harry potter cast/crew @harrypottercastjkr - Tumblr Blog

tom--22--felton

#Repost @t22felton

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Such a beautiful piano - Thank you @palazzofirenzebybaglioni for letting me dabble x

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Tom Felton dressed as Harry Potter for Halloween 2021

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laurens-german

EMMA WATSON, TOM FELTON HARRY POTTER 20TH ANNIVERSARY — RETURN TO HOGWARTS

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HARRY POTTER CAST DOING THE POTTERMORE HOUSE TEST ━ Bonnie Wright, Matthew Lewis, Rupert Grint & Evanna Lynch (2016)

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RUPERT GRINT & TOM FELTON ━ Ph: Scott Sternberg (August 2011)

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Daniel Radcliffe photographed by Arseto Adiputra for Men’s Folio Indonesia Nov-Dec 2015 (x)

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From JK Rowling's new book: Her Villian's tumblr header

A girl living with disabilities who criticizes Rowling's self insert character of abelism is the bad guy

animentality

thesoftboiledegg

What makes JKR's shitshow even harder to process is that she didn't just ruin a book series. Harry Potter was an entire subculture. Like Star Wars and Star Trek fans, Harry Potter fans dedicated their lives and careers to the series. I don't know if I'd call it "underground," but liking Harry Potter got you beaten up when I was in school, so it was more of a dedicated indie culture than a mass-appeal fanbase.

Harry Potter was so huge that fan works developed their own followings. Potter Puppet Pals racked up hundreds of thousands of followers and was nearly as relevant as the series itself. For fanfiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality got so big that it has a Wikipedia page. The band Harry and the Potters spawned the wizard rock music genre. A Very Potter Musical developed a fanbase and launched Darren Criss's career.

Harry Potter also has extensive ties to fandom history. Everyone in my generation (millennials) remembers coming home from school to read Harry Potter fanfiction on the Internet. Today, most people just post their stories on Wattpad or Archive of Our Own. But at the time, the fanbase was splintered between fanfiction.net and dozens of individual websites and forums, some made for specific ships. Since they all had individual hosts, a lot of those sites have been lost to time.

And there's the infamous My Immortal fanfiction, which is an Internet legend with people still searching for the author. Everybody read that one (and laughed at it) in middle school.

Pre-social media, fan sites like The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet had massive followings because they were one of few sources for news, theories, essays and fan content. Some of these sites still exist after being around for over a decade and building their own legacy.

Before Deathly Hallows came out, fans were so desperate to know what happened that Mugglenet published a book called What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End? Yep...Harry Potter was so big that people wrote separate books about what would happen in an upcoming book.

And that's not mentioning all the book release parties, Harry Potter-themed events, monuments, fan films, restaurants and even a theme park. A lot of fandoms have those, but Harry Potter infiltrated every aspect of popular culture.

Today, there's a thriving culture of "Harry Potter adults" with themed weddings, baby showers and Etsy stores. Putting your Hogwarts house in your Instagram bio is pretty much a prerequisite for joining the "bookish" community. Warner still produces new content, like the Fantastic Beasts series, although we've all seen what a disaster that's been.

Everyone has at least a few memories associated with Harry Potter even if it's just watching the movies. I had great memories associated with Harry Potter. But looking back at the subculture, history and thousands of fan works, it doesn't seem fun anymore. Studying the fandom or being part of it comes with an awkward tension because you don't want to seem like you're condoning JKR's bigotry but can't divorce her from the series. This subculture was spawned by a woman who turned her legacy of magic and wonder into one of abuse and hatred.

I don't expect people to write paragraphs about how much they hate JKR every time they post about Harry Potter, but it's still uncomfortable to see people make new content or wear their Harry Potter Etsy tote bags like nothing happened. Even if they clarify that they don't support her, it's just a weird, tense situation for everybody.

People dedicated years of their lives to running Harry Potter fan sites, writing fanfiction, cosplaying characters and making fan movies. If I were in that situation, I'd have a mild identity crisis. I'd ask myself "Did I waste all those years? Should I delete my content? Where do I go from here?"

So ultimately, JKR didn't ruin "just" a book series or even "just" a fandom. She tanked an entire culture, which inspired people to look at Harry Potter more critically. The issues that people brought to the light tainted the series's legacy even without JKR's personal issues.

Once, Harry Potter was a series for generations. Now, former fans hope that the series fades into irrelevancy. Unfortunately, JKR didn't just tarnish her legacy--she took decades of history, millions of fans and a worldwide subculture along with her.

peerieweirdo

it’s crazy having been super-involved in the HP fandom for more than a decade and watching the fallout from this

quidditch (the real sport) has changed its name to quadball

the harry potter alliance (a nonprofit) has rebranded to fandom forward

the sub-subcultures that sprung up within the HP fandom have now distanced themselves from the main fandom and have become independent groups in their own right

HP was so integral to the development of early online fandom (as OP’s mentioned) that now there’s sort of just a weird... hole in the internet

for many HP fans, it took up a lot of their life. three conventions a year, wizard rock shows, HPA fundraising, granger leadership academy, nightly fanfic, podcasts, quidditch games.

when fans (rightfully) shunned JKR and began to leave the fandom, a lot of them (myself included) were left rudderless. how do you reconcile the fact that most of your friends, hobbies, sometimes even jobs, were due to the work of such a hateful person? as OP said, did i waste my life?

