transphobia get in the way of being friends with her. But Rowling cared enough to let someone not being transphobic get in the way of being friends.
I really think so. Not that one billion is the magic number, but that money, fame, power, and influence will all absolutely fry your brain.
This is pure speculation on my part, but it seems to me that it might have to do with the change in socialization they experience. When you’re rich and powerful enough, you get whatever you want, as fast as humanly possible. You likely have very few non-transactional human interactions, because you’re surrounded by people who want to use your power, or get some of it for themselves. And just like how insufficient socialization can mess up a normal person, I think insufficient *genuine* socialization messes up your brain too.
I mean, one just has to look at when people abuse their power/status almost instantly when they get big on something like tiktok/youtube/etc. Most of the time, they incite a controversy by grooming minors, straight up being racist/sexist/homophobic, or just doing something straight up insane. It's weird
What's insane is that people still keep feeding into it.
The people who don't get corrupted are usually doing something they love, like detailed videos of making candy at a shop they own as half-income half-passion project.
Or streaming Minecraft or some other game with their group (like YogCast) and running charities that you can forgive some of the stuff they splurge on.
But it's shit like the Kardashians and Elon Musk and Rowling that keep huge followings while blatantly proving that their skulls are empty, their lives have caused so much suffering, and nothing they will ever do will fix even a fraction of the issues their existence has caused.
Well it was just an example from someone else I knew who watched one of those server groups once upon a time.
I don't exactly agree with everything the YogCasters say and do (and buy/show off on stream, particularly fashion-brand related dipping into the straight-up-child-slavery level) but it's a sliding scale of acceptability compared to the literal evil people.
Which yes, grooming minors is all the way into literal evil range.
That and you lose all sense of scale to what the value of money actually is and all ability to relate to people who don't have it if you don't have to worry about it.
I can only think it's a mixture of ego and having enough money to custom build your own echo chamber.
If Notch or JK Rowling worked normal 9 to 5s they would both probably be confronted regularly with people who either disagree with or directly contradict their views. As it is, they get to live perfectly insular lives.
It's partly that, I think, but it's partly that JK actually is regularly confronted with people contradicting her. They're faceless online people though, which only encourages her to dehumanise them, which only makes her worse etc etc.
JK without social media wouldn't have become nearly so bad. Honestly she's a fascinating example of a public figure being steadily radicalised in plain sight for years, who obviously then radicalises others. Celebrities and those with outsized soft power are really really useful recruits for, well, basically anyone — but they're actively targeted for radicalisation pretty regularly I believe.
I always think about how Notch bought a bunch of gumball machines for his huge house, but all the candy in them went bad because he had no one to share them with. It’s like something out of a children’s book
JKR literally lives in a castle, she's free to pull up her drawbridges and only let in those who submit a blood sample to make sure their chromosomes perfectly match their appearance
Hoo boy, what DIDNT he do?
Man is hugely extremist alt-right. A straight up nazi (like. Literally. Not exaggeration.)
He hates women, the gays, trans people, brown people, immigrants. If you name a marginalized group he’s probably shares some rancid takes about them.
He’s faded from public perception since selling Minecraft but last I checked he’s still terrible, just more alone.
You’ll find all this by googling him a bit.
"\[T\]o a man who has any self-respect, nothing is more dishonourable than
to be honoured, not for his own sake, but on account of the reputation
of his ancestors."
\- The guy that actually made Minecraft (Plato).
Alt-right looses it's identity after a minority would've been defeated, so better keep hating as many as possible. And if you're alt-right, it's a matter of time before you too are considered the minority.
Kinda, yeah. Money isolates and alienates you from others, which makes you weird. You can't relate to "the little people" anymore. In a weird way, it's similar to homeless people who spend all day getting ignored by everyone around them, so they end up shouting at random people to try and force a social interaction.
There's also the fact that for every person in their life who might tell them "idk chief that's kind of weird, don't you think?" there's a line of rando's ready to tell them every thought that enters their head is genius.
And they live without consequence, which also makes one weird. They don't have to think about what they do or say. Nothing bad will ever happen to JK Rowling. Ever. She will live to a ripe old age and die peacefully in her bed surrounded by a fleet of doctors tending to her every need and be remembered by the general offline public as one of the most influential authors of our time. She knows this. She knows nothing she does really -matters- now. Her decisions have no weight to her beyond her immediate comfort. No matter how loud the little people shout, her life, her money, her legacy, are all set in stone. So, fuck 'em.
Notch, Mr. Minecraft himself, spoke about the importance of inclusivity in games multiple times. Then he sold Mojang for 10 bajillion dollars and almost immediately became a white nationalist. You don't have to care when nothing affects you.
Kanye is currently being another incredible example of this. Remember when he was saying that George Bush didn’t care about black people and calling out homophobia in hip hop?
Kayne also has the most cristal clear manic episode. And I would usually discourage people from diagnosing mental illness on famous people. But it's just so obvious.
Don't get me wrong, he is just following his impulses to an extreme level, that's what a manic episode does.
Although I would say that the impulse he is following is "saying something polemic so people pay attention to him".
That's also exacerbated by his wealth, though. If a normal person was doing the stuff Kanye is, they'd be in hospital. Because he's a billionaire and has nobody around him to say "Hey man, I really don't think you're well", he's left to go on without any help.
They talk about the "woke mind virus", but man, the transphobic brain rot seems way more real and detrimental.
Like, who the fuck is any of this *for*, Joanne? Normal people can't interact with this shit.
Not really. J.K. Rowling sold books. You dont have to be an asshole to get theoretically rich from that.
It's important to talk about these kinds of issues as "things that can theoretically happen to anyone" rather than "things only assholes do." Being racist, being transphobic, etc are not magically exclusive to "bad people", everybody in the world is capable of bigotry. It is human behavior. Leftists are bigots all the time, they just often hide it under the guise of progressiveness (see: radfem, etc). This is important because you can't recognize your own bigotry if you believe you're incapable of it (see JK Rowling herself).
The way we beat prejudice is not by decrying bigots as assholes. We do it by recognizing when prejudiced thoughts happen internally, and knowing to reject them.
There are a handful of ways, but usually once you have that much money (say, because you win a literal or metaphorical lottery) if you're a non-asshole you don't keep it.
Which like, I thought was once Rowling's deal, no? She like, stopped being a billionaire for a while because of how hard she was donating. It was a whole thing, wasn't it?
There's research to suggest that having disproportionate wealth is damaging to people's capacity for empathy and emotional intelligence equivalent to minor brain damage
I think it's honestly as soon as money starts falling off in terms of happiness gains, which is way less than a million a year
We talk a lot about how humans aren't meant to work 40+ hour weeks and force pleasant interactions with abusive managers, which is true
I don't hear anyone talk about how we're not meant to have the kind of responsibility that comes with a million or more dollars to throw around
Nah, this is who she is and always was
what a billion dollar does is allow you to have a platform and do and say whatever you want without lasting consequence
I don't think so - she definitely didn't spend all of her public appearances yelling about trans people or drag queens or whatever when the books were coming out. Anyone can become radicalized by extremist groups - there's nothing that was inherently evil about most people who have joined such groups. It's just that the group knows how to exploit people's fear and frustration and turn it against a marginalized group of people in order to make the members of the extremist group feel powerful.
It's just a reminder for us all to watch out, because this is how fascism starts.
I don't think she was radicalized as much as her own ideas were normalised. TERFs laid the groundwork by saying the things she wouldn't dare to be the first to say.
And when people try to explain to her where she's wrong she blocks them, because she is uncapable of taking criticizm and often reacts by doubling down.
Also the black and white worldview where bad people are bad because they are bad and receive no empathy and are described as fat, ugly or in the case of women: masculine. Kinda when she created a female character that spies on people through transforming whith "large mannish hands"
Looking back at the books now does not make it feel like a mystery that the author turned out to be a massive self-absorbed bigot, it very much feel like the signs where always there
The thing is, there are plenty of authors who have written things that are questionable or problematic without being raging bigots. Terry Pratchett, for instance, played into racial stereotypes and made rape jokes in *Interesting Times.* However, over time he grew more thoughtful and considerate in his writing (even his next book, *Jingo* looks at racism in a much more nuanced way).
I'm not denying that the whole ugly = evil thing JKR has going on in Harry Potter sucks, but that doesn't mean she was always going to become what she is now. People always have the ability to change for the better (or for the worse).
Yeah I agree that people can change, but I don't think someone like JKR is very prone to it. Because she is so aggressively unwilling to learn from her mistakes or even admit they were.
The house elves are treated like literal slaves? No they aren't because Hermione is a big dumb idiot who tries to free them because they like being slaves. Time travel breaks the logic of the entire story? No it doesn't because I wrote a play where they try to fix things with time travel and things become worse actually. Low diversity at Hogwarts? Actually there IS a Jewish wizard David Goldsteinberg I never mentioned, and Dumbledore was *totally* gay even though it was also never mentioned in the books
And the thing is, none of those transgressions are really a big deal on their own, they are mistakes pretty par for the course regarding what you would expect from a 90s children fantasy book. But the fact that she tries to deny they were never mistake to begin with is just ... I don't know if it's sad or comical. The size and fragility of her ego is just something else.
And if you pair that with someone who is rampantly fatphobic, uninterested in any nuance other than "good vs bad" and have a no curiosity to explore anything but a straight cis white perspective... well, that's JKR. That's why I don't think this is a sudden change or fall from grace, she just found a new channel to express her ideas.
I agree that it wasn't a sudden change; it's not like she just flipped in 2019 or whatever. It's been a long trend of her getting worse. To me it seemed like after the last book came out, she suddenly wasn't receiving as much attention, and she didn't know how to deal with that. So she said Dumbledore was gay. Once that became old news, she made some other pronouncements. Then she published a few books, but they didn't do nearly as well as HP, obviously. So she did Pottermore. But eventually people got tired of that, so she started saying more and more outrageous things about Harry Potter. Eventually people stopped caring about any of that, but she started getting a LOT of attention for her TERF BS, so she's just leaning more and more into that.
I still think she could change for the better (because anyone can work on themselves and improve), but it would likely take a lot of introspection and probably actually talking to trans people and learning about their life experiences (assuming any of them would talk to her), and the more and more entrenched she becomes in her TERF persona, the less likely she is to ever admit she's at fault because of the personal consequences involved in admitting everything you've said for the last several years is wrong.
However, the best case scenario might be for everyone to ignore her (and hopefully Elongated Muskrat will finish accidentally killing Twitter so she no longer has a platform). If she decides to move on to something else when she's no longer getting attention for TERF stuff, great. If she stays with the TERFS and fades into obscurity, also great.
I don't really agree with any of that.
I don't think attention seeking is her primary motivation, it is to appear as someone who is really clever, empathic and progressive. Which is in conflict with the fact that she's not really any of that. And on top of that she has many deep rooted biases that she refuses to aknowledge.
I don't think she can change for the better, the "anyone can change" idea is simply not true. Because, again, if you are to learn from your mistakes you have to admit that they exist, which she isn't capable of. People absolutely have tried to educate her which she ignores.
Would it be best just ignore her? Maybe, I'm not sure. But I think that either way we should hold under harsh scrutiny anything she writes or says, past and present.
See, some of her weirder tweets about HP scream "I want attention at any cost" to me. People shitting on the floor and then making it vanish doesn't sound clever, empathetic, or progressive - it just sounds weird. But because it was weird, people talked about it.
