JK Rowling’s Descent into Madness Has Been Long and Existentially Horrifying

So, if you want to learn about the trans perspective on Rowling’s infamous meltdown, you can watch this video.

This isn’t a deep dive into her current community nor all the insane things she’s said.

Nor is this a re-examination of her work; that’s been done before. This one does that and it’s ten hours long – hour seven is … chef’s kiss.

This is not me clinging to the last of the fandom either; the marauders fandom survives with queer readers much younger than me regardless so yes, queen, slay.

No, dear reader, I am simply here to set the record straight: JKR has always had a toxic relationship with her fandom and should not be respected as an artist.

As a past Harry Potter fanatic, I’m kind of sick of watching young LGBTQ+ people being pressured to defend their existence, when prior fans should be taking an offensive position, not with misogyny and harassment, but honesty. This franchise has been in slow decline. JKR no longer deserves the fame and money she got in the first place. That was clear long before trans rights entered her vocabulary. And if you’re somehow late to the fandom party, please allow me to educate.

Because for new conservative hangers-on who haven’t been fans of the work historically, it appears as though liberals loved JKR one moment, and then, as soon as she disagreed with the masses on one issue, committed a Thoughtcrime, we tried to burn her to the stake. Because she was SO brave, now there’s a thousand video essays on why Harry Potter is bad.

But that’s not what happened, is it? And I’d like to prove it.

So if you want to hear about the perspective of a cis elderlennial whose decades-long Harry Potter obsession involved listening to weekly HP podcasts before Facebook was a thing, obsessing about fanfiction, and even studying abroad in London, read on. Are you ready for cringe? Are you ready for the ennui? The feeling of “yikes” and “ooph”? Twelve years of it? In Azkaban?

Often, the reaction of other people is to minimize, the same way a bully would minimize a peer’s Lego Star Trek set.

Why do you care so much about this?

If that’s really your question, I must answer with a question of mine own: Where was Gondor when the Westfold fell?

Where were you when our enemies thought our handmade Gryffindor robe, sewn before there was any publicly available merchandise, was cringey?

Where were you during the great April Fools jokes of MuggleNet?

Why do I care about this? I feel as though my soul was robbed. My experience in the fandom now feels like a weird cognitive load. It’s mentally burdensome for all queer HP fans these days with every tweet. It’s like a slow rot on your entire childhood identity.

The last few years have been horrifying as a prior fan. I was used to disappointing sequels and awful takes, but when I first read the words “Social Contagion” on Pottermore, a eugenics dogwhistle, my soul left my body a little bit. And the fact that she paints her enemies as death eaters makes me feel like I’m trapped in Jonestown in 1978 with a psychotic cult leader.

As a prior fan, I feel the strangest sense of duty. To state two plus two equals four.

No, my lovelies, she’s always been like this.

And so, where to begin? Where, where, where. I have a list, but before I get to my list, I suppose I’ll start by exploring when I, personally, began to lose faith in this person.

Ingredient #1: Let’s dissect that awful blog post.

It was on her flash website. Yo, y’all remember flash?! You could click in special sections of the site (which included exciting items like her used gum wrappers _{oh my god}_{she sucks so bad}) to look for clues for the next Harry Potter books. One day on the cork bulletin board she drops this bomb of a livejournal-esque rant:

“For Girls Only, Probably…

Being thin. Probably not a subject that you ever expected to read about on this website, but my recent trip to London got me thinking…

It started in the car on the way to Leavesden film studios. I whiled away part of the journey reading a magazine that featured several glossy photographs of a very young woman”

I’m going to skip this part. Basically she’s had the revelation of all of the girls in the 90s had – that magazines are full of skinny people. It’s baby’s first woke.

“I mean, is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I’m not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain…

I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn’t seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!’”

My name must be Dudley Dursley and it must be my birthday because there’s a lot to unpack here.