i’m obviously not saying that this is the worst part about JKR’s bigotry (the worst part is, of course, the bigotry) or that HP fans are the worst-done-by victims (who are of course trans people)

but it is WILD to see such a juggernaut of internet fandom be virtually scrubbed away

nimium-amatrix-ingenii-sui

(Tags by @mainecoon76) Really important additions IMO. “Well I always knew it was trash” or “Read literally any other book” are comments that pop up whenever the discussion comes around, and they’re not just useless, they entirely miss what the discussion is about. It’s about a massive cultural phenomenon that has been brought down by its living creator’s hatred and bigotry. It doesn’t matter whether the original content was ever any good. There are plenty of fandoms built on mediocre-at-best content and it absolutely doesn’t matter as long as it brings people joy. The issue here is that the entire material is now so poisoned that it has become hard to interact with it while it’s simultaneously hard to avoid. All the while remembering the joy that once was there and that has now been poisoned. Most Harry Potter fans have read plenty of other books. Many are active in other fandoms as well. “Read another book” is completely beside the point.

fierceawakening

This is exactly why I feel so uncomfortable with the "read another book" people. I'm not even big into HP, but like... if this happened with any one of my current blorbos, ESPECIALLY the ones that have been there for me on and off over decades, I'd be super upset.

Because it's not about how amazing a particular work is or isn't. There are classic stories, yes, that most humans agree are good even after a long time, but there are also stories that are just good enough everybody knows them, whether or not this will be the case a generation later. And it's not wrong or bad to like those!

Fandom is, most often, about the person seeking a fandom looking for a lens to understand themself and their experiences better. To impose a pattern on them that helps the chaos of life make more sense. I have a modified body, but I'm not (to use an example that's not HP, so people who hate HP won't accuse me of lacking imagination or something) ACTUALLY an evil cyborg that oozes goo and possibly won't die.

But the evil cyborgs who ooze goo and don't die are helpful, because there are parts of my experience that their story captures and describes, so I'm invested. More than anyone would "need to" be, really, because of the specific things about me that make it personal.

Which is what bothers me about the way so many of us treated Potter fans. Dump it, get rid of it, lose it, find something else. Turn on a dime, no matter what this meant to you and no matter what it does or doesn't have to do with how you feel about trans people OR WHETHER YOU YOURSELF ARE TRANS. No matter what it got you through or showed you that you could face, because for all the faults you fear will overwhelm you, at least somewhere inside you have a Gryffindor's courage or a Slytherin's cunning or a Ravenclaw's wit or a Hufflepuff's steadfastness.

I still maintain that shunning was unreasonable, and still deeply wish we all had chosen "She Who Shall Not Be Named is dead to us, long live Hogwarts" instead of... acting like a cult on a purity purging kick.

dragonesseclectic

So choose it! I refuse to stop reading and enjoying HP fanfiction just because JKR is a horrid TERF who is pathetically trying to convince herself that fans of HP must still love her if they love HP fandom. She's just using an invidious variation on "the lurkers support me in emails", and some terminally online folks are buying into it. No, just because JKR claims that liking Harry Potter is supporting her views doesn't make it so--she's what we might call an unreliable narrator. No one is forced to choose between supporting trans rights and enjoying Harry Potter; it's a false dilemma imposed by a bigoted liar. Harry Potter belongs to the fans--you can already see the change-over. "Epilogue, what epilogue?" and "Cursed Child doesn't exist" are major themes on AO3. It's like when Highlander fandom collectively decided there was only one movie and a decent TV series based on it. Fandom, not JKR, has decided what they'll accept as canon or not.

fierceawakening

"She's just using an invidious variation on "the lurkers support me in emails", and some terminally online folks are buying into it."

Yup.

kyraneko

Funny how we've gone from "you fanficcers are stealing from the author with your noncommercial fandom activity" to "you fanficcers are supporting the author with your noncommercial fandom activity" the instant that became the more useful opportunity to shame us for what we like and how we like it.

It's been years now since she produced any Harry Potter stories, let alone the good ones that we grew this massive garden of fanculture from, and everything that's taken it from being a random, satisfying kids' book series to the cultural phenomenon that it is, we've provided. We've provided the love, we've provided the attention, and, yes, we've provided the fanworks, the meta, the memes, the art, the headcanons, the reshaped and complexified understanding that is what Harry Potter is now as opposed to what it was when we first turned the last page of Deathly Hallows or the first page of Sorcerer's Stone.

She supplied it, but we transformed it. We reflected it. We remade it.

Her contribution, though not precisely irrelevant, is long ago and far away, and we have paid her for that already.

She was the seed.

We are the forest.

Fuck her, Harry Potter is ours.

justaleafinthewind

This is so important. I’m a trans person who loved Harry Potter even before I realized I was trans, and I refuse to let JKR force me discontinue my involvement with the fandom.

It wasn’t until after all this shit began to hit the fan that I made an ao3 account and started writing HP fanfic in earnest, though I was hesitant to do so because of JKR’s bullshit. But it feels so much better to me to contribute to this fandom as an act of reclamation, filling it with all the trans and queer rep that I want and deserve because I am not about to let this terf asshole ruin these characters and stories that were such an integral part of my childhood.

I almost think of it as my own personal fuck you to her, because she’s trying so desperately to wrench this joy from my trans grasp and I am never going to let her.

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I don’t know what Daniel Radcliffe is doing these days and this clip doesn’t help but here’s my thoughts on the matter:

ohwhpotter

Daniel Radcliffe pays tribute to Robbie Coltrane

“Robbie was one of the funniest people I’ve met and used to keep us laughing constantly as kids on the set ... I feel incredibly lucky that I got to meet and work with him ... He was an incredible actor and a lovely man”