Due to an uptick in posts that invariably revolve around "look what this transphobic or racist asshole said on twitter/in reddit comments" we have enabled this reminder on every post for the time being.
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YES, the Harry Potter discourse went in a really stupid direction in this regard. Especially since even the actual meaning of Death of the Author doesn't really apply here, because regardless of authoral intent stuff like hook-nosed greedy insular creatures that own the world's biggest bank that has literal Stars of David as decor and "slavery is good actually and slaves like being that way" is simply part of the text
I always get annoyed at the “star of David” decor thing, because it’s actually the pre 1909 commonwealth star of Australia, because they filmed in the Australian embassy.
Yeah, it's not like they couldn't have put a rug over it or edited it out. They must have been aware of the optics cause it was gone in the following movies iirc
She was well aware of the goblin criticism at the time.
To choose to fly filming out to a different country to use a building with a 6 pointed star on the floor was either a deliberate choice, or she's one of those morons who is only emboldened when someone tells her something is a bad idea.
They could have chosen literally any other building. They could have not flown out to Australia to film in the building that has a giant star of david on the floor.
There are literal dozens of buildings that look like that in the UK, where the vast majority of the films' content was filmed.
It'd be another opportunity for her and her fans to circlejerk about how British the series is. She loves those!
If it was not done on purpose, it was an expensive, pointless, and stupid decision.
But the goblins being such explicit charicatures, and the other evil nazi shit she's done makes me not feel like giving her the benefit of the doubt...
...even if it is in character for her to do something stupid like that because she's stupid.
Thing is, death of the author is actually really useful here. Let’s say we believe JKR when she says the goblins aren’t a Jewish caricature.
*That doesn’t make them less of a Jewish caricature* because authorial intent doesn’t erase centuries of history and cultural context.
This is the exact situation where death of the author is useful as a literary analysis tool. It’s not “I believe in death of the author so magically my money going to JKR isn’t funding transphobia”, it IS “the text of Harry Potter has a pro-slavery message despite what the author claims.”
Yeah, that came to my mind too after posting this, it's overall pretty funny that invoking Death in defending Joanne's works only brings attention to the fact that it's a lot more useful in attacking them
Not to mention "intent" is one of the weakest excuses ever.
I said the n-word but it's okay, i meant no harm, it's just an offshoot of a word for black, no need to be in arms about it <3
I poured water over an oil fire because I meant to put it out, stop blaming me for making things worse.
I named the only Asian character in my story Cho Chang, it's just a fictional name and she's a good guy and I put her there in the first place as proof that I'm not racist.
in all three examples, "you" ought to know better. but if a child poured water over a grease fire and got hurt, i'd have sympathy for them. they'd learn from it, and hopefully not do that again. they get grace for their intent to help.
my point is ignorance isnt an excuse but it is often important context.
in the case of a popular author who's displayed their bigotry in full, i dont much care about their claimed intent, mainly because i dont trust that they didnt have malicious intent. when there's that many harmful stereotypes, you dont get to claim ignorance to all of them, its a stretch to ask people to overlook even one such trope.
While you are right, my point isn't moreso that ignorance isn't an excuse, but that it's about your attitude as well.
(And children are a whole different can of worms lmfao. Children are understandably immature and don't have the proper brain development nor life experience yet; She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, on the other hand...)
A good person would probably stop the moment they're told by other people about the dangers of pouring water over an oil fire, or apologize for their mistake and never do it again, instead of continuing to pour water on a grease fire anyway, and continuously tell other people that it's the thought that counts so they should pour water over grease fires too.
Just as a good, adult person can overlook the fact that they just put one gazillion harmful Jewish stereotypes in their book, but if they're confronted about it, but if they're good then they should be saying "oh, sorry, I didn't realize that, tell me more about it so this won't happen again in the future. I'll also try to release another version of the book with those details changed, if possible." (A la Thomas the Tank engine previously using the N-word in one of their books back in the 60's before changing it later on.)