In case it’s not obvious, yes, fat shaming is bad. I’m glad that Rowling chose the Birkenstocks in this moment, and saw, what seems to be the first time, the horrible fatphobic society we’re all stuck in. But really this blog post should be a starting point of self reflection.

It’s both much deeper than that and not that deep. Californians say “you’ve lost weight” as a casual compliment over brunch. Have you ever thought about why that’s a compliment, Jo?

No? Okay, I’ll tell you: It’s a compliment because skinniness relates to a glow-up, it reveals a jump up in class, it shows that you can afford to take care of your health, it relates to rags-to-riches, because unfortunately, at least in America, excess weight is tied to poverty. It’s a politics of bodies.

And why is it linked to poverty? Systemic issues, like walkable cities, green spaces, food desserts, public education, overworking, and racism. Not to mention the eugenics-rooted BMI index giving doctors and their patients inaccurate medical information, or the widespread issue of eating disorders, or the public shaming sites that still exist. These are huge problems that JKR’s paper-thin take doesn’t even begin to consider.

But wait, you might think, isn’t Harry Potter full of characters that are “bad” and described as unappealingly fat in gruesome, ugly detail?

“Section: Rubbish Bin

Symbol(s): Pure Garbage

JKR has no right to talk about the glorification of unhealthily underweight women in some sections of the media, because there’s a fat boy in her books.”

This was her reaction – the “Rubbish Bin” section was for fake stories … literally fake news.

Realizing that you might have accidentally contributed to someone else’s struggles with weight just by absorbing cultural expectations is often the first painful step of understanding this issue. She cannot seem to conceptualize a systemic problem, nor see how she is a part of it.

Really, her revelation here was a good starting point, but … I’m sure fans of the books may already be raising their eyebrows here (like how her characters always do every other page). She did not learn from this life-changing reflection. This post is far more than a decade old. It’s older than I think the existence of Twilight. And since then, she has written even more cruel, horribly fatphobic things.

This was written after that soul-searching blog post:

“He was an extravagantly obese man of sixty-four. A great apron of stomach fell so far down in front of his thighs that most people thought instantly of his penis when they first clapped eyes on him, wondering when he had last seen it, how he washed it, how he managed to perform any of the acts for which a penis is designed.” – The Casual Vacancy

Maybe she’s only focused on women being fat shamed? But no, this was published even later, as Lindsay Ellis pointed out:

“A hugely obese old lady came into view on the landing above them. She was clad in shocking-pink leggings and a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘The More People I Meet, The More I Like My Dog.’” – Troubled Blood

It’s so embarrassing. Reading this blog post from nearly twenty years ago again makes me so angry.

So, we see the trend here, right?

This woman gives a bland, white toast opinion already made popular by pop feminism. She does not do her research, only just enough to make her feel like she’s already right on an issue. She publishes something a livejournalist would be embarrassed to post, and ends up saying some ignorant things. She does not question the system, at all, only socialist institutions, and only at a surface level. She gets criticized understandably and doubles down, hard, thinking she knows what’s best for her fans in a really condescending way. And she just doesn’t change despite everyone telling her more details.

She’s done this so many times, in so many ways, and on so many topics.

No matter what she says, if you look at how she acts, she doesn’t respect trans people … I mean fat people.

You can see how this person with this level of fame and this lazy research habits could make assumptions about groups of people she knows nothing about, do a surface level of research, become convinced shes right, posts embarrassing ignorant garbage, keep doubling down and down and down, until she’s humiliated herself and her fans by proxy. Less people were loud about the fatphobic stuff in 2006; after all, hadn’t she expressed the “correct” take? But these trends were always there.

Ingredient #2: Do y’all remember those W.O.M.B.A.T.s?

Anyway, I should mention again that I have a list. Before I get to mylist, I would like to point out another important element to JKR’s madness: a fundamental worldbuilding error at the center of the entire wizarding world.

Why is the Wizarding World of Harry Potter secret?

