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 family will always be poor(even when Harry should be paying rent or at least buying them a new car).Voldemort is evil because he was a rape baby.
As a sorta half blood rape baby, this has always driven me mad. I am not evil because my conception was.
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 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
And one of her more recent blow-ups was against asexual people.
“Influencing” is putting it mildly. Funding organizations with political power is a lot more than that.
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.
Genocidal monster? Good lord that’s a bit of a stretch
She support israel
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.
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.
Yeah, and you can see it in his fiction as well. While in earlier stories characters literally kill themselves or go insane because they are not racially pure, the narrator in “Shadow over Innsmouth” looks forward to his final transformation into a fish person:
I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
Lovecraft is problematic for other reasons.
The problem is that what makes his work good is this pathological fear of the other, that he interlinks with xenophobia and notions of racial purity in his fiction.
You can’t love the art and hate the author with Lovecraft, you have to accept they’re both pretty fucked up.
Sure, but people can use Cthulhu in their own books/games/movies and Lovecraft still gains nothing from it.
All true. They are not the same Hp was about as xenophobic as you can get.
But ido disagree with that last part. I can read and love his stories but never learn anything about him. I can’t unlearn about him.
Several of his stories are outright racist though.
How do you go about loving that without acknowledging there are issues?
Same reason i can love a villain as a character. Just because i love a of work of fiction or fictional characters does not mean i endorse the mesaage.
Have you read Herbert West: Reanimator? I think that one in particular had an especially problematic description of a black man. I had to put down the anthology for a bit when I got there.
Also she’s anti-ace
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?
The ones who have the biggest problem with it are the ones upset about no one wanting to sleep with them in the first place.
“These people aren’t fucking exactly the right amount.”
Someone should tell Mobius 1.
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.
It absolutely matters - these people have giant egos and if people start disliking their stuff it’ll hurt them real bad.
Elon Musk literally wakes up at 3am cause he gets triggered so hard.
Don’t let them have a good night’s sleep ever again.
Somehow I doubt Rowling is losing any sleep over people she hates hating her back. That’s why the streamer harassment campaign over the first game was a bad idea. It lost her no money and turned people to her side more often than gaining allies.
Nah she’s absolutely losing sleep. These people have all the money in the world and thats what they do with their free time?
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.
He had a stroke in 2011, and I think having two kids die fucked him up. (Some of his early works had sympathetic portrayals of gay men.)
I’ve always found it amusing that the guy who wrote Wyrms (fourteen year old girl is destined to be impregnated by a monster, and the book is her weird horny journey to it) and Hart’s Hope (where our hero has to rape a teenage girl in front of an audience in order to claim sovereignty over the kingdom, and she turns into the story’s main villain) got so hung up about sexual purity.
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.
The point of S.P.E.W. is that Hermoine is an obnoxious activist for caring about slavery so much. Winky gets freed and becomes a depressed alcoholic, the other house elves get pissed that Hermoine tries to give them homemade socks. Hagrid calls Dobby weird for not wanting to be a slave.
Pottermore used to have an article “To SPEW or not to SPEW” which was critical of Hermoine. The text clearly condones the race based slavery. Heck - even the name “SPEW” is a joke.
I never considered that Rowling was making fun of Hermoine’s Elf position.
But I did think it strange that a nicely set-up elf rebellion never arrived.
They’ve tried their best to wipe this article off the internet:
Hermione’s methods might be ill-advised, but this doesn’t render her entire cause unworthy. Just because most elves don’t want freedom doesn’t mean they don’t deserve better treatment. Hermione’s dream of an elf in government might be far-fetched, but there’s merit in wanting to protect the vulnerable and allow them more choices. However, she ought to be careful – ‘tricking’ elves into freedom is arguably as unethical as enslavement.
Before we go, let’s consider Kreacher. Think of how he changed when treated with kindness by his new master, Harry Potter. Previously he’d been bitter and unpleasant, not to mention a liability to his previous owner. Had Sirius treated him a little better, things might have worked out differently. Dumbledore was right – being kind to Kreacher was in everyone’s best interests.
If you look at other translations, “SPEW” is often changed to that language’s word for “vomit,” “fart,” or “snot.”
The only person responsible for the written content seems to be Rowling. And her key witness is Hagrid who is not portrayed for his intelligence in the books.
This is not good for Rowling, but I think kids would still read the HP series and take Hermoine’s point of view.
People made Harry Potter their entire personality to the point of their school/house or whatever basically amounting to astrology to them. JK Rowling could shoot their child in front of them and they’d still take any chance to throw money at her they can get.