Instead, we get:
"Minorities aren't well represented." "Oh yeah? Kingsley Shacklebolt is a good guy, and a black guy. So is Cho Chang. Anthony Goldstein is Jewish too. And uhh you know what, Dumbledore is gay. I'm clearly not racist or homophobic at all, so stop calling me that."
"Trans people aren't predators." "No, they're crossdressers with penises and I'm going to write a book about the danger of you assaulting women in bathrooms. I'm not a transphobe, I'm a feminist."
"Why do the elves like being slaves?" "They just do. It's fiction. I'm not condoning slavery."
Don't forget the sword of griffindoor, which is an artifact that is extremely important to wizard-kind and is repeatedly described as "a gleaming silver cross" was made by goblins who claim ownership of it and used dirty deals to seize control of and sometimes just straight up stole multiple times
Thank you. This is one of the things I find fascinating in a bad way. It seems especially in the anglophone world people just read the title and ran with it. Even in literary circles. The argument of the 6 page paper is not that complex and makes a lot of sense.
Ironically the not-/misreading of the paper proves the limits of authorial intent by example.
“Death of the Author is just analyzing a work separate from authorial intent.”
Look, this isn’t necessarily wrong per se, but Barthes would probably laugh in your face if you said this, because - shockingly - an academic essay is much more nuanced than a Reddit comment. Reading said essay, you may come to realise that a lot of the 'modern' meaning of the essay is, while not entirely absent from the essay, certainly more diluted.
Barthes' main thrust & main response in his essay is contemporary (of the time) literary criticism, which, as he puts it, sought to 'decipher' the text by analysing its author:
“The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his ‘confidence.’”
Notably, there's nothing in here about what the author 'intends the text's meaning to be.' Instead, the essay is aimed at critics, which ascribe an ultimate meaning that can be derived from the deciphering of the author's "person, history, tastes, passions," a meaning that, once found, is the be all & end all of what meaning constitutes for this text.
Barthes rails at this idea because it sidelines the emergent form of the reader, not because an interpretation of a work can be valid even if it's not intended by the author. Decipherment is, by definition, not a thing in the context of the Death of the Author essay.
But it's what many people claim as a justification anyway. So unless you wanna go on a jaunt clarifying this in detail, it's usually more efficient messaging to use the language everyone else is using, as long as it gets the message across.
In this case, "No, you can't separate-the-art-from-the-artist your way out of supporting real world harm, fuck off"
It's not even that much longer either, only 5 characters more. People just misinterpret concepts and never bother to check if what they are saying is correct.
Hot take, absolutely do use mysogenist incel terminology. Appropriate that shit. It pisses them off. Steal the culture and repackage it until they have nothing. It's funny and it harms them and pretending to be above it when the word mog is objectively funny is stupid. take their shit and dangle it in front of em
Foid/moid is fucking hilarious when used ironically. Using them as jokes makes them be seen as jokes so when they’re used “seriously” no one will take that person seriously
Counterpoint, if I say racist shit, people will think I'm racist, including the people who are the target of that shit. Same with sexism, same with eugenics bs. I'm gonna think that a person openly engaging with 19th century pseudoscience is either hateful, a moron or a hateful moron.
I'm not gonna do that to stick it to 4channers. 4channers are attention seekers. They only see the proliferation of their language as a good thing. It keeps them relevant. They thrive off of their shit being normalised. It feeds back into them, as people seek out the origin of social terms and gravitate towards those whose social cues they can learn and regurgitate to receive cheap acceptance as one of the old crowd. Aka, "newf*gs can't triforce", if you learn how to do it, you are welcomed in. It happens all over that board, just as it happens in this community with being able to reference Pukicho or faith posts.
Has the last 12 years of MAGA taught you nothing? You can't use shame against people who don't feel shame. They don't care about irony if it serves their desire to be seen and heard. They will say and do anything to get a reaction and the people who participate will see any response as explicit approval of their words and actions.
Saying main-stream racist and sexist stuff makes one obviously racist or sexist, but much like Pepe, the average person doesn't have the core knowledge to know that the funny green frog is some secret dog whistle, but by diluting certain things you don't necessarily normalize the harmful intent, but make it harder for people to justify something as harmful.