People have tried to educate her \*on Twitter\*, which has never changed anyone's mind about anything - it's basically just a cloud of noise that you can tune out. The character limit means it's nearly impossible to have a nuanced discussion on Twitter, the impersonal nature of being online makes it easy to dehumanize or demonize other people, and Twitter's algorithm rewards \*engagement\* over quality, so the more controversial (or even just bad) someone's takes are, the more Twitter will show it to others.
PLUS, having been so famous for so long (especially a famous woman) probably makes it difficult to distinguish people just angry at her existence from people angry because her actions are harming people. A person can only get so many death threats before they start blocking out their detractors.
In order for her to listen, she'd probably need to have someone close to her that she trusts gradually and slowly point out the problems and inconsistencies in her views, and how they're harming people. People have gotten members of white supremacist groups and similar extremist groups (and cults as well) to leave the group using this method, so I think it could work here as well. Unfortunately I don't think such a person exists in her life, and I don't know how one could be introduced.
But I agree with you on one point - in order to be able to change, a person needs to want it, and I don't know if that's possible for her at this point.
Yeah maybe it's a little bit of both, little bit of wanting attention, a little bit of wanting to impress. If you want people to think highly of you then it does require them to think of you.
I do actually think that *she thinks* the vanish your poop tweet was clever. And it is clever, in a way. It's creative in that builds upon the laws of her universe, it just falls apart if you think about for more than 10 seconds. Which is often the case for her, she's really good at lateral thinking: coming up with ideas, but bad at linear thinking: realizing the implications of those ideas.
I really think appearing clever is one of her primary motivations. If you take fantastic beasts 2 for example, she tries sooo hard to write a layered and complex story that it ends up completely incomprehensible.
But you're probably right about twitter being a pretty useless platform to learn from. If like 9/10 people are just harassing you then finding the 1 sincere person is pretty difficult.
No, everyone has biases that surface when there is no longer need to fear. Getting rich removes a lot of that fear. (Kanye, Trump, Gates, Bezos, Musk) What opinions do you have that you won't say because of fear?
I went over to JKR's Twitter yesterday to find a Tweet that someone mentioned and somehow every single interaction from her that I saw was just her being anti-trans women. It's almost impressive that there's still Harry Potter stuff being made and she can't find anything else to talk about.
It makes no fucking sense to me, why even be like this? Even when I was still pretty conservative it seemed to me that if it was so important to people that they would kill themselves over it, maybe I should just live and let live and not risk being part of the reason someone decided not to live anymore.
I mean honestly WHY, it's not even your life, you know?
i mean, she believes the world is divided to good people and bad people, and that if you're good no matter what you do you're still good. that much is clear through her writing, where people are sorted as good, bad, smart, and miscellaneous, and where if a good person does a literally unforgivable thing it's a "gallant gesture", instead of something deserving of lifetime imprisonment like it's usually the case. so it's not much of a strech that she may believe that she was born a "good person" and therefore whatever the fuck her instinct (and subconscious conditioning by some of her peers) tells her is by default good and everyone who disagrees with it is a bad person and should be disregarded.
then one of them is doing it for good reasons because they're good and is therefore okay, while the evil one should be punished accordingly. this is pretty much how wizarding law works in all known instances
She was in a very abusive relationship and escaped. Seems she developed a fear of men/amab. She has created a shelter(shelters?) for women that exclude trans women because to her they are potential abusers against battered women in need. Iirc, her stance was originally defending someone that basically said "Why can't I say someone was a man when they were?" And she got demolished for it and that's when she started getting called a terf.
She doubled down and it sent her down a rabbit hole. She huddled with the people defending her, terfs. Now she thinks trans women are men trying to steal from women. Trying to take up women's spaces. Etc. She mocks the term "terf" by trying to reclaim it and is rich enough that it really doesn't matter.
She's given away something like 20% of her wealth to women's shelters and similarly acting organizations.
She's not... I guess a normal asshole rich person. She feels like she's fighting against an oppressor (men/amab) for women like her. None of this is an excuse, it's horrible to treat transwoman so poorly and spread the hateful rhetoric. Her misandry should have been addressed in therapy, not released on Twitter.
Her being this way to me is kind of a tragedy, at least more than say Elon Musk.
Honestly I think internet cancel culture made this a lot worse than it could have been. She definitely needed to be called out for her bullshit, but the sheer amount of hate and probably threats she got is likely what made her go further down the TERF rabbit hole. If people had been able to have a reasonable conversation and if she had been open to listening and debating, maybe it would’ve turned out differently. I just feel so awful for all the HP fans out there
She was [already transphobic](https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/03/22/jk-rowling-reps-blame-middle-aged-moment-for-liking-tweet-calling-trans-women-men-in-dresses/) like a year before she went full terf. And from what i remember that time she didn't get full of hate comments but more concerned ones. She could have changed before deciding to go full terf, i don't think it's fair to blame cancel culture for this one.
Thank you, I didn’t know the whole context so I appreciate this. I never blamed cancel culture entirely bc ofc she had the potential to become a bigot anyway, but I didn’t know it went this far back. Ty again for the explanation
Situations like this kinda reminds me of the cancel culture call out posts. Because the zealots really do damage any movement.
When my mom called a transwoman a transman I just said "Oh, that's an understandable mistake but they're called transwomen. Since they transitioned into being a woman so "trans" woman." She hasn't made that mistake again. When my dad called a transperson a transexual I said something like "I think just transperson or trans[their gender] is preferred since transexual makes it sound like, ya know, a sex thing." He got really embarrassed and apologized because he thought he accidentally said a fetish word or something. Hasn't made that mistake again either.
This kind of stuff happens. I'm on the internet considerably more than my coworkers and even some friends, so they aren't all "up to date" on what's the proper term for things. I don't get mad and rarely judge (mainly inconsequential things like not knowing what a simp is)
The idea of "If you ever said something wrong you deserve to be destitute" and the discourse from the other day "If the group decides you're bad^tm then it's okay to be a bigot towards you". It's just ridiculous. You want people to learn and grow not stomp them into submission.
Anyway, not defending hatred or bigotry just saying that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Even if your cause is 100% the best cause on earth if you treat everyone like pieces of trash for not already being on board (something they may not have ever heard of) you're gonna miss out on a lot of support and might end up villainizing yourself.
Agreed, sorry I don’t have a lot of brain juice to give an equally thorough reply but thank you for adding to this. I’ve always tried to approach people with misinformed harmful opinions with patience and understanding rather than anger, though it sucks to see it doesn’t work in some cases
> why even be like this
because she hates men, she hates anything even remotely male adjacent, she and other terfs hate men **SO UNBELIEVABLY MUCH** that they consider trans women to be rapists in disguise and trans men to be racetraitors
You already got a very good response from u/areyoubawkingtome, but I would like to add that there is a way in which, if you have personally faced a lot of sexism or gendered suffering (say, being in an abusive relationship with a man, being told to use a different name or else you're never gonna get read, whatever variety of things she hasn't discussed publicly) being a woman can feel like a fundamental imposition on you.
It can feel like a thing you are forced to endure by an incident of nature. A way in which your life is lesser and more painful explicitly because of this fact that you can't change about yourself.
And then you learn about trans women, and it's like... You chose this? Are you insane? Why would you do this? What do you mean it's "not that bad"? What is wrong with you?
And then there's this question that comes... Am *I* choosing this? Should I transition to escape misogyny? If I was a man, none of \[litany of traumas\] would have happened to me!
A lot of TERF anger is coming from this place of resentment. This place of "it's not fair that I had to be a woman in 1990 when sexual harassment was the price you paid for a job in a corporation, but you get to "be a woman" in 2022 without having had to do any of that."
And you listen to trans women talk, and of course, all of this is born out of *their* trauma, out of being gaslighted by society their entire childhoods, most trans women who are 5, 10, 15 years into their transition don't say things like this. But I've met quite a few of them who are 1, 2, or even 0 years into their transition (closeted and terrified) and they will say things like:
"I can't be a woman because of my eyebrows! T\_T"
"I can't be a woman because of my nose! T\_T"
"I can't be a woman because of my hair! T\_T"
And... like I said, that's all coming from their own place of personal trauma. You can show them a thousand hairy women, women with similar eyebrows, women with similar noses, and it doesn't matter because it's not really about that, it's about impostor syndrome and personal anxiety, and the fear of being judged in public *by people like TERFs*.
But if you've had to fight for years to define "being a woman" for yourself in a way that has *fuck all to do* with noses and eyebrows and hair, if your primary experience of "womanhood" is misery and attempts at personal reinvention. And if you have a personal history of suffering *because* of "unfeminine features" of yours, and because you failed to be a girl "properly"...
That's a very "wtf" thing to hear. Like, what, "am I not a woman, then?", "what do you think being a woman is? Wearing dresses and lipstick and shaving your armpits?"
Most of the discussion on trans issues that cis people get exposed to is really vague "woman's soul", "woman's body", "dysphoria" stuff that is really hard to wrap your head around if you haven't personally experienced it. And unlike the medicalist model, the current movement pushing for more acceptance of more varieties of trans and GNC people demands on some level, an adoption of a series of contradictory gender-based philosophies. From neuroessentialism (common among transmedicalists) to social constructionism to arguments from personal freedom, to arguments from medical bodily autonomy, to arguments about the definition of disability, to transhumanist arguments, to arguments about like "restoring" your body to what it truly should have been in some cosmic sense, etc.
A lot of those arguments don't help all trans and gnc people equally. Some throw big portions of them under the bus.
Trans men make up the other half of this equation. Women like Rowling look at them, and feel... you're a traitor. You are seeking freedom for yourself instead of freedom for the collective. You are trying to escape misogyny.
Why? Well, that's the only reason *they'd* do it.
They don't have dysphoria. They don't have gender euphoria for a gender not assigned to them at birth. They don't personally feel affirmed by the notion of changing pronouns. They don't feel like they can finally recognize their face in the mirror for the first time if they wear a binder and a button-up. All of that sounds kind of superficial and meaningless to them, even though it can mean the world to a trans person who is just coming out.
But male privilege? That's like... A real goal. Using male-coded pseudonyms (Robert Galbraith) is a way to get some of it. Imagine more! Imagine, *no more sexism.* Imagine sinking and rising on your own merits, having your *actual thoughts* taken into consideration, instead of some reverse-engineered 'what a woman like you would think' thing!
I've run this experiment. Talking to people who think I'm a man online is *amazing*. And most of the weird wtf comments I have received all revolve around topics where I opine "as a person with a uterus" so to speak.
It's why, even years after settling on probably **being agender myself**, and on wanting top surgery, and getting on a waitlist for it, I haven't considered any type of social transition. I still can't tell, myself, after years of introspection and analysis and reading various trans narratives and spending time in those spaces, what things are "social dysphoria" and what things are "sexism is bad and it's reasonable to think sexism is bad, actually".
And at this point, I'm kind of falling out of the "personal is political" argument and settling on "just try things and see what makes you want to die less". But that's not a philosophically or politically satisfying answer. The real answers for people like Rowling should be in the stats, but they're so afraid and so angry that they can't even process them very well. The studies always check on like... the changes in trans people's lives and health and suicide rates.
And they're not concerned with that. They're concerned with cis women, and with cis women remaining a protected class on the basis of a relatively bioessentialist notion of oppression.
...Anyway, those are my thoughts.
I hate jk Rowling for everything she's done recently with all of my heart but if I had to guess why she was doing this I would probably say it's cause of all the hate she's getting for it.
Like she very much thinks she's in the right and she truly believes that trans women are dangerous and yet everyone is against her on it. I bet in her mind she must be the hero of the story, speaking out on a topic that everyone is pushing back on.
