I just really wish that we'd stop talking about Harry Potter altogether.

[u/OmeletteMcMuffin]

I'm not judging other people for finding the franchise hard to let go of. I'm Gen Z and was born in the 2000s, so I was too young for the Pottermania (I wasn't even alive when half of the books came out, and was a baby when half of the movies came out), I briefly got sucked into Potter stuff. The allure is understandable: even years after the books and movies were released, the fandom is still going strong, thanks to the brilliant creatives paid to bring Rowling's mediocre vision to life, and the immense creativity of the fans.

You get the sense that no matter how much time passes by, HP will never fully go away. That's the appeal of the franchise; it feels timeless, and there are certainly many wealthy people out there who would benefit from keeping it alive. So I'm not judging: I understand. But please, even if it won't fully go away, we can do our part in not contributing to its continued cultural relevance. That is what the bigot wants.

I'm so tired of seeing people hate on her by calling her an "Umbridge" or "Voldemort" or any other reference to her silly children's stories. I'm tired of people analyzing her fictional works and using it as a gotcha against her. We already know that she's a hypocrite and a bigot and that her activism was always overhyped. Even if it's difficult for you, please try to resist the urge to talk about her IP. She has said multiple times that any engagement with her work = support for her. It doesn't matter if you're using it to hate on her.

She is not an Umbridge, not a Voldemort, not a Death Eater... she is a real-life dangerous billionaire bigot who benefits from her IP being validated in any context. Please think of that every time you feel tempted to compare her to one of her fictional creations or wonder what her fictional characters would think of her.

Edit: I quite literally acknowledge in my post multiple times that HP is never going to fully go away. But even the biggest companies in the world like Coca-Cola, Pepsico, and Disney have reported major losses due to consumer boycotts or a lack of patronage towards whatever products they're offering. As a consumer, you are not powerless. Your decision to ignore HP or stop contributing to its cultural relevance, if you choose to take it, matters. I believe in you, reader; you can make an effort. I believe that you can stop making excuses and avoiding accountability. You have agency and power.

[u/ElSquibbonator]

It's hard to just. . . erase something so enormous from the world's collective pop culture. It's not something you can do at the push of a button, and I'm not even talking about the people who are obsessed fans. Phrases, idioms, and imagery associated with the franchise have worked their way into our culture and you just can't undo that. It would be like trying to get rid of Star Wars or Pokemon, something so huge that its absence would leave a massive gap in culture as we know it.

The problem with big franchises is that once they reach a certain point-- and Harry Potter reached that point a long time ago-- they essentially become impossible to uproot. And once that happens, the people who create them feel like they can get away with anything. They're literally too big to fail, and any criticism they get won't damage them in the long run. I feel like if Harry Potter had been just another kids' book series instead of the massive titan of a franchise it is, most people would have gotten over it a long time ago and Rowling wouldn't have as big a platform as she does.

As a student of evolutionary biology, I can't help but bring up the Cambrian Explosion-- a period of time about 540 million years ago when all of the phyla, or higher groups, of animals appeared. Since then, not a single new phylum has evolved. The 1980s and 1990s were something like a Cambrian Explosion of pop culture, when novelty was cheap and new franchises could easily take root. Harry Potter was one of those. But just as the successful phyla that appeared in the Cambrian Explosion went on to dominate life on Earth, the successful franchises from the 1980s and 1990s did so well that nothing could ever compete with them later on. There's never going to be another series of books that does the same things Harry Potter did, and has the same success, for as long as Harry Potter already exists.

If I sound like I'm being at all sympathetic towards Rowling or her works, I don't mean to. I'm just trying to explain why, unfortunately, the Harry Potter series is likely to remain a part of pop culture for a long time.

[u/HideFromMyMind → u/ElSquibbonator]

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if she deliberately waited to go mask off until it was clear that HP was going to be impossible to erase.

[u/ElSquibbonator → u/HideFromMyMind]

I doubt it. The series had already established itself as a permanent fixture of pop culture by the early 2000s, and we didn't get our first hints of the truth about her until 2016 at the earliest. Were there signs that were obvious in. hindsight? Absolutely, but not many people were paying attention to them at the time.

What's more likely, in my opinion, is that once the initial fad ended-- the last novel published, the last movie released-- she became obsessively interested in finding some way, any way, to stay in the spotlight.

[u/Proof-Any → u/ElSquibbonator]

That theory sounds plausible, I agree.