The reason feels like a lame excuse as a child, but as an adult, the reason is incomprehensible. Now that I’ve watched that ten hour video essay (again, it goes hard and went completely demonitized) and the latest Fantastic Beast movies, I’ve come to terms with the fact that there is no logical way that Wizarding Isolationism is moral. (I’m sorry but, yes, I think Grindlewald should have stopped Hitler.)

But let’s say I haven’t done those things yet. Let’s say it’s 2006. I don’t know what eugenics is. My favorite author has published a pop quiz on her weird dirty desk website: the Wizards’ Ordinary Magic and Basic Aptitude Test. My palms are sweaty. I’ve been Asking Jeeves HP trivia questions for hours. My heart is racing. I can’t wait to pwn my friends with an incredible score and posted on my AIM away message. I play it as soon as it opens. The website crashes a few times. I come back.

Not all the questions are terrible. Some are cute, like this one.

“10. Which mode of transportation would you advise for a young mother traveling with one-year-old twins with a low boredom threshold, her grandmother, who suffers from severe motion sickness, and her husband, who has never mastered the three ‘D’s?

a. Apparition

b. Broomsticks

c. Floo Powder

d. Knight Bus

e. Portkey”

Adorable. I can use my encyclopedic knowledge to answer this, because we all know the three “d’s”. But then I get to this question and my blood runs cold. I completely stop. I’m stunned:

“In your opinion, which of the following contributed MOST to the introduction of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in 1692? Choose ONE.

a. widespread persecution of wizarding children by Muggles

b. escalating attempts by Muggles to force witches and wizards to perform magic for Muggle ends

c. escalating attempts by Muggles to force witches and wizards to teach them magic

d. increasing numbers of witch-burnings

e. increasing numbers of Muggles being burned in mistake for witches

f. failure of Ministry of Magic Delegation to Muggle King and Queen (William and Mary) begging for protection under Muggle law”

Ma’am. Madam. Respectfully. What … is this?

I don’t have an answer. We’ve never had an answer. What sounds worse? Maybe D? How am I supposed to read JKR’s mind? What is the “right” reason? What possibly could be a good enough reason why an entire world keeps itself secret and isolated? Why? Why can’t wizards enjoy fun muggle inventions like hair dryers and SPAM? Why can’t muggles occasionally get magical prosthetics? What would be a good enough reason when, considering all elements within the text, muggle society has improved a great deal with airplanes and nuclear plants and wizarding society has remained stuck in the 1700s in everything from clothing style to quills? Why do I suddenly feel like I’m being quizzed in a Scientology backroom and not taking a fun Harry Potter trivia quiz?

And teenage me realizes suddenly – there isn’t an answer. None of these answers work. None of them are good enough. JK Rowling must have figured out some other thing, and the answer isn’t here. Something’s wrong with the test.

These answers don’t make sense.

I’m not saying none of these reasons couldn’t be true, and heaven knows that national division is intensified by dumb real-life reasons. What I am saying is that it tastes of thin gruel rather than substance. What I’m saying is that, if any of these are true, it seems dumb to keep the system in place centuries later.

I take this test. I just barely pass. I’m too embarrassed about my score to post it on Livejournal. The reviews on this test from diehard fans are lukewarm, and this was at the height of the books’ popularity. I investigate because I feel crazy. I find that even Harry Potter expert fans disagree on the answer to that question.

I feel miserable, all of the sudden. I don’t like my score. I think I failed.

No, young Steph, you didn’t fail. This series is just flawed and the writer doesn’t know what she’s doing.

Since then, Rowling has never published the answers, and also she had to give a public explanation of her scores, which did not satisfy. Even though she’s built a brand around answering every question and satisfying the super-fans, she’s failed at some important aspects of developing her entire world very, very early on.

Ingredient #3: I personally can only think of two times in two decades that JK Rowling has publicly admitted to being wrong about something.

The last element I would like to discuss before I get to my list is that … my God, this woman has an ego. And before you say I’m being to harsh, know that she’s admitted to being too thin-skinned herself.

