idk i wish we like... took a moment to just be sad about how a book series a lot of us really really loved turned out to have been written by an awful person?
like yes it has problematic themes but i wish we would stop pretending it always sucked and everyone who liked it was a dumb idiot. yes it’s not Literature (TM), it’s a children series, ok nu. but it was a really good children’s series and there were reasons everyone loved it.
a lot of us have lost an important part of our childhood because it’s tainted now and like. maybe we could or should just be sad about that and recognize we lost something.
also if people could stop yelling about how we’re stupid idiots with no taste because we liked children’s books when we were eight years old that would, like, be cool too
like if you were a kid who was abused or different or lonely the idea of being whisked away to a magical world was immensely compelling. the idea of having friends and finding out you were special and there was a reason you were being mistreated was immensely compelling.
on top of that the worldbuilding is genuinely immersive. it really felt to me like there was a world beyond the main characters and that’s something i rarely find in other books.
and yeah as an adult i can look at the goblins and rita skeeter and see how it’s all problematic but as a kid it all truly flew over my head. the goblins didn’t give me internalized antisemitism cause i did not realize they were pulling from jewish stereotypes. rita skeeter did not make me transphobic cause i straight up did not notice the parts about her physical body being “manly” until people pointed that out two years ago.
yeah as an adult i can read it and see a whole boatload of problematic stuff but it wasn’t actually always obvious and like. it could have gone differently. if jkr was a different person she could have apologized for all of this. or explained she hadn’t known better but now she does and that she’s sorry to the communities she hurt. there was a moment when i thought that was possible. now it’s obvious that it’s not, and i think i’m allowed to mourn that.
and i’m allowed to mourn that something that was incredibly important to me as a child and that i really loved is now irrevocably tainted. we all are. we don’t have to pretend it retroactively sucked and that we were all idiots for being nine-year-olds who wanted to escape our lives and found a means to do it vicariously. fuck, it’s sad enough that nine-year-olds wanted to escape their lives. but anyways we weren’t idiots, the books were good for their time and what they were. we genuinely lost something of value and it’s okay to mourn that.
Also, I get very tired of hearing "read any other book" - many potter fans were, and are, voracious readers. We have read and enjoyed other books; many of the books we read as children were marketed as "if you like Harry Potter..." at the time. Feeling grief over the betrayal of one author does not mean that you don't enjoy, or care deeply about, other books.
if you're invested enough in a book series that you feel the need to mourn when you find out the author's a bigot, your life went wrong somewhere.
you mean the part where i was literal six-year-old? no you’re right i should have just skipped right to adulthood
I mean, as noted in the posts above, for a lot of people who escaped into Harry Potter and other books so hard as children, their lives DID go very wrong somewhere. When the books were coming out, I knew more than one person who were suicidal teenagers who didn’t kill themselves because “but then I won’t find out how the books end”. So, you know, maybe don’t be a shithead about people having feelings about something that was important to them.
And what’s more, a lot of the kids I grew up with who escaped the hardest? Turned out to be queer. In one way or another. When we grew up, that feeling of being an outsider that made us long so deeply to leave for Hogwarts eventually made sense! This was before she said anything about Dumbledore but we knew the story resonated with us. And when I was in high school and she said Dumbledore was gay? We whispered that rumor excitedly at lunch. We didn’t know about the discourse over what constitutes good gay rep. We just knew that we weren’t supposed to know about People Like That™️ and so we were very happy to find out. I legitimately can’t remember another canon gay character in the media I had access to at the time.
And I know trans people who took Dumbledore’s line “It matters not what someone is born but what they grow to be” and RAN WITH IT. A line from Harry Potter encouraged their transition. So yes, the fact that the women who wrote it wouldn’t have encouraged them the same way is a huge blow. We’re not stupid for grasping on to anything we could construe as support. And we’re not stupid for being hurt when that support gets retroactively revoked.
