Clara the Spaceship

lymmea:
valentineish:
psudopod:
chrispineofficial:
chrispineofficial:
chrispineofficial:
can people with harry potter urls just not fucking follow me
the way i am losing followers over this. GOOD. bye
It’s also not just her transphobia. Even with death of the author, no pure media, etc. the HP canon itself isn’t… great. The writing is middling, and the world is foundationally right-libertarian and ethnonationalist.
This world is not welcoming to many people. The misogyny, racism, anti-fat bias, and antisemitism are all in plain text.
Slavery is framed as so necessary, it is a natural state of being – an innately hostile idea made worse by a lead character’s horror at this being a joke. The wizarding world canonically ignores human world suffering and even genocide. Werewolves are an AIDS allegory involving child predation. The ambiguously Asian character has two last names.
There is much better media to cherish despite its flaws. Why choose the franchise with real life implications and limited room for others?
Exactly. When we read Harry Potter as kids, we didn’t notice all the really questionable themes. We were too young to recognize them, and so we just paid attention to the cool magic and fantastic elements and “wow what if MY school was like this!!!”, and were dazzled.
But we’re adults now. Those themes are still there, but now we’re old enough to see them. We can understand what people mean when they point them out, even if they’re too subtle (or have become too familiar) to pick up on ourselves. And once you see the worm in the apple, you can’t go back to eating the apple as though you don’t know it’s there. You either have to stop eating…or commit to consuming something you know is bad for you.
(Everyone who yells about how you don’t want harmful themes normalized in fiction? Uh, where are you when we talk about HP? This is the kind of subtle normalization of harm that you should be worried about, on a scale that’s genuinely concerning and that directly reflects the author’s commitment to causing real world harm. C’mon, guys, want to actually make that argument correctly for once???)
I didn’t process any real world connotations behind “some lesser races are better off enslaved” when I was younger. I didn’t think deeply about the fact that all evil characters in HP tend to be fat, ugly, or both. When the books brushed over our heroes putting Christmas hats on the decapitated heads of slaves mounted as trophies on the walls as though this was just a silly, harmless little thing, I didn’t think about it any deeper because the narrative told me I shouldn’t. I didn’t know enough about anti-Semitic dogwhistles to see all the Jewish coding of the goblins. The fact that wizards could prevent immense harm and loss of life to Muggles with magic and actively choose not to never gets questioned by the author, so why would a kid think to ask? The similarities of how werewolves are treated like queer people (and in particular like gay men with AIDS) was not something I was equipped to recognize. (By the time the queerbaiting and the exceptionally obvious racism came out, I was old enough to recognize it, but by that point I’d already fallen out of love with the franchise anyway.)
I would not have ever liked HP if I had seen any of this when I first read it. And I am unable to like it in retrospect now that I CAN see it, because you cannot have that much shit in the sandwich and still have it taste good.
Of course I’m going to be horrified by people who know all that shit is in there and still want to chow down. Enjoying in ignorance is one thing; it’s what most of us did initially, because we were young. But if you know it’s there, then at best you’re saying “I don’t consider any of this bad enough to stop eating”. At worst, you’re saying “this is actually what I enjoy”.
Either way, it makes you incredibly unsafe. That shit is hurting people, and on some level you’re okay with it being there. No one who is hurt by it can trust someone who’s okay with it, because you clearly have no intention of putting a stop to that harm as long as it still gives you things you want. We can’t stop you from consuming what you like, of course, just like we can’t censor JKR(and I wouldn’t wish to, I’m always anti-censorship)…but if we don’t want to be anywhere near you, you have only yourself to blame. Your choices define you, and those choices carry consequences.
I know there are a lot of HP fans who want to ‘fix’ the narrative. But honestly, it’s flawed down to the bones. You’d be so much better off building your own world than trying to rehabilitate one that was built to such baseline harmful specifications. There is nothing in the HP fandom (including the community, which is increasingly apologists and transphobes) that you cannot get better elsewhere. And whether you like it or not, as long as you’re part of the fandom, JKR is feeding on you and your engagement. You bolster her. You keep her relevant and powerful, even if you don’t give her a cent. She can use you as evidence of a market she can sell her work to investors on, because look at all the activity and interest and staying power HP has!
Let it die.
I will not pass up an opportunity to post Shaun’s soothing voice calmly dissecting the awful, awful themes in Harry Potter.

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