#hellraiser megatron thanos phyrexia

[fierceawakening]

Re hp discourse:

I heard someone in the audience of a lecture comment that 'Harry Potter is right wing now'.

Now I know that the charitable reading of that statement is 'yeah, a rich heir kills someone upsetting the status quo and becomes an FBI agent' but their use of the word now connotes the author's transphobia.

But I feel like that association is very obscure relative to the size of the books' readership globally. Which makes the comment seem badly mistaken.

Yeah, like, the old coworker I follow on FB who posted about liking it... I was disappointed to see it, but not SURPRISED. His thing the whole time I knew him was playing Hogwarts the Whatever mobile games on every lunch break beginning to end regardless of quality, because that was his fandom and his thing.

Do I wonder if he might secretly be right wing? I mean, I guess he could be, but he's a super muscley gay guy who really didn't seem to me to not realize straight society would find him kind of weird and cartoonish.

So I would guess that if he has heard about it, it was something like "JKR turned out to hate trans people, fuck that but I love my wizards."

Which, I mean, I could get tied up in knots over it, but I could also be like "you know? Tumblr is kind of a politics petri dish. Are we sure everyone who plays this game is as aware as we are? Are we sure ignoring the creator's well known transphobia translates to BEING transphobic? Are we sure ignoring the creator's well known transphobia... translates to... hating Jews... because of some alt-right connections... that most people said were gone... when a game dev left?"

I guess for me it's... talk to your friends. Ask them why they're doing things. Nine times out of ten people aren't being intentionally malicious, or going "my principles are less shiny than Hogwarts."

I dunno, it feels to me like the revival of 2000's SJ stuff, where you were assumed to endorse anything you didn't vocally oppose.

I'd hoped we might be past that, kinda.