And yet you brought up fecking American Psycho as an example of a book that should not be used to infer the author's personal views. Talk about really not getting it. The views expressed in that book are as obvious as it gets, and you obviously didn't get it.
Transgender rights discussion
- Thread starter crappycraperson
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The Harry Potter books aren't like ASOIAF(for instance), but they're not exactly children's books either. You got torture, abuse, trauma, fascism, politics and plenty of murders. There's even a chapter where we follow the English prime minister's point of view as he's frustrated by the voters turning on him.
At the same time, the books are not as morally ambiguous as you'd expect from more adult fantasy books. Rowling has a very black and white approach and it is very clear who the good guys are. And the villains, bar a few rare exceptions, are almost always portrayed as ugly or fat. And if the villains are women then Rowling will often give them masculine features(large "man-like" hands, square jaw, moustache etc). Rowling's biases and real life opinions shine through the pages.
The universe she has created is in many ways much worse than modern Europe in terms of discrimination(there's even slavery!) and she will gladly acknowledge this in her books. But in her idea of a happy ending(her words) nothing has actually changed or been addressed. They manage to defeat fascism, but fascism had largely been dead for 10 years prior to the main story. It's just a return to status quo. In her idea of a perfect world you don't do anything to upset the system. You just make sure that competent people are in charge to maintain it and keep fascism in check.
If you re-read the HP books while knowing about Rowling's love for New Labour and her TERF stance then a lot of the frustrating parts suddenly make a whole lot of sense.
There's a lot of that about.
I get that. She made the mistake of sharing an unpopular opinion about sex vs gender on Twitter. And instead of backing off when she realised she’d poked a hornet’s nest, she doubled down, dug her heels in and went full tilt into the culture war. Hence we are where we are. With floor tiles in scenes in movies of her books being used as evidence that she’s antisemitic and 90 minute podcasts on her problematic political views in a children’s novel about wizards and goblins.
I had the pop-up version. Preferred Goodnight Moon though.
From the very periphery of opinion on her, one of my defining memories is her refusal to boycott Israel. Obviously I don't hold her in high regard for that, combined with the comments on the trans issues (mainly the point about the historic suffering of women - it's vague now what exactly annoyed me, I've not kept up).
The opinionated among us have all said things to disrupt hornets and dug in, but this is a long time to say she's just being stubborn?
And I’m not even sure Pogue really is a terrible person. Just insanely stubborn and argumentative. To the point of self harm. Which raises the possibility that he will be denying the holocaust by the time this thread reaches 100 pages.
Do people actually think that Rowling is clever enough to instill clandestine messages of transphobia or anti Semitic notions in HO books?
Has anyone read them? There's plot holes galore, poorly explained and poorly worded subplots, there's artifacts she made up on the spot to fit the story she tried to create.
There's no cohesion throughout any of the series, it's a shockingly poor series of books written by someone who really is an average writer at best.
Yet she's clever enough to hide her evil thoughts in this prose?
Has anyone read them? There's plot holes galore, poorly explained and poorly worded subplots, there's artifacts she made up on the spot to fit the story she tried to create.
There's no cohesion throughout any of the series, it's a shockingly poor series of books written by someone who really is an average writer at best.
Yet she's clever enough to hide her evil thoughts in this prose?
Yeah, there’s obviously some tipping point where a very stubborn person defending an unpopular (or misguided? misinformed?) opinion online ends up fairly removed from reality. And that’s going to be influenced not only by how stubborn they are but also how sustained and malicious is the flack they get for that opinion and also, undeniably, their underlying character. It’s a mixed bag.
I sometimes think I’m on my own path down that slippery slope when I try to defend Fred’s latest haphazard midfield performance.
It's wild how you're still peddling this claim whilst ignoring every post that's asked you who in this thread actually accused her of being a raging antisemite.
You can absolutely take conclusions about his politics from his work, it’s not something that can be debated, he’s on the record talking length about what inspired the work and the real world allegories that’s inspired it.
Sure you can’t do this for every writer and every work, but you honestly could not have picked a worst example for your point. It’s akin to reading Animal Farm and saying there’s no way of knowing the author’s thoughts on Stalin
But people have had 90 minute podcasts about it!! This is completely unprecedented. Usually people only spend a lot of time and effort on things I think are worth spending a lot of time and effort on.
a) You’ve a strange definition of “wild”
b) I haven’t ignored any post asking me that question (that I know of) never mind every post
c) Post #1608
I don't think that any of this was intentional. I think that she is mostly unaware of her own biases to the point that it affects her writing. Adult readers don't even have to read between the lines. She probably didn't even notice how a character being fat or ugly practically always is shorthand for them being morally corrupt or downright evil or how most of her evil female characters have masculine features. I don't know much about the anti-semitic stuff, but my guess is that this was unintentional too.
