It’s kind of too late now, though. Even if we somehow convinced every person on earth to never buy another Harry Potter anything ever again. She’s already got her bag. That won’t go away and she’d continue being a horrible person with the power of wealth.
Elon’s wealth, on the other hand, exists almost entirely as a fiction of his businesses’ value. He is much more susceptible to being taken down with them.
I never understood all this whinging about J. K. Rowling. I was a big fan of Ender’s Game when I was younger, but when Orson Scott Card revealed himself to be an asshole I dropped those books like a bad habit and everyone I knew did the same. There wasn’t even really any debate over it. Why are we still wringing our hands about Harry Potter?
Enders Game (and the whole series) is a bit different, as unlike Harry Potter they are actually trying to teach a lesson in empathy and understanding instead of just being a fun magical romp.
To this day I have literally no idea how the Orson who wrote those books became the man he did. He lives his life by the antithesis of the ideals he preached.
they are actually trying to teach a lesson in empathy
S.P.E.W. and mugblood rhetoric seem like progressive topics with real world analogues.
Her transphobic politics seem to be separate from the HP universe.
Because it became a multimedia franchise and fans still want to keep consuming it despite how much she sucks, so there’s a lot of mental gymnastics.
best I can do on Rowling is look forward to the inevitable Behind the Bastards coverage
“Influencing” is putting it mildly. Funding organizations with political power is a lot more than that.
Also it’s not just a trans thing.
JK is incredibly ableist and regularly mocks disabled people. For example one of her latest books is basically painting all chronically ill people as malingerers.
It’s in her HP books. The editor just tampered it down, but you can still see it now that we have a pattern. It’s why I hate the people who say, “hate the artist, but love the art” bullshit. The art is bad as well and I’m proud I bailed on that series half way though.
I like the comparison of Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings that points out Harry Potter was a very special, perhaps ethnically special boy, who deserved his powers because he was naturally good, while Frodo Baggins was a dude who got saddled with an absurd level of responsibility, which he never could have handled without a long list of friends and randos who found it amusing to help him.
If it was just Harry, it would just be an over used clique, but ethnic or birth traits kept coming up. Hagrid is naturally angry. Voldemort is evil because he was a rape baby. House Elves are natural
slavesservants. The Weasley will always be poor(even when Harry should be paying rent or at least buying them a new car).well that is more Harry Potter information than I previously had, but I’ll just move on and pretend to be dumber than I am, which is already pretty bad. when I was kid I gathered an embarassing amount of knowledge on Stephen King novels. I didn’t really expect him to be one of the good guys in 2025, but there he is.
I gave up on HP half way through, but because the topic kept coming up so when I saw what looked like a good review everything on yt, I put it on in the back ground.
Oh, right. The Irish character kept blowing things up.
well I just get more and more impressed with Rowling the more I learn
Also she’s anti-ace
“These people aren’t fucking exactly the right amount.”
Someone should tell Mobius 1.
You would think that of all the non-heteosexual sexualities that asexual people would be the least likely for someone to be prejudice against. I understand that asexuality is a spectrum and any generalization about any large group of people lacks accuracy but, generally I’ve found aces just want to be left alone. Something I think we can all appreciate every now and again. They’re just not interested in romantic and/or sexual relationships. The first decade of my life was like that, I think the first decade of most people’s lives are like that. What’s so hard to understand about people who just don’t feel that attraction?
This is why i call it separating the artisr from the finance, the art is just unavoidable collateral damage.
Perfect example. Hp Lovecraft is dead he gains no money, rallies no crowd, calls no lawmaker. JkR does still, she does gain money and spends it trying to make the world worse for people.
Lovecraft is also a different case. It should be obvious now that he was a clinical xenophobe and was afraid of most things. He wasn’t really looking to put other people down to compensate for his own shortcomings. If Lovecraft was still alive, I wouldn’t argue with people boycotting him, but he’s not the same as JK.
Yeah and Lovecraft came to see his racism was wrong before the end of his short life. Rowling so far has only clamped down harder on her detrimental bullshit.
Is that true? I’m an HP Lovecraft head and had never heard that
In his later letters to, and I could be wrong about the recipient, Robert E Howard he lamented that he wasted so much time being afraid of other cultures, and recognised his xenophobia as ignorance.
Moreover, ACAB includes Harry Potter
Minecraft Creator notch went the same way, as did Dilbert author…
I’m convinced there’s a cabal of billionaires that either get dirt on people on the rise and corrupt/blackmail them, or eliminate people who are not corruptable before they get too rich/powerful. It doesn’t take much to kill someone, and neuvo riche probably aren’t prepared for the precautions they’d actually need to take.
