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theyikesfiles · 13 hours ago

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Personally, I find that this kind of article never reaches the target audience? This is no criticism of the article tone and it's intentions, more of an observation - and something I often lose my sleep trying to figure out is how exactly to reach this target audience.

I was obviously very into Harry Potter, engaged with the fandom, read fanfiction, did fanart, the whole thing - and like a significant portion of the fans, felt betrayed and outraged by JKR's blatant hateful endorsement of bigotry. There is a large fandom community committed to boycotting products and media of the franchise, encouraging piracy, and engaging with the work critically. To quote Sérgio Vaz, the reader is sacred, not the writer. I sense a movement of fans claiming the relationship they built with the story as their own, reframing its cultural impact. But like every internet community, it is also a bubble of sorts.

To the point that it made me wonder - who's still buying all of this Warner Bros Harry Potter tat? Who's even going to the cinema to see Fantastic Beasts? Surely everyone here knows better?

How do you get a relatively offline and politically uninterested millennial to not buy a Dobby plushie for their kid? Are they reading small political blogs? How do you get a 64-year-old uninformed father who watched his kid go through their formative years with Harry Potter, drove them to book launches and movie premieres as a teen, not to buy them a Hufflepuff mug for xmas? I know for sure, from meeting people like this in real life, that the arguments in this blog post would never reach them. "A lot of people see their spending power as being totally divorced from the world at large. Every day, we’re plagued by difficult decisions about where our money should go and how we square our ethics with the crushing reality of a cost-of-living crisis. (...) But often, it feels like some smarmy losers use the very true ethos of ‘there is no ethical consumption under capitalism’ as a cheap excuse to satisfy their vainest urges. It’s evident in every influencer who does a Shein haul and then claims it’s a way to appeal to lower-income followers (it’s not. It never is.)"

This is well said and the more insidious part of the problem - and tackling this could mean a complete overhaul of people's values in a western capitalist society. The road is long and the work is hard, but I often find that some will opt to shame Harry Potter fans simply because it's easier. Infantilising arguments like "you're not getting a hogwarts letter" and the ever so repetitive "read another book", as far as I observed, tend to breed resentment and defensiveness - and HP fans already have a pretty cosy community to turn back to and lick their wounds when they feel attacked.

I'm not saying this as a "they should be nicer to wittle Harry Potter fans and protect their feelings!". To some extent, outrage, and shame can be useful tools to shake some people out of their comfort zones. But is it working, in this case? Is it generalising the audience and failing to communicate to specific groups within this audience? Will a Chinese teen who loves British pop culture, a boomer father from the American midwest, a middle-class millennial mom from Staffordshire, and an Irish author of smut fanfiction in their late 20s have the same takeaway from blog posts like this? The answer is "obviously not", so what do we do?

However, to the people who do know better and still choose to invest their money in HP merch and media, I can offer my sincere disappointment and bafflement.

This got a bit long as a response, but these are genuine non-rhetorical questions.

I haven't purchased a HP item in close to a decade - I use the books I already had as doorstops or to prop a laptop up for meetings nowadays.

There is NO "death of the author" with JK Rowling - she controls and continues to profit from her IP, and uses that money to fund hate groups.

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theyikesfiles · 2 days ago

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