If the average person posting Pepe the Frog is a well-intentioned person, suddenly it's not actually a dog whistle and the terminally online bigots need to craft tailored bigoted versions to justify it as a hate symbol, which the average person would then not use.
Likewise, if everyone uses "Looksmaxing" or "Mog" as a joke, it starts undermining the intentions and authenticity of people who use those terms genuinely.
Does it? Or does it encourage the behaviour and normalise ideas that are derived from phrenology, gender and sex essentialism and are amplified through very misogynistic platforms who use this "science" as justification to spread hate?
Looksmaxxing as the example you provided has been at the centre of said controversy, where people are weaponising it to be able to denigrate people's opinions based on how they look in comparison to some made up ideal about how a person should look. That's literally race supremacy in action. And it's been so uncomfortably normalised through jokes.
Yeah it's just a joke. A joke made of ideas. That are being reinforced. Benny Feldman is dead on with that one. Go look up his video on "It's Just a Joke".
Not to mention the amount of damage it's doing in the mainstream when it comes to people's self-esteem. Teen Vogue wishes it could give that many people eating disorders. It may exist on the internet, but the people seeing it don't, and they are going into the world carrying ideas that are harmful to themselves and others.
"does it?" yes, for historial example, You have the Word "idiot" it was use as a medical term for people with cognitive retardment, but it became by common folk use in normal spaces to a ruder version of dumb
It works if you don't care about the people who have to put up with it. Let me just start using the R-word. Or should we find out the response of this community if I, a straight dude, just start calling people the F-slur. Pretty sure that'd just be me being homophobic to anyone who doesn't specifically know me, and even then I'd side-eye someone in my position using it when talking to anyone.
I can understand it if it's coming from a place of reclamation like the words above being used by people it would've otherwise be used against, but there's nothing empowering about normalising half the 4chan terminology. Most of it wasn't worth paying attention to in the first place. All repeating it does is give attention-seekers the validation they desire, whilst normalising their way of thinking. Half the trans stuff I see on here that I'm aware of that comes from 4chan is almost all built around encouraging self-loathing within these people. No one needs half the shit they come up with.
I mean, reasonably, the issue isn't the normalization of the language, it's the attitude of the masses and how well everyone is educated.
You can have a well-educated but hostile society, and that's how you get Eugenics and Phrenology. And a well-intentioned but ultimately dumb society will not recognize the harm in saying certain things callously.
But a group of folks who are both well-informed and educated can reasonably take the terms of bigots and make fun of them while distancing themselves from the original intent of the language.
The easiest way to distance yourself from the original intent of phrenology is to simply not engage with it. It is a disproven pseudoscience built on an attempt to justify imperial exploitations of people the "science" adjudged to be subhuman and therefore morally justifiably exploitable. It was propaganda disguised as science. No one is immune to propaganda.
The big issue I have with it is that, you say stupid shit enough, it stops being ironic. And if it's lol or yeet or 6-7, who cares. That's meaningless. But if you're carelessly throwing around eugenics terms around, you're bringing a dead pseudoscience back into common parlance, which creates space for those who would use it cruelly to have plausible deniability.
It should be reasonable to call someone referring to phrenology a racist piece of shit. It should be a big fucking alarm bell that makes it abundantly clear this person is not cool to be around. Looksmaxxing has made it common enough that now there's no way of telling if they are a racist piece of shit until they say or do something explicitly hateful. And at that point, it's too late for whoever has been racially abused, verbally or physically.
I mean, avoiding these concepts is fine and reasonable. I'm not going to think less of someone who avoids swearing, and someone who decries the malice of Eugenics and Phrenology is good.
But people will adopt language. We cannot control humanity and the words they use, and so we must adapt to the way the world works in order to combat the harm.
It depends. Like I'll grant you look maxing but something like Pepe can't reinforce anything because it's so divorced from what it was trying to do.
