my engagement with hp fandom is an ongoing struggle for me, as there are periods of time that i feel a lot of guilt about participating in a fandom for an intellectual property created by someone as vile as jkr. i used to let the aforementioned types of callout posts affect me a lot more until i tried to look at all of this in a more practical manner. i have had to attempt to disentangle this as a question of emotion and look at it more as a question of whether my actions as a participant in the drarry fandom are having tangible effects.
harry potter is one of the largest intellectual properties in the entire world. there are so few people in the west who don’t know what harry potter is. claims that fandom is “advertising” for harry potter are for this reason invalid in my opinion. accusations that we are responsible for perpetuating awareness for an intellectual property that my 85 year old neighbor knows about does not hold water. were this a smaller IP that less knew about, i think we would have a different situation on our hands. deplatforming hate mongerers can be effective, but the idea that harry potter will ever be deplatformed in our lifetime is a joke, and therefore i think the best we can do is to continually extricate JKR from fandom engagement with the HP intellectual properties.
i really feel for the people who make the types of callout posts jalesidor is referring to, or who send hate to the people in this fandom informing them that jkr is a terf, as if they don’t know. their pain is real, and it is shared by me and many in this fandom. i believe it is a misplacement of that pain to target fandom participants, though; they can send as much hate as they want to JKR, and she will never read it. but if they send hate or make callout posts about fandom participants, that might feel like it can effect more change, even though, as I said, I personally do not see fandom participation as benefiting JKR or her views in any empirical way. the moment that changes, and fandom becomes something that is quantifiably propping JKR up, i will reassess. i do not think that is the situation we are in.
i think every person’s engagement with HP fandom is a very personal thing. for me, frankly, it is a long running balancing act between enjoyment and pain. there are long periods where i think that the JKR Of It All is too much for me, and i’ll have to leave. there are long periods where i wonder where i’d be without drarry fandom, which has been such a fruitful and welcoming place to explore and engage with my transness in a world that is not hospitable to people like me.
for many people, this pain outweighs the happiness. that was me up until very recently when i discovered fandom. still to this day, harry potter official works make me extremely upset to engage with. but drarry fandom, to me, feels so far removed from the IP and JKR that that pain doesn’t translate here - case in point, i was working on a drarry fic just last night and listening to a movie score playlist, and i teared up when a song from the HP films came on. i couldn’t get more than thirty seconds into it without skipping it - there’s too much pain there, while fic itself is so removed for me that i don’t think of JKR at all.
my point with this example is that everyone has their personal limitations with what they can comfortably engage with with HP fandom. some people can watch the movies and read the books, some people can’t even see logos without being upset, and there has to be a level of respect for everyone’s relationship with engaging with this fandom as we navigate our own limits. there has to be a level of practicality about what effect fandom participation has on upholding HP’s grip on the culture, which i have a hard time believing is any.
i hope this goes without saying, but none of this is to absolve active financial support of the HP intellectual property, which does line JKR’s pockets, and can potentially be funneled into direct harm to the trans community as she continues her hate campaigns and donations. buying official HP merchandise, paying to see the films, etc has quantifiable effects on the maintaining of this IP and i don’t condone that at all. that’s not what i’m talking about here; i’m not even discussing the effects of openly supporting HP by wearing merch/putting your house in your twitter bio, etc. i’m just talking about engaging with fandom in this small pocket of the internet where everyone already knows HP, is trying to figure out their own feelings with it, and are largely having active and ongoing discussions about the effects of our actions.
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