Which views in particular? You can read the book in any number of ways and any number of people have. I'm still not sure what conclusions I'm supposed to draw about Brett Easton Ellis politics. He did have a thematic point I think he was trying to get across, but I don't necessarily draw any conclusions about Brett Easton Ellis's own beliefs from it.
You say that, but a lot of people who have read Animal Farm think it's anti-socialist, instead of anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian. Same with 1984, incredibly.
I'd like to see them try that with Road to Wigan Pier or Homage to Catalonia, but I'm sure they'd manage.
All art reflect its times and the zeitgeist. We can only be sure what Lucas's Vietnam era politics are because he told us, in innumerable interviews and bios. Otherwise you could just as easily infer from Star Wars that it's about squabbling over which branch of the Skywalker family gets to hold office, ie George Lucas is in favour of inherited aristocratic power. I mean, do the slaves we see in Episode 1 get liberated at the end of Return of the Jedi or not?
Animal Farm was written specifically to deliver a warning about Stalinism.
I dunno, the fact you're still banging on about this despite it being immediately obvious she wasn't being accused of being antisemitic, is pretty wild.
J.K. Rowling is anti-semitic? That’s a new one to me. I thought her only problematic views were around trans rights?
EDIT: She’s being called anti-semitic because of the decor on the floor of a bank in one of the movies?!
That's it. That's where your claim she was accused of being antisemitic should have stopped.
PC gone mad innit..
To be fair, and contradicting myself somewhat, I wouldn't have felt comfortable with Heinlein being around my 12 year daughter, after reading the Door into Summer.
So at worst she uses cliches and kids novel stereotypes. Show me a major kids' author who hasn't used the same shorthand.
Do people actually think that Rowling is clever enough to instill clandestine messages of transphobia or anti Semitic notions in HO books?
Has anyone read them? There's plot holes galore, poorly explained and poorly worded subplots, there's artifacts she made up on the spot to fit the story she tried to create.
There's no cohesion throughout any of the series, it's a shockingly poor series of books written by someone who really is an average writer at best.
Yet she's clever enough to hide her evil thoughts in this prose?
No, but it has apparently become a staple of this thread to grossly exaggerate the claims made against J.K. Rowling as it relates to the Harry Potter books. Literally no-one has claimed that she deliberately has put any transphobic or antisemitic messages into the Harry Potter books.
The books go beyond the children's book label around book 3 or 4. I'd say her books are somewhere between Narnia and ASOIAF in terms of maturity. They're books for teenagers.
Why even bring up racism, discrimination, slavery and a whole laundry list of systemic issues, address them, and then do absolutely nothing about them in a story that is literally about good vs evil? Why spend a considerable amount of pages making fun of the only character trying to make positive change as if she's in the wrong? It all seems really odd. Either she didn't see these things as issues or she completely forgot about them. Hilariously enough it could actually be the latter.
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I read Starship Troopers recently. I really enjoyed it. I didn't read it as an endorsement of fascism, rather an "endorsement" of a strong industrial military complex, or at the very least a fictionalized perspective on a society with one.
Upon further reading, at the very least, it seemed quite relevant to what was going on in the US at the time and there was debate about to what extent Starship Troopers reflected Heinlein's own views.
You don't have to be racist or antisemitic or homophobic to sometimes fall into the trap of using a trope associated with these things. When you do, it's fair other people point it out. Especially so if you use those tropes in your real life. I don't understand why is it so hard for you to believe that a person who commonly uses anti-trans tropes is capable of using other tropes in her writings. Maybe it's not on purpose, but it can tell us something about her mindset. This criticism is miles away from calling her a raging antisemite.
The books/films have wizards and goblins but, as an example, she chose to include slavery in it, she chose to mock characters who stood up for the slaves, she chose to write characters who normally represent goodness and common sense like hagrid justifying slavery. She didn't have to do it, but she included all this in her children’s novel about wizards and goblins, as you call it. So why is it unfair to criticize her for it? I could understand if people were looking for crazy subliminal messages, but this stuff is very clear and very direct.
Good points, there may well be some unconscious biased thoughts being written.
However making the Dursley dad and son obese/overweight was more of a showing that they were gluttonous and greedy rather than an overweight person is evil for example.
Also there seems to be a big divide on HP women characters, some believe a lot of them are feminist heroines who show the strong powerful independent side of women, others deem them to be.
People can delve even deeper if they wanted into the series regarding pure Born's and pure blood, and make a case for it being a view upon racial equality, but I highly doubt it was ever perceived to be that way by Rowling judging by the almost jovial nature of the first two books.
This can be disproven pretty quickly, and has been in the last couple of pages of the thread. There are loads of examples of Rowling's politics coming through in Harry Potter, often by her own admission.