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.
I won’t be able to ever shake off Harry Potter. I don’t think of points and views, I just love the idea of another world to go learn magic away from tech and such. I don’t read or listen to it for the political points, or whatever other trash she’s hidden in there. I read it as a form of escapism.
That said, I absolutely hate Rowling. Its to the point that I’m embarrassed that I still like HP. I hate the stupid shit that pukes out her mouth and I hate that she’s taken a whole fanbase down with her. I feel like, for just liking Harry Potter, I’m labeled a patriarchal fascist and that’s not my stance at all. I was an innocent kid who fell in love and still uses the books as a safe place to this very day, because I took refuge in them when my mother was at her most abusive (physically and mentally).
When I was very young, I would daydream about being taken away from her to another world to just dive into magic. She would lie to my therapists and tell them I had mental issues and a vivid imagination. That it was all in my head that she abused me. No one believed me when I cried for help. I was tested for autism. I was diagnosed with severe ADHD. There was one time in elementary school where they tried to take my video game magazine from me in class and I was hysterical, screaming that the demons in my head were going to get me. They blamed the magazine material (Mortal Kombat with Baraka on the front cover, I actually still have it). I was treated as though I was crazy.
It was pure, mind-altering hell. She won every court case over my father on the mere fact that she was my mother. She tried to have me put on numerous drugs as a kid, but my father refused and they needed both parent’s consent. So that’s why I’m irrationally addicted to the books. I’m not so vulnerable as to have my moral views swayed by a fictional story. However, Rowling will never get another cent from me if I can help it. My audiobooks are already pirated as is. I just wish I could be more honest about loving the books without having to tell this story and not be regarded as a piece of shit for liking them.
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!”
Black? The twist was he was a fishman.
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.
Is Dark Corners of the Earth fucking with my memory of it…? The game starts off with being basically the story of Shadow Over Innsmouth but then includes a bunch of other stories all jumbled together to make something unique. 🤔
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.
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!)
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.
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.
The alcoholic driving instructor. Her name is Madam Hooch, what more proof do you need?
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.”
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.
HP ain’t got shit on The Hobbit.
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.
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.
Also like Elon Musk, her origin story is a load of bullshit.
Fuck rowling, i pirate ALL her shit. Ill do what i want with the I.P. and nobody can stop me.
“I’ll make my own Hogwarts! With blackjack, and hookers!”
That’s called The Magicians
Call that hooker hermione the way she gave my hog warts.
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.
best I can do on Rowling is look forward to the inevitable Behind the Bastards coverage
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This is idiotic. If being rich makes you inherently bad, then it’s a highly curable condition: make them not rich. Remove their money (and all access to it via secondary means).
But don’t try to justify killing people you apparently simply want to kill with flimsy logic.
But really, neither of these are realistic, they are both overly simplistic solutions to what is a systemic problem which requires a systemic solution.
That systemic problem can never be solved in any other way. It is not possible.
Green Plumber FTW
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Moreover, ACAB includes Harry Potter
Does ACAB extend outside the USA?
There are some countries that do somewhat better than the US (though it’s pretty much an inherent issue when you give people power over others), but there are more countries that are about as bad or worse. Most countries are neither in the US nor in Europe and less developed countries are generally not doing better than the US on the human rights front (at least before the current presidency).
I’d say outside the US there is generally less of that macho psuedo military ‘alpha male’ vibe and it is generally less tribal with internal protection, but there will always inherently be something problematic with a job that places people above their peers in power and the people that apply for it. Whilst many may do it entirely for good reasons there will always be bad actors. I dont really see ACAB as entirely true, even in america, but i think the role itself as a job will always be a problem in society.
It does. My friend just got back from Tel Aviv last week and he had some pictures of ACAB graffiti on buildings there.
I think we need datapoints from countries less authoritarian than the USA.
Belgian here. The cops just killed a guy on his scooter on an road “accident”. They blamed the kid. Then we learned that the cop had his driving license suspended for drunk and reckless driving and wasn’t supposed to be on the wheel. They kill people all the time.
They entered my home uninvited and pushed my mum to the ground because of a noise call
France : a local bar is L’ACABane dans les bois, “The cabin in the woods”. It should be spelled La cabane dans les bois.
French cops are throwing litteral grenades at peaceful protesters
Hilarious. Does it get raided often? I’d love it to be an ironic cop hangout.
Fair!
Why shouldn’t it?