As a fan, in the early days, the fact that JKR always, always had an explanation for every minute micro-decision was thrilling. It works almost like a video-game-like system of rewards for attention and memory. A lot of people hand-waved when she was occasionally argumentative because, after all, she was the author.

Now looking back it feels like an artistic narcissism, one that refuses to let go of attention at any opportunity. I am far from the only person to cringe at Pottermore – an evolution of her worst fandom-related habits. Being a JKR fan means that you have to deal with so much nonsense and so little debate. And I get wanting guardrails when talking to pedantic fans who love their gotcha moments, but I can’t help thinking about how much Pottermore feels like anti-art. How much time and mental energy could have led to better books, to improving the craft.

In any case, here are the two things:

First, she admitted to being wrong about which train station she’d been visualizing when she wrote the first book – a fact that’s irrefutable and that no one cares about.
Second, she admitted that there was a lost twenty-four hours between when Voldemort died and when Harry was brought to the Dursleys – a fact even more irrefutable that only a fraction of super-fans even remotely care about.

So, we now have the formula: a person who makes lazy, sweeping claims off the cuff, who can’t seem to admit when she’s wrong, and who has implanted deep-seeded issues in the most core components of the lore.

Watching this artist negotiate public life online has been like watching a house of cards for two decades.

Now, you might have a conservative relative say, “The woke mob blames her for everything! You’ve mentioned transphobia, racism, sexism, fatphobia! All stupid woke talking points. She’s just telling the TRUTH. They’re so ungrateful!”

Well, my sugar plum fairy, let’s put it a different way.

What do you want from a talented fantasy/mystery author? If I were to write down my ingredients for a wonderful fantasy author and stuff it up the chimney for the wind to bring, a la that scene from Mary Poppins, what would be on my letter?

You’d want logic in their worldbuilding.
You’d want their ideas to be researched.
You’d want integrity.
(A touch of emotional stability is seemingly an optional bonus.)

She doesn’t have any of these things. Re-writing the history, issuing take downs, and retconning mistakes to make herself seem more consistent is not integrity. Knowing the Latin roots of spells is not worldbuilding. Researching Native American folklore and claiming that it was white wizards’ instead is not good research. This is what makes a good author a good author. An author without these things is like a chimney sweep without their bristles.

What is there left of this person, as an artist? What is there to like? What has she produced lately that’s so incredible?

So, fine. Take away “culture war” talking points. What’s left? A writer who doesn’t write. An author who hasn’t published anything of note in twenty years. An artist whose style has not improved or changed to the point of parody. An influencer who’s embarrassed her devoted following over and over and over and over again.

**Here is the list.**

Before I get into this, please understand: This is not a list of sins. As a practice, I don’t really love that. I am not hammering this onto the church door. I don’t expect repentance and mea culpas. This list, I will insist, is not a list of “woman bad.”

This list represents all the times that a devoted fan might … pull away a little, perhaps. They might go “ew” or “hmm.” They might get a little less enthused about that collection of Ron Weasley action figures. They might feel a twinge of ennui. This is a list of a few of the times that fans might have felt a little browbeaten, or uncomfortable, or weirded out. This is merely a historical recollection of being constantly disappointed.

Keeping that in mind, let us begin:

