#and mind you the plot of his book is predicated on harry being bad at communication

[mermaidsirennikita]

Someone pointed out that Lisa Kleypas edited out a line wherein Cam Rohan basically thought (thought!) "pregnant bitches be crazy" when Amelia got emotional about something, and I. Cannot. Deal. Lol.

[celestial-depths]

Harry Potter has always been much less progressive than its fandom: a retrospective

In June 2020, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling decided to use her platform to devalue trans people by ridiculing a headline with trans-inclusive language and going on to spout hateful nonsense like insisting that recognizing trans women as real women makes the experiences of cis women somehow less valid. I’m not going to repeat her baseless arguments here because I’m not really interested in picking them apart, as more qualified commentators than me have already done that, and doing so would be like throwing rocks at a house of cards anyway. Instead, I want to reflect on the fan reaction to her statements. The response has been overwhelmingly negative, with many fans expressing feelings of disappointment and surprise over her choice to further vilify a group of people who are already marginalized and vulnerable to violence and discrimination. I was disappointed, too, but, sadly, not surprised. Not because this isn’t the first time in recent history when Rowling has aligned herself with TERFs, but because I think her writing and interviews have always suggested that her politics are way more regressive and conservative than what most of her fans may have assumed. Me and Harry Potter go way back. I’m in my thirties now, and I remember reading the first two books at the age of eleven, just before the global Harry Potter hype had really taken off. In fact, I may have been among the last wave of readers who got to start the series without the faintest idea what the books were even about. At the time, I had a habit of reading books without checking out the blurbs first because I enjoyed the feeling of diving into a story and being taken completely by surprise, so I didn’t even know that wizards were involved when I started reading. I couldn’t have been at more perfect an age to discover the books. For pre-teen readers like me, they were the perfect mix of escapism and relatability. It was wild adventures and magic combined with the everyday reality of a school-aged child, which is probably why I felt more connected to it than I did with other fantasy books I also enjoyed, such as The Lord of the Rings. Harry would learn spells and fight dragons in one chapter and worry about homework and making friends in the next one, which was why it was always easier for a kid like me to daydream about going to Hogwarts than it was to imagine fighting orcs in Middle-Earth (sidenote: this is also why I was never a big fan of the HP movies; they kept the exciting highlights but they left out the slice-of-life parts, which instantly made them seem less relatable to me). My generation also got to grow up with the series. I read the first book at 11, and the final one was released when I was 19, so I was always roughly the same age as Harry during my first read of each book. But by the time I read that final chapter, I was no longer as enamored with the series as I used to be – not because I’d grown bored with the series, but because its politics had started to worry me over the years. I didn’t like the story it was telling between the lines, and I certainly didn’t like the note it ended on. I wasn’t really involved in the fandom during my first years of being a fan of the series, but I did step into it around the time Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released. I was fifteen, I was extremely excited about the release of the first new HP book in three years, and I soon found myself spending hours in fan message boards speculating about future plot twists and discussing my favorite characters. The fandom had its flaws – you don’t know the meaning of the word “petty” unless you’ve witnessed the absolutely brutal fights adult human beings in the HP fandom had over their Hermione Granger shipping preferences – but overall the community was inclusive and open-minded. The fans were a diverse bunch of people who generally seemed to agree that the world of HP was as progressive as they were, since the main message most of them picked up from the books was that one should not discriminate anyone based on the qualities they were born with. I agreed with that reading of the books for a long time, but as I grew up I began to pay closer attention to what the books were actually depicting and what it was leaving out altogether, and I eventually started to wonder whether the series was progressive as it was made out to be. The story was seemingly preaching a message of inclusion, yet all the characters were straight (no, Dumbledore doesn’t count because his sexual orientation was never brought up in the books), cis, and able-bodied, and non-white characters were barely there. What is there to be inclusive about when there’s hardly any real diversity among the very, very vast cast of characters, especially not among the main heroes? Moreover, HP’s way of using non-human characters as metaphors for discrimination yielded very questionable results. The series used house-elves as a metaphor for slavery, yet it ends with the conclusion that the enslavement of house-elves was only wrong when they were treated cruelly, and that they actually preferred slavery to freedom, which was why Hermione was depicted as being silly for fighting for their emancipation. That’s a load of yikes. Werewolves, the series’ metaphor for the HIV positive, were violent, tragic, and uncontrollable, which is... also not great. And don’t even get me started on the books’ take on goblins, who bore extremely uncomfortable resemblance to antisemitic