a harry potter fan's guide to navigating pride month

This is how you do it. Hermione Grainger? More like HENRY GRINDER!! And he's PEGGING HARRY!

Yes. Can we get a trans Harry fan fic where he defeats an evil trans hater? Make it a kids book to for extra points!

Too bad, trans people are more important than your pottertreats. If trans people say something is hurting them just stop doing it. Don't get into the nitty gritty of "how much harm does it do really?" make as wide a distance as you can to it.

As for this specific instance its not even hard to see how it is harming trans people: talking about hp keeps it in the spotlight which generats more sales.

Why wouldn't you purge the franchise that funds trans genocide from your life??

it does seem extremist as a perspective, but that extremist might think talking about the franchise is akin to marketing or a more passive or subtle way of the franchise receiving funding.

Probably a better argument is that JK Rowling is not as influential as some anti-trans activists, and our behavior and norms should ideally be rational and reflect those priorities.

I agree with you that coalition building is important, and in this particular case probably more important to trans rights than strict adherence to rules like never speaking of Harry Potter.

If mentioning the name of Harry Potter marks someone as a transphobe who is equally as bad as politicians actively stripping them of their rights…

literally nobody is saying this. you aren't listening. stop pretending to be my ally until you decide to hear what we say.

until then keep your stupid butthurt strawman bullshit to yourself.

I love trans people, and I actively fight for them and their rights.

eat shit.

If you see an oppressed people protesting against their opression, and your first instinct is to lecture them on the optics of their protest, you're not really an ally. You're just using "optics" as an excuse to not do anything to help out but still think of yourself as a good person. I don't think anyone falls for it.

That's still boosting the cultural impact of her work. In some cases piracy increases total sales.

Even better: pirate it, and whatever it would have cost, donate that amount to an LGBTQ+ charity.

Just pirate all of it.

how can you enjoy it though? like, don't you get disgusted knowing you're consuming the product of a transphobe? fuckin gross

I would agree, but the wizard game where the good guys put down a slave uprising isnt just antisemitic and transphobic, even worse, its mid.

That's what I told a friend who asked if she should read enders game. Get it from the library or steal it. Orson Scott Card doesn't deserve your money because he's a shitty person.

Me as well, and I stopped watching anything with Dave Chappell too. TERFS can take a flying leap for all I care.

Hmm so I have 51.397.624.942 dollars, lets get that to 52BN, right?

It's so stupid.

In my humble opinion it also breaks the social contract; where money is used as a substitute for labour, no one should have hundreds(or wayore ofc) of lifetimes of labour sitting in an account, it doesn't even make sense.

How on earth can this be changed/reformed? Having the ability to gift someone a lifetime of labour is a very powerful incentive, one that we did not vote for when it comes to the billonaires.

Am I making sense?

They're basically swifties ffs.

it is interesting how JK Rowling hasn't had the same boycott pressure as Elon Musk and Tesla, I think trans rights are just not as motivating to most people, unfortunately

because it's Don't support assholes,

but what if it affects me personally?

member when the entire culture collectively dropped Bill Cosby like a hot potato and a crazy amount of people didn't wring their hands about pirating and nostalgia and "separate art from the artist" and ninety nine other fun and creative ways to miss the entire fucking point in their scramble to talk over the actual people affected so that they may excuse themselves to continue supporting the content and by extension the creator?

that shitty cookie company remembers.

Thank you for the recommendation

Ooo now I wanna read the Feline Wizard trilogy again.

my builders were probably a POS too and I gotta go sell my house to make SOMEONE happy

Your builders don't continue to receive payment for your house after it is built, right?

but Im done being asked to be a soldier in every battle against a bad person.

I think that is sorta overselling what a boycott is.

I understand the sentiment. But then I'd say: buy used media.

As long as she doesn't get any money

…its sic my one single escape from reality.

What, have you become incapable of reading another book or something since HP dropped? Sounds like a rough existence tbh.

Did the rest of your books, local library and internet connection burn in a freak accident? Why couldn't you just read anything else, which would also likely be better?

dude it's a shitty ya series from 20 years ago. if this is "too much" for you as an ally then BYE BITCH DONT LET THE DOOR HIT YOUR ASS we don't need no weakass fuckers like you who give up over a shitty kid's book.

literally read another book. hopefully one more age appropriate.

