If I had wizarding powers, the first big spell I would learn would be how to turn myself into a witch. That this never comes up is all I need to know about JKRās point of view.
Harry potter is directly responsible for being who i am today. In a family that taught the kind of hate that JK now represents, harry potter was a wonderful escape from it and helped teach me acceptance and comradery. That noone should be judged or excluded no matter who they are. And that you should always fight nazis, whether theyre magical or not.
It deeply hurts to see the author go the exact opposite way now. It really is heartbreaking. But it doesnt taint my experience with her work.
I wont contribute money to her ever again, but i still have my books and movies and such. Because its such a hugely important part of my life.
Also, as i always say, JK is a god damn billionaire(?) And it would have cost her exactly 0$ to keep her fucking mouth shut
So much was covered in it, human rights, and media/propaganda too.
"You've been reading Rita Skeeter, Mr Fudge" is a line that I hear in my head so often when I hear people speak hatefully nowadays.
She also covered how being a trust-fund kid makes you better than everyone else. Which was a little odd for her politics at the time.
The only way I'd ever be willing to re-experience Harry Potter is through those movies, as they represent more than just the work of Rowling. I do agree that HP as a work itself was good, which makes JKR's bullshit feel like even more of a stab in the back.
It so strange that Cristian moms were right about Harry Potter... It was the work of the devil... But it wasn't because of "magic".
I kind of hate to have to say this, but its ok to still like the stories. If you have to buy them, buy used, otherwise pirate. I can't possibly be the only one who was launched headfirst into allyship by the HP fandom and the more people that happens to the better. As always, JK can go fuck herself.
It's not just about enjoying the stories though. It's more about buying more and more merch, running promo with your house scarf and that stuff. It's about.claiming to be an ally while still giving her money that she proudly funnels into hate campaigns.
In my opinion, even talking about the licence itself is giving her free publicity and indirect money. HP should be forgotten until she dies.
all harry potter cannon is on AO3
And that's why you buy used or pirateš No additional money for the shithead and the market is flooded with second hand stuff anyways
Honestly, even if the whole franchise didn't leave a bitter taste in my mouth, I wouldn't want ti buy used merch and run around promoting it.
I generally am not a huge fan of licensed merch, I prefer fan- or selfmade stuff, but to me there is still a difference between printing a Rohan coat of arms on a t-shirt and knitting a Gryffindor scarf.
No.
Let them go entirely.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmOPM1cSrY4
Tldw: piracy still makes her money. Also, money is not the only form of currency that empowers her. And attention IS money.
Don't pirate. Let it go. Move on.
I used to hate harry potter because I felt it was poorly written, now I hate it because JK is an awful trash person and its poorly written.
I mean it may not have been amazing, but the target audience was children. I was never like super into it but I did like it as a kid and I do understand people being sad that something they grew up with got ruined.
It always breaks me up a little how important HP was to my friend groups growing up. I mean, all the way into my mid-20s. My trans friends and neurospicy friends both loved Harry Potter, going so far as having themed Christmas stockings. All of those happy memories, all of that money given to someone who turned out to be so spiteful. I can't look at HP the same way anymore. So many HP fans were queer. It just hurts in a way I can't fully express. more so that people still support her product.
This is exactly it. So many of the very people she hates were the ones who loved her stuff the most. Queer people were the backbone of the HP fandom, so her embracing evil was that much more of a betrayal. If the people who wrote fanfiction, cosplayed, and engaged with the community the hardest can walk away from it, normies can too. It is not some monumental ask, nor is it one that a lot of the people demanding it haven't done themselves.
I think its a little wrong to use the past tense here; In online spaces the queer fandom has maybe been shell shocked out of the rabid fandom of the past - but I have a gay trans couple in my friend group who are still big fans and run around with Niffler backpacks. There is no clear-cut line between normies and queer people here; just different people drawing the line between content and author in different places.
I've counted myself lucky that most of the things that I like either haven't been dramatically revealed as created by monsters, or if there are monsters involved they weren't as charismatic and central to the creation of the work, or the monsters are long-dead and no longer capable of profiting from their work. When JKR revealed her true colors, it was easy for me to walk away from a fairly casual Harry Potter interest. I could easily pass on the new movies; they're mostly terrible. I could easily pass on Hogwarts Legacy, because I really only play about one game per year, so that one just never made the cut. The biggest pang I ever felt was that some of the Harry Potter Lego sets look rad as hell, but... whatever, they're expensive and I can cultivate other interests no problem.
I have real sympathy for people who got into HP early in life, who had their personalities shaped by it, who felt like they had derived real moral and ethical lessons (even if JKR herself rebuked those lessons later on), who felt like they had developed a personal bond with the material. The parts of those people that were shaped by HP are theirs, and they don't owe those parts of their identities to JKR, but I can easily imagine that it would hurt like hell to try to let go of those feelings.