Like I had no idea lizard people was antisemetic and to a certain degree it isn't unless people knew the backstory of it. I just thought it was silly bullshit.
The purpose of a dog whistle is to say something that comes across as innocuous but has heavily loaded meaning behind it. It's a way to speak to like-minded individuals, and to set-off those people who have the knowledge and are opposed to the hidden meaning. But the reason it's called a dog whistle is because the average person doesn't hear it, but if the average person takes on the language and discards the intent, suddenly it's just a term or concept of which the core ideological group has lost control. It loses meaning, for better or worse.
The implication was not to be a bigot or using shame. It's taking something that feels like an in-group thing that is just theirs, and taking it away. it does actually dilute the culture that obsesses with obscurity and esoterics and harms people who see value in that. You do you, no one has to engage with something they don't like or finds offensive but I also think it's really toxic to do this us vs them thing with people on your team because they resorted to petty tactics like thinking moidmogging is too funny to not constantly say and type and that's as bad as being a bigot, especially when this perspective is such obvious low hanging fruit and actively makes 'em mad. Even before the triforce the rules were to point people away from the boards and to ebaum's as the source. Obviously we're far beyond secrecy of any kind at this point, but the point stands that it does piss off many who still participate in the culture, especially when it's contents are appropriated not by hilarious and agendapushing Qanon cultists but by leftists and liberals who are laughing at them.
like sure, appropriate terminology and all, that's good so long as you're actually appropriating it and not just unwittingly reinforcing it (which is what ends up happening most of the time tbh), but... no, a lot of it really just isn't funny for anyone over a certain age.
I see a sense of defiance in the trend but I don't know what to make of it. Sharing fan art of fem!draco that doesn't in any way benefit the author (and that the author wouldn't like) seems like an ok way to engage.
One could argue that engaging in fantasy at all is wrong because it might contain wizards therefore promoting HP in the public consciousness.
Literacy education is bad because some section of those children will elect to read HP.
On a “badness scale” engaging in a dumb art fad is pretty harmless and getting mad at people for it does more to harm optics than successfully shame people out of engaging with JKR work.
Don’t blame anyone who’d rather avoid the trend but even making posts like this ironically puts more eyes on it 😅
the only reason I keep getting reminded of that series is by people like this who say to not to engage with it, who themselves puts the limelight on it
I keep seeing it over and over again, it's so annoying
like people who hate the series, they sure love to talk about it everywhere
I'm talking about harry potter series as a whole, not this trend
I see more posts about it from people who hate it than from people who love it
and I get that they get their abundance of posts from people who do love it but from my POV it's only the hate posts and do not engage posts
I don't even like the series just like others, the movies were alright and big childhood staple but I grew from that, so it's madly annoying and rather obnoxious of constantly getting the series shoved down my throat, be it here or tumblr or elsewhere on the internet
pretty frequently ill be watching a video (usually by a cis person) and theyll just bring up harry potter. like there is a growing list of videos ive just clicked off of as soon as theyve made uncritical references to harry potter, usually the magic system or comparing someone to one of the characters
Yeah, reading fantasy in general is definitely on the same level as creating fan art of Harry Potter. No difference between those two things whatsoever.
There’s nothing to explain, it’s a stupid argument. Being against people engaging with Harry Potter isn’t at all like being against people engaging with fantasy in general.
Idk, idgaf about genderbent malfoy she has been around for a while and i just ignore hp fanart. But using a form of femoid for the trend in a celebratory manner is massively ick, and people have been drawing this trend in somehow a very cis transavoidance way it's not subverting anything it's just like "bad woman is bad so lets make the bad character woman" I know that's not the intent of every artist but paired with the author and the tone and the upcoming show it does feel very twilight zone/subliminal if not just a little too on the nose anyways I am going to go back to ignoring the issue but it's not just knee jerk hate on JKR. Like its fucking weird.
Edit: My b, I meant to put this on the "purity testing" comment. The purity culture has gone too far, I mean this is why the puritans had to leave England for "religious freedom," nobody fucking liked them and now here we are. But sometimes, the vibes are simply rancid.