That and money corrupts (or so we’re told, seems like it’d make as much sense that people who hoard money corrupt)
You should watch Shaun’s video on the Harry Potter series. He goes into a deep dive of how the books are littered with her political views - even the first one - and how you can watch her become more conservative as they progress and she became more wealthy: the books start out criticizing the system, but by the end, the message becomes that the system should never be questioned.
Throughout the books are a pattern of borderline racist stereotypes (the black kid is named Shacklebolt, the Asian girl is named two single syllable last names - might as well be named Ching Chong - the 15-year-old Irish kid is obsessed with whiskey and blowing stuff up, etc), but you can also see where her transphobia came from. Everytime she wants you to hate a woman in the books, she describes them as having some kind of masculine features, from a strong jawline to “mannish hands.”
As people become more wealthy or famous, they’re given a bigger microphone to cast their garbage opinions with and it’s never been easier to tell the world your shitty political beliefs than it is right now.
His video on Rowling’s new friends is also a good watch.
Helen Joyce has gone onto Jordan Peterson for Chrissakes. They’ll overlook their feminism as long as they can hate trans people.
Rowling has also platformed NeoNazi Posey Parker’s work. This is the person who popularized that “adult human female” slogan they love so much.
The feminism is a front. If they make themselves the victims, they can be hateful shits.
The Harry Potter books aren’t very good. They probably only got enough promotion to become the phenomenon they did because the kingmakers knew what kind of a person J. K. Rowling really was. If she’d actually been a decent human being that series would’ve died in obscurity.
I think it just takes quite a few moral failings to even achieve that level of wealth in the first place in the vast majority of cases.
Here specifically, these people are authors and IP holders in a society that places a lot of value in ignorance and in very chauvinist and racist ideas. By hook or by crook, they’ve made something original. They have some merit, and you would expect them of all people to see those societal failings for what they are. To not comment on them, or to uphold them, or to mask them, (arguably all the same thing) is a decision they made in their work. I think we vastly overestimate how easy it is to do that across an entire body of independent work if it doesn’t align with your beliefs.
It makes sense that a person who has the merits and will to do something like that, again, entirely without challenging such obvious failures (as most in their position would), would be chosen to win the broad favor of a society that desperately does not want to be challenged or its failings acknowledged (esp ruling class, the ones with something to lose and wealth to spare to push these things), and would gain a lot of its wealth. Especially in ye old early-internet world when people weren’t discovered as easily. Then, when their platform is secure, the mask slips.
It’s not a conspiracy or an aberration, it’s survivorship bias. These people are a product of our society. We have to reckon with that.
edit: I realized I could expand on what I meant in a few places so I sprinkled a bit more in.
Scott Adams was always insane. Behind the Bastards covered him. Before twitter, we just inserted our own meaning into the short comics. When he had more time to write a story in the cartoon, there were come signs. I remember the Bob Bastard episode and how he views people who give to charity.
Money/power doesn’t corrupt, it liberates you from the consequences of your actions. It allows you to freely be fully true to yourself without fear of repercussions.
They are…billionaires. That is the common denominator of horrible people. They think that because they are rich beyond measure that their opinions should rule the world. The world would be a much much better place if we were rid of the pestilence of the billionaire class and maybe the ‘$100s of millions’ class. No one gets to being a billionaire by being completely honest, law abiding, fair, moral and ethical. Rules must be ignored in the quest for superlative riches. Those rules are only for those who haven’t become rich enough to ignore them. Even if they seem like benign benefactors, scratch the surface and you will find they are, without exception, evil.
Fuck rowling, i pirate ALL her shit. Ill do what i want with the I.P. and nobody can stop me.
Same, I love HP. It’s probably my all time favourite series, but I haven’t paid her a cent since she showed her true colours, and I never will again. So I pirate.
“I’ll make my own Hogwarts! With blackjack, and hookers!”
Call that hooker hermione the way she gave my hog warts.
That’s called The Magicians
Also like Elon Musk, her origin story is a load of bullshit.
Her work did really speak to me as a young gay child in a place where it wasn’t ok. That being said, fuck the author. Haven’t gone to the park, haven’t seen the new movies, haven’t played the new games, haven’t given her any money in well over a decade.
In this day and age, I can easily find entertainment elsewhere. Anyone else that loved her work can do the same.
…but really must tell others of us with less personal investment about the nature of what and why. I knew she was controversial and probably a bad person due to headlines in the periphery, but I didn’t know she is a genocidal monster type of a person. H.P. was a little late (in film) for my childhood, but it is still good to know why exactly she is to be avoided at the peripheral awareness cultural level.
Solution? Trans-positive fanfiction that celebrates the parts you’re nostalgic for, but doesn’t financially benefit Rowling
shes going to hate star trek or most sci fi genre.
Trekkie here. People still complain about modern Trek being “woke” unlike their preferred version (which definitely does not talk about “woke” issues through allegory, or something)
Modern trek is very fascist unfortunately.
