Figuring It All Out: My Genderfluid Life

I've rarely seen a more validating sentence in my entire life.

High fives all around, friends. If we’ve accomplished nothing else today, we still have this.

I feel the need to add this

Death Of The Author is out, Bullying Of The Author Out Of A Forum About Their Own Work is in

What makes JKR's shitshow even harder to process is that she didn't just ruin a book series. Harry Potter was an entire subculture. Like Star Wars and Star Trek fans, Harry Potter fans dedicated their lives and careers to the series. I don't know if I'd call it "underground," but liking Harry Potter got you beaten up when I was in school, so it was more of a dedicated indie culture than a mass-appeal fanbase.

Harry Potter was so huge that fan works developed their own followings. Potter Puppet Pals racked up hundreds of thousands of followers and was nearly as relevant as the series itself. For fanfiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality got so big that it has a Wikipedia page. The band Harry and the Potters spawned the wizard rock music genre. A Very Potter Musical developed a fanbase and launched Darren Criss's career.

Harry Potter also has extensive ties to fandom history. Everyone in my generation (millennials) remembers coming home from school to read Harry Potter fanfiction on the Internet. Today, most people just post their stories on Wattpad or Archive of Our Own. But at the time, the fanbase was splintered between fanfiction.net and dozens of individual websites and forums, some made for specific ships. Since they all had individual hosts, a lot of those sites have been lost to time.

And there's the infamous My Immortal fanfiction, which is an Internet legend with people still searching for the author. Everybody read that one (and laughed at it) in middle school.

Pre-social media, fan sites like The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet had massive followings because they were one of few sources for news, theories, essays and fan content. Some of these sites still exist after being around for over a decade and building their own legacy.

Before Deathly Hallows came out, fans were so desperate to know what happened that Mugglenet published a book called What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End? Yep...Harry Potter was so big that people wrote separate books about what would happen in an upcoming book.

And that's not mentioning all the book release parties, Harry Potter-themed events, monuments, fan films, restaurants and even a theme park. A lot of fandoms have those, but Harry Potter infiltrated every aspect of popular culture.

Today, there's a thriving culture of "Harry Potter adults" with themed weddings, baby showers and Etsy stores. Putting your Hogwarts house in your Instagram bio is pretty much a prerequisite for joining the "bookish" community. Warner still produces new content, like the Fantastic Beasts series, although we've all seen what a disaster that's been.

Everyone has at least a few memories associated with Harry Potter even if it's just watching the movies. I had great memories associated with Harry Potter. But looking back at the subculture, history and thousands of fan works, it doesn't seem fun anymore. Studying the fandom or being part of it comes with an awkward tension because you don't want to seem like you're condoning JKR's bigotry but can't divorce her from the series. This subculture was spawned by a woman who turned her legacy of magic and wonder into one of abuse and hatred.

I don't expect people to write paragraphs about how much they hate JKR every time they post about Harry Potter, but it's still uncomfortable to see people make new content or wear their Harry Potter Etsy tote bags like nothing happened. Even if they clarify that they don't support her, it's just a weird, tense situation for everybody.

People dedicated years of their lives to running Harry Potter fan sites, writing fanfiction, cosplaying characters and making fan movies. If I were in that situation, I'd have a mild identity crisis. I'd ask myself "Did I waste all those years? Should I delete my content? Where do I go from here?"

So ultimately, JKR didn't ruin "just" a book series or even "just" a fandom. She tanked an entire culture, which inspired people to look at Harry Potter more critically. The issues that people brought to the light tainted the series's legacy even without JKR's personal issues.

Once, Harry Potter was a series for generations. Now, former fans hope that the series fades into irrelevancy. Unfortunately, JKR didn't just tarnish her legacy--she took decades of history, millions of fans and a worldwide subculture along with her.

it’s crazy having been super-involved in the HP fandom for more than a decade and watching the fallout from this

quidditch (the real sport) has changed its name to quadball

the harry potter alliance (a nonprofit) has rebranded to fandom forward

the sub-subcultures that sprung up within the HP fandom have now distanced themselves from the main fandom and have become independent groups in their own right

HP was so integral to the development of early online fandom (as OP’s mentioned) that now there’s sort of just a weird... hole in the internet

for many HP fans, it took up a lot of their life. three conventions a year, wizard rock shows, HPA fundraising, granger leadership academy, nightly fanfic, podcasts, quidditch games.

