JK Rowling is living proof that hate often disguises itself as a virtue.
(And a lot of people fall for it because, oh, let’s see… Her tone is not violent. Aawwwww. What a wholesome, civilised, innocent lady!)
The hateful wolves in sheep’s clothing who desperately want people to believe they’re “just innocent victims of the world uwu” usually obsess over trying to prove that real hate is only overt. Ya know, someone is only a difficult person if they act like some kind of Looney Tunes villain who gives a monologue before torturing someone… Or, ya know, displays anger.
Because suuuuuuuuurely, if you’re not displaying anger, you can’t be evil. Right? Riiiiiight?!
Surely condescenscion, “nice person” racism, silent treatment, pathological smothering behaviour, self-centeredness, ultraconservatism delivered with a spoonful of sugar, among other things, can never be evil. Oh, never ever. Nope. Not even a tad. Villains are never tame. They’re all overt and cartoonish, always.
Yeah, right.
Today’s article was inspired by this brilliant video by one of my favourite youtubers. Go give it a watch, she deserves some love.
Oh, and before I forget, my tolerance for TERF is zero. I won’t extend myself, I already said it and you can infer the rest — or cross my boundary on your own peril.
What can we say about the Harry Potter fandom? Are they (we!) “just like JK Rowling?”
Uhhhhh no. First of all, I used to be in the very early fandom, back in the late 90s. This lasted until the mid-2000s. I even cosplayed some of the characters as the movies were coming out! I was obsessed.
By and large, the Harry Potter series is a product of its time. It’s no more outrageous than other products of the media taking the world by storm during the same period, such as America’s Next Top Model and Friends — series that carried a whole load of prejudiced, narrow-minded, and downright hateful messages (Always in good fun, though! Nothing overtly aggressive or barbaric. So, in some boomers’ logic, “nothing wrong” with them). Now we can see the problem, but back then, we were oblivious to it. A lot of these series’ audiences were super young and naive at the time (I was a pre-teen myself), which adds to the reason why we simply consumed the content without questioning anything.
To add insult to injury, many of us were raised by… “ultraconservative?” (I’m trying to be NICE. If I weren’t, you’d hear the uncensored truth) families, teachers, and whole communities who didn’t seem to give a fuck about human rights or compassion. A lot of them still don’t (including some who PRETEND to). And look, how interesting, that’s the same baby boomer generation JK Rowling belongs to! Wow, what a coincidence!
Anyway, without extending myself too much in the rant above (even because I don’t need to. If you still don’t get it, you’re not my target public), the short answer is no. The Harry Potter fandom has been, at most, naive. It’s great that we can learn and grow (and grow out of this fandom, as well…) as we get older and wiser, but that’s no reason to beat our past selves up. In fact, learning and growth is the best possible product of such mistakes! A lot of people involved in the other problematic series mentioned — ANTP and Friends, to name a few — have since given public statements either apologising for their past conduct, or clarifying that they no longer hold the same views they had during the production phase of their beloved franchises. That’s great. Nobody is complaining about that.
JK Rowling, however, stays in denial. That is why so many people have left the fandom and now dislike her. It isn’t a “witch hunt”. It’s just plain common sense. She has a fear of accountability which matches pretty closely that of narcissists and other “cluster B” people. Not to armchair-diagnose anyone, but there ya go, it’s at least an interesting coincidence.
Oh, but she is so… “civilised”. So tame, so calm and collected, never screaming like one of the hysterical female characters she wrote into Harry Potter… Surely she’s just misunderstood, come on, she couldn’t be a villainesque person. Could she? Look at her puppy eyes!
That’s exactly what the most despicable kind of evil people do — they disguise as “sheep” when in fact they’re wolves. It’s a tale as old as time! There’s a warning about it in the Bible. I’m not speaking as a Christian (I’m not Christian), I’m speaking as a History nerd: when a 2000-year-old book calls out your bullshit… Maybe… Just maybe… There’s something seriously wrong with your denial.
Oh, but look! Rowling is from a working class background… And anti-nazi… And a woman. She’s not very privileged. Why think she would side with the bad guys?
Here’s another age-old fallacy: the assumption that just because someone did a couple of things right, or didn’t have much power for most of their lives, they’re automatically angels beyond reproach.
Ya know, just like some abusers claim that they “clothed and fed” their victims, so of course they wouldn’t be capable of evil. Abusers give breadcrumbs of genuine love, oh wow, what a kind gesture! Quick, let’s turn a blind eye to all the bad things they also do. A very flawless logic, I’m sure.
If anyone is surprised by JK Rowling becoming, specifically, a TERF (one of those groups who pretend to be compassionate but in fact are hateful, but oh, wait, they’re not hysterical so they “must” be good people. Right? Riiiight?), just take a second look at how she portrays women in *any* of her pieces of fiction — even the acclaimed Harry Potter.
Her prejudice against women who won’t conform to a super-duper-hyper-specific standard of beauty, race (yes, race, namely white), and temperament (“calm and collected” only) didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It’s clear as day when you re-read Harry Potter as an adult. It’s no wonder she, like many other closeted racist people, mistook Olympic athlete Imane Khelif for a trans woman (or, in her words, “a man”) when in fact she was cis (or, in JK Rowling’s dumbed-down language, a woman with a vagina). No, guys, it’s not just Rowling being a TERF and parrotting fake news without checking (because she’s done that in the past…). This time, it was also because of her racism. The same kind of racism that can be seen in the Harry Potter series — often targetting, specifically, women of colour.
Women who are like me.
I have at least two articles about this phenomenon, here and here. (One could even say I predicted what would happen to Khelif. Some things are so obvious, we don’t need an oracle to predict them — but of course the world turns a blind eye to anything that isn’t overt).
…But as Rowling implies in her Harry Potter series (more than once, and quite overtly), “a mother’s love trumps all”. So as long as you act stereotypically lunar and motherly (namely, “not savage”, translation: like a good old white person indoctrinated into the good old Victorian ways, who would refrain from displaying any kind of emotional intensity and prefer bland-flavoured everything), you’ve got yourself a get-out-of-jail-free card to be as bigoted as you please. Keep it covert, and keep it going!
What a “beautiful” world.