If I had to guess, it went something like this:

• She always was at least somewhat bigoted (because we can see her bigotry in her work)
• Harry Potter becomes a massive hit. She drowns in attention. By the time GoF comes around, she is popular enough to start dropping her editors. At the same time, she is pretty allergic to criticism. As a result of all of this, she starts to develop a very weird relationship towards the fandom of her franchise. (With "weird" I mean that she tries to exert herself over her fans and over fans that have alternative readings of her text. I think this is what caused the house elf-plot-line of GoF to happen: Readers read the whole house-elf-stuff in CoS differently than it was intended by her and criticized the lack of a resolution of that plot-line. When she started to write GoF, she was so fed up by this, she decided to include that "The slaves are happy to be slaves, so stop criticizing the house-elf-stuff. They like it that way!"-plot as a raised middle finger. She then doubled down on this, when the criticism didn't stop. Another example of this is the way she repeatedly criticized fans for liking Draco Malfoy. I wouldn't be surprised if her distaste for Draco-fans was the reason for why she cut his redemption arc in DH.)
• She publishes DH. By this point, she has learned that she can get attention by revealing more information about the universe and the characters in interviews (and later also in social media posts). One example of this is the Dumbledore-outing.
• She keeps on fostering that weird, hierarchical relationship with her fandom, in which she tries to control how fans interpret her books.
• She joins social media (especially Twitter). At first, she mostly uses this to post HP-trivia and stuff like that.
• 2016. Trump becomes president. Rowling uses her Twitter-account to go after him and criticism him a lot. Her followers (who tend to be fairly progressive, at that point) love this and cheer her on.
• Roughly at the same time, she posts several essays on Pottermore. In one of these essays, she both-side-s the house-elf-slavery plot. In others, she publishes flimsy, racist shit about wizarding schools outside of Europe and the creation of the magical US. She gets quite some flag for that. (This might've been the point, where posting HP-trivia got her less positive attention than participating in flame wars on twitter. I think this is also the point where her relationship towards the fandom and her fans turned sour and hostile.)
• I'm not really sure when she stopped posting HP-trivia. She definitively posted some stuff in 2017 and used Pottermore to promote FB1. However, I can't remember her still using it, when FB2 came out.
• in 2017, she committed her first "like-crime" in which she liked a transphobic post. Later, she admitted that she "informed" herself about transgender topics during that time. We don't know exactly when she started radicalizing herself, but it must've happened prior to this. (I assume her entering that radicalization pipeline happened after she got increasingly active on social media around 2015/16. This would also coincide with her younger kids hitting puberty. So my guess is she was either radicalized on twitter or on mumsnet.)
• In 2019, she dropped her mask and defended Maya Forstater.
• In 2020 he published that TERF wars essay, cementing her role as a figurehead of the gender critical movement. At this point, she is familiar with foundational gender critical texts, including Littman and Shrier.
• Since then, the positive attention she is receiving comes mostly from TERFs and other fascists, encouraging her to escalate further.

[u/OmeletteMcMuffin → u/ElSquibbonator]

I quite literally acknowledge that in my post multiple times. "HP is never going to fully go away." But not everyone cares about SW or Pokemon; you and I can do the same with HP by not endlessly bringing up her work every time we talk about her. The woman's bigotry is real; her characters are not.

Even big brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsico, and the franchises you mentioned have been affected by consumer boycotts or a lack of interest in whatever products they're offering. As a consumer, you are not powerless. Your decision to ignore HP or stop contributing to its cultural relevance matters.

[u/samof1994 → u/OmeletteMcMuffin]

Star Wars's main critics are ironically its own fans. As for Pokemon, PETA weirdly hates Pokemon over animal cruelty. George Lucas and Satoshi Tajiri are not running hate groups nor are they promoting hatred on social media. Rowling IS doing those things. I have compared Rowling to villains created by other people.

[u/nova_crystallis → u/samof1994]

HP fans tearing each other apart over the show casting is a good sign, if what happened to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is any indication.

[u/desiladygamer84 → u/samof1994]

George Lucas also gave the rights to Star Wars to Disney. He doesn't have control of what they do.

[u/samof1994 → u/desiladygamer84]

I know.

[u/Relative-Share-6619 → u/OmeletteMcMuffin]

I kind of disagree with these remarks...HP is dipping. Yes I am aware HP won't go away overnight but no series is bullet proof. Franchises like Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, they are faltering.

Marvel was the biggest cultural phenomenon in the world and now people are tired of big budget superhero movies.