I wasn't interested in playing it, but now I'm gonna do this out of spite.

It's alright but it's definitely got more popular than literally all the other coming of age teen fictions through sheer luck. And I read a lot of these as a kid so I know what I'm talking about.

I've also heard that she was immensely helped by translation because when her shit was translated she was already starting to get famous, so the publishers contracted their best, and apparently the originals are a lot less "well written" than e.g the french version. I personally never bothered to check because I have more interesting things to read.
Fun fact about this one : when my librarian mom brought the first volume of Harry Potter home, I remember she told me that it must be good because she had never heard of the author (and she was specoalized in kids literature so she knew a thing or two about children and teens book authors) but she knew the translator

i read that shit around 10th grade because it became fucking impossible to navigate anything in english class, since every other discussion related back to them because that was the only thing these cretins had ever read in their life or something.

they're fucking awful hack work.

the "plot" is razor thin and meanders most of the time, most of the length is filler, all the lessons beyond useless vagueries like "do the right thing" are awful things to impart to children, the worldbuilding is slapdash, the magic system tries to split the difference between whimsical and well-defined and is competent at neither, and the hero simply fails upward to the conclusion of his arc.

i said all of this back then and everyone to a person dismissed me as a "contrarian" and continued marvelling at the brilliance of this monumentally terrible book series.

if you love your kids you'll give them something better to read than fucking harry potter.

Commtitle is slightly misleading, any microblog screenshots are allowed as per the sidebar.

I read the Mistborn books, and wasn't terribly impressed. Anyone that repeatedly and unrepentantly uses the phrase "decked him in the face" is not a good writer. :)

you. you get it. i like you, you understand the point. you're listening.

Neat, gotta start reading this guy books then

So weird considering they are literally novels for children lol...

Have you considered Redwall. BJ is dead so he can't be pressured by the Anglican Church. I'm not excusing RJ, but the Anglican church is pretty fucking brutal in the UK anytime they get remotely threatened.

Also Redwall is fire as fuck.

bad news, your friends are shitlibs. being queer doesn't excuse them from being bad people.

Frfr… people who can't move on from HP are so fucking pathetic because they're climbing over each other to tell you how they're obsessed with some totally mid books written for a primary school reading level. It'd be weird even if the author weren't an insane fascist.

i didn't even like them as a kid, they're asinine slop and kids deserve better.

If you are fine with suppression of LGBTQ+ programs etc, like, not upset about it, sure! I guess this post is not meant for you then.

Tbf there were likely people saying the same thing about meine kampf when Jewish people were going missing.

I've never really been a HP fan, so it doesn't bother me. And as a straight white male, pride has fuck all to do with me... Buuuut I'm capable of seeing why trans communities would take issue with her inflammatory statements, and funding of discrimination against them.

Her latest venture is entirely funded by her, and aims to provide legal support for fighting against trans inclusion; Regardless of whether you agree with trans people, surely you can understand why they wouldn't want to fund that?

If you are not upset at the author then it is really no surprise you are not going to stop consuming their content. But it does say more about you than anybody else.

the issue isn't "somebody is upset" and if you think it is you're deeply ignorant and out of touch. stop playing the victim when people urge you not to support monsters.

also your taste fucking sucks, try some good fantasy on for size sometime.

Normally I’d agree, but Harry Potter is already huge.

And while I think this whole response is a bit extreme, it is a case of her source of wealth being way more famous than herself.

man what a stupid thing to say to a group of people advocating the boycott of someone who is tirelessly campaigning and actively spending more money than god to try to eradicate them for years on end now.

we're not upset that we had to think about her you colossal moron, we're upset because she is using her money and influence to do untold harm to trans people at large, meanwhile the public ignores us and continue giving her money anyway, telling themselves excuses about the art and the artist or whatever.

THE ART FUNDS THE ARTIST, AND THE ARTIST IS TRYING TO GENOCIDE US YOU FUCKING MOOK. and the only way to not realize that this is what it's about, is to be actively ignoring us about it.

this is exactly like the Chik-Fil-A people funding programs to mentally abuse queer kids into being "straight" and you assholes shrug and go "it's just a sandwich and i like it" as you continue to actively fund god damn child abuse. except it's at an even larger scale.

and here you are condescending to us about it, because you're comfortable sticking your fingers in your ears. walk into the sea please.

