why are we reblogging harry potter gifs, my liege?
Well you see. There was a good gif of the new harry potter series on my mutual's blog. And I reblogged it.
Less facetiously: people are allowed to think whatever they want about jk rowling. However, the most-sold book series in history doesn't just... y'know, vanish from culture at-large because people stopped liking its author.
For the past decade and a half the political side of fandom culture has continuously been trying to turn Harry Potter into a shibboleth. Originally it was that you showed you were a good progressive ally by comparing every conservative political figure to Voldemort and the Death Eaters and anyone opposing them as plucky young adult protagonists. I distinctly remember the exasperated refrain of "read another book" because political discourse was just that oversaturated with such comparisons.
And then Rowling went against the mainstream progressive grain on gender politics and went from a celebrated leftist figure to The Actual Devil more or less overnight, and suddenly the way to show off how enlightened and progressive you were was by how much you hated the series and how hard you could harass people who didn't hate it enough. It has progressed firmly past the point of any actual criticism of the books or of rowling herself and into 'if you like this thing or are even neutral towards it, it is because you are The Outgroup' territory. It's boogeyman thinking.
And i NEED people on here to be able to wrap their head around the fact that the majority of the world does not treat it that way. It's books. It is a Children's Book Series. One which many, many people read growing up and then proceeded to never get embroiled in Twitblr discourse about. There is no innate political statement coded into revisiting the stories you read as a child. That some people choose to project an extra moral dimension into it is their own business to sort through, not everyone else's.