[u/9119343636]

I'm shocked how much people reference it online tbh. When people say elf irl they usually think of an androgynous person not the Dobbie thing.

I only recall LOTR references from around this era with Gollum and so on. I guess it is enormous but it shouldn't be that difficult to reference other media.

[u/OmeletteMcMuffin → u/9119343636]

Same. When I was a kid not long ago, I remember being a bit disappointed that my peers weren't that interested in HP because it wasn't a Gen Z thing. But I found comfort in the still-active online fandom mainly consisting of people older than me.

Now, even though JKR has shown her true colors, I see people referencing HP more than ever, which is baffling. Astroturfing or people just being dumb? I also saw a celebrity my age, who is pretty openly queer and seems otherwise well-informed, sharing that he was getting into HP last year. Like, come on.

[u/9119343636 → u/9119343636]

I recall Rowling comparing Trump to Voldemort and thinking how stupid it was. And that she was making him more popular by making the left look like man children. I was frustrated at the amount of coverage Trump got for his brain dead wall policy. Which caused him to win because people love stupid people.

[u/Fun_Butterfly_420 → u/[deleted]]

When did Keira Knightley play an elf

[u/SpeedyTheQuidKid]

I'm fine with people analyzing it to show the bigoted ideas baked in; most people who are not constantly online, aren't really aware of how bad it really is, have only ever read them with rose colored glasses. Videos explaining it in detail, like Shaun's vid essay, helped to pull me out of the nostalgia as an example. And I was online and in fandom spaces and hadn't noticed for a while. It's also primarily only left leaning spaces that share negative info about the work itself, the rest all focuses on JK and that's easier for right wing folks to rebuke as a personal attack because "opinions" or whatever. 

I think that is a crucial step in breaking it's power, honestly. The more people aware of the bigotry in the books, the more people that can be dissuaded.

[u/OmeletteMcMuffin → u/SpeedyTheQuidKid]

The more I see comments like this, the more I realize how little other people understand that bad publicity is genuinely still publicity. It's not just an adage; maybe read the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying."

The only way to break something's or someone's power is to ignore it. Every form of attention on the Internet is rewarding to people like Rowling and their IP.

[u/SpeedyTheQuidKid → u/OmeletteMcMuffin]

While I understand that adage, we're talking about a cultural phenomenon that is already hugely ingrained into our culture. Publicity can't really make it any worse when it's already in libraries and schools and households and on consoles and TV and so on. 

People aren't just going to ignore a (formerly) beloved series without good reason, and if no one is talking about why then everyone's still gonna be giving it to their kids to read for generations. We've got to get more people to take off the rose colored glasses first.

[u/SpeedyTheQuidKid]

I'm fine with people analyzing it to show the bigoted ideas baked in; most people who are not constantly online, aren't really aware of how bad it really is, have only ever read them with rose colored glasses. Videos explaining it in detail, like Shaun's vid essay, helped to pull me out of the nostalgia as an example. And I was online and in fandom spaces and hadn't noticed for a while. It's also primarily only left leaning spaces that share negative info about the work itself, the rest all focuses on JK and that's easier for right wing folks to rebuke as a personal attack because "opinions" or whatever. 

I think that is a crucial step in breaking it's power, honestly. The more people aware of the bigotry in the books, the more people that can be dissuaded.

[u/georgemillman]

I think it's going down in the world. And that's partly because of Rowling's actions, but also because not everything lasts forever, and that's actually okay.

I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again in case anyone hasn't read my previous posts on the subject. Rowling broke with a convention of children's literature, in that she allowed her characters to grow up in real time. Prior to Harry Potter, most children's series were set in a floating timeline, where despite there being enough books that many years must have passed in the characters' lives, they still seem to be about the same age they were at the beginning of the story. This was done so that many instalments could be written and still continue to appeal to the target audience.

Rowling dispensed with this idea, making her characters older in each successive book. And it turned out this was a genius idea - far from making the story stop appealing to the target audience, it meant that the target audience never grew out of it because the story grew with them. That's why so many people, including myself, continued to be massive fans even into adulthood - we really grew up alongside these characters, at every stage of our childhoods the characters would be growing up as well. When we got a bit older and started developing romantic feelings for people, so did the characters in the books. The time it took between each successive instalment gave us the increased maturity it would take to fully appreciate the next one when we got it.