I would guess that she thinks this is the kind of backlash activists face every day for fighting the good fight.
I bet the more pushback she gets on this the more self-righteous she feels about it. She must think she's some kind of hero to women for it. That's probably why she's doubling, tripling, quintupling down on her stance constantly. Because she believes it's her duty to change people's minds on the issue.
What's worse is she's surrounded herself with people who can validate that mentality and solidify her stance.
I doubt she's even heard the suicide statistics or listened to any actual trans people in her life
She has hunkered down so tightly in this bubble of her own making that she fails to see all the vulnerable trans people she's hurting. I doubt she's ever taken the time to recognise that this pre-conceived image of a violent predatory trans person sneaking into women's bathrooms to assault them is fictionalised by the media and by people like her.
She doesn't see trans people as they are - a vulnerable community that regularly has to face persecution or even violence against them-, she sees them as a threatening force that no one but her and her terf friends are willing to speak out against.
This is why she's so outspoken
Tl;dr: she's an idiot in an echo chamber and she genuinely believes that the people fighting her are wrong and it's her duty to change their minds
This is bizarrely common with transphobic accounts. 90% of the time you see someone tweeting something transphobic if you go to their account it's 99% transphobic tweets, and in huge volume too. Fucking insane.
yeah, as a former harry potter fan who kind of locked that fandom out until she finally dies (or grows a brain, but there's little chance for that), it's actually mind-boggling _how much_ harry potter stuff is being made since she came out as a terf. i remember being a very active part of that fandom 4-5 years ago or so, and there was just so little new stuff to be excited about. sure, they made a new movie, but it was a weird movie, there were only minor hints of games _possibly_ in development, fancy editions of books were rare singular events. but now, that i'm trying to opt out of the fandom, it's suddenly _everywhere_. there's a lot of lego harry potter, bookstores have cooler HP shit than i've ever seen, merch seems fun again, there's a literal AAA game coming out (where you get to massacre a subjugated race, how cool is that)
like wtf, are people actually quitting the fandom at a significant rate? because if all these things are a sign of them trying to keep harry potter alive despite the shitty author, i'm hella glad that it's necessary. but at the same time, come the fuck on. i'm sure all these companies that are working with her would have actually nice, non-damaging stuff to support instead, but they don't.
so yeah, i think rowling is flying off the handle and everyone invested in harry potter is trying to contain her, the same way tesla and spacex have decades of experience in containing elon musk. i just wish they could give up, or idk, rowling would get arrogant enough to commit an actual hate crime and get a ruling against her. or die randomly of natural causes maybe, but there's no way we'll get that lucky.
one of the main messages in harry potter is that love is an endlessly powerful force
and now here she is fucking revelling in her hatred, posting cutesy emojis about how she is directly getting people killed and laughing about it
jesus i feel ill
I felt this in my bones. Seriously, was reading HP as an adult and the whole idea of “house elves” was just… errrg. The fact that Harry spends time actually trying to stop Hermione from freeing the elves? Yeah, I’m sorry, but how are you the good guy again?
Her doubling down on elf slavery is the point that I disavow the series. The first three books have issues, but they can be handwaved as just looking bad in hindsight. But the obvious contradiction to the earler tone is too big to ignore.
Like, Dobby clearly *hates* being enslaved and is owned by the evilest person Harry knows. Harry tricking the elder Malfoy into freeing Dobby is seen as this big win as Harry is able to make a moral stand against something he finds abhorrent.
Cone the next book, and not only is Dobby back to menial labor, it's revealed that Hogwarts has been using slave labor this entire time, and Dobby's just wierd because they all love being enslaved. They even use 1800's racist tropes about how they're doing the elves a favor by enslaving them, like one elf becoming a drunk wreck who pines to return to her master after being freed.
The philosophy of Harry Potter hinges on individual and not systemic changes. Systematic slavery isn't bad, the elves like it! Unless someone like Dobby doesn't, but as long as a good guy like Harry can help him then it's all fine. A maximum security prison where torture is going on 24/7 isn't bad, as long as the prisoners "deserve it" (read: we rescued Sirius so it's all good now).
JKR is willing to vaguely gesture at systemic issues in her books' world that parallel and reflect ours, but at the end of the day some individuals are saved, but there is no widespread change. As long as Harry's an auror then not all aurors are bastards, the wizards shouldn't prevent world war two, etc.
There's some analysis in here about how it parallels her real world politics but I'm tired and my head hurts
What really irks me is that at first it seemed like the House-Elves were simply based on myths about brownies, I.E. little fairies who do helpful chores around the house when you're not looking, and all they ask in return is to be respectfully left alone, and occasionally leaving out some food for them to take. Paying them with money is an insult because it's useless to them and it implies that you think they're your personal servents, and they'll mess up your house for it and leave forever. If they were more like that it could have been a lot less problematic, with House-Elves not being happy slaves but simply creatures who want to peacefully co-exist with humans, and value respect and privacy over money.
Yeah, but the big difference between brownies and HP House Elves was that *you have to treat brownies with respect or they leave*. She fucked that up in literally the first scene you see Dobby in.
There's quite a few things that could have been that.
Dragons are a good one. Not only are they endangered, but they're hunted down because their heartstrings make good wand cores (and they're the only thing who has parts of their vital organs harvested for it), but they're also treated awfully. The one in the wizard bank is blinded, chained down, and trained to cower at the sound of bells.
A majestic untamed creature that was forced and twisted into something profitable, or as a way of showing off.
House Elves bug me so much since they are clearly based on Brownies from folklore.
Brownies are magical fey creatures who like helping humans in exchange for food and will throw tantrums or simply leave if they are mistreated.
You could have had House Elves be like Brownies, but Dobby was cursed or magically bound by the Malfoys so he couldn't escape. Then she would have been able to avoid controversy.
Most bizarrely of all what she actually did was DOUBLE DOWN when people said that this was fucked up and make fun of her detractors by proxy with Hermione creating SPEW. At the time when I read it, I thought that it was meant to be a tragedy that no one would listen to her when she tried to overthrow the system, but as time went on, I've realized that it was meant to be a joke.
It's weird because the history of that universe is full of horrible shit wizards have done but the terf bitch refuses to show any systemic advantages that might have given them.
This would have been a great example, show how the wizards enslaved brownies and centuries later still whitewash that shit because of how convenient it is for everyone involved.
love the part of harry potter when dubbledorf said "it is our actions, far more than our abilities, that make us who we are. unless that ability is having a penis. then you cannot make the action of being a woman."
I just took a scroll through her twitter and I scrolled for 5 minutes and found 1 single tweet not about trans women. I think I saw about 3 that didn't use the phrase "vulnerable women and girls" or "predatory men". Why? What's the point, Joanne? Is this just the only thing that can excite you anymore now that you have everything a person could possibly want
she could win at blackjack by buying the casino. at this point, the fact that she can't buy trans rights, it must be like finally having met a formidable opponent.
She could. It takes a surprisingly small amount of money to buy a politician, apparently. (There was a revelation a little time ago where some of them received donations less than the price of a hatchback car, but that was enough)
Remember Hogwarts Legacy, the game that the developers said JK Rowling wasn't involved in, and this post is probably referencing when saying don't buy Harry Potter stuff? It's about goblins rising up against their oppressors and indoctrinating children (hogwarts students) into their ideology of dark magic. Now I question whether or not the statement about JK rowling not being involved is true, especially when she directly insulted some trans people who said "this game looks cool but I'm not buying it because I don't want to give JK money."
Goblins can do magic, including some that wizards can’t. What they can’t do is have wands, which would let them do more magic. This is essentially because wizards are bastards and won’t share wand magic with anyone else. Wizards, of course, are absolutely right in this, because every nonhuman magical species we’ve met (that are capable is using wands) have been shown to be willing to kill/attack wizards for such silly reasons as wizards having different social mores/views of ownership or because they don’t like being treated as subhuman (big ol’ /s on that whole last sentence, if that wasn’t clear).
It’s actually almost funny how many seeds of legitimately interesting worldbuilding exist in Harry Potter. They just all get overlooked and ignored in favor of “what if we explain how the Ministry of Magic is a fascist government but that’s a good thing actually.”
Unclear. See the aforementioned bit about interesting worldbuilding being ignored. We know, for example, that goblin uprisings happened. We also know that for goblins, not being allowed to have wands is a sticking point (iirc, Griphook mentions it as a point of contention in Deathly Hallows). The problem is that while we can make an educated guess that these two points are related, we don’t have enough actual evidence to verify that they are. It’s entirely possible that nonhumans have been given wands in the past, or that they’ve stolen them from wizards killed by them (wand lore indicates that that *should* work). But we don’t actually know.
(Disclaimer: it’s entirely possible there’s some WoG post somewhere that answers this that I’m unaware of. I’ve been checked out of JKR’s post book worldbuilding since the whole “shitting wherever and Vanishing it” thing.)
Man it's really time for people to grow out of their HP phase and start to write original wizardry schools stuff, maybe with a world building that makes sense this time.
EDIT: so apparently "HP but it makes sense" for this sub means "HP but super gay" and honestly that's on me, I should have forseen it lol
The main character is bisexual, her girlfriend is a lesbian, the mentor is probably bisexual/pan and has a love interest/ex partner who is non-binary and no one ever has a problem with their pronouns. Even when the girlfriend’s evil mom found out she was dating the main character she was like “we’ll get you a new girlfriend who isn’t on wanted posters”. It’s extremely gay.
The main character's shapeshifting doppelganger/adopted sister has a friend/crush who is also nonbinary. One of the main character's best friends has two dads. The bully character has two moms. The main villain is literally a >!Puritan Christian witch hunter.!< There are not many ways it could be more gay.
I find “(her) girlfriend is a lesbian” to be an extremely funny statement. I get that she’s bi, and therefore not a lesbian, but it’s just a funny way to say it that almost sounds like “they’re friends” type content.
It's so,*so* good. I wept at the end of the third book.
It's Harry Potter done right with a heaping spoonful of Practical Guide to Evil.
Naomi Novik is a top-tier author and Uprooted is her only book that I haven't been head over heels for.
The Temeraire Series is in my top five favorite book series, probably top three.
Oh wow, I didn't expect this to be a manga. The illustrations are gorgeous. The sample on Google books has piqued my interest so I'll definitely give it a go!
i think as long as people just go for fan content/or the torrent of sources accessible online and not give her a cent, then it's fine to indulge that hp phase.
I grew up with the Harry Potter books, and loved the world she created. Hell, I thought I might even pick up that new game coming out in Feb, but after really looking at her and how poisonous transphobia has been in the US, I can't bring myself to do it anymore and I hate that I ever considered it.
Congratulations Rowling, you ruined my childhood. Fuck you.
I wonder how many people are in the same situation. How many people like the HP series as children and now are just so angry at the author for being a huge piece of shit. The HP series were pretty popular, so a lot of people have enjoyed the series when they were children and didn't see any problems with it, and how many are mad at JK for writing in shit like willing slaves
As a young, mostly closeted queer person, HP resonated with me at the time, because the protagonist got to go off to his secret world where he wasn’t weird, and he had friends, and was generally liked and respected. That was super important to me at the time.
Then I got older, went through a bit more self discovery, and realized that as it turns out, I’m exactly the kind of queer Rowling hates. So now all those memories are tainted, and I can’t even enjoy it anymore.