caricatures. The series built a hierarchy between species and used it to address real-life inequality between groups of people, but it never dismantled or even properly questioned that hierarchy, In fact, the biases towards and unequal treatment of other species was ultimately made to seem natural and right. So, there’s that. The books were also littered with awful fatphobia, which doesn’t comply with the anti-discrimination message by any means, and the apparent importance of personal choices and accomplishments got lost by the final two books. For instance, the penultimate book explores Voldemort’s origins and concludes that he was simply born evil, either because he lacked a mother’s love or because he was born from a loveless union (a rape, if we’re being specific, though the books doesn’t recognize it as such, and that’s a whole another can of problematic worms). I don’t even have the time to unpack all the twisted ideas about gender roles that plot point suggests, but my main point here is that it seems like Voldemort never chose to be evil, and apparently neither did his followers, as most of them seem to be villains because they were sorted into Slytherin, or that they were sorted into Slytherin because they were already villainous. At the age of 11. Even the two Slytherins who actively choose to do the right thing in the end (Draco and Snape) do so out of cowardice (Draco) or selfishness (Snape). Meanwhile, as the series progresses Harry’s goodness is less and less predicated by his actions and more based on the virtue of simply being the Chosen One, all the way up to the point where Harry ends up resorting to torture and mind-control – two of the three “unforgivable“ acts as determined by a previous installment in the series – and suffering absolutely no consequences, because he is the hero and nothing the hero does can be bad. The world of Harry Potter, which steers towards being morally ambiguous around the midpoint of the series, ends up being disappointingly black-and-white and deterministic by the end. Choice ends up having very little to do with anything. And then there’s the gender issue, which bothered me most of all. The series exhibits very old-fashioned and restrictive gender roles without ever really questioning them, throws around casual sexism, and it paints a really appalling picture of femininity through its overly sentimental, subservient, frivolous female characters, whose only motivation for doing anything is far too often devotion to a male character or their children, and who are always defeated by their pesky female emotions. Rowling is a self-declared feminist, and I distinctly remember this one writing of hers where she was congratulating herself for championing characters like Hermione Granger over characters like Pansy Parkinson, and that’s her view of feminism I guess? Putting down one female character in favor of another? Pitting women up against each other, urging them to be good girls instead of bad girls – doing all that instead of paying attention to the structural, cultural, ideological reasons why gender expectations and inequality are harmful? Honestly, I don’t think that HP is pro-women at all; the female characters lack agency and are constantly sidelined in favor of male characters, and the series valorizes a very narrow view of womanhood that’s obsessively centered around motherhood and sacrifice.   Overall, the HP series seem to idealize this aesthetically and ideologically old-timey view of society where the world is unrealistically white and straight, and where static hierarchies prevail. The story does not end in a revolution, rebellion, or reform because the story isn’t really about progression; it’s about following traditions and preserving pre-existing power structures. The epilogue of the series really hammers down this point: in the final chapter, the main characters have grown up, married their (white) childhood sweethearts, assumed the roles and biases of their parents and named their kids after their dead relatives, joyfully returning to the origin point of a cycle that brought death and destruction into their world as if there was never anything wrong with that cycle to begin with. So, yeah. I’m not really shocked to see J.K. Rowling expressing awful opinions about trans people because the world of HP was already built upon a whole bunch of awful, traditionalist ideas. As a teen, I’d been read the series through the hopeful lens of my own set of values, but by the time that final book was released, I’d become disillusioned with Rowling and the series, and I no longer took HP for the forward-looking, inclusive story I had made it up to be. I didn’t stop liking certain aspects of the books, but I did stop thinking of Rowling as someone to look up to. For some time, I hoped that Rowling was simply misguided and that she would eventually listen, learn, and rethink. But she keeps proving herself as someone who absolutely refuses to see past her privileged, white, and straight point of view despite all of her resources, and who has inexplicably chosen to crusade against trans women, of all the people in the universe, as if the world wasn’t already hostile enough towards them. So, fuck her. But you know what? The HP fandom doesn’t have to take its cues from J.K. Rowling. The fans don’t have to condone her discriminatory views or agree to read her books in the light of her backward politics. They’ve never done that. From Wolfstar to Black Hermione and from Gay Draco to Trans Snape, the fandom has always been a nurturing environment for fan interpretations that aim to add diversity and complexity to the books, whether Rowling agrees or not. Long live the headcanon. (The fans have also learned to tune out Rowling’s unnecessary comments when they feel like it. Two words: wizard poop. That alone should suggest that the things she says aren’t always worthy of anyone’s attention.)