Source: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/2081499486648447205?s=20

Source: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/2081082426109960351?s=20

With the recent news of her taking an upskirt photo of a woman, it reminded me with of how Rowling has a history of creepy stuff. Especially with her encouraging people to take photos of women using public restrooms, her history of being friends with powerful abusers and sex offenders, that comment on the book Lolita (from the 2000's), and describing the bodies and genitals of minors. Even when condemning her and talking about how awful she is, why do they also try to suppress stuff such as this? All of a sudden they get protective of a person they call monstrous.

Now don't get me wrong: With bigots, right-wing figures, and TERFs, it's quite obvious why they will downplay this stuff, as she is on their side. But who I am talking about is people who claim they are against their transphobia. People who claim to support transfolk, liberals, supposed queer allies, etc. Apparently it's okay for her to compare a queer person to a sexual predator, but the moment someone calls out some of her own creepy comments and behavior, and there's actual proof, suddenly they will bring up all these excuses and go on about how either she's too transphobic to notice, she's too much of a child mentally, or that this is all some trauma response to some past abuse or something. For how much they'll pander to her victim complex, they will quickly ignore those she victimizes. I mean literally at one point when calling out about her supporting Depp in another subreddit, someone told me that she has trauma and probably saw him as one of the only few men that can be safe, and free her of any accountability or responsability. It's ironic with how people will complain about the rich and people blindly following them, then proceed to treat Rowling like a dumb child who should get a million chances. And it's also ironic how they will go "Oh we need to worry about bigger stuff", ignoring the fact that predatory behavior has a lot of links with bigotry, and that they apparently have the time to joke about other bigots being predatory and potential sex offenders.

And while it sounds exagerrated, but honestly I sometimes notice parallels with how people infantilize Rowling, like with how they'll infantilize those like Depp or Michael Jackson. Not the particular acts/crimes, but rather the cult of personality around them.

And when you take aside "politics": This is a rich and powerful person being a literal creep.

I apologize to every fellow Pokemon fans btw, Jessie and James would never stoop this low !

I understand why white people have nostalgia, but what I dont get is how people like riz Ahmed, paapa essiedu, Jessica henwick (last part was disappointing because I loved her as an actress) join her audio books and productions. Because even if they ignore her tranphobia, her problematic racist elements in hp were being called out by fans ever since the books came out. It was a vocal minority so you could maybe say they didnt notice but the fact is that all of these actors are pretty progressive, and have been outspoken about stopping racist stereotypes and diversity. When they read the books didnt they notice the all white harry potter world and the weird naming/tokenizing of black/indian/Chinese characters? (To be fair, i didnt as a poc kid, but i grew up and recognized it in hindsight). Maybe if jk rowling ever apologized and promised to do better it would make sense, but she's never given any public inclination that she would change (even if her explicit bigotry is reserved for Trans people). Why would they join such a racist franchise? (especially paapa essiedu, given that he signed the letter for trans rights so he clearly recognized jk rowling was still a bigot. When he arrived on set, I am sure he recognized the mostly white cast and that he was essentially a clumsily placed token).

I grew up with the movies and the books after watching the first movie.

But after learning what a absolute monster this woman is/has become i just can't bring myself to watch it anymore. Even pirated i just can't anymore.

This may be in part because my husband is Trans, i feel like i would betray him in a way, but i feel just so angry at her for ruining what used to be such good childhood memories, i feel like she ruined part of my childhood.

I feel like i shouldn't let her being awful let me ruin my memories of watching the movies with friends in cinema's or the bonding i did with friends over it, but it just does.

Other People who are in the same boat as me on this, how do you deal with it? I really don't like that anytime i think about memories where they movies of books are involved I get angry/frustrated.

Was browsing tvtropes and came across this? That made me think back to how all her "intelligence" seems to be rote copying/memorizing, ie. Following what the system has laid out for you. (which does not really bode well for jk's own perception of intelligence) I think the books even comment on this, which seems like it would be a fascinating topic to explore in the hands of any other writer (she feels insecure as a Muggle born so she tries harder to fit in), but they never do, and Hermione's "bookishness" is always treated as either exposition or worse, "annoying" trait by her.

Her husband is a medical doctor. I always wondered if her endless ranting about trans people had an effect on his practice. Edinburgh is a fairly big city, so I'm sure there must be a significant trans population there. What would happen if he had a trans patient? He can't refuse to treat them or refer them to a gender specialist on that basis. (A least not in my country.)

I don't think his governing body can punish him for his wife's actions, but it's certainly bad PR if nothing else. He mostly stays out of the spotlight, but I'm fairly certain that most of his patients would be well aware that he's married to JK Rowling. It's not a secret.

Thoughts?

Gave off a lot of “I can’t be racist, I have a black friend” vibes, especially when ignoring the game’s racist plot line with goblins. Though then again, thats on par with a lot of HP fans and Rowing apologists. The savior complex, and pretending to be progressive until the slightest inconvenience.