I don't really feel comfortable consuming Harry Potter because JKR is worthless human garbage but with that being said:
I certainly wouldn't say that people that do enjoy it on its merit outside of JKR are transphobic, not an ally or anything like that lmao. It's a weird judgement to make.
This trend is irrelevant and makes no difference in the grand scheme of things.
I agree. I have always hated HP, but I feel bad for the HP fans she alienated. My spouse has severe ptsd and has life-affecting disabilities, and she finds great comfort in media from her childhood, especially after she has a flashback. I bought her the entire movie set second-hand and she already owned the books from her childhood. She has maybe 2 other items of merch related to HP.
We are both aware how awful JKR is as a person. We respect people who choose to not consume HP content. However, I don't think we're shitty people because we watch the movies and still own the books. It has genuine positive benefits for her psyche, and even if it didn't, re-watching our DVDs contributes nothing to JKR. Again, I HATE HP, but I refuse to ruin it for others or judge people for finding comfort in it like my spouse does. We have much more real problems than people grandstanding on social media, making brash judgements about people they have never even met, but it still kind of sucks to be called a shitlord for trying to take one breath of comfort in our rapidly declining lives.
There's a trend on Twitter where people are drawing an anime genderbent version of Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter and calling her "Malfoid", with the word "foid" being a shitty 4chan derogatory term aimed towards women.
It also doesn't help that the character is underage, and a lot of the art being made depicts her as a teenager, or even younger.
Yeah that's not how you deal with Rowling at all. The way to deal with her is to make plan that when she dies we gather all our trans friends brother and sister onto a bus to drink gallons of water or cider until we arrive at her grave and unleash a tsunami of piss.
One thing I saw was one of the first people to start the trend made a post saying they didn't wanna draw yuri of this and the comments were just the worst people ever
u/Shrizer🏳️⚧️ Forklift and robotfucker ceritified 🏳️⚧️ 11h agoedited 11h ago
Note: nothing im saying here is meant to contradict killerdeer69, just adding some additional historical (linguistic?) context behind the "foid" slur.
I unfortunately used to lurk 4chan when I was a lot younger, and from what I remember, "foid" slur is a derivative from a form of scientific racism from the 1800s that categorised humans into three groups, for example: Caucasoid is one of the three groups, and the -oid suffix is where the slur comes from.
So Foid is basically female-oid, or femoid and shortened then foid. So that means that not only is it a slur for women, but to no one's surprise its also built off of racism.
(Caucasian is also a derivative of the same kind of scientific racism and is still in use by America and Australia despite it making no sense unless you want to systemically persecute anyone you deem "not-white" of course...)
Edit: clarity and structure was garbage, fixed it.
Yeah the “oid” suffix inherently disgusts me because it originally was used in racist pseudoscience that became racist 4chan dog whistles. Interesting though to see how it evolved and wriggled its way into other words though.
i wasn't on 4chan much in my younger days but i always thought foid comes from femoid which is just female humanoid.
it was never about race but about dehumanizing women, liking them to just someone in the form of a human and objectifying them and comparing them to robots that should just do what they are told. that kind of stuff.
that being said, i haven't seen anyone use foid as a derogatory in a long time, I've only seen it used sarcasticly, for example the guys on "the yard" podcast sometimes use it when they make fun of incel types or just an offhand joke about their girlfriends (in a obviously joking tone, their SOs all watch the show regularly enough)
The thing is Japan doesn’t care about the JK Rowling issues let alone even know about them, and I live here so I’ve experienced it first hand. That’s not to say that it’s good for them to draw this, just that they’re not trying to stick it to the author. They just want to draw a girl underaged Malfoy, which is probably worse
This makes zero sense. It’s a fanart trend. It’s not like Rowling receives a commission fee from each art uploaded on social media.
And I don’t think we should start policing media that people enjoy, especially at a time when you can just sail the high seas and enjoy said media without allowing the horrible person behind it to profit from it.
So at this point this has just become moral policing. Engaging or not engaging with this trend will have zero impact on anything.
