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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 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.
I’m conflicted when her movies enter the libraries of streaming services. I’m not sure how exactly they get monetized and how much of a difference one watch makes. I watched Fantastic Beasts. Newt Scamander is a cute character. But I watched it with my parents, who would’ve watched it anyways.
I own Hagwarts Legacy, I got it somewhere for free. They probably get some compensation for freebies, but I wouldn’t expect that to be determined by the exact amount of gifted titles either. I never played it.
Nobody should be using any of the big streaming services anyways just because they’re evil in their own right. Just pirate HP stuff if you want to watch it.
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.
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’, like…
- Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook/YouTube et cetera (pro-queerphobia, pro-fascist corporations actively funding and supporting alt-right movements across the world and helping alt-right actors make databases of queer people)
- Discord (surveillance company working with ICE, handing over trans folks’ personal information to the cops, the age verification scandal et cetera)
- Minecraft (created by alt-right figurehead Notch, owned and operated by notoriously evil company Microsoft)
- World of Warcraft (Blizzard, notoriously anti-union, pro-sexual harassment corporation)
- … and so on.
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.
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.