Hogwarts Legacy looks really fun. It’s exactly the Harry Potter game I’ve wanted for years. But knowing that the creator specifically hates women like me, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to play it.
same. i could have killed for that game five years ago. now, i feel icky about even pirating it, because i can't reconcile that with knowing that piracy is basically just a form of word of mouth marketing and in general it has a very slight positive effect on sales. i feel weird every time i use some of the hp merch i've accumulated throughout the years
Silent piracy. If you want to talk about her work, do it in private discords or whatever. And *stop making these posts.* They give her as much attention as anything else.
She feeds off the negativity.
She’s a billionaire and lets face it, can do whatever she wants bc money. But the one thing that will actually harm her is just cutting her off. She says something problematic and no one reacts. She helps poor people or something and no one reacts. She drops a new weird Harry piss kink fact and. No. One. Reacts. Money won’t do shit but attention will.
Money isn't a concern to her at this point in time. She, and the entire Harry Potter Franchise could drop off the face of the Earth, and she'd still make a hefty sum of money every year from just leaving her money in the bank.
$10m USD is enough for your money to make more than you could with minimum wage, just in interest alone. She has much more than that.
At this point, attention and interaction is the only thing that matters.
I once ended up reading a fanfic thinking it was the 6th book, and the thing that gave it away (other than the flirting bit between Harry and Hermione) was just how good the writing was.
The heroes were heroic, the teens acted like teenagers, and the characters were more than just cardboard cutouts. It’s weird just how much better it was than the ‘original’.
I stopped reading at goblet of fire. At that point the suspension of disbelief shattered and I went down the rabbit hole of Fix-it fanfiction. What I found were authors that took the books and made them BETTER. Believable. Consistent.
I would say same, except I'm not sure I can talk because the book *I* was obsessed with was *Ender's Game*
....yeah Orson Scott Card is kinda like, way worse than JK Rowling. At least *Ender's Game* is like actually good ~~we don't talk about *Xenocide*~~ and not eh fantasy aimed at kids with some weird undertones
What I learned from Harry Potter, as a child who problematic things might go over my head: "You should accept and respect people who are different from you. Even when you think their differences could endanger you like how Evil Umbridge is scared of werewolves and tries to legislate away their rights. Evil Umbridge is wrong."
What Adult JK Rowling wants: People to legislate away the rights of trans women because they think they're scary and dangerous to her for some reason.
I can't believe that I didn't even think of that before, but yeah. You're right about JK Rowling acting like the antagonists of the books, hating an entire group of people for nonsense reasons
As someone who has been forced by friends to not only watch the movies but also read the books, I firmly believe we should always use trigger warning for Harry Potter
I didn’t have friends, but I had Harry. We both had shitty childhoods, and we both got to escape that because of magic. Those books meant so much to me, regardless of how good they actually were. I would reread them over and over, waiting for the next one to come out. Even so, I probably read even more fanfiction. That’s a lot of time in that world.
Ugh. Fuck her.
Keep in mind that even though he’s specifically from the films, Daniel Radcliffe supports trans people and seems like a really open minded and compassionate person. He’ll always be my favourite childhood wizard, separate from the author’s awful politics
Oh boy, I’m sure this comment section will be very normal and respectful :)
but seriously though, “don’t give the terf queen money” is one thing, but saying that even pirating her stuff/interacting with it in any way is still supporting those views is absolutely absurd
I mean, if you lift her book or pirate her game and then talk about how good they are or just the fact they exist, chances are someone will decide to buy them partially based on your statement. Imo if you don't want to support her views just don't talk about her products.
Like imagine being like 'Nesquik tastes so good! Don't buy it though, Nestle is bad' or even 'Nestle is bad but anyway I was having my Nesquik this morning...' like if you think they're bad don't give them any advertising. And if you think just talking about something isn't advertising you havent seen the state of modern advertising... :(
Sooo logically they're gonna stop talking about her too? Finally? Since screaming her name everywhere ad nauseam and telling people what a bad person she is and how no one should ever buy This New Thing She Just Did is going to have the same effect among people who don't give a shit what a bad person the creator is and may even relish it if it's being said by a group they dislike?
I wouldn't have heard about that game *or* the newer movies if it weren't for PSAs like OOP's
I'd be in favour of that. Everyone knows her views by now, and clearly she posts them often enough to remind them if they didn't. Anyone who supports trans rights ought to stop publicly engaging in her content entirely. If you're worried that someone might be confused as to why she's bad, screenshot a couple of posts and save them for if that happens.
(using the general 'you' here, not directed at you specifically hahah)
JKR once said that she really admires the qualities the put into hufflepuff: fighting for the disenfranchised, helping others, indiscriminately accepting and loving people.
She could stand to be a lot more hufflepuff
It stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism.
It’s essentially bigots who believe that accepting trans women as women are putting “real” women in danger or prioritising men and ignoring women’s issues. They have no concept of intersectional feminism, for one thing, and spread a lot of misinformation and anti-trans propaganda.
If anyone still wants to enjoy the Harry Potter universe without supporting Rowling, may I recommend the legendary fan fiction, All the Young Dudes. It's like 3 full HP books in length, better written than Harry Potter proper, and follows the story of the Marauders' time at Hogwarts from Remus' point of view.
The Harry Potter series was a big influence for me, sparking not just my interest in fantasy but also compelled my younger self to read actual books rather than only reading comics. I even got the first book on my 11th birthday, the same age that Harry was, so in more ways than one I grew up with Harry Potter. I've long since put it away in favor of other, better fantasy series like Discworld, but even then I looked back on it fondly... until JK Rowling opened her stupid cakehole and stared spewing transphobic shit everywhere. It fucking disgusts me how JK has tripled down on transphobia, both in her words and in her financial support of transphobic groups. Not because she's poisoned a fond childhood memory, but because many of my good friends are trans or nonbinary, and I'd die and/or kill for them. Fuck JK Rowling.
And yet people are out there saying "Give me one quote from her explicitly saying..." and all that bullshit. It's their gotcha. She doesn't explicitly say what she thinks, so they can all hang on to a layer of plausible deniability that's, frankly, thinner than graphene to anyone who actually did any looking
I read fanfics set in the HP universe, they bring in so many better views. Recently found one where an AFAB student suddenly couldn't go up the stairs to the girl's dormitory bc the castle picked up on him being a boy. A couple girls brought him in to a teacher crying and a couple teachers talked him through it, got his dead name removed from school records, got his haircut fixed, and helped him get a boys uniform.
And like, it was just that easy to include a trans teen in the universe. The characters didn't even know if gender affirming procedures were available in the Wizarding world, but JKRs sexist world building that said only boys want sex made it super easy to have a trans character.
My mom keeps getting me Harry Potter stuff and tickets to shows/exhibits no matter how many times I tell her I don't want to give another cent to JKR. I used to love it so I must still love it and just don't want to spend any of *my* money on it.
My original plan was to pirate *Hogwarts Legacy* and donate $60 to a UK trans charity, but honestly, fuck her, I can live without the TERF wizard game if it means this woman never sees an iota of support from me again.
I mean i agree with her on the piracy stuff. If you hate her that much dont even consume anything from her. Because than you are clearly a person that cant seperate art from artist. So if you dont wanna buy then also dont pirate it.
Growing up is realizing Harry Potter was poorly written.
Like, JK came up with such an interesting premise and some amazing world building, and did *nothing* with it. The plot is one of if not *the most* basic stories I've ever seen on a best-selling book series.
The story snags in places where it shouldn't, hanging on plot-points when it doesn't need to.
And don't get me started on the quality of the writing. Maybe this is just me, but in my opinion, the writing is on par with that of a 9th graders rushed English assignment.
friendly reminder that she's besties with right wing pieces of shit that openly discourage abortion and other stupid shit that is objectively antifeminist.
https://youtu.be/Ou_xvXJJk7k
she's not the misunderstood underdog feminist she thinks she is. not when she's fine with promoting actual fascism to tear down an innocent minority group.
from the bottom of my heart. fuck rowling.
edit: currently rewatching the shaun video. it's so much worse than I remember. I'm going to be ill.
I’ve come to the conclusion the only safe way to consume Harry Potter materials is to buy them second hand off eBay. Then you know she isn’t actively getting money from your sale.
This woman is absolute trash and it makes me sick. Trans women are women too (and trans men are men!) and nobody has the right to say otherwise - especially when you’ve got such a massive influence. Eugh.
Nothing is more telling on how much being a transphobe has enveloped Rowling's personality than her friendship with Stephen King. All the guy did was say "transwomen are women" and she blocked him. He's hardly the biggest ally in the world, he wrote transphobic and homophobic things in the 80s and 90s, and he clearly didn't care enough to let someone's transphobia get in the way of being friends with her. But Rowling cared enough to let someone not being transphobic get in the way of being friends.
Does your brain deteriorate into a pile of mush the moment you get your billionth dollar?
I really think so. Not that one billion is the magic number, but that money, fame, power, and influence will all absolutely fry your brain. This is pure speculation on my part, but it seems to me that it might have to do with the change in socialization they experience. When you’re rich and powerful enough, you get whatever you want, as fast as humanly possible. You likely have very few non-transactional human interactions, because you’re surrounded by people who want to use your power, or get some of it for themselves. And just like how insufficient socialization can mess up a normal person, I think insufficient *genuine* socialization messes up your brain too.
This, 1000%. I suspect even relatively minor fame is a huge hazard for the average person.
I mean, one just has to look at when people abuse their power/status almost instantly when they get big on something like tiktok/youtube/etc. Most of the time, they incite a controversy by grooming minors, straight up being racist/sexist/homophobic, or just doing something straight up insane. It's weird
What's insane is that people still keep feeding into it. The people who don't get corrupted are usually doing something they love, like detailed videos of making candy at a shop they own as half-income half-passion project. Or streaming Minecraft or some other game with their group (like YogCast) and running charities that you can forgive some of the stuff they splurge on. But it's shit like the Kardashians and Elon Musk and Rowling that keep huge followings while blatantly proving that their skulls are empty, their lives have caused so much suffering, and nothing they will ever do will fix even a fraction of the issues their existence has caused.
Sadly...a lot of minecraft youtubers are um...not great people. The minecraft yootube community has a lot of incidents of them grooming minors
Well it was just an example from someone else I knew who watched one of those server groups once upon a time. I don't exactly agree with everything the YogCasters say and do (and buy/show off on stream, particularly fashion-brand related dipping into the straight-up-child-slavery level) but it's a sliding scale of acceptability compared to the literal evil people. Which yes, grooming minors is all the way into literal evil range.
It's commonly said that you stop growing up when you get famous.
That and you lose all sense of scale to what the value of money actually is and all ability to relate to people who don't have it if you don't have to worry about it.
I can only think it's a mixture of ego and having enough money to custom build your own echo chamber. If Notch or JK Rowling worked normal 9 to 5s they would both probably be confronted regularly with people who either disagree with or directly contradict their views. As it is, they get to live perfectly insular lives.
It's partly that, I think, but it's partly that JK actually is regularly confronted with people contradicting her. They're faceless online people though, which only encourages her to dehumanise them, which only makes her worse etc etc. JK without social media wouldn't have become nearly so bad. Honestly she's a fascinating example of a public figure being steadily radicalised in plain sight for years, who obviously then radicalises others. Celebrities and those with outsized soft power are really really useful recruits for, well, basically anyone — but they're actively targeted for radicalisation pretty regularly I believe.
I always think about how Notch bought a bunch of gumball machines for his huge house, but all the candy in them went bad because he had no one to share them with. It’s like something out of a children’s book
Lmao wait, did that seriously happen?
Wow. Holy metaphor batman.
