You gotta know when to cash the check and ride off into the sunset.
Funnily enough I feel like To Kill a Mockingbird is basically the exact opposite of the Harry Potter series morality-wise. To Kill a Mockingbird basically shows the evil inherent in the system and that one good actor can't make any meaningful change, sometimes can't make any change at all. Whereas Harry Potter basically has one chosen person who is able to stop evil and becomes part of the inherently good system that was just corrupted by bad actors.
Brb, moving to the alternate timeline where JK Rowling pulled a JD Salinger.
There was a time when JK Rowling was seen as an inspiration to aspiring writers everywhere with her rags to riches story. Then she became a meme for retconning every other detail about her series, and now she's known as the Transphobe who never stops posting about being one. What a life.
Imagine an alternate reality where JK either moved on from transphobia or never had it: She would easily go down in history as one of the best writers of the modern era, and her Twitter could just be silly jokes about Hogwarts classes starting up, Harry Potter holidays, or just worldbuilding.
Harry Potter itself wasn't for me and I read the whole series, but I at least had respect for her. Now she went full clout-chaser with the whole "DAE le trans people BAD!?!?! THANKS FOR THE CASH, TWITTER!"
there would be think pieces every few years about how fucked up the house elf slavery stuff was, or the anti-semitic goblins or whatever, but i don't imagine any of that would ever stick without the author publicly doing her best to make the world a worse place
Yeah all of that stuff only gets more attention than “Huh yeah that’s iffy” because she keeps throwing vile tantrums all the time. If she had just shut the fuck up I really don’t think any of that would’ve been blown up as much as it (reasonably) has been
eventually someone would have done the shriekcast or something like it, and there would have been plenty of analysis of the shitty stuff, but it would have no penetration into the broader culture. randos on twitter would have no opinion beyond "i liked the books when i was a kid"
Or the movies where the directors were smart enough to disavow the weird stuff or give characters with racist names less screen time.
they still picked a bank with a star of david mosaic on the ground for the goblin bank set, but apart from that :bruh-moment: they toned down a lot of the racism, slavery apologia, fat shaming, lookism and general meanspiritedness of the books.
still have the star of david in the goblin bank, but other than that they improved stuff
edit: had to step away and @AcidSmiley said what i was going to
I'd say most successful and not best, because her books aren't very well-written. They are children's books of course and no one should expect flawless story structure and zero plot holes from those, but her whole project is one big problem and would have seen critique eventuallyregardlesss. There is SO MUCH else in there to critique, from wizards being pro slavery to Harry's unending obsession to become a cop even as the system fails him time and again to racist-ass naming conventions to...everything. So much of it is bad that I feel she was always destined to become what she is now and it's just the details of what she gets canceled for that would change.
For example, the whole 'wizards used to just shit on the floor and then magick away the evidence' thing, which she probably said in response to someone asking light-heartedly why old timey Hogwards has indoor plumbing, shows her making up the dumbest shit ever and pretend like she thought about it in advance. It's painfully obvious she is doing this . She could never admit that she just didn't think about these things while writing and for some reason she has to present herself as infallible, leading to garbage retcons and inane takes. Her meme status was always inevitable and thanks to the slavery angle alone she was always destined to be cancelled for something.
Harry’s unending obsession to become a cop
Man not even, he just wants to go to magic high school and not die to the evil wizard(s), the books literally do not even talk about what he wants to do with his life until the epilogue is like "oh and harry became a magic fed"
he mentions a couple times "maybe i'll be a cop" but it always comes across like he doesn't really know what he wants to do. and then he just goes ahead and becomes a cop
I distinctly remember him talking about wanting to be an Auror, or at least saying it when asked by random people. Been a while since I read these books tho and I ain't going back ever.
It's like if Jim Henson or George Lucas decided to become Nazis. Though with JK Rowling its even worse for the HP brand since its so tied to her as a singular author
BTW, it's not particularly hard to doxx J.K. Rowling, you can just fucking google it and find out that she and her husband now live on the 162-acre Killiechassie Estate, near Aberfeldy in Perthshire, Scotland after having sold their old house near Edinburgh.
The neat upside about having land in Scotland is that access legislation was removed about 20 years ago, meaning that you can do pretty much fuck all to prevent people from walking on your land. There are some exceptions I think, like protected wildlife habitats and military grounds. But as long as you don't use motorised trasnsport you could walk about in Rowling's 162-acre Killiechassie Estate, near Aberfeldy in Perthshire.