The lawsuit. Yeah. In 2008, she sued a fan-created website that she herself had used as a worldbuilding tool, claiming that she would not be able to publish her own encyclopedia due to copyright issues, a book that never happened, a book that later simply became Pottermore, which is a far worse version of what the Harry Potter Lexicon had been. Back then, the fans were almost unanimously on JKR’s side.
The other lawsuits. Another situation where fans sided with JKR and scoffed at desperate authors trying to make a quick buck, she was sued for stealing the word “muggle.” Looking back, the situation feels a lot muddier. How often does this stuff happen? Is it truly every time an author makes a ton of money?
The epilogue. Even when the books were coming out, there was something rotten in the state of Denmark. Lots of fans were inevitably disappointed by this or that, but the epilogue was/is widely and consistently mocked for marrying off young characters and making them have weirdly named children.
Dumbledore being gay. Although she was being praised at the time (2007) for the “right” decision, even though she admitted to having gay characters well after it was safe to do so, this tweet has been viewed less and less positively over time. It wasn’t great then either. But at the time, personally I felt rather aggravated by it, even though I was a part of the very scant Grindledore fandom (yes, that was the ship’s name). Why not Remus and Sirius, Jo? They were and are widely considered gay in the cannon, and yet you married your queer-coded characters and then killed them off? Why the old sexless man whose ex was a super-villain, Jo?
The promises of books that never came. I do recall hearing about a “political fairy tale” and a handful of projects over the years that never came to be. I want to stress as you’re reading this list, how this writer doesn’t seem to write. She doesn’t get out of her comfort zone. She mashes out her mystery books to a conservative audience and has completely lost her imagination. No fun fantasy books for you peasants, within the HP universe or without.
The first post-Potter book. The Casual Vacancy was her first book after the series, and got lukewarm reception by both fans and critics. The warmest review said it was “no masterpiece.” One of the larger fan outlets, MuggleCast, titled their episode about it “Episode 258: Casually Vacant … Story.” “I mean … I feel like ….this is of course our initial thoughts. This is not a bad book or badly written. But to me this is not a story that needed to be told,” said the one fan who’d read the biggest portion of the book. Ooph, ouchie, owie.
The time she mysteriously broke up with her agency. It’s always a great sign when a dictator fires the only people who tells him no. Around the same time as The Casual Vacancy, she fired Christopher Little. Now … there are always plenty of good reasons why one might break up with their agency, but it certainly felt ominous at the time, especially because it came across as sudden: “[Little] is disappointed and surprised to have heard the premature news about the proposed new arrangements.”
The Cursed Child. Theater goers with no context very much seemed to enjoy the stage play, but the published script was hated by pretty much all of the hardcore fans for myriad reasons including the use of awful time travel and the words “Jeez Louis.” But even the Guardian said that the plot was “convoluted.” Theater fans assumed Potterheads would love it; Potterheads assumed theater fans would love it. Surely, someone must’ve loved it, right?
So, so, so many bad video games. If you would permit me to make a sweeping generalization, only because I’ve played almost all of these on console and mobile, Harry Potter video games just suck. The film-adjacent EA productions were rushed and at times abusive. The mobile games had a lot of jank. Playstation 2 Hagrid has become a meme for a reason. They added nothing to the lore, were unpleasant to play, and often felt incomplete.
Some weird choices in the films. I know a lot of people love the fifth Harry Potter movie. They’re wrong but I respect their list. But ignoring the writers’ strike sucked, and it did kind of make the film suck. For me personally, I found that the later films had a lot of “eh?” and “wha?” The worst moment of my own memory was the time in the eighth movie when Voldemort’s robes grew tentacles. Y’all even remember that? Another topic for another time.
Pottermore, just in general. Even when the site launched with the broken Sorting Hat feature, fans were already complaining of too much information, retcons, and inconsistencies in the lore. It’s too much to keep track of. As time marched on, it took on a very strange tone, but we’ll get to that.
That map that totally ignores population. So much. Just so much wrong with the Pottermore global Wizarding schools map. I can’t even get into it. Here’s a helpful rant.
The stealing of Native folklore. Yea, Jo, go ahead and use a Navajo tradition (in a time and place that would have been occupied by the Wampanoag and Massachusetts tribes), call it magic, and call the natives who use that tradition liars. That will go over well.
That SPEW article defending house elf slavery. Yo, this was so bad. I feel like it was at this point in the fandom, about seven years ago, that a lot of fans began to pull way back from the fandom. Defending slavery is a line we don’t cross, thank God.
Hermione’s race (but let’s ignore the SPEW thing). In the same vein, no, JKR never imagined Hermione to be black. Hiring a black actress for The Cursed Child is a great concept. However. It does feel weird when you re-read the book and there’s two long portions of book four about Hermione being the only one protesting against slavery at Hogwarts.
That time she donated against Scottish Independence. This is a deeply local issue but I remember hearing about it during my time in London. All I’ll say is that it was a fairly unpopular move. A million pounds is a lot of money for such a small sovereignty. I don’t know. It feels weird.
Chocolate Frogs. Perhaps it shall be another blog post for another time, but the chocolate industry is … bad. But the important thing here is that fans pointed that out to Rowling in the hopes that she would cut ties with Nestle to end child forced labor in creation of the chocolate frogs, and she has yet to do so.
The sequel series. Fantastic Beasts movie-goers have experienced lukewarm reviews at some times and outward confusion and boredom in another. Hardcore fans are, if anything, aggravated by all the retcons, such as the concept of the Obscurus. Film fans find the pacing to be quite poor. No one is happy but Warner Brothers, it seems.
The Pottermore poo article. This was an all time low. I’d like to highlight that the infamous poop article that was only published coincidentally after Lindsay Ellis made her “Death of the Author” video. For those who don’t have the context, it’s a weird stream of consciousness word vomit. For those who do, it’s a tantrum.
The Robert Galbraith books. It makes perfect sense that Rowling would move to adult mystery, and there’s honestly no shame in that. But it’s certainly weird that Robert Galbraith, who had a pretty decent mid-lister run, was “outed” for lack of a better word. These books aren’t great. They’re bloated, under-edited, and are filled with all of her worst writing ticks.
Hiring alleged wife-beater Johnny Depp. See also: Not firing alleged wife-beater Johnny Depp. I don’t want to even get into it, but she’s been getting flack from the fandom the entire time about that whole thing.
The first on-screen gay representation. The first on-screen gay representation is a predator meeting a child in a dark alley. That’s literally not hyperbole; it’s what happens in the movie.
The time Dumbledore wasn’t gay at all. They have a magical friend locket. Also, Rowling never deserved any clout for claiming he was gay in the first place.
The TERF wars blog posted during American racial protests. And for extra points, she also implied that autistic people shouldn’t be allowed to make choices about their own bodies.