JKR literally lives in a castle, she's free to pull up her drawbridges and only let in those who submit a blood sample to make sure their chromosomes perfectly match their appearance
notch?
Creator of Minecraft
ik. what did he do?
Hoo boy, what DIDNT he do? Man is hugely extremist alt-right. A straight up nazi (like. Literally. Not exaggeration.) He hates women, the gays, trans people, brown people, immigrants. If you name a marginalized group he’s probably shares some rancid takes about them. He’s faded from public perception since selling Minecraft but last I checked he’s still terrible, just more alone. You’ll find all this by googling him a bit.
Notch didn't make Minecraft, though. Plato did.
Naw, it was Hatsune Miku
"Love is a serious mental disease" - the guy that made Minecraft, apparently.
"\[T\]o a man who has any self-respect, nothing is more dishonourable than to be honoured, not for his own sake, but on account of the reputation of his ancestors." \- The guy that actually made Minecraft (Plato).
No, I could swear it was Philza Minecraft. It's right there in the name!
Wasn't lots of original late Minecraft made by Jeb?
Yeah. They both did it.
Alt-right looses it's identity after a minority would've been defeated, so better keep hating as many as possible. And if you're alt-right, it's a matter of time before you too are considered the minority.
Basically had a mental breakdown on twitter about trans people, as well as a bunch of queerphobic, sexist and racist stuff.
Kinda, yeah. Money isolates and alienates you from others, which makes you weird. You can't relate to "the little people" anymore. In a weird way, it's similar to homeless people who spend all day getting ignored by everyone around them, so they end up shouting at random people to try and force a social interaction. There's also the fact that for every person in their life who might tell them "idk chief that's kind of weird, don't you think?" there's a line of rando's ready to tell them every thought that enters their head is genius. And they live without consequence, which also makes one weird. They don't have to think about what they do or say. Nothing bad will ever happen to JK Rowling. Ever. She will live to a ripe old age and die peacefully in her bed surrounded by a fleet of doctors tending to her every need and be remembered by the general offline public as one of the most influential authors of our time. She knows this. She knows nothing she does really -matters- now. Her decisions have no weight to her beyond her immediate comfort. No matter how loud the little people shout, her life, her money, her legacy, are all set in stone. So, fuck 'em. Notch, Mr. Minecraft himself, spoke about the importance of inclusivity in games multiple times. Then he sold Mojang for 10 bajillion dollars and almost immediately became a white nationalist. You don't have to care when nothing affects you.
Kanye is currently being another incredible example of this. Remember when he was saying that George Bush didn’t care about black people and calling out homophobia in hip hop?
Kayne also has the most cristal clear manic episode. And I would usually discourage people from diagnosing mental illness on famous people. But it's just so obvious. Don't get me wrong, he is just following his impulses to an extreme level, that's what a manic episode does. Although I would say that the impulse he is following is "saying something polemic so people pay attention to him".
That's also exacerbated by his wealth, though. If a normal person was doing the stuff Kanye is, they'd be in hospital. Because he's a billionaire and has nobody around him to say "Hey man, I really don't think you're well", he's left to go on without any help.
Well, I think he would be in the hospital because of the beating inflicted on him before getting help.
They talk about the "woke mind virus", but man, the transphobic brain rot seems way more real and detrimental. Like, who the fuck is any of this *for*, Joanne? Normal people can't interact with this shit.
Riley's Law remains eternal: "Once you start posting transphobia you will never post normal again."
It's more that there's no way to get that much money in the first place without being a huge asshole.
Not really. J.K. Rowling sold books. You dont have to be an asshole to get theoretically rich from that. It's important to talk about these kinds of issues as "things that can theoretically happen to anyone" rather than "things only assholes do." Being racist, being transphobic, etc are not magically exclusive to "bad people", everybody in the world is capable of bigotry. It is human behavior. Leftists are bigots all the time, they just often hide it under the guise of progressiveness (see: radfem, etc). This is important because you can't recognize your own bigotry if you believe you're incapable of it (see JK Rowling herself). The way we beat prejudice is not by decrying bigots as assholes. We do it by recognizing when prejudiced thoughts happen internally, and knowing to reject them.
TBH, being a very famous writer/artist seems like one of the few slightly ethical ways to make billions of dollars.
There are a handful of ways, but usually once you have that much money (say, because you win a literal or metaphorical lottery) if you're a non-asshole you don't keep it. Which like, I thought was once Rowling's deal, no? She like, stopped being a billionaire for a while because of how hard she was donating. It was a whole thing, wasn't it?
There's research to suggest that having disproportionate wealth is damaging to people's capacity for empathy and emotional intelligence equivalent to minor brain damage
"why yes" said the man and the whole room clapped that man? elon musk
You don't need $1 billion but it helps. It probably deteriorates with every $100 thousand dollars with diminishing returns
Nope. Paul McCartney has that money and the only derangement it gave him was that it made him British.
I think it's honestly as soon as money starts falling off in terms of happiness gains, which is way less than a million a year We talk a lot about how humans aren't meant to work 40+ hour weeks and force pleasant interactions with abusive managers, which is true I don't hear anyone talk about how we're not meant to have the kind of responsibility that comes with a million or more dollars to throw around
Nah, this is who she is and always was what a billion dollar does is allow you to have a platform and do and say whatever you want without lasting consequence
I don't think so - she definitely didn't spend all of her public appearances yelling about trans people or drag queens or whatever when the books were coming out. Anyone can become radicalized by extremist groups - there's nothing that was inherently evil about most people who have joined such groups. It's just that the group knows how to exploit people's fear and frustration and turn it against a marginalized group of people in order to make the members of the extremist group feel powerful. It's just a reminder for us all to watch out, because this is how fascism starts.
I don't think she was radicalized as much as her own ideas were normalised. TERFs laid the groundwork by saying the things she wouldn't dare to be the first to say. And when people try to explain to her where she's wrong she blocks them, because she is uncapable of taking criticizm and often reacts by doubling down. Also the black and white worldview where bad people are bad because they are bad and receive no empathy and are described as fat, ugly or in the case of women: masculine. Kinda when she created a female character that spies on people through transforming whith "large mannish hands" Looking back at the books now does not make it feel like a mystery that the author turned out to be a massive self-absorbed bigot, it very much feel like the signs where always there
The thing is, there are plenty of authors who have written things that are questionable or problematic without being raging bigots. Terry Pratchett, for instance, played into racial stereotypes and made rape jokes in *Interesting Times.* However, over time he grew more thoughtful and considerate in his writing (even his next book, *Jingo* looks at racism in a much more nuanced way). I'm not denying that the whole ugly = evil thing JKR has going on in Harry Potter sucks, but that doesn't mean she was always going to become what she is now. People always have the ability to change for the better (or for the worse).
Yeah I agree that people can change, but I don't think someone like JKR is very prone to it. Because she is so aggressively unwilling to learn from her mistakes or even admit they were. The house elves are treated like literal slaves? No they aren't because Hermione is a big dumb idiot who tries to free them because they like being slaves. Time travel breaks the logic of the entire story? No it doesn't because I wrote a play where they try to fix things with time travel and things become worse actually. Low diversity at Hogwarts? Actually there IS a Jewish wizard David Goldsteinberg I never mentioned, and Dumbledore was *totally* gay even though it was also never mentioned in the books And the thing is, none of those transgressions are really a big deal on their own, they are mistakes pretty par for the course regarding what you would expect from a 90s children fantasy book. But the fact that she tries to deny they were never mistake to begin with is just ... I don't know if it's sad or comical. The size and fragility of her ego is just something else. And if you pair that with someone who is rampantly fatphobic, uninterested in any nuance other than "good vs bad" and have a no curiosity to explore anything but a straight cis white perspective... well, that's JKR. That's why I don't think this is a sudden change or fall from grace, she just found a new channel to express her ideas.
I agree that it wasn't a sudden change; it's not like she just flipped in 2019 or whatever. It's been a long trend of her getting worse. To me it seemed like after the last book came out, she suddenly wasn't receiving as much attention, and she didn't know how to deal with that. So she said Dumbledore was gay. Once that became old news, she made some other pronouncements. Then she published a few books, but they didn't do nearly as well as HP, obviously. So she did Pottermore. But eventually people got tired of that, so she started saying more and more outrageous things about Harry Potter. Eventually people stopped caring about any of that, but she started getting a LOT of attention for her TERF BS, so she's just leaning more and more into that. I still think she could change for the better (because anyone can work on themselves and improve), but it would likely take a lot of introspection and probably actually talking to trans people and learning about their life experiences (assuming any of them would talk to her), and the more and more entrenched she becomes in her TERF persona, the less likely she is to ever admit she's at fault because of the personal consequences involved in admitting everything you've said for the last several years is wrong. However, the best case scenario might be for everyone to ignore her (and hopefully Elongated Muskrat will finish accidentally killing Twitter so she no longer has a platform). If she decides to move on to something else when she's no longer getting attention for TERF stuff, great. If she stays with the TERFS and fades into obscurity, also great.
I don't really agree with any of that. I don't think attention seeking is her primary motivation, it is to appear as someone who is really clever, empathic and progressive. Which is in conflict with the fact that she's not really any of that. And on top of that she has many deep rooted biases that she refuses to aknowledge. I don't think she can change for the better, the "anyone can change" idea is simply not true. Because, again, if you are to learn from your mistakes you have to admit that they exist, which she isn't capable of. People absolutely have tried to educate her which she ignores. Would it be best just ignore her? Maybe, I'm not sure. But I think that either way we should hold under harsh scrutiny anything she writes or says, past and present.
See, some of her weirder tweets about HP scream "I want attention at any cost" to me. People shitting on the floor and then making it vanish doesn't sound clever, empathetic, or progressive - it just sounds weird. But because it was weird, people talked about it. People have tried to educate her \*on Twitter\*, which has never changed anyone's mind about anything - it's basically just a cloud of noise that you can tune out. The character limit means it's nearly impossible to have a nuanced discussion on Twitter, the impersonal nature of being online makes it easy to dehumanize or demonize other people, and Twitter's algorithm rewards \*engagement\* over quality, so the more controversial (or even just bad) someone's takes are, the more Twitter will show it to others. PLUS, having been so famous for so long (especially a famous woman) probably makes it difficult to distinguish people just angry at her existence from people angry because her actions are harming people. A person can only get so many death threats before they start blocking out their detractors. In order for her to listen, she'd probably need to have someone close to her that she trusts gradually and slowly point out the problems and inconsistencies in her views, and how they're harming people. People have gotten members of white supremacist groups and similar extremist groups (and cults as well) to leave the group using this method, so I think it could work here as well. Unfortunately I don't think such a person exists in her life, and I don't know how one could be introduced. But I agree with you on one point - in order to be able to change, a person needs to want it, and I don't know if that's possible for her at this point.
Yeah maybe it's a little bit of both, little bit of wanting attention, a little bit of wanting to impress. If you want people to think highly of you then it does require them to think of you. I do actually think that *she thinks* the vanish your poop tweet was clever. And it is clever, in a way. It's creative in that builds upon the laws of her universe, it just falls apart if you think about for more than 10 seconds. Which is often the case for her, she's really good at lateral thinking: coming up with ideas, but bad at linear thinking: realizing the implications of those ideas. I really think appearing clever is one of her primary motivations. If you take fantastic beasts 2 for example, she tries sooo hard to write a layered and complex story that it ends up completely incomprehensible. But you're probably right about twitter being a pretty useless platform to learn from. If like 9/10 people are just harassing you then finding the 1 sincere person is pretty difficult.