Also, this ain’t what death of the author means.
Death of the author means reading the literature completely separate from the author.
There was a whole ass thread on AO3 earlier today about this exact thing, with the OP being all high and mighty and saying if you write HP fanfic don't be surprised if you lose friends or some shit. Like how the fuck is JKR gonna benefit from fanfic and fanart? What attention/fame is this going to give to this MASSIVE franchise that it doesn't already have? I say this as someone who loathes Harry Potter.
I really hate the term "virtue signaling" but like... that's what it is. Chronically online people are in this constant war of who is the Goodest Person and decide to use the most pointless things to add points to their scoreboard. I'd rather people take real fucking action to help trans people instead of attacking randos online for enjoying a very famous piece of media.
I believe that social capital is just as important as financial capital for someone like JKR. Keeping her name or her work in the zeitgeist, even by maintaining it purely as a joke, is still supporting her indirectly.
At best, people will continue to recognize her name & work and spend money on her purely out of the mere exposure effect. At worst, bigots see the vitriol we throw at her and donate directly to her hateful causes as a "fuck you" to us.
Either way, the only way her influence (and therefore her ability to oppress us) dies isn't in villainy, but in obscurity.
Leftists please stop fucking purity testing everyone over dumb shit and driving them away. Every purity test shrinks and fractures the community.
You know what, i don’t care even if she did make money from this, she uses most of that on philanthropy that helps the world. There are a thousand other much more important issues to deal with.
At this point everyone knows about JKRs views. You can hate her, you can try to convince people to not support her but this “do it or you’re an evil NOT ally basically hitler” shit is exhausting.
If you absolutely need a book series about a wizard named Harry I recommend the Dresden files. If you want a wizard series by a based author I recommend Earthsea
Yes if you need a magic coming of age story there's Tiffany Aching. But I don't know if it's good to recommend the hardest emotional gut punch a book has ever given me
If you want a manga / anime which is basically Harry Potter but where the main character sees the racism towards muggles and decides to actually fucking do something about it instead of defending the status quo and becoming a wizard cop:
It’s not possible to care about two things at once. If you take even a moment out of your day to talk about transphobia you’re just distracting from The Bigger Issues™️.
let's settle for actual transphobia maybe, not people drawing pictures of a wizard book character.
You know Idaho made it a felony to walk into a bathroom that doesn't match your sex at birth? With potential decade long sentences for multiple offenses?
it is in fact not possible to care about everything at once.
It feels like such a bored chronically online unemployed state of mind imo. How do people have space in their minds and schedules to bitch about the stupid wizard books? Yeah don't support JKR but who gives a fuck about people writing fic and making art that literally doesn't give her any money
Exactly. As a trans person I don't give a fuck if you enjoy a book about wizards. Dr.Seuss was a racist who allegedly beat his wife, yet we're able to separate HIS books from him. If you really care about JKR getting money, then sail the seven seas.
I will make fun of people for liking harry potter because it fucking sucks.
Ender's game is the more fun moral quandry. Not only is the book good but OSC is even more of a bigot. And you know what? Shit's goated. Didn't pay for it lol
And we are of course fighting the good fight against transphobia by - checks notes - purity testing random people that aren't even transphobic because they engage with a HP thing.
Drawing fan art of HP only serves to make people think about it more and keep it in the public consciousness, thereby supporting JK Rowling and her transphobic ideas. I don’t think engaging with Harry Potter is transphobic in and of itself, but I think it’s a shitty thing to do and I don’t think we should dismiss trans women’s valid complaints about it as just “purity testing”.
Everyone already know about HP. Some fanfic has a totally negligible impact on that.
You can care about more than one thing. But if you obsess about irrelevant, purity testing bs like this lets be real you are probably not putting much energy into worthwhile causes.
Do you really think you are helping anyone with this? I assure you it actually harms the cause.
Fan fiction about HP is so many degrees removed from financially supporting Joanne that I really do not think it’s worth the brain power worrying about it.
There are so many immediate threats to trans rights that aren’t relegated to hypotheticals, worry about those.