Officer, someone sending an artistic image of a gargantuan Hulk fucking a cement truck is not worth your time or resources.
what would i even threaten her with? standing outside of her walled-off mansion with a sandwich sign until her TERF paladins drag me away? she's literally a billionaire who can afford armed bodyguards, a team of dozens of bloodthirsty litigation lawyers and who with 100% certainty doesn't open all that hatemail herself. I'd honestly be surprised if she still blocks people on twitter herself instead of having a lackey do that for her. It's downright ridiculous that she whines about doxxing when there's doxxed trans people without any of her vast ressources for protection and retaliation out there being hounded until suicide by her frothing, unhinged supporters.
all i'm saying is that it's fucking rich when a public figure whose real estate purchases make it into the british yellow press pretends that it needs the actions of militant trans activists to doxx her.
it was either a good bit or some very sad wrecker.
they posted about how this massive wrecker brigade the silver legion was going to descend on this site and make it completely unusable. they had a day that they were counting down towards.
anyways the day arrived and nothing happened :shrug-outta-hecks:
something something paper tigers :silver-legion:
who can afford armed bodyguards
those are extremely illegal in the UK
it doesn't matter how much she doesn't give a fuck, she wouldn't be able to get one
The first few books had all sorts of LGBT-coded characters, magic that literally let you change your gender, and a young group of alienated iconoclasts fighting against a moribund, sclerotic status quo that threatened to crush them for being different.
Then JK Rowling blew up, got personally famous, and partnered with Disney. Suddenly the stories were about defending the status quo, horny teenagers in painfully vanilla relationships, pro-sports, and big explosions.
Oh well...
Remember when JK Rowling tried to take credit for making Dumbledore a gay character without actually writing a gay character?
She at least kinda-sorta alluded to it in Book 7. But even then, "gay for Wizard Hitler" wasn't exactly her brightest literary moment.
it was always about defending the status quo. the first book has hagrid say the reason magic is secret is because muggles would want too much help, like how magic can cure any disease might save lives
The pro-sports was always there, none of them were really queer coded, she didn't partner with Disney, they never really fought the status quo, just kinda complained sometimes, and magic never really changed anyone's gender. We see women only look like men using magic in the last book, ever other transformation was in the same gender, because jkr can't imagine gender changing. Thd books and author sucks but learn what you're talking about before speaking.
The pro-sports was always there
The rec-league shit was there as a rhetorical device to build drama and advance the plot. Book 2's use of Quidditch as this insanely dangerous sport that puts you in the hospital was good aktuly.
she didn’t partner with Disney
It was Warner Bros. My mistake.
they never really fought the status quo, just kinda complained sometimes
The first three books were genuinely anti-establishment in character. Book 3, in particular, did a great job of painting the institutional world as cruel, corrupt, incompetent, and plagued by bigotry.
magic never really changed anyone’s gender
The Polyjuice Potion does this on a number of occasions.
Thd books and author sucks but learn what you’re talking about before speaking.
:spiderman-pointing:
He only gets injured because his broom and one of the balls is enchanted in books one and two respectively. Quiditch is played as super cool the whole way through, anything dangerous is to make it look more exciting, not like a bad idea. The reason we don't see any danger from it later is because less and less time is spent on the field and people just try directly to kill him. The most dangerous thing that happens at a game is book four, when the world cup gets attacked, which has nothing to do with the sport.
This is not in a revolutionary "we need to fix the system way" but in a boomer "government sucks why can't I do what I want?" way. They don't ever suggest there is something wrong with using dementors to suck people's souls out, just that Sirius is innocent so they have to free him. This makes sense at this reading level, as kids at like 13 are still learning how the world works, thinking up new better systems is beyond them. However, there is no way the government is bad in 3 it isn't worse in 5, and the same solution of "hope old white guy in charge of school fixes it" is all they come up with. Heck, in later books it is clearly shown that the status quo had literally no possible way of fighting voldemort, and they still just want to go back to that, no changes.
The only time someone changes gender with polyjuice is in the last book when they are sneaking Harry away and have some girls and women disguised as him to throw off their pursuers. That's literally the only time, when all that was required was some visual and no speech or behavior,.and they all comment on how gross they feel. Past that, turning into someone else's appearance for a short amount of time using really expensive ingredients is not exactly a transition surgery.