I don't have a great solution. I think it's right to back away from HP, I think it's right to avoid ever giving JKR another dime. I don't pretend that I could easily give up everything Star Trek, for example, ever put into me, if I were ever put in the same position. I try to have patience and grace for people who do feel that tension, so long as they acknowledge the realities on the ground for what JKR is and what she is trying to do, right now, with the wealth that HP has generated for her.
It's really the people who come to you for assurances that they aren't doing a bad thing by supporting HP. Like they tell you about playing Hogwarts Legacy hoping that you'll ease their conscience. It's really awkward and they never feel good when you tell them that, yes, them buying into HP directly hurts us.
Yeah, that's a bit like asking someone who is vegan for ethical reasons to give you permission to sometimes eat hamburgers. Core concept. Wrong conversation to try to have.
Its a nice drawing but the small scale doesn't quite capture her "of course ms. Rowling, we have our 3 best morticians working around the clock on your makeup, but there's only so much we can do with a 5 year old dessicated skeleton"
That's why I pirate it
Still bad, then you talk about it with others and contribute to popularity. Only way is to pretend it doesnt exists.
I loathe JKR as much as anyone else, but I do wonder why the whole "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" thing seems to end exactly at Harry Potter and nowhere else.
No trans person I know who goes nuclear about everything related to consuming or discussion Harry Potter has any issues with the endless promotion of 'approved' products and companies that are often even an integral part of online 'trans culture', likeā¦
Of course not all of these are directly equivalent to JKR and HP in terms of tangible impact on trans people specifically, but the scale is definitely off. Why do folks cut off friends for discussing Harry Potter fanfiction but not for ordering a skirt on Amazon or encouraging vulnerable trans folks to hand their data to Discord?
The older I get, the more it seems like a teenage in-group out-group peer pressure thing than a real world view. Hating on Harry Potter signals you're a good person, and that gives one a feeling of belonging in the community and having an identity that stands for something. It's more of a rebellion thing than anything. At the same time, being a 'Discord trans girl' has an 'uwu cute' aesthetic and therefore must be good and desirable, no matter the implications.
It's a vibes-based world view.
Of course JKR is evil and I want her prosecuted for what she's been doing to hurt us. I just think shaming random people for enjoying Harry Potter is ineffectual and hypocritical when practically nothing else is so heavily policed; and while 'mainstream trans culture' online promotes and supports so many other evil companies and their products.
I dropped literally everything in your list for the reasons you outlined (except WoW, which I dropped before I knew anything about Blizzard).
But Rowling is worse than them.
Corporations are amoral, and entirely self serving. They will fuck over anyone if it earns the corporation a profit.
Rowling is not amoral. Rowling is driven by hate, and her goal is not self interest, and her harm is not indiscriminate. Her harm is targeted and deliberate, and she explicitly uses her visibility to normalise and encourage harm to the people she is targeting.
And deliberate targeted hate that tries to create more hate is worse than amoral self interest.
Rowling is not amoral. Rowling is driven by hate, and her goal is not self interest, and her harm is not indiscriminate. Her harm is targeted and deliberate, and she explicitly uses her visibility to normalise and encourage harm to the people she is targeting.
Don't forget to drop the mic after dropping bars like that.
Exactly. Intentionality matters. It's the difference between killing someone through accident and carelessness (like a distracted driver causing a car accident) and malice (arranging to deliberately run someone over with your car.) One is a crime like manslaughter, the other is first degree murder. Intention is everything in law and morality.
I'd argue that a company is more like someone not caring if it runs anyone over or not than someone who accidentally ran someone over. Wilful disregard rather than carelessness. But international harm is still worse than either
A few things
The "there is no ethical consumption under captilaism" as a get out of jail free for trying to do better is just a nothing. We should all be, within our capabilities, trying to ensure we aren't at the very least direct financial supporters of evil companies.
Re: no trans person you know (...)
I'm a trans person I know, I go nuclear about jkr and harry potter, and I also go nuclear about the support and usage of meta products, purchasing of games from corps like actiblizz, ubi, ea, square, Microsoft, etc, Minecraft, discord, etc etc etc. I'm in the minority of the minority, sure. But most people don't have the emotional or mental energy to "fight that many battles" at once, much less to convince others to do so.
The fact that most people might stop at hating jkr and HP isn't evidence that they're wrong or something. Its just a symptom of how well known it is that jkr and her products harm trans people. Fewer people know (or, have internalised) that the other examples are bad.