Reminder: What does this list lack?

New books. New ideas.

Anything.

Just bad takes and doubling down. It’s turtles all the way down, Jo. It’s all repulsion and no attraction. This person stopped growing an artist and stuck to being a celebrity a long time ago. (And no, oozing out occasional Galbraith books does not count as artistic growth.)

Do not feel bad about the cancellation.

On Reddit, user buffalorosie asked, “The worse she gets, the guiltier I feel for participating in the Fandom. Does anyone else struggle with this?”

Yes. This is what some may call a cognitive load. We carry it, as fans. It’s painful to us and only us. She didn’t win her money. She took it from us. We gave it to her.

In every step of her march towards fame, there were queer people there to promote and support her. She used gay people with platforms to get famous in the first place.

As has been pointed out, JK Rowling’s story is a Russian nesting doll of rags to richest tales because she wrote a rags-to-riches story, and is herself a rags-to-riches story. There is a long history of why that would be so appealing to the American palate, but that’s a story for another time. But her rise in celebrity was calculated. Rowling pushed back on a lot of this narrative in the beginning, especially the detail about writing on napkins, to her credit, but people have control over which parts of their own story they want to tell. There’s a handful of things constantly she fed to the press over and over: “it came to me on a train,” “I didn’t have money to make photocopies” and so forth.

She sold a rags to riches story. To gay people.

She sold herself as an underdog to a meritocratic society, and now is shocked when that meritocratic society has – reasonably, logically, patiently – found her to be a touch entitled.