I don’t watch Star Trek, but even I know that the first show was hated in its time for having a black woman in the main cast and would’ve been called “woke” and boycotted for the socialist themes.
Which is odd, since nutrek seems obsessed with section 31 and the mirror universe, so fascists should be on board.
those people are conservatives, and i dont believe they were ever true trek fans, to say that. the problem with nutrek is the showrunners/execs pushing thier own agenda, and “tyring to be offended for thier target audience” of OG trek.
Again, this is just vibes based. I will not be defending Discovery but Lower Decks is fucking awesome and Strange New Worlds is a solid return to TNG style storytelling. Vaguely gesturing at imagined wokeness is not an argument.
Trans Wizard Harriet Porber by Chuck Tingle unironically slaps.
Chuck Tingle is amazing and I hope continues to write for a long long time.
Related to the reply at the bottom, it’s so weird to me whenever people try to either separate or hand-wave Lovecraft’s attitudes from his works as if they’re not super-duper fucking related to each other. Like, you can’t say “HPL was a elitist xenophobe but Shadow over Innsmouth is a good story,” like one doesn’t follow the other… “therefore, Shadow over Innsmouth is a good story.”
Part of what makes Lovecraft’s horrors so timeless dispite their frankly dated and unsatisfying writings is how he tapped into a primal fear that most other creatives have abandoned, the fear of “the other group.”
/rant
I may elaborate more/clarify some things if people want to talk about it
Also HPL is super dead, his estate isnt continuing his legacy of being a racist fart waffle. The whole “Death of the author” problem becomes much easier once the actual author is dead and they no longer personally benifit from the discussion or consumption of their work.
Thats why JKR is so problematic, engaging with her BS keeps her relavent so she can do more damage. HPL can be discussed more freely because he cant break anything else from his coffin in Providence.
Defending shadow over inssmouth, specifically, is weird because that is the one where the scary part is supposed to be the main dude finding out he’s the offspring of a monkey-princess from Africa. The most obvious, straight up not even subtle racist twist.
It is a good story… Up until the end and you’re meant to be scared by “oh no my grandma was black!”
You’re thinking of Arthur Jermyn. Innsmouth is the fish people that the neighbouring town thought was simply a product of spending so much time fraternising with the Chinese.
Black? The twist was he was a fishman.
To Lovecraft, the sinister other was a continuum stretching from people of non-WASP stock all the way to ancient chaos gods at the core of a vast, pitiless universe
Using “stock” when describing racial lines: Pure HP. 🤌🏻
He was what I call hilariously racist, as in, so over the top all you can do is laugh. Hell, he hated on other white New Englanders that weren’t from “good stock”.
And his cat, LOL my god, what a name. (Really wasn’t unusual to name a black animal something like that. As Archie Bunker would say, "What?! That’s what we called dose people in dose days!)
I don’t want to talk about it but I like where your thought it going. I’m just not feeling like I have a lot to add.
Lovecraft is a bit of an odd duck in this comparison largely because his own works are fairly dull and uninteresting on top of being a generally shitty person overall.
His contributions are mostly that he had some really interesting ideas from the world building side of things that other authors and creators turned into far more interesting stories. Not really comparable to JKR in that Harry Potter is actually a pretty good piece of YA fiction.
I think Harry Potter is pretty shitty and uninteresting fiction. It is not really a constructive argument though, because it is entirely subjective. A lot of people thinks that Lovecraft wrote some great and interesting fiction, so I am not really sure what you are trying to say.
Well, Harry Potter is entertaining, but it is racist and bigoted in a more modern subtle micro-aggressive way. “Slaves actually want it, if you are a good master” apology, Voldemort is evil because he wants to be immortal (not because he promotes the ideas of an genocidal eugenicist), glorifying emotional manipulation, the high school jock is the protagonist and he grows up to be a cop. The text is difficult content wise for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with Rowling’s political stances. I mean the girl of Asian descent is literally called Cho Chang.
She called the Asian girl “ching chong”, she called one of the few black people in it “shackle bolt”, and she might as well have called the Irish kid “Irish O’Carbomb” given his name an propensity for unintentionally setting things on fire.
Don’t even get me started on the goblins.
She straight up admitted lycanthropy is HIV, and all werewolves are interested j is spreading their disease by attacking anyone nearby, one werewolf specifically targets children, if I remember correctly.
The only gay characters I am aware of, one is a villain, and the other other is “one of the good ones” who never acted on it after a point and just stayed a celibate single.
The only non-magical users in the magic world “squibs”, basically disabled people, are portrayed as shitty humans. Every summer Harry got left with ms fig who was “a mad old lady”, and the school caretaker Filch, who is a sadist that welcomes umbridge with open arms, a parasite who latches on to whoever benefits him most.
I’m sure there’s others I’ve never caught or thought about.