when fans (rightfully) shunned JKR and began to leave the fandom, a lot of them (myself included) were left rudderless. how do you reconcile the fact that most of your friends, hobbies, sometimes even jobs, were due to the work of such a hateful person? as OP said, did i waste my life?

i’m obviously not saying that this is the worst part about JKR’s bigotry (the worst part is, of course, the bigotry) or that HP fans are the worst-done-by victims (who are of course trans people)

but it is WILD to see such a juggernaut of internet fandom be virtually scrubbed away

When the Harry Potter HBO series comes out, I better not be seeing any of the bullshit justifications that you guys used to justify your Hogwarts Legacy purchases.

"Oh, she won't be making any money from it!" She's the executive producer.

"There's no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway!" That excuse applies when you're talking about things that humans actually need, like food. That excuse does not apply when you're talking about a TV show.

"I have to support the creators!" No you don't. No you fucking don't. If that excuse was true, you'd have to consume every piece of media that was ever created. Besides, Warner Brothers is a billion-dollar corporation. You won't hurt their feelings if you boycott one TV show.

"But it was my childhood!" I don't care. I legitimately do not care.

I don't wanna go through this bullshit again. Just don't fucking watch the series. It's that simple.

If you give this woman money, it will go to transphobic causes. If you give this woman a platform, she will use it to boost transphobic causes. This isn't a "well nobody's perfect" or "well x other creator also did something bad once" situation, this is an inordinate amount of influence for a creator to have, and supporting her by word or wallet actively hurts trans people.

EXACTLY it's fucking disgusting

True and based.

Good for her :)

lol

@demilypyro

Checked to confirm. It’s true, it’s recent, and the source is beautiful

(also the ‘children’s charity’ Lumos doesn’t recognize trans children, so this failed fundraising event is an all around good thing)

Oh gods, alright. Of course Livraria Lello would be the one to have it. I wonder if they were trying to get rid of it?

I actually would like to talk about Lello and their relationship with Harry Potter and also just ask you to visit the bookstore.

So, anyway, Lello opened in 1906 in Porto, North of Portugal.

JK. Rowling lived in Porto for a bit in the 90’s, where she first started writing the Harry Potter series. It was said she might have frequented it and some important stairs from the book were based on Lello’s stairs. In fact: The book release of Harry Potter and The Cursed Child happened in Lello.

What this meant is that this bookstore ended up having to fight to remain a bookstore. There are so many tourists, a lot of them that only wanted to look at it because it was Harry Potter related somehow and buy nothing. There were (and still are) insane queues to enter the bookstore.

Lello, who wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a Harry Potter museum, ended up having to make a system where people have to pay to enter. If you buy a book that goes above the price you paid for the ticket, the money you paid will be deducted from the book price.

I can tell from going there fairly frequently that they try to be less connected to Harry Potter as possible if they can manage. Yeah they have the books for sale but they also have a plethora of books and their own merchandise to choose from.

Despite JK. Rowling’s involvement with the bookstore, in the Portuguese Wikipedia page, even in the part about the famous writers that went there, there isn’t a single mention of her. Zero. Not in the history nor anywhere else. It’s beautiful.

Last time I went they had an exhibition about José Saramago’s work (portuguese author who won the Nobel Prize) and on the upper side of the stairs had an enormous collection of winners of the Nobel Prize and authors Lello concidered had the quality to also have won (it the Nobel Prize existed when they were alive) and authors that might win.

It’s quite interesting because all was very thought out and you had a whole reason as to why those books were there. Me and my mother ended up chatting for a long while with one of the bookshop employees (they have a lot of young employees btw) and we even ended up chatting with other foreigners that went there shopping.

Also, did I mentionthe bookshop is gorgeous?