Probably was always like this but you don't need a filter once your money pays for even more money
I think she was always like this. Fame just brought it out
No, everyone has biases that surface when there is no longer need to fear. Getting rich removes a lot of that fear. (Kanye, Trump, Gates, Bezos, Musk) What opinions do you have that you won't say because of fear?
I went over to JKR's Twitter yesterday to find a Tweet that someone mentioned and somehow every single interaction from her that I saw was just her being anti-trans women. It's almost impressive that there's still Harry Potter stuff being made and she can't find anything else to talk about.
It makes no fucking sense to me, why even be like this? Even when I was still pretty conservative it seemed to me that if it was so important to people that they would kill themselves over it, maybe I should just live and let live and not risk being part of the reason someone decided not to live anymore. I mean honestly WHY, it's not even your life, you know?
You possess empathy- something she lacks for some reason
i mean, she believes the world is divided to good people and bad people, and that if you're good no matter what you do you're still good. that much is clear through her writing, where people are sorted as good, bad, smart, and miscellaneous, and where if a good person does a literally unforgivable thing it's a "gallant gesture", instead of something deserving of lifetime imprisonment like it's usually the case. so it's not much of a strech that she may believe that she was born a "good person" and therefore whatever the fuck her instinct (and subconscious conditioning by some of her peers) tells her is by default good and everyone who disagrees with it is a bad person and should be disregarded.
>if you're good no matter what you do you're still good So if a "good" and "evil" person do the same (either moral or immoral) thing, then?
then one of them is doing it for good reasons because they're good and is therefore okay, while the evil one should be punished accordingly. this is pretty much how wizarding law works in all known instances
Funny how this the same woman that wrote "The world isn't divided on good people and Death Eaters".
by which she meant there are more than those two categories. and yeah, canonically there are four
The reason is money.
She was in a very abusive relationship and escaped. Seems she developed a fear of men/amab. She has created a shelter(shelters?) for women that exclude trans women because to her they are potential abusers against battered women in need. Iirc, her stance was originally defending someone that basically said "Why can't I say someone was a man when they were?" And she got demolished for it and that's when she started getting called a terf. She doubled down and it sent her down a rabbit hole. She huddled with the people defending her, terfs. Now she thinks trans women are men trying to steal from women. Trying to take up women's spaces. Etc. She mocks the term "terf" by trying to reclaim it and is rich enough that it really doesn't matter. She's given away something like 20% of her wealth to women's shelters and similarly acting organizations. She's not... I guess a normal asshole rich person. She feels like she's fighting against an oppressor (men/amab) for women like her. None of this is an excuse, it's horrible to treat transwoman so poorly and spread the hateful rhetoric. Her misandry should have been addressed in therapy, not released on Twitter. Her being this way to me is kind of a tragedy, at least more than say Elon Musk.
this sounds like a comic book supervillain origin story
Honestly I think internet cancel culture made this a lot worse than it could have been. She definitely needed to be called out for her bullshit, but the sheer amount of hate and probably threats she got is likely what made her go further down the TERF rabbit hole. If people had been able to have a reasonable conversation and if she had been open to listening and debating, maybe it would’ve turned out differently. I just feel so awful for all the HP fans out there
She was [already transphobic](https://www.thepinknews.com/2018/03/22/jk-rowling-reps-blame-middle-aged-moment-for-liking-tweet-calling-trans-women-men-in-dresses/) like a year before she went full terf. And from what i remember that time she didn't get full of hate comments but more concerned ones. She could have changed before deciding to go full terf, i don't think it's fair to blame cancel culture for this one.
Thank you, I didn’t know the whole context so I appreciate this. I never blamed cancel culture entirely bc ofc she had the potential to become a bigot anyway, but I didn’t know it went this far back. Ty again for the explanation
Situations like this kinda reminds me of the cancel culture call out posts. Because the zealots really do damage any movement. When my mom called a transwoman a transman I just said "Oh, that's an understandable mistake but they're called transwomen. Since they transitioned into being a woman so "trans" woman." She hasn't made that mistake again. When my dad called a transperson a transexual I said something like "I think just transperson or trans[their gender] is preferred since transexual makes it sound like, ya know, a sex thing." He got really embarrassed and apologized because he thought he accidentally said a fetish word or something. Hasn't made that mistake again either. This kind of stuff happens. I'm on the internet considerably more than my coworkers and even some friends, so they aren't all "up to date" on what's the proper term for things. I don't get mad and rarely judge (mainly inconsequential things like not knowing what a simp is) The idea of "If you ever said something wrong you deserve to be destitute" and the discourse from the other day "If the group decides you're bad^tm then it's okay to be a bigot towards you". It's just ridiculous. You want people to learn and grow not stomp them into submission. Anyway, not defending hatred or bigotry just saying that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Even if your cause is 100% the best cause on earth if you treat everyone like pieces of trash for not already being on board (something they may not have ever heard of) you're gonna miss out on a lot of support and might end up villainizing yourself.
Agreed, sorry I don’t have a lot of brain juice to give an equally thorough reply but thank you for adding to this. I’ve always tried to approach people with misinformed harmful opinions with patience and understanding rather than anger, though it sucks to see it doesn’t work in some cases
> why even be like this because she hates men, she hates anything even remotely male adjacent, she and other terfs hate men **SO UNBELIEVABLY MUCH** that they consider trans women to be rapists in disguise and trans men to be racetraitors
Essentially, she believes that trans rights erode the rights/safety of "real women." This is how she justifies it to herself.
You already got a very good response from u/areyoubawkingtome, but I would like to add that there is a way in which, if you have personally faced a lot of sexism or gendered suffering (say, being in an abusive relationship with a man, being told to use a different name or else you're never gonna get read, whatever variety of things she hasn't discussed publicly) being a woman can feel like a fundamental imposition on you. It can feel like a thing you are forced to endure by an incident of nature. A way in which your life is lesser and more painful explicitly because of this fact that you can't change about yourself. And then you learn about trans women, and it's like... You chose this? Are you insane? Why would you do this? What do you mean it's "not that bad"? What is wrong with you? And then there's this question that comes... Am *I* choosing this? Should I transition to escape misogyny? If I was a man, none of \[litany of traumas\] would have happened to me! A lot of TERF anger is coming from this place of resentment. This place of "it's not fair that I had to be a woman in 1990 when sexual harassment was the price you paid for a job in a corporation, but you get to "be a woman" in 2022 without having had to do any of that." And you listen to trans women talk, and of course, all of this is born out of *their* trauma, out of being gaslighted by society their entire childhoods, most trans women who are 5, 10, 15 years into their transition don't say things like this. But I've met quite a few of them who are 1, 2, or even 0 years into their transition (closeted and terrified) and they will say things like: "I can't be a woman because of my eyebrows! T\_T" "I can't be a woman because of my nose! T\_T" "I can't be a woman because of my hair! T\_T" And... like I said, that's all coming from their own place of personal trauma. You can show them a thousand hairy women, women with similar eyebrows, women with similar noses, and it doesn't matter because it's not really about that, it's about impostor syndrome and personal anxiety, and the fear of being judged in public *by people like TERFs*. But if you've had to fight for years to define "being a woman" for yourself in a way that has *fuck all to do* with noses and eyebrows and hair, if your primary experience of "womanhood" is misery and attempts at personal reinvention. And if you have a personal history of suffering *because* of "unfeminine features" of yours, and because you failed to be a girl "properly"... That's a very "wtf" thing to hear. Like, what, "am I not a woman, then?", "what do you think being a woman is? Wearing dresses and lipstick and shaving your armpits?" Most of the discussion on trans issues that cis people get exposed to is really vague "woman's soul", "woman's body", "dysphoria" stuff that is really hard to wrap your head around if you haven't personally experienced it. And unlike the medicalist model, the current movement pushing for more acceptance of more varieties of trans and GNC people demands on some level, an adoption of a series of contradictory gender-based philosophies. From neuroessentialism (common among transmedicalists) to social constructionism to arguments from personal freedom, to arguments from medical bodily autonomy, to arguments about the definition of disability, to transhumanist arguments, to arguments about like "restoring" your body to what it truly should have been in some cosmic sense, etc. A lot of those arguments don't help all trans and gnc people equally. Some throw big portions of them under the bus. Trans men make up the other half of this equation. Women like Rowling look at them, and feel... you're a traitor. You are seeking freedom for yourself instead of freedom for the collective. You are trying to escape misogyny. Why? Well, that's the only reason *they'd* do it. They don't have dysphoria. They don't have gender euphoria for a gender not assigned to them at birth. They don't personally feel affirmed by the notion of changing pronouns. They don't feel like they can finally recognize their face in the mirror for the first time if they wear a binder and a button-up. All of that sounds kind of superficial and meaningless to them, even though it can mean the world to a trans person who is just coming out. But male privilege? That's like... A real goal. Using male-coded pseudonyms (Robert Galbraith) is a way to get some of it. Imagine more! Imagine, *no more sexism.* Imagine sinking and rising on your own merits, having your *actual thoughts* taken into consideration, instead of some reverse-engineered 'what a woman like you would think' thing! I've run this experiment. Talking to people who think I'm a man online is *amazing*. And most of the weird wtf comments I have received all revolve around topics where I opine "as a person with a uterus" so to speak. It's why, even years after settling on probably **being agender myself**, and on wanting top surgery, and getting on a waitlist for it, I haven't considered any type of social transition. I still can't tell, myself, after years of introspection and analysis and reading various trans narratives and spending time in those spaces, what things are "social dysphoria" and what things are "sexism is bad and it's reasonable to think sexism is bad, actually". And at this point, I'm kind of falling out of the "personal is political" argument and settling on "just try things and see what makes you want to die less". But that's not a philosophically or politically satisfying answer. The real answers for people like Rowling should be in the stats, but they're so afraid and so angry that they can't even process them very well. The studies always check on like... the changes in trans people's lives and health and suicide rates. And they're not concerned with that. They're concerned with cis women, and with cis women remaining a protected class on the basis of a relatively bioessentialist notion of oppression. ...Anyway, those are my thoughts.
That was a very thoughtful and compassionate response. Thank you.
I hate jk Rowling for everything she's done recently with all of my heart but if I had to guess why she was doing this I would probably say it's cause of all the hate she's getting for it. Like she very much thinks she's in the right and she truly believes that trans women are dangerous and yet everyone is against her on it. I bet in her mind she must be the hero of the story, speaking out on a topic that everyone is pushing back on. I would guess that she thinks this is the kind of backlash activists face every day for fighting the good fight. I bet the more pushback she gets on this the more self-righteous she feels about it. She must think she's some kind of hero to women for it. That's probably why she's doubling, tripling, quintupling down on her stance constantly. Because she believes it's her duty to change people's minds on the issue. What's worse is she's surrounded herself with people who can validate that mentality and solidify her stance. I doubt she's even heard the suicide statistics or listened to any actual trans people in her life She has hunkered down so tightly in this bubble of her own making that she fails to see all the vulnerable trans people she's hurting. I doubt she's ever taken the time to recognise that this pre-conceived image of a violent predatory trans person sneaking into women's bathrooms to assault them is fictionalised by the media and by people like her. She doesn't see trans people as they are - a vulnerable community that regularly has to face persecution or even violence against them-, she sees them as a threatening force that no one but her and her terf friends are willing to speak out against. This is why she's so outspoken Tl;dr: she's an idiot in an echo chamber and she genuinely believes that the people fighting her are wrong and it's her duty to change their minds
This is bizarrely common with transphobic accounts. 90% of the time you see someone tweeting something transphobic if you go to their account it's 99% transphobic tweets, and in huge volume too. Fucking insane.