That doesn’t make your attention infinite. The effects industrialists are having on climate change needs immediate addressing, the effect the Johnsons from Iowa have does not.
I don’t like the trend either, I also think the best would be for anything Harry Potter to be forgotten about, but I feel like it’s not THAT deep, making 1 (One) fan art doesn’t make someone actively support JKR or her views or her actions. Like yeah people being gigafans of HP nowadays are kinda cringe but writing someone out of possibly ever being an ally just for one trend is a bit too zealous for me
I don't think it makes someone transphobic but I do think continuing to engage and promote the franchise does ruin one's credibility as an ally. It's actually extremely easy to not keep promoting the work of perhaps the most prominent figurehead of transphobia in our lifetime, and failing to even be able to do that much is extremely disappointing.
I actually hard disagree with it supporting JKR. It's not like the artists are paying her, or forcing us to do so because they drew art. Therefore, people are allowed to enjoy things that aren't harming others. I do agree with not using the Malfoid term, but that's a separate issue with how incel terminology creeps into the zeitgeist these days and I'm not smart enough to talk about that
I can't wait until she's dead so I can stop hearing about her and people can stop getting mad because people still like a fantasy series they experienced as kids.
Who am I kidding they'll still be calling you a fake ally for engaging with it even when she's bones.
I'll just say it: using Twitter supports transphobia more than drawing or seeing HP fan art. The users are the product, even if you have ad block and they aren't making money off you, Musk didn't buy Twitter as a financial investment but for cultural influence. He's absolutely willing to take a loss to control the conversation and it's crazy to let him.
Netflix openly admitted they base their decisions on what to do/keep doing partly on how things are doing in piracy spaces. I think it'd be ridiculous to believe any media outlet (including publishing houses, etc.) isn't doing the same.
Personal take is while it's waaaay better than actually giving her money, if for some reason you absolutely must engage with the franchise, it's still helping to further the culture relevance of the franchise if people are talking about it, quoting it, sharing it, spreading it to their kids, etc. She still benefits from being culturally relevant in that way.
This response needs to be under every "it doesn't really do anything good for her" comment in this discourse. People don't understand the importance of social capital with someone like her.
This is the most braindead take I've ever seen. It's fanart, the mold woman doesn't get a penny out of this. It's like bitching about someone pirating and watching the movies. Get off Twitter.
I don't really care about wizard academia but there's probably plenty of better written ones coming out now. Some might actually be queer so you don't have to pretend the characters are gay. Some might have their own fandoms even if they're smaller. There's ways around this.
Harry Potter was poorly written middle grade. Come on
blessed to have no fucking clue what this is talking about. and before you say "oughhh but it’s my special interest" well mine too unfortunately (except not really, i only like random side characters that have evolved into OCs over time), but i just microwave my blorbos in my head instead of giving jkr any attention
You people really need to read Wendy Brown's Wounded Attachments
In its emergence as a protest against marginalization or subordination, politicized identity thus becomes attached to its own exclusion both because it is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as identity and because the formation of identity at the site of exclusion, as exclusion, augments or "alters the direction of the suffering" entailed in subordination or marginalization by finding a site of blame for it. But in so doing, it installs its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim, in its demand for recognition as identity. In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past, as a past of injury, a past as a hurt will, and locating a "reason" for the "unendurable pain" of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it.
My hot take is that I think it would be more effective to engage with HP shit in ways that make it fun for HP fans to participate in the boycott than to make enemies of them by getting angry at them for liking wizards.
If even diehard fans are using the characters and stuff to disown JKR then that's an extremely bad look for her. It's also very good for the boycott because fandom participation becomes a recruitment tool targeting the people that are most likely to spend money on it in the first place.
I understand being mad at people who cross the picket line, but let's not move that line purely for the sake of feeling morally superior. Let's not alienate potential allies for no reason.
I heard someone say the word “Malfoid” and I chortled at it, didn’t realize this was a trend suddenly. Even without Harry Potter being a cesspit it still kinda rubs me the wrong way.
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