As are their book editions (my English edition of Tom Sawyer I bought there)

Have also a photo of the bookstore from 1906 :)

So, if you go there, please don’t go because of Harry Potter. And please don’t shit on it because of Harry Potter too. It’s a very good bookstore and it deserves recognition, but not from there.

i am OBSESSED with this response my philosophy teacher made to my introduction post okay OBSESSED

ok but did you put your fucking h*gwarts house in your online class discussion forum introduction

absolutely not i have taste what i DID say for my interesting fact was that i have 999:59 hours in my copy of pokemon heartgold

ok ok i understand. this professor is just dunking on harry potter right out the gate unprompted

it's really disappointing how people's critique of jkr starts and ends with her transphobia, and they completely ignore her blatant antisemitism, racism, homophobia, slavery apologism, sympathy for the wizard nazis, (the wizard nazi incel) snape's redemption, the villain of fantastic beasts trying to stop the holocaust, and the new game literally being a rehash of the blood libel myth.

&her ableism, fatphobia, classism, and general naked imperialism (look at things like the "thunderbird" in fantastic beasts, or anything and everything she's ever said or done about Scotland, for example)

This ass-hat has actually lobbied against things like "letting disabled people survive" and "the colonised nation I live in taking steps toward independence."

Oh, and you already mentioned it, but - antisemitism, again. Cannot stress the antisemitism enough because, holy fuck she's so antisemitic!

"didn't you used to like hp"

yes cuz i was a child and it was a huge phenomenon that gave me an easy sense of wonder and companionship shared with my peers and i was unaware of many evils of the world

i am now an adult and able to see how hateful its creator is and what kind of messages she spreads and i don't want that in my life ✌️ she finds my existence "tragic" and "unfortunate" and is funding legislation that kills people, she can suck my entire ass

That new Potter game looks like it's just magical blood libel except they want you to burn the Jewish village down.

Okay for real though, Rowling's whole "antisemitic goblin" thing is actually WAY worse than a lot of people think.

Like even outside of Jowling Kowling Rowling being a piece of shit anyway, the blatant antisemitism in these Goblin characters is getting less and less excusable as an "honest mistake." Rowling's antisemitism is blatant at this point people's excuses don't work for her- here's why.

It's one thing to let your unconscious biases influence your world-building, nobody is immune to that risk, but it's another to have it pointed out and double down on it. Rowling is notorious for retconning details into her story, adding "inclusivity" after the fact (oh boy, we got "at least one Jewish wizard at Hogwarts" a few years ago!) but nothing was ever done to address the goblins. The house elves got an attempt at least with "they like being enslaved so it isn't bad!" (Which arguably makes it even worse but like... at least she recognized a problem existed in the first place I guess? I'm being very generous here.)

It's also way more than just "they own banks and have hooked noses." That said, that's notable enough on its own. When we say they look like a stereotype that is extremely literal, here's a piece of nazi propaganda side-by-side I saw:

Anyway, the books also establish that goblins can use magic but aren't allowed to carry wands. (So like, obvious systemic oppression that's never rationalized, we're supposed to just accept it and assume it's because they're untrustworthy or something.) Even Hagrid, who deals with magical creatures for a living and also tends to be much more With It than the rest of the cast, calls them "not the friendliest of beasts." Idk about y'all but it's a little disturbing to see even Hagrid call them "beasts" even though they're considered intelligent and "civilized" enough to run their whole banking system. Not to mention this is Hagrid, the guy that gave a Terrifying Giant Spider Everyone Hated a chance. The new game makes it even more clear that goblins are exceptionally greedy and don't understand (or abide by) wizard customs. They're considered at fault for their own oppression and the current rebellion must be stopped to put them back "in their place."

ALSO THEY ARE LITERALLY TRYING TO KIDNAP CHILDREN. That specifically has a HUGE and extremely direct history to a thing called blood libel, the leading excuse for pogroms for centuries. Christians love the idea that we are very literally kidnapping Pure Christian Children™ and using their blood to make matzah on Passover. That's not even kosher. The most recent example I could find of this exact myth was in the United States in 1928, though the idea of Jews luring away children was a good way to teach stranger danger in Nazi Germany. Nowadays blood libel sentiment fuels things like QAnon (where we're kidnapping children to use their blood for Satanic stuff I guess?) Antisemitism has a LONG history of painting Jews out to be predatory towards children in particular.

Okay, now for the main excuses for her I hear:

"But she visited a Holocaust museum and said she based Voldemort off of Hitler!"

Anyone can visit a Holocaust museum. They're buildings. Holocaust museums are not machines that suck in antisemites and spit out allies, yet in the public eye, it seems all a celebrity needs to do to remove accusations of antisemitism is visit a holocaust museum and make a statement about how horrified and inspired they were. Visiting a museum doesn't mean shit. Neither does writing a metaphor for Hitler or racism, that's literally the most low-hanging fruit possible.