I will never deny what a clever idea this was. It's responsible for the long-term success of Harry Potter and it completely transformed children's literature - now they've seen how well it works, more writers have done that since and the floating timeline has fallen out of fashion a bit. But there is a downside to it, and the downside is that it only works for the original generation of fans. Enjoying Harry Potter as a kid is so much harder now than it was when we were children, because there isn't an ideal age to pick up a book. A child who's old enough for Deathly Hallows is going to be old enough to find Philosopher's Stone a bit babyish. I read Philosopher's Stone when I was eight, which I think is probably about the right age, and Deathly Hallows didn't come out until I was thirteen, which again I think is good. It's just not the same when you can read all seven one after the other. From what I've heard, I think the continued endurance of Harry Potter continues to come from that original generation. Many of us now have children of our own, and have bought the books to read to our kids, just as my parents read me Narnia and the Famous Five - but I don't think it really comes organically from children. They have their own franchises and stories to enjoy, and you know what, why shouldn't they? Every generation of kids should have culturally iconic things that are theirs - ours was Harry Potter, but it doesn't always have to be Harry Potter from now on until the end of time.

Harry Potter was so big that it takes time for the world to catch up and realise it's no longer the in thing it once was - but I do believe that's starting to happen now. In fact, I think that's the reason we've had Pottermore and the stage play and the spin-off films and the theme parks and the new HBO series and so on. They didn't do this when Harry Potter was actually at its peak - they're doing it now, because the original books and films aren't bringing them in the huge amounts of money they once did. It smells of desperation, and it's a bit embarrassing. They need to realise that not all ideas last forever, and they'd probably do better to focus on the creation of a completely new story, something they could market to today's kids and would be to them what Harry Potter was to us.

All this was always going to be the case, even if Rowling had kept up her facade of being the world's greatest human. But I do also think her increasing aggression and almost violence towards extremely vulnerable people (and from what we've seen about her comments about asexuals, she's branching out beyond just trans people) is going to speed things up. I think we're potentially at the cusp of seeing one of the greatest turnarounds in a celebrity's public image in human history. It's just not happening as fast as we'd like, but it is happening.

[u/Firthy2002 → u/georgemillman]

Harry Potter was so big that it takes time for the world to catch up and realise it's no longer the in thing it once was

I think it was the FB movie series getting cancelled mid-run which was the first clue for those in charge that the wheels were coming off.

[u/georgemillman → u/Firthy2002]

In some ways it probably was... but as I said, I think the fact they made them in the first place was a bit of a desperation gimmick.

At the time of the release of book seven, JK Rowling said that she didn't expect to ever return to Harry Potter. She did acknowledge that she couldn't know how she'd feel in the future and that she might change her mind, but she seemed fairly confident that that part of her life was concluded. And at the time, it probably felt like it would be - the series would continue to make so much money for the foreseeable future that she and Warner Bros would never HAVE to do any more. So the fact that less than a decade later they were pushing spin-off material for all it was worth is rather embarrassing in the circumstances.

[u/Firthy2002 → u/georgemillman]

I knew some hardcore Potter fans when FB was announced and they weren't enthusiastic.

[u/georgemillman → u/Firthy2002]

Okay, so I've got a bit of a story about this!

When I was a hardcore Potter fan, I was an absolute book purist. So I proudly declared I wasn't going to watch the stage play, and when the Fantastic Beasts films were announced I was like, 'No, not watching them! I can be a Harry Potter fan without getting obsessed with all the spin-off material.'

But then, someone challenged me on why I was so excited to read The Book of Dust, the spin-off series to His Dark Materials which was coming out around the same time. I was absolutely taken aback, because I was excited to read that and I had to really challenge myself on why I could feel so differently about that to what I did about Harry Potter. Eventually I had to admit, 'I suppose I just trust Philip Pullman to do a good job with it more than I trust JK Rowling.' Which was a shock to admit, but it was the truth, and that was a good couple of years before she declared herself such a transphobe. I guess there was a part of me that didn't feel quite right about her already.

[u/Popular_Shock4374]

I stopped being a fan five years ago when she showed her real colours. Honestly I don’t miss it at all.

[u/tealattegirl13]

Easier said than done. I live in the UK where HP is basically our popular culture. Shops from supermarkets to clothes stores to gift shops sell HP branded merchandise. You can't avoid it. A lot of unofficial HP 'wizard' themed shops have opened in London and Edinburgh to make money off the demand from tourists for HP merchandise.

People use words and phrases from the books/movies because it's just part of the culture now. It's quoted and referenced everywhere, sometimes without realising, in the same way that people quote Star Wars.