The argument of "they're kids books, they're about wizards and elves, who cares" falls down because most of them are aimed at YA audiences and Rowling self-admittedly has a crack at making points about things like racism, fascism, slavery, discrimination, politics, corruption in the media etc. It's certainly nothing new for people to be interested in the viewpoints espoused in the books young people read, and it's nothing new that people engage critically with the themes of popular and influential pieces of media (particularly ones which were ubiquitous during their own childhoods). That goes double for instances where the creator of that media goes on to become a significant political activist in their own right. I think a mistake you keep making is that you're attributing the familiarity of some of her critics with the minutiae of Harry Potter to obsessive nitpicking born out of hatred, when in reality the reason her critics know so much about Harry Potter is that they're largely people in their 20s and 30s who grew up on it and are (or were) fans when they were kids.
Rowling's issue is that she wanted it both ways with Harry Potter. She wanted credit for addressing political and social issues in the books but didn't want the scrutiny that comes with that. She can't seem to grasp that if you include moral themes in your writing, you can't decide which bits of your books are meant to be a moral lesson and which aren't.
For example, she was rightly praised for setting up lycanthropy in the Harry Potter world to be an analogy for HIV and highlighting the societal stigma of being HIV-positive in a way that was relatable to younger audiences. But if you're going to build up that analogy and talk about it in interviews, you have to accept that people are going to be a bit confused if you later introduce a werewolf antagonist whose MO is, basically, going around intentionally giving HIV to children (which is almost a perfect combination of two classic homophobic tropes - spreading disease and preying on children).
Now, I personally think a lot of this stuff (including that example) comes from a combination of her limitations as a writer/"thinker", ignorance of the issues she's trying to address and a big dollop of arrogance, rather than it being an example of outright bigotry. There is a bunch of stuff though which absolutely reflects some pretty ugly/weird/regressive attitudes, and her habit of getting hyperdefensive when called out on anything (going back to way before twitter), never mind how minor, makes it's difficult to parse out the two. And then of course, people who have seen her going off it about trans people on twitter are less willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on stuff that they might have done beforehand.
Edit: also, providing Twilight and Percy Jackson as examples of works that aren't scrutinised for their themes is funny, because Twilight sparked a massive debate online about the unhealthy relationship dynamic it was romanticising, and Percy Jackson is often praised for it's portrayal of neurodivergent characters. Obviously it probably doesn't cross into 'real news' like the Rowling stuff because neither series is as famous or popular as Harry Potter, and the authors of those works haven't leveraged their fame to push controversial beliefs in the way Rowling has (despite Meyer holding quite a few)!
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I would think that the main point about the Dursleys is that they are selfish assholes. The mother isn't better than the other two, but she is not fat for some reason. She is however described as ugly of course. Ultimately I find it funny that there are perhaps 30 named characters who are portrayed as unambiguously bad and maybe 90% of them are ugly or fat(or both). And Rowling is particularly ruthless about the looks of the female characters who fall on the wrong side of good vs evil.
I actually think book Hermione is a decent feminist icon. Definitely better than film Hermione who is without any flaws.
She already brought up the pure blood stuff in the second book and made kind of a big deal about it, though.
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Well put!
Really? It comes complete with it's own highly offensive slur ('mudblood'), and the bad guys are intent on making sure that non-pureblood wizards are excluded from their society and not given equal rights. Basically, they define the worth of a person based on their heritage, not their character or accomplishments. It seems an obvious allegory for racism to me, and I'm sure it's intended like that.
This is also something that, in my opinion, works fairly well in the series. All of the good guys are on the right side of the issue, and the bad guys are on the wrong side of the issue.
That’s an excellent post and (unusually for me!) I can’t find anything in there to argue with. Methinks it’s time to take a break from this thread…
Pogue was hacked!
Your possibly correct,
I perceive it to be no more than a playground insult from a kid which she then took and ran to be a allegory for racism.
Let's not kid ourselves, in the first few books the main culprit using this term is a kid, this changed later on in the series and more adult characters used the term, this suggests to me it wasn't intended as being anything too deep.
You perceived wrong then. It’s absolutely not a playground insult and people are shocked at Malfoy using it. The connection to Voldemort and his followers is immediately explained I think.
Fair enough.
I just felt it was only used by Malfoy in the first book, I must have it wrong, it's been a while since I read the books.
You are not wrong in that the first two books are very much targeted towards kids, so they are lighter on the serious stuff. However, after the insult is introduced, the three main characters do have a sitdown with one of the adults that explains the gravity of it. I don't think that would have been included if the insult was similar to smellypants or something. Whether or not she knew it would become so integral to the remaining serious is another matter.
If you are interested, I just stumbled upon this:
https://harry-potter-compendium.fan... 1992.&text=In the Chamber of Secrets in 1993.
Explains the use of the term quite well, I think.
All the best man, see you around