I think people should feel shame if they're giving money to jkr or otherwise promoting her presence. I also think it would be good if more people were taking stands against more things, but jkr's a good start
This is a strawman. There may be no ethical consumption under capitalism, but not all consumption is ethically equal. Each individual makes a value judgement based on how much harm their purchase is doing and how much they need to make it.
That line is different for everyone, and youāre conflating those lines by collapsing trans people into a monolith. Itās inconsistent because people are different.
That being said, anecdotally, I donāt give money to any of the companies you listed, and neither do most of my friends afaik.
Like Ada said, JKR is uniquely hateful and her acceptance by society is enormously harmful. She shares as much responsibility as Hilary Cass for trans people being as discriminated against as they currently are in the UK. Her activism has ruined and ended lives, not because she's just greedy, but simply for the love of the game.
Also, don't use any of those other products if you can avoid it. Harry Potter is an easily avoidable series, not a hard to avoid service like Amazon or YouTube. It's not that hard to walk away from that fandom, especially when all the most interesting contributors have already left.
i think a lot of it comes down to how much easier it is to drop Harry Potter than entire social platforms and such.
for example, it'll take time and energy for me to move from Windows to Linux, which i simply don't have right now. but all i need to do to stick it to Rowling is not care about Harry Potter.
now, that doesn't mean i would go out of my way to harass people who still support the franchise, but i could see how that would embolden other people to do so, and i still think it's important to let people know that J.K. Rowling actively advocates against trans people existing.
complete tangent about Minecraft
i may get flak for this, but Minecraft is completely disconnected from Notch nowadays - he's still riding his fortune from when he was involved, sure, however i'm fairly certain he hasn't seen a penny since he sold it off, in contrast to Rowling who still gets a cut. correct me if i'm wrong on that.
i get being put off by it entirely because of Microsoft, that's valid. Mojang largely works independently of them though afaik, and Mojang seems fairly supportive if anything - they've hired at least two LGBTQ+ folk that i know of, Lena Raine (Celeste's composer) and Sarah Boeving (who i only knew was queer via the on-screen pronouns in Minecraft Live 2023). on top of that, they removed some splash texts referencing Notch in 2019 after he made "controvesial (i.e. transphobic) statements on Twitter" (source).
looking at the wiki, these splash texts were also added in 2020:
as well as these ones in 2022:
and while i know this isn't the biggest show of support Mojang could do (e.g. un-region locking the progress pride cape), it does help solidify in my mind that i'm not supporting bigots by playing a game i purchased over a decade ago.
... ok, other than the Microsoft account i had to make for it, you have me there.
Well, hereās one, I actively cut many of those things out of my life. For instance, I used to love StarCraft 3, but havenāt gone back in a long time, and dont buy or play blizzard games, I donāt use any meta products, shop amazon, have anything to do with hp, gave away the books and movies etc.
Jkr is a horrible person, and if you just canāt give up a very mediocre story, maybe you arenāt an ally
Theoretically, would it be fine if someone liked Harry Potter, but never paid for any of it? If they pirated everything digital, bought second-hand books or merch, and never talked about it being good?
Not suggesting anything, because I'm not even a HP fan. Just curious what you guys think here. Might have been discussed already, but I haven't seen it.
Sure, that's probably fine. But on the other hand, why not try any of the vastly better stories about a magical world to be obsessed with?
It is ok to let go of something you used to love. It is ok to let go of something you still love. It will be sad and maybe even uncomfortable. but if you learn and know that this thing you love is hurting other people, you need do decide what you value more; peoples right to self-actualization and be their authentic selves, or your own comfort and entertainment.
(I used a lot of "you" and "your", but I want to stress I used those in a general sense, not directing this towards you specifically)
Only if they never talk about it with anyone so as to not cause other people to spend money instead. JKR and her work being promoted in society is inherently bad for trans people.
Oh another round of asking supposed allies to give up cheap-ass treats in turn for something more substantial. I'm here for it. stop it with the harry potter shit, there is better stuff out there that doesn't harm trans people
Animorphs is better, there's more of it, and the authors support trans kids.
And they turn into animals, how neat is that.
Unlike some trans people, I actually think the original works were pretty good, even with all of their flaws and problematic portrayals. Those aspects do make it easier to not engage with anymore, but a work that touched so many people and characters who were so beloved are nothing to scoff at. If Rowling was instead trans people's greatest ally, people wouldn't be so critical of it.
All that said, there absolutely is better stuff and HP is fairly easily replaceable.
I get the sentiment but I just wish people would stop watching or reading Harry Potter because it's shit.
I'm just glad we can all rest easy on everything else that hasn't been ruined by a horrible person,... like Coraline.
separate the artist from the art
I am, I separated all of the rest of my pirated media from the media containing sociopaths and sycophants.
Also you can use this when people try to justify pirating is acceptable
The cited source in the video description
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