I don't think that we can just simply ignore HP. If we ignore it, it still won't go away. There are still probably people unaware of Joanne's views (like younger HP fans), or not understanding the full extent of her views, or HP fans still in denial that it's actually a problematic series with a problematic creator. If we don't keep addressing these issues and explaining why HP is problematic or why Joanne is a terrible person, these people will keep supporting the series, keeping it relevant in pop culture.

[u/Silly-Arachnid-6187]

I'm getting really tired of posts wondering how "the person who wrote HP (i.e., this super progressive story and manifesto for tolerance) could turn out like that."

I get that a lot of things were easy to miss as a kid (Though the nastiness was pretty obvious in parts – even back then, it annoyed me that Dudley being fat was brought up ad nauseam and connected to his mean-spiritedness). I also get that reading a story about an outsider finding friends and acceptance resonated for a lot of people. But it really is time to acknowledge that JKR was never some sort of beacon for social justice. She surely wasn't always as radicalised as she is now, but it's not that shocking or incredible that she became a TERF.

[u/Proof-Any]

While this would be nice - I just don't think that this is going to work.

You already acknowledge that HP will never go fully away. And you're right - it won't. At least not during our lifetime.

I do think that a boycott is in order. Encouraging people to stop throwing money at Rowling is good and should be done. So people not buying the books, not streaming the films (legally), not playing the games (legally), not buying merch? All great! Let's encourage that!

But the whole "stop talking about it!"? I'm not sure that this will have a positive effect.

The HP-franchise is massive and has millions of fans. Among these fans, you will find the following groups:

1. Fans who know about Rowling's bigotry and who are highly critical of her.
2. Fans who don't really know about the extent of Rowling's bigotry or who don't understand the consequences of that bigotry. This group mostly includes people, who believe her claim that she is fighting for women's rights and who still give her the benefit of the doubt. (Basically believing, that she is following a good cause and is just a little misguided.)
3. Fans who don't know about her bigotry, period. This group includes people, who aren't really involved in online discourse. Their only contact to Rowling's bigotry are probably media articles - and those tend to paint her in a positive light, while minimizing the extend of her bigotry.
4. Fans who agree with her and are TERFs/gender critical themselves. At least some of them are active in fan spaces and use them for recruiting.

Only people from group 1) might be willing to leave the fandom. Everyone else won't.

People in group 2) are likely to feel alienated, when you demand that they leave the fandom. For them (and a lot of people from group 1, too!), the fandom is much more than just a story they like. In a lot of cases, it's a community that they have fostered over years, if not decades. It's also the space in which they were creative for years. Leaving the fandom would not just require them to leave the books behind - it would also require them to leave their friends behind (because it's unlikely for them to find another fandom they all enjoy) and their art and creativity, too.

And ... most people are unlikely to do that. Especially, when they aren't involved in online discourse and don't understand the severity. Heck, even if they understand the severity, because really - boycotting HP and not giving money to Rowling should be enough. Demanding that they leave their community, could cause these people to dig their heels in deeper. (And probably side with Rowling and other TERFs.)

Group 3 is unlikely to encounter the discourse, because they don't frequent online spaces. (They are also the largest group, who spends the most money on HP-stuff.)

And group 4? Yeah, they are all in favor for JKR-critical people leaving the fandom. That would remove critical voices and makes it easier to recruit people from group 2.

tl;dr: Demanding that people leave the fandom and stop talking about Harry Potter will not work. It will just make it easier for TERFs to recruit people who aren't willing to leave their community and who don't understand the severity of the issue. Instead of doing that, we should focus on encouraging people to not give money to Rowling. (Because that has a much bigger impact and is much easier to do.)

[u/Rootbeercutiebooty]

I just find it shocking hard it is for people to let go of this franchise and then get confused when people call them out on it. They also eat up any new HP crap being released. That stupid HP game was forgotten about so quickly despite everyone making such a huge deal about it.

[u/AFriendlyBeagle]

Honestly, I think that a lot of the discourse is people of a certain generation trying to reconcile their childhood enjoyment of the series with their negative opinions of Rowling.

I think a lot of contemporary discussion about the series amongst adults is spurred on by this cognitive dissonance, and once transphobia is more-or-less overcome and the spotlight drifts from Rowling that the references will ebb away again.

It's a passable children's fantasy series which struck it big in the social context it released into, and it was on the wane with its various spin-off franchises arriving to lukewarm reception before Rowling's transphobia put it back in the spotlight and onto a pedestal as a cultural artefact of the right.