Maybe they were negative stereotypes but we were too young or too not Br*tish to perceive them that way?
The one prominent black wizard is named Kingsley Shacklebolt. Kingsley, as in Martin Luther King Jr, Shacklebolt, as in shackles that slaves wore.
It's like if that one scene from The Usual Suspects was a cumtown bit.
Meet Kim C. Rooftop, the first Korean wizard.
So that she could use the name of the "inventor" of gay conversion therapy.
Robert Galbraith, son of a jackal
The first book in this series was about a man who dresses as a woman to kill women.
No joke here. How do I make this any more absurd than it already is?
and also it was published before she was an "out" transphobe -- although i remember trans people were pointing out her transphobia for years before people started to notice and it became her entire identity
yeah, but even that started after the first book iirc. it started because of some people she was following on twitter, and then she liked some tweets, and then started posting about it before the transphobia went mainstream
Robert Galbraith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Galbraith_Heath
Heath experimented with gay conversion therapy, and claimed to have successfully converted a homosexual patient, labeled in his paper as Patient B-19. The patient, who had been arrested for marijuana possession, was implanted with electrodes into the septal region (associated with feelings of pleasure), and many other parts of his brain. The septal electrodes were then stimulated while he was shown heterosexual pornographic material. The patient was later encouraged to have intercourse with a sex worker recruited for the study. As a result, Heath claimed the patient was successfully converted to heterosexuality. This research would be deemed unethical today for a variety of reasons. The patient was recruited for the study while under legal duress, and further implications for the patient's well-being, including indications that electrode stimulation was addictive, were not considered
She chose to be this person. Incredible.
Unfortunately not that surprising, given that she's also coded a werewolf character as a bug chaser and groomer.
she made being a werewolf a metaphor for aids, which is already fucked up given the inherently predatory nature of werewolves, but at least the first book where that's a thing features a nice guy who gets kicked out of his job unjustly because he's actually safe around kids. but then she made the second of the 2 named werewolves in the series a very literal child predator
She wants to sneak into men's bathrooms to steal the little scented urinal things.
Look if they didn't want me to eat them why would they call them cakes?
Give it 7 years until the inevitable "What if Voldemort was the good guy?"
MF really became the gammon she poked fun at with the Dursley family.
No see, the Dursleys were bad because they were physically ugly as well. This is an important part of moral fibre.
Her books really go hard on the “being ugly on the inside will make you ugly on the outside” shit but she also can’t hold back on the fact that she despises attractive people, especially women
No see, the Dursleys were bad because they were
physically uglyiconically British as well.But she had plenty of "ugly" good characters and "pretty" bad ones.
Hagrid, Neville, the Weaselys, the House Elves, Mad Eye Moody, Professor Sybill - they're are all described as out-of-fashion, goofy-looking, and otherwise unattractive. The whole "Order of the Phoenix" crew are intentionally pitched as motley.
By contrast, Slytherin leadership are all unfailingly beautiful, fashionable, and charismatic. Dolores Umbridge is, similarly, focused on normalcy to the point that it becomes sinister. And there are a host of supporting characters that are played up as "normal" faceless bureaucrats who vacillate between uselessness and outright hostility.
She does denigrate the Dursleys specifically for being fat a lot, especially Dudley
The father-son pair are more painted as gluttons than fat. They're lazy and spoiled. Dudley eventually grows up to be a teenage soccer hooligan, trading his fat for muscle, but he's still painted as a bully and a coward.
he's described as whale-like and wider than he was tall, and the first time the narrative is ever sympathetic to him is after he gets fit in book 5 or 6 because of dementor trauma
He's also described as constantly gorging himself on treats and throwing a hissy fit because he didn't get enough birthday presents.
I guess they could have described him as sleakly dressed, finely boned, and of immaculate complexion, like Bellatrix Lestrange.
how, as an author, do you write this kind of obvious, whiny drivel, and not feel an ounce of shame
I'd imagine the massive hoard of gold she's sitting on helps with the shame.
When frantic, dishevelled Edie Ledwell appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn't know quite what to make of the situation. The co-creator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie
This reads like she's trying to write herself into a Harry Dresden novel.