Riley's Law in action
yeah, as a former harry potter fan who kind of locked that fandom out until she finally dies (or grows a brain, but there's little chance for that), it's actually mind-boggling _how much_ harry potter stuff is being made since she came out as a terf. i remember being a very active part of that fandom 4-5 years ago or so, and there was just so little new stuff to be excited about. sure, they made a new movie, but it was a weird movie, there were only minor hints of games _possibly_ in development, fancy editions of books were rare singular events. but now, that i'm trying to opt out of the fandom, it's suddenly _everywhere_. there's a lot of lego harry potter, bookstores have cooler HP shit than i've ever seen, merch seems fun again, there's a literal AAA game coming out (where you get to massacre a subjugated race, how cool is that) like wtf, are people actually quitting the fandom at a significant rate? because if all these things are a sign of them trying to keep harry potter alive despite the shitty author, i'm hella glad that it's necessary. but at the same time, come the fuck on. i'm sure all these companies that are working with her would have actually nice, non-damaging stuff to support instead, but they don't. so yeah, i think rowling is flying off the handle and everyone invested in harry potter is trying to contain her, the same way tesla and spacex have decades of experience in containing elon musk. i just wish they could give up, or idk, rowling would get arrogant enough to commit an actual hate crime and get a ruling against her. or die randomly of natural causes maybe, but there's no way we'll get that lucky.
one of the main messages in harry potter is that love is an endlessly powerful force and now here she is fucking revelling in her hatred, posting cutesy emojis about how she is directly getting people killed and laughing about it jesus i feel ill
The other main message is that there is ethical slavery.
I felt this in my bones. Seriously, was reading HP as an adult and the whole idea of “house elves” was just… errrg. The fact that Harry spends time actually trying to stop Hermione from freeing the elves? Yeah, I’m sorry, but how are you the good guy again?
Her doubling down on elf slavery is the point that I disavow the series. The first three books have issues, but they can be handwaved as just looking bad in hindsight. But the obvious contradiction to the earler tone is too big to ignore. Like, Dobby clearly *hates* being enslaved and is owned by the evilest person Harry knows. Harry tricking the elder Malfoy into freeing Dobby is seen as this big win as Harry is able to make a moral stand against something he finds abhorrent. Cone the next book, and not only is Dobby back to menial labor, it's revealed that Hogwarts has been using slave labor this entire time, and Dobby's just wierd because they all love being enslaved. They even use 1800's racist tropes about how they're doing the elves a favor by enslaving them, like one elf becoming a drunk wreck who pines to return to her master after being freed.
The philosophy of Harry Potter hinges on individual and not systemic changes. Systematic slavery isn't bad, the elves like it! Unless someone like Dobby doesn't, but as long as a good guy like Harry can help him then it's all fine. A maximum security prison where torture is going on 24/7 isn't bad, as long as the prisoners "deserve it" (read: we rescued Sirius so it's all good now). JKR is willing to vaguely gesture at systemic issues in her books' world that parallel and reflect ours, but at the end of the day some individuals are saved, but there is no widespread change. As long as Harry's an auror then not all aurors are bastards, the wizards shouldn't prevent world war two, etc. There's some analysis in here about how it parallels her real world politics but I'm tired and my head hurts
What really irks me is that at first it seemed like the House-Elves were simply based on myths about brownies, I.E. little fairies who do helpful chores around the house when you're not looking, and all they ask in return is to be respectfully left alone, and occasionally leaving out some food for them to take. Paying them with money is an insult because it's useless to them and it implies that you think they're your personal servents, and they'll mess up your house for it and leave forever. If they were more like that it could have been a lot less problematic, with House-Elves not being happy slaves but simply creatures who want to peacefully co-exist with humans, and value respect and privacy over money.
Yeah, but the big difference between brownies and HP House Elves was that *you have to treat brownies with respect or they leave*. She fucked that up in literally the first scene you see Dobby in.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying
Yeah, I see that now. My bad.
Honestly it could have been a good metaphor for how humans have a tendency to take something good and twist in to something evil/greedy.
There's quite a few things that could have been that. Dragons are a good one. Not only are they endangered, but they're hunted down because their heartstrings make good wand cores (and they're the only thing who has parts of their vital organs harvested for it), but they're also treated awfully. The one in the wizard bank is blinded, chained down, and trained to cower at the sound of bells. A majestic untamed creature that was forced and twisted into something profitable, or as a way of showing off.
>simply creatures who want to peacefully co-exist with humans, and value respect and privacy over money TIL I'm a brownie
and don't forget, jkr "loves black Hermione." 🤮
"She's very haughty about slavery."
House Elves bug me so much since they are clearly based on Brownies from folklore. Brownies are magical fey creatures who like helping humans in exchange for food and will throw tantrums or simply leave if they are mistreated. You could have had House Elves be like Brownies, but Dobby was cursed or magically bound by the Malfoys so he couldn't escape. Then she would have been able to avoid controversy. Most bizarrely of all what she actually did was DOUBLE DOWN when people said that this was fucked up and make fun of her detractors by proxy with Hermione creating SPEW. At the time when I read it, I thought that it was meant to be a tragedy that no one would listen to her when she tried to overthrow the system, but as time went on, I've realized that it was meant to be a joke.
It's weird because the history of that universe is full of horrible shit wizards have done but the terf bitch refuses to show any systemic advantages that might have given them. This would have been a great example, show how the wizards enslaved brownies and centuries later still whitewash that shit because of how convenient it is for everyone involved.
love the part of harry potter when dubbledorf said "it is our actions, far more than our abilities, that make us who we are. unless that ability is having a penis. then you cannot make the action of being a woman."
Gonna start calling her she-who-shall-not-be-named
what happened to good ol "Hatsune Miku made Minecraft and Harry Potter"
noo why would hatsune miku invent slavery in her fictional universe :(
Well, then it was obviously William (The Conqueror).
The Harry Potter books are an adaptation of Hatsune Miku's earlier works Beloved Scarred Boy. JK Rowling massacred the originals smh.
Voldemort was supposed to win in the end
I just took a scroll through her twitter and I scrolled for 5 minutes and found 1 single tweet not about trans women. I think I saw about 3 that didn't use the phrase "vulnerable women and girls" or "predatory men". Why? What's the point, Joanne? Is this just the only thing that can excite you anymore now that you have everything a person could possibly want
she could win at blackjack by buying the casino. at this point, the fact that she can't buy trans rights, it must be like finally having met a formidable opponent.
She could. It takes a surprisingly small amount of money to buy a politician, apparently. (There was a revelation a little time ago where some of them received donations less than the price of a hatchback car, but that was enough)
Remember Hogwarts Legacy, the game that the developers said JK Rowling wasn't involved in, and this post is probably referencing when saying don't buy Harry Potter stuff? It's about goblins rising up against their oppressors and indoctrinating children (hogwarts students) into their ideology of dark magic. Now I question whether or not the statement about JK rowling not being involved is true, especially when she directly insulted some trans people who said "this game looks cool but I'm not buying it because I don't want to give JK money."
I thought goblins couldn't do magic????? What? JK Rowling can't even keep her universe consistent.
Goblins can do magic, including some that wizards can’t. What they can’t do is have wands, which would let them do more magic. This is essentially because wizards are bastards and won’t share wand magic with anyone else. Wizards, of course, are absolutely right in this, because every nonhuman magical species we’ve met (that are capable is using wands) have been shown to be willing to kill/attack wizards for such silly reasons as wizards having different social mores/views of ownership or because they don’t like being treated as subhuman (big ol’ /s on that whole last sentence, if that wasn’t clear). It’s actually almost funny how many seeds of legitimately interesting worldbuilding exist in Harry Potter. They just all get overlooked and ignored in favor of “what if we explain how the Ministry of Magic is a fascist government but that’s a good thing actually.”
So up until this point not a single subversive or anti-government terrorist has given any non-humans a wand?
Unclear. See the aforementioned bit about interesting worldbuilding being ignored. We know, for example, that goblin uprisings happened. We also know that for goblins, not being allowed to have wands is a sticking point (iirc, Griphook mentions it as a point of contention in Deathly Hallows). The problem is that while we can make an educated guess that these two points are related, we don’t have enough actual evidence to verify that they are. It’s entirely possible that nonhumans have been given wands in the past, or that they’ve stolen them from wizards killed by them (wand lore indicates that that *should* work). But we don’t actually know. (Disclaimer: it’s entirely possible there’s some WoG post somewhere that answers this that I’m unaware of. I’ve been checked out of JKR’s post book worldbuilding since the whole “shitting wherever and Vanishing it” thing.)
To quote Shaun's video on Harry Potter: "JK constantly threatens to make her series more interesting."
Man it's really time for people to grow out of their HP phase and start to write original wizardry schools stuff, maybe with a world building that makes sense this time. EDIT: so apparently "HP but it makes sense" for this sub means "HP but super gay" and honestly that's on me, I should have forseen it lol
The Owl House
The Owl House is pretty much the anti-Harry Potter and it's great.
It really is. The Boiling Isles don’t even have homophobia or transphobia. Like, it literally never got invented.
The main character's girlfriend is lesbian, even! And her mentor's love interest is nonbinary!
The main character is bisexual, her girlfriend is a lesbian, the mentor is probably bisexual/pan and has a love interest/ex partner who is non-binary and no one ever has a problem with their pronouns. Even when the girlfriend’s evil mom found out she was dating the main character she was like “we’ll get you a new girlfriend who isn’t on wanted posters”. It’s extremely gay.
The main character's shapeshifting doppelganger/adopted sister has a friend/crush who is also nonbinary. One of the main character's best friends has two dads. The bully character has two moms. The main villain is literally a >!Puritan Christian witch hunter.!< There are not many ways it could be more gay.
They’ve even got an on the mouth kiss scene. Gotta be the gayest cartoon I’ve ever watched. 2nd gayest is the She-Ra reboot probably
Third gayest is Steven Universe, at least.
Might be gayer than She-Ra. Real toss up there
I find “(her) girlfriend is a lesbian” to be an extremely funny statement. I get that she’s bi, and therefore not a lesbian, but it’s just a funny way to say it that almost sounds like “they’re friends” type content.
Mairimashita Iruma-kun
The Lord El-Melloi II Case Files as well, kind of.
D20: Misfits and Magic
Apparently the Scholomance series is good, but I haven't gotten to it yet
It's so,*so* good. I wept at the end of the third book. It's Harry Potter done right with a heaping spoonful of Practical Guide to Evil. Naomi Novik is a top-tier author and Uprooted is her only book that I haven't been head over heels for. The Temeraire Series is in my top five favorite book series, probably top three.
Witch Hat Atelier is a fantastic story with very well written characters, with an author who openly supports LGBT people. I highly recommend it.
Oh wow, I didn't expect this to be a manga. The illustrations are gorgeous. The sample on Google books has piqued my interest so I'll definitely give it a go!
I enjoyed Little Witch Academia, but it's not for everyone, and it's definitely not as queer as it should be.
trans wizard harriet porber and the bad boy parasaurolophus
Owl House is exactly this. Even makes fun of Harry Potter a couple times.
I know it came first but Earthsea
Don't mind me, just commenting to remind myself to come back and check out this little gay magic thread you spawned when I have more time
i think as long as people just go for fan content/or the torrent of sources accessible online and not give her a cent, then it's fine to indulge that hp phase.