If we as a collective give you power and wealth, and you don’t handle power responsibly, there is an intense, ancient social need to cut off your nipples and leave you in a bog. We have a psychological need in a meritocratic culture to see those without merit see consequences, and it’s not always fair or balanced. But doesn’t this cancellation seem like the most banal form of that? It’s literally a defensive versus offensive position. Isn’t it natural that we feel cheated?

So much of what made Potter great was the simple fact that it was an addicting, accessible mystery series that had its fanbase online. I can’t understate how important that was to its success. Theories, sock puppet shows, podcasts, fanfiction, student films, musicals, all of this could be made and shared immediately. There’s still stuff out there that’s so much more valuable and interesting artistically about Potter than the books themselves.

But there’s a lot about the original content that hasn’t aged well. I think the biggest example of that is Mr. Snape. To make a gross oversimplification, mental and emotional abuse is far less socially acceptable than it was in the 90s, and to quote the above Youtuber, “Snape mentally abused Harry while physically protecting him.”

Even without all of JoRo’s bad behavior, a reappraisal was inevitable. Time marches forward. If I ever were to become as rich and famous as Rowling, I should hope that my themes and angst would not still be relevant ten generations later. Because I would hope that those problems would be solved. That culture could move on.

The point of art is never to live forever.

It’s completely normal and rational to stop liking something. No need to feel guilty. Popularity is random and not always fair. You owe her nothing. And as an artist, she has given you nothing.

I’d like to offer a quick anectdote as something of a silver lining.

Reddit has this thing called r/place, and for those who don’t know, it’s really cool. Basically, a user can place one pixel per hour on this massive board. So if you want to draw something, you need a huge community of people. It’s some of the coolest shit on the internet. While this was going down a few years ago, I kept thinking about how, if this happened in 2004, it would be nothing but Harry Potter. As it was, the remnants of the fandom has a tiny little corner.

I know that Reddit is not a perfect litmus of the entire internet, and that this isn’t a representation of all of culture, but I can’t help but feel a strange sense of comfort that Potter doesn’t have as big of a representation here, despite being a fan, that we’re interested in other things, that we’ve moved on.

Please support the Fruit Loops.

For the love of Merlin, please stop putting this on trans people to manage your feelings about your terrible fandom.

Why are we talking about trans rights when we release a new HP video game? The simplest, clearest reason you should not play the new HP video game is that the only good game that the franchise has ever produced was on Gameboy Color, and it’s been a steady decline since. I played nearly every awkward, rushed, terrible EA game. I refuse to play something in the same franchise as the awful Playstation potions game of HP4, a game I beat in 4 hours. I don’t care how much better the graphics are. The goblin lore is bad. It’s absurd. The only reason we are talking about these games is because of free culture war publicity. They’re awful. They’ve always been awful.

Why are we defending buying Wizarding World merchandise? Make your own damn merch, you fake fan. Yes, I’m gatekeeping. I had to sew my own wizarding robes. Crochet your Slytherin scarf. Dig a pop figure out of a landfill. Make a Dobby costume out of a paper bag and hand it a sock. Enjoy the books like it’s 1999 and you’re parents believe in witchcraft, you hipster, you hanger-on. Do you really want to be one of the TERFs toting a Hogwarts badge who still – still, STILL – has not even read the books, even on audiobook?

I want to go beyond the recommendation to just block her, I also want to dissuade people of creating and supporting a different celebrity in her place. James Somerton was, is, will be wrong about this.

What I’d recommend for all of you, earnestly, is to call your local library and just … check in. See if there’s anything happening. Banning LGBTQ books, books about racism, etc. Midlisters of fiction are really suffering right now in general; most authors don’t make JKR money, and still their voices should be shared with the world. So, support them.

If you know people who are being influenced by Rowling, start a book club. Find and support authors who explore gender. I’ve read these books and they are pretty good:

Hell Followed With Us By Andrew Joseph White
May the Best Man Win by Z.R. Ellor
The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang

Okay, now I guess I’ll write “I must not tell lies” into the back of my hand until it bleeds.