The way the Ursula K. Le Guin quote where she talks about the first Harry Potter book is used is a bit disingenuous because she is talking about the literary quality of the book and like that's not what the "Rowling really fucking hates and slanders trannies"-discourse is about. People are acting like she called Rowling herself "ethically mean-spirited" when she did not and it actually doesn't matter whether the books are in fact actually evil or just trash or widely acknowledged masterpieces because it doesn't change anything about what Rowling does. But apart from that it annoys me because the people sharing that quote don't care about the quality of the books, they only care to reframe the books as a symptom of the author's decrepit morals which is fair insofar as a lot of an authors social and ideological hangups shine through in their writing (some authors are even said to try to mediate, reflect and transform their hangups through writing, the monsters) but it's also unfair in that it completely ignores what Le Guin was actually saying and in that it is actually worthwhile to try to process HP as a book series and a phenomenon. Because Le Guin is right. I used to really like Harry Potter - when I was a kid - and now I can't fucking hear about it anymore, but it really is "good fare for it's age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginary derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited". Le Guin is talking only about the first book here, where the age-group is 11 year olds, and what she is saying is it's an okay children's book, nothing special, pretty judgy. Harsh for a die-hard fan to hear maybe, but hardly the revolutionary takedown people make it out to be. But I think it holds true for the book series as a whole. Like I said, I think it's disingenuous to portray the books as uniquely evil when what they really are is exactly what people expect and want from YA books: lots of characters they can relate to, a seemingly big world they can imagine living in and a nice, inoffensive, boring sentiment like "love is the strongest magic" or whatever. If you were to read the books to find out about the authors political and social opinions, you would expect her to become famous for being very racist and classist, with the role the centaurs, house elfs and gnomes play in the story. Trans-what? Anyway, none of that really stands out in a late 90s, early 00s kids / YA books. And it has all those things the YA audience (which of course includes much more people than just those in their late late teens) desperately craves, even if it is nothing special ("imaginary derivative" would be a baffling criticism to levy against a YA book btw but it does make sense in context where Le Guin talks specifically about how much it annoys her that apparently none of the reviewers at the time have ever read another kids fantasy book). And here my well trained distrust comes into play. Because I have seen so many tweets and hour length youtube videos about this (okay only like two videos but still) that I don't think it's about Rowling spreading hate speech anymore. But it's also not cancel culture, because people are already trying to cancel Rowling, and they should continue to do so, but what you aren't explaining when you're talking about how uniquely awful the Harry Potter books are, is why and how Rowlings statements may classify as hate speech. Let me be the asshole here and say that