You may not hear about her much, but that doesn't mean Harry Potter isn't getting a new show on HBO next year. Clearly, JK Rowling is still "in the cultural spotlight" and making plenty of money off of the thing this post is asking you not to support.

i basically had to because for two years every discussion of every piece of fiction in english class came down to harry potter comparisons.

so when i was finally allowed (thanks for the cultural hobbles, weird evangelical parents!) i read the series so far at the time and kept up with the last several books as they were published and my god it sucks so bad.

i related what a literary and moral trainwreck i thought the series was in detail to several teachers, and was universally lambasted as a contrarian who hates everything popular, and it became my reputation for the remainder of my high school career. all for taking the the trouble of consuming and analyzing a work of fiction as i'd been taught when i didn't strictly "have to" (even though i did "have to" in order to fully participate in class) and presenting a well-formed (for a high schooler) critical opinion thereof.

you're better off reading literally anything else than harry potter, and i don't understand the loyalty verging on derangement people have for that overhyped piece of hack work.

read literally any other book.

The short answer is it's not books. It's mostly licencing deals in the form of video games and merchandise... However HBO is about to put forward a new series that JKR will have executive control and an executive sized pay check for.

It's the "well it already exists and licencing deals are already paid, might as well watch it/play it/own it" that keeps the whole engine rolling on. Every time there's a little bit of advocacy to disengage from the fandom it is always spun as "too late" or focuses on the books or death of the author... But all that's really required is ambivalence.

Inevitably the new HP thing will come out and whether or not trans people mention anything people will drag up the controversy, use the reminder to brigade the spaces trans people connect online, try and goad their trans coworker for a commentary and set off yet another flurry of right wing backlash that makes elevating the franchise a patriotic duty to "stick it to the moralizing trans people to show them who is boss". All of this causes more cultural pressure on a population already underwater with being chased out of the public sphere but it will be framed as a just retaliation for a perceived slight.

It's a song and dance that will continue ad infinitum as long as it's profitable because appearantly nostalgia is worth turning a blind eye to the where the money goes.

The books are good and the movies are good. Young people of the internet forget the kind of childish shit we had before Harry Potter.

Also the movies have fucking Hans Gruber who tries to kill John McPotter and that was awesome.

"I'm a trans ally, let me pat myself on the back about it for a paragraph. Okay now that I'm done congratulating myself let me build a rhetorical strawman where trans people are a monolith of unreason making arbitrary demands of everyone and if you don't comply with all of them you're automatically branded a nazi, even for just saying the wrong sequence of words on accident. Don't you want to make sure you hang on to all the good allies like me?"

these people can all walk into the fucking sea, i'm so god damn done.

It's because she's still alive and donating to transphobic organizations, not merely because she's a bitch. Your H.P. Lovecraft book from the library isn't hurting black people.

disengaging from the franchise altogether has the added effect of not helping to keep it culturally relevant to JK Rowling's benefit.

c'mon dude. it's kids' books. it's lame kids' books. it's the macaroni and cheese with dinosaur nuggets and chocolate milk of fantasy series, except it's the lame off-brand macaroni and the breading is soggy and slides off and the "chocolate" milk is carob water.

rowling is a hack and a monster, you owe yourself better than that regurgitated tripe.

Or you could just... watch better movies.

You're really giving off "you can't tell me what to do" vibes on par with angsty teenagers and black conservatives. But good on you for pirating.

if that's your attitude then get bent, you were never on our side to begin with. enjoy your high-budget low-quality chattel slavery advocacy made by a bigot for particularly stupid children.

lmao imagine using the phrase "cancel culture" unironically. who even takes that seriously?

lmao imagine not realizing that a thing being popular creates demand, and that demand creates profit for the ip holder, and that ip holder uses the money they get from the ip to hurt trans people.

lmao imagine not understanding that boycotting that ip whose holder uses the money to hurt trans people is a way to reduce harm against trans people.

lmao imagine not realizing that none of this is at all hard to understand unless you just already want to believe trans people are just loud and upset for no reason all of the time, and running your mouth about how hard it is to understand.

Because she actively funnels money to hate groups using money she receives from this intellectual property, and boasts about doing so.

If there's two things billionaires don't care about, it's money and popularity.