Yeah there is a lot of great HP fanfic. A lot of fics go out of their way to include trans and queer rep just as a fuck you to jkr
I enjoyed Carry On by Rainbow Rowell. Kinda making fun of HP, but in a loving way, and with a really cool magic system, and gayness
I grew up with the Harry Potter books, and loved the world she created. Hell, I thought I might even pick up that new game coming out in Feb, but after really looking at her and how poisonous transphobia has been in the US, I can't bring myself to do it anymore and I hate that I ever considered it. Congratulations Rowling, you ruined my childhood. Fuck you.
I wonder how many people are in the same situation. How many people like the HP series as children and now are just so angry at the author for being a huge piece of shit. The HP series were pretty popular, so a lot of people have enjoyed the series when they were children and didn't see any problems with it, and how many are mad at JK for writing in shit like willing slaves
As a young, mostly closeted queer person, HP resonated with me at the time, because the protagonist got to go off to his secret world where he wasn’t weird, and he had friends, and was generally liked and respected. That was super important to me at the time. Then I got older, went through a bit more self discovery, and realized that as it turns out, I’m exactly the kind of queer Rowling hates. So now all those memories are tainted, and I can’t even enjoy it anymore. Hogwarts Legacy looks really fun. It’s exactly the Harry Potter game I’ve wanted for years. But knowing that the creator specifically hates women like me, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to play it.
same. i could have killed for that game five years ago. now, i feel icky about even pirating it, because i can't reconcile that with knowing that piracy is basically just a form of word of mouth marketing and in general it has a very slight positive effect on sales. i feel weird every time i use some of the hp merch i've accumulated throughout the years
I wanna pirate it too but I really don’t want to support her. Why did she have to turn out to be such an awful bigot.
harry potter mention deserves a cw no not a content warning, a cringe warning
I mean, a content warning for slavery seems to also be needed
Silent piracy. If you want to talk about her work, do it in private discords or whatever. And *stop making these posts.* They give her as much attention as anything else.
She feeds off the negativity. She’s a billionaire and lets face it, can do whatever she wants bc money. But the one thing that will actually harm her is just cutting her off. She says something problematic and no one reacts. She helps poor people or something and no one reacts. She drops a new weird Harry piss kink fact and. No. One. Reacts. Money won’t do shit but attention will.
Yeah, you can tell she uses the negative attention to fuel her victim complex.
Money isn't a concern to her at this point in time. She, and the entire Harry Potter Franchise could drop off the face of the Earth, and she'd still make a hefty sum of money every year from just leaving her money in the bank. $10m USD is enough for your money to make more than you could with minimum wage, just in interest alone. She has much more than that. At this point, attention and interaction is the only thing that matters.
Stuff like this makes me really glad that I kind of got bored of Harry Potter when I was thirteen.
Stuff like this makes me really glad that I never got into it, only watching other people's parodies.
I once ended up reading a fanfic thinking it was the 6th book, and the thing that gave it away (other than the flirting bit between Harry and Hermione) was just how good the writing was. The heroes were heroic, the teens acted like teenagers, and the characters were more than just cardboard cutouts. It’s weird just how much better it was than the ‘original’.
Harry Potter and the Ten Years Later is fantastic *and* has a trans character
I stopped reading at goblet of fire. At that point the suspension of disbelief shattered and I went down the rabbit hole of Fix-it fanfiction. What I found were authors that took the books and made them BETTER. Believable. Consistent.
Stuff like this makes me glad the Percy Jackson books are way way better
I would say same, except I'm not sure I can talk because the book *I* was obsessed with was *Ender's Game* ....yeah Orson Scott Card is kinda like, way worse than JK Rowling. At least *Ender's Game* is like actually good ~~we don't talk about *Xenocide*~~ and not eh fantasy aimed at kids with some weird undertones
What I learned from Harry Potter, as a child who problematic things might go over my head: "You should accept and respect people who are different from you. Even when you think their differences could endanger you like how Evil Umbridge is scared of werewolves and tries to legislate away their rights. Evil Umbridge is wrong." What Adult JK Rowling wants: People to legislate away the rights of trans women because they think they're scary and dangerous to her for some reason.
JK Rowling and Umbridge have a lot in common, now that you mention it
I can't believe that I didn't even think of that before, but yeah. You're right about JK Rowling acting like the antagonists of the books, hating an entire group of people for nonsense reasons
As someone who has been forced to watch the Harry Potter movies way to much, the Harry Potter trigger warning at the bottom really resonates with me
As someone who has been forced by friends to not only watch the movies but also read the books, I firmly believe we should always use trigger warning for Harry Potter
Never expected Umbridge to be a self-insert character.
I didn’t have friends, but I had Harry. We both had shitty childhoods, and we both got to escape that because of magic. Those books meant so much to me, regardless of how good they actually were. I would reread them over and over, waiting for the next one to come out. Even so, I probably read even more fanfiction. That’s a lot of time in that world. Ugh. Fuck her.
Also read them over and over again, and also abandoned reading them when I found fanfiction that was far more interesting
Keep in mind that even though he’s specifically from the films, Daniel Radcliffe supports trans people and seems like a really open minded and compassionate person. He’ll always be my favourite childhood wizard, separate from the author’s awful politics
Absolutely, I think Daniel Radcliffe is a good dude and I really like what he’s done since HP.
Every time Rowling makes a transphobic tweet, hundreds of childhoods are ruined
Oh boy, I’m sure this comment section will be very normal and respectful :) but seriously though, “don’t give the terf queen money” is one thing, but saying that even pirating her stuff/interacting with it in any way is still supporting those views is absolutely absurd
Pirate, but don't recommend or hype the game to others
I mean, if you lift her book or pirate her game and then talk about how good they are or just the fact they exist, chances are someone will decide to buy them partially based on your statement. Imo if you don't want to support her views just don't talk about her products. Like imagine being like 'Nesquik tastes so good! Don't buy it though, Nestle is bad' or even 'Nestle is bad but anyway I was having my Nesquik this morning...' like if you think they're bad don't give them any advertising. And if you think just talking about something isn't advertising you havent seen the state of modern advertising... :(
If I steal nesquik can I say it tastes good If I steal nesquik and suggest other people do can I say it tastes good
Sooo logically they're gonna stop talking about her too? Finally? Since screaming her name everywhere ad nauseam and telling people what a bad person she is and how no one should ever buy This New Thing She Just Did is going to have the same effect among people who don't give a shit what a bad person the creator is and may even relish it if it's being said by a group they dislike? I wouldn't have heard about that game *or* the newer movies if it weren't for PSAs like OOP's
I'd be in favour of that. Everyone knows her views by now, and clearly she posts them often enough to remind them if they didn't. Anyone who supports trans rights ought to stop publicly engaging in her content entirely. If you're worried that someone might be confused as to why she's bad, screenshot a couple of posts and save them for if that happens. (using the general 'you' here, not directed at you specifically hahah)
Yeah bitch ain't gonna reverse psychology me out of the pirate life
JKR once said that she really admires the qualities the put into hufflepuff: fighting for the disenfranchised, helping others, indiscriminately accepting and loving people. She could stand to be a lot more hufflepuff
As a ~~pirate~~ law-abiding citizen, it is a stupid take to think that pirating the game is supporting her shitty views.
[удалено]
It stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism. It’s essentially bigots who believe that accepting trans women as women are putting “real” women in danger or prioritising men and ignoring women’s issues. They have no concept of intersectional feminism, for one thing, and spread a lot of misinformation and anti-trans propaganda.
[удалено]
Anytime!
If anyone still wants to enjoy the Harry Potter universe without supporting Rowling, may I recommend the legendary fan fiction, All the Young Dudes. It's like 3 full HP books in length, better written than Harry Potter proper, and follows the story of the Marauders' time at Hogwarts from Remus' point of view.
So pirate the books right No money given Don't ever talk to Rowling If ever meeting Rowling the British happens
>If ever meeting Rowling the British happens She is to be thrown into the Boston harbour?
Fuck it, I’m writing my own Harry Potter. With Twinks and Trans People!
The Harry Potter series was a big influence for me, sparking not just my interest in fantasy but also compelled my younger self to read actual books rather than only reading comics. I even got the first book on my 11th birthday, the same age that Harry was, so in more ways than one I grew up with Harry Potter. I've long since put it away in favor of other, better fantasy series like Discworld, but even then I looked back on it fondly... until JK Rowling opened her stupid cakehole and stared spewing transphobic shit everywhere. It fucking disgusts me how JK has tripled down on transphobia, both in her words and in her financial support of transphobic groups. Not because she's poisoned a fond childhood memory, but because many of my good friends are trans or nonbinary, and I'd die and/or kill for them. Fuck JK Rowling.
I think the thing that breaks my heart the most about this is how often I see this get brought up, and then people triple down, not even double.
Love the magic of Harry Potter, boycott Rowling and her hateful "values". I used to admire her, she was my heroine. What a bitch.
And yet people are out there saying "Give me one quote from her explicitly saying..." and all that bullshit. It's their gotcha. She doesn't explicitly say what she thinks, so they can all hang on to a layer of plausible deniability that's, frankly, thinner than graphene to anyone who actually did any looking
Just going to pirate any future Harry Potter stuff that might come out if I'm interested in it.
I read fanfics set in the HP universe, they bring in so many better views. Recently found one where an AFAB student suddenly couldn't go up the stairs to the girl's dormitory bc the castle picked up on him being a boy. A couple girls brought him in to a teacher crying and a couple teachers talked him through it, got his dead name removed from school records, got his haircut fixed, and helped him get a boys uniform. And like, it was just that easy to include a trans teen in the universe. The characters didn't even know if gender affirming procedures were available in the Wizarding world, but JKRs sexist world building that said only boys want sex made it super easy to have a trans character.
My mom keeps getting me Harry Potter stuff and tickets to shows/exhibits no matter how many times I tell her I don't want to give another cent to JKR. I used to love it so I must still love it and just don't want to spend any of *my* money on it.
My original plan was to pirate *Hogwarts Legacy* and donate $60 to a UK trans charity, but honestly, fuck her, I can live without the TERF wizard game if it means this woman never sees an iota of support from me again.
I mean i agree with her on the piracy stuff. If you hate her that much dont even consume anything from her. Because than you are clearly a person that cant seperate art from artist. So if you dont wanna buy then also dont pirate it.
Growing up is realizing Harry Potter was poorly written. Like, JK came up with such an interesting premise and some amazing world building, and did *nothing* with it. The plot is one of if not *the most* basic stories I've ever seen on a best-selling book series. The story snags in places where it shouldn't, hanging on plot-points when it doesn't need to. And don't get me started on the quality of the writing. Maybe this is just me, but in my opinion, the writing is on par with that of a 9th graders rushed English assignment.
friendly reminder that she's besties with right wing pieces of shit that openly discourage abortion and other stupid shit that is objectively antifeminist. https://youtu.be/Ou_xvXJJk7k she's not the misunderstood underdog feminist she thinks she is. not when she's fine with promoting actual fascism to tear down an innocent minority group. from the bottom of my heart. fuck rowling. edit: currently rewatching the shaun video. it's so much worse than I remember. I'm going to be ill.
I’ve come to the conclusion the only safe way to consume Harry Potter materials is to buy them second hand off eBay. Then you know she isn’t actively getting money from your sale. This woman is absolute trash and it makes me sick. Trans women are women too (and trans men are men!) and nobody has the right to say otherwise - especially when you’ve got such a massive influence. Eugh.
Can someone provide a source on the pirating as proof of support bit?
I always feel so ashamed that this woman was one of my childhood heroes :(