She straight up admitted lycanthropy is HIV,
Notice that two queer coded characters (Lupin and Tonks) are shoved into a straight, age gap relationship, where they immediately have a baby and are killed off.
Tonks is especially egregious. You have a woman who dyes her hair crazy colors and chooses to go by a more masculine nickname, and then at the end, we have Lupin calling her “Nymphadora.”
The alcoholic driving instructor. Her name is Madam Hooch, what more proof do you need?
Voldemort is evil because he wants to be immortal (not because he promotes the ideas of an genocidal eugenicist)
That’s not quite true but the degree that’s tolerated is what makes it odd.
In (I think) the seventh book, the trio is horrified, upon infiltrating the Ministry of Magic, at a statue that the Death Eaters have installed which has wizards sitting on muggles as a throne with the phrase “Magic is Might” (for whatever reason, my brain remembered this as, like, a centaur and an elf and, maybe, a goblin underneath but I think this still qualifies for genocidal eugenicism, nonetheless).
But (as you and others have pointed out) these ideas have kind of tepidly been present throughout wizard society well through the books. Even if we disregard – say – Malfoy’s use of Mudblood and such (as his family was always analogous to supremacist families, anyway): Arthur Weasley’s pretty much not respected by his colleagues for his interest in muggles (which, if we were to actually take themes seriously, could have been an opportunity for Rowling to draw further connections with his monetary class) while those who do respect him kind of just regard it as pointless amusement, the fact that nearly every magical creature exists meaningfully segregated from wizarding society without any exploration of why (even in cases where the text provides it as being a choice by the magical creatures), and other small bits.
Like, perfectly reasonable if you’re trying to represent a realistic society (people have all kinds of prejudices) but Rowling and her protagonists seemingly have no interest in it (or, perhaps more importantly, rooting it out more thoroughly past the overt supremacy of Voldemort).
Explicit, in-your-face bigotry: the books come down hard on but it seems wholly interested in maintaining the status quo, so long as it isn’t disruptive.
Which, like, (considering the author) isn’t surprising but I do find it interesting in the ways in manifests itself.
(for whatever reason, my brain remembered this as, like, a centaur and an elf and, maybe, a goblin underneath but I think this still qualifies for genocidal eugenicism, nonetheless).
You remembered correctly, kinda. The “Magic Is Might” statue was installed later on, but during Order Of The Phoenix in the ministry there’s the ‘Fountain of Magical Brethren’. It’s a wizard and a witch that are being stared up at adoringly by a centaur, goblin, and an elf.
Which I wouldn’t call genocidal eugenicism, but it’s definitely problematic in a different way. I think I remember Dumbledore pretty explicitly calling the statue a bad thing, but I don’t remember exactly how or when.
Oh, I meant that the muggles being made the throne, rather than other magical creatures, was still genocidal eugenicism (basically, still qualifies, even if I didn’t remember correctly).
But the previous example you bring up is another case of what I was trying to highlight: the books are aware of the low-key prejudice present throughout the society. Both implicitly and explicitly (e.g. Dumbledore’s highlight), it’s aware that less overt forms of prejudice exists.
Which is what makes it never getting addressed, by the end of the books, so…I dunno, notable, in some capacity?
It’d be much more simple if we could just say that the books implicitly argue for the status quo but it’s something more overt, instead. The books seem cognizant and aware of marginalization – both supremacist (à la Voldemort) and social/somewhat-systemic (various examples we’ve brought up) – yet there’s a way in which even this awareness is tamped down to that’s-just-the-way-it-is by not even arguing for it but just by…doing nothing about it. These microaggressions and prejudices are noticed though never confronted while we continue to socialize and interact with these people who express such bigotry and never gets resolved in any meaningful way, by the end.
I’d say his writings were more novel, and interesting, than Rowling’s. He overused fancy words, and when you stripped away the ornament, his stories ran on xenophobia and catastrophising (“what if those weird-looking foreigners practice human sacrifice, or are really not humans but fish-monsters?”), but he could write a compellingly eerie story. (Some of them have, of course, aged worse than others.) Rowling, meanwhile, plots like a LLM trained on the past century of British children’s literature.
Meanwhile, neck-deep in AI slop and surrounded by bots, the uncanny valley of people that aren’t people with unknowable intentions may turn out to be the most resonant.
Fourth grade me disagreed with it being pretty good YA fiction even at that age. It was generic and only decent if it was your first exposure to YA fantasy.
I liked them until the fifth book came out - I was about in fifth grade. You could tell that when Order of the Phoenix came out that she had George Lucas syndrome and wasn’t being told “no” by editors anymore.
I still did the midnight releases and fun stuff, but it jolts from a decent “monster of the week” children’s series to overwrought garbage.
HP ain’t got shit on The Hobbit.