Or everyone's biggest "gotcha:"

"But Rowling wasn't in charge of making the games OR the movie design!"

Y'all really think they didn't ask her to sign off on this? You really think she wasn't in the room when people pitched their ideas for the entire plot? You think she'd hand over the rights to her cash cow and then never look at the product?

Yeah, Rowling is probably not maliciously thinking about how she can make it worse. But at the very least, she wrote enough into her work to inspire people to make harmful stories like this, and a literal billionaire can't be bothered to hire people who give a shit (about any of her many issues) to screen things on her behalf. In the age we live in, I think it's telling that she doesn't even try. o

So, apparently there's a new Harry Potter game, that's basically "Hogwarts and the Blood Libel".

The plot is basically straight out of the Protocols of Zion and QAnon, your character has a slave (presumably a house elf), and your objective is to surpress a social justice movement.

So uh, fuck that very much.

a line that summarizes my feelings, taken from a good article with more perspectives and context:

and here are a couple more articles on anti-semitism in hp + what it means for hogwarts legacy:

Did Hogwarts Legacy Seriously Just Make The Anti-Semitic Goblins The Villains?

Should ‘Harry Potter’ Fans Boycott ‘Hogwarts Legacy’?

The ‘Harry Potter’ Anti-Semitism Controversy, Explained

Jon Stewart Calls Portrayal Of Goblins From J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Anti-Semitic

tl;dr the anti-semitism (and racism) is completely unavoidable in this franchise, and simply being trans inclusive with character design to off-set jkr’s bigotry does not erase how awful that still is

Thank you for the additional articles @jercythesiscrying !

okay so ive been avoiding hearing anything about the new harry potter game. im sure a lot of us have. if yall dont know, its a major game and not a shitty mobile game or anything. but i just found out its apparently about fucking suppressing the goblin rebellion. no, not helping them bc hey maybe that would be a good thing. nope! youre tasked with putting the goblins back in their place apparently.

for anyone who doesnt remember, the goblins were the banker characters who worked in gringotts and looked Uncomfortably Like jewish stereotypes. and youre suppose to suppress their rebellion, where theyre rebelling against the fact that like most nonhuman magical creatures, theyre treated like shit by wizards. yep :)

View on Twitter

click thru the top tweet to read the whole thread with all the screenshots, it just gets worse and worse but jesus fucking christ, HOW. i know i shouldnt be surprised that this fucking francise of all of them is pulling this shit but how fucking blatant can you be.

if it wasnt enough that youd be lining the terfs pockets buying this shit, is the plot being fucking blatant ass alt right propaganda enough

There is no death of the author when the author is very much alive and literally trying to exterminate people ok? Ok

Also when the art itself, completely separated from the artist, is still fucking racist. Lmfao

death of the author is about literary analysis, putting aside the things you know about what the author intended or didn’t to interpret and understand the text on its own. it removes the special status of the author’s own understanding of the piece for reasons that are outlined in the original essay “Le Morte d’Auteur” by Roland Barthes. The essay claims that a work of literature (or really any piece of art) has no meaning until it is read, and that the meanings are informed by countless cultural inputs that all converge on one point: the reader.

it is NOT about “separating art from the artist” or whatever little dorks need to tell themselves to feel good about liking the transphobic media mogul’s racist wizard books.

What death of the author IS NOT:

"JKR may be an abhorrent person who is actively campaigning against minority groups having human rights, but since you can enjoy her children's series without knowing that, I think we should just let people enjoy them in peace, never mind the fact that the royalties from those books are funding her anti-human rights campaign in the UK."

What death of the author IS:

"Even if JKR now claims that she did not have racist intentions when she wrote this pro-slavery subplot, or antisemitic intentions when she created this fictional race of banking goblins, or anti-Irish intentions when she made this Irish joke-character associated with expositions, or transphobic and sexist intentions when she repeatedly described these villainous female characters in terms of having masculine physical traits, we can still confidently say that her children's series contains racist, antisemitic, anti-Irish, transphobic, and sexist features. We should judge her works by what is actually in them, and not with her post hoc rationalizations for why all of these features are supposedly not as bad as they look on paper."