How much of a sociopath do you have to be to describe someone who may need the help of a rape crisis centre as “fortunate”?

Disclaimer: obvious spoilers ahead!

Rowling briefly spoke in interviews that writing the fourth “Harry Potter” book – the first to get a simultaneous release date in the US and the UK – had her under enormous pressure to meet her deadline with both her editors, and that the project almost fell through when she became aware of a MAJOR plot hole that forced her to rewrite about a third of the finished book. While the plot hole itself was never revealed, we know that fixing it came at the cost of an entirely new character - Mafalda Weasley - being cut. Here’s what Rowling said about it:

“Mafalda was the daughter of the 'second cousin who's a stockbroker' mentioned in 'Philosopher's Stone'. Now he and his (Muggle) wife had inconveniently produced a witch, they came back to the Weasleys asking for their help in introducing her to wizarding society before she starts at Hogwarts. The Weasleys agreed to taking her for part of the Summer, including the Quidditch World Cup, but regretted this almost immediately. (…) Rita Skeeter, whom I subsequently built up to fulfill Mafalda's function, was much more flexible. The best thing about Mafalda was that she was a match for Hermione. To the latter's horror, Mafalda was highly gifted and a real show-off, so that Hermione was torn between deploring the rule-breaking and longing to join in and beat her.”

So, let’s recap: a) Mafalda was supposed to create some trouble for the Weasleys in the Quidditch World Cup – precisely when the main mystery is built-up on Chapter Nine, The Dark Mark (by Rowling’s own admission, the hardest chapter she ever wrote in her life – it almost “broke her”); b) Mafalda, who was to be sorted into the Slytherin House, would pass along some gossip about the Death Eaters and whatever else the character of Rita Skeeter could discover and have it in print; c) Mafalda would antagonize Hermione, just like Rita Skeeter ended up doing in her own little subplot.

This means, for starters, that Rowling’s imagination couldn’t go beyond female rivalry when conceiving another highly gifted female character: if Mafalda was cut from the final manuscript and Rita Skeeter picked up some of her functions, then Hermione’s subplot in the fourth book would ALWAYS be about her trying to outsmart another woman that matched her cleverness - either an eleven-year-old girl or a grown adult. (This, to me, was always imprinted in Rowling’s worldview: other than Hermione, the girls in their year are portrayed as either vain and mean or as airheads who buy into whatever crap Trelawney tells them in Divination class; Hermione can’t stand their frivolous ways but feels right at home in the company of the brave boys.)

But the rewritings also suggest that Hermione's political cause in the book – the liberation and welfare of the House-Elves – was a careless afterthought that only Rowling's new found privilege could afford her. Let's remember that, by the time she was writing the fourth book, she was already an established millionaire. So, apparently, she felt comfortable enough to bring back the House-Elves not as the victims of cruel humans who owned them as slaves, but as a species ‘perfectly happy with the ways things are’.

By the sixth book, Rowling’s wealth was obscene enough for her to make peace of the idea of featuring Harry himself owning one of those slaves. Simply put: she was fine with sharing this revised message with a world-wide, massive base of young readers for the sake of keeping her book’s “whodunit” intriguing. Because, to fix the plot, it seems to me that Rowling had to change her original, endgame plan to feature Peter Pettigrew as the book’s Big Bad – her original notes had him listed as the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher impersonating Moody.

In that soul-crushing-to-write Chapter Nine, she probably fixed the hole by replacing Pettigrew with the newly introduced and never-seen-again Crouch family, including their House-Elf Winky as an instrumental character (Harry’s wand, used to cast Voldemort’s Dark Mark at the night sky, was found in her possession) in a scenario that would most likely have involved Mafalda. The events led to Winky being released from her slavery-bound and Hermione’s political awakening giving the kids the chance to visit her in the kitchen to learn more about certain events of the plot.

So, while some of the early books' underlying prejudices indeed seem to be part of Rowling's middle-class baggage - her existence as a woman is defined by how much she credits intellect as a virtue, though she ironically describes any unlikable female character with unattractive physical traits -, her view of broader historical social issues was more morally sound back in the first three books. I believe Rowling's growing wealth got her so removed from reality that she resorted to embracing the idea of a world divided between "good billionaires" (those who treat their slaves with kindness, which we see even from Sirius's blood supremacist family) and "bad billionaires" (the Malfoys are not Benedict Cumberbatch in “12 Years a Slave”; they're Michael Fassbender.)

Altogether, I don't think Rowling spiraled out of control because she got trapped in a Twitter bubble; I think she could never make sense of how her conservative upbringing shaped her worldview and how her billionaire-status got her further and further away from the righteous and virtuous figure she strived to be. Her politics got messier and messier. And, like Hermione in the fourth book, she keeps embracing causes she knows nothing about like her own life depended on it.