Cromalin [she/her]

yeah the last line of the last book (before the epilogue) is harry thinking “gee, i sure hope my slave brings me a sandwich,” as he lounges in bed. i didn’t talk about the house elf stuff because my focus was on the goblins but it’s just as, if not more, rancid and evil. many such bits in the books, rita skeeter was really the first sign of jkr’s transphobia

very good podcast! i’m a little behind their catching fire read which is still a delight

I’m sorry, but this is such an insane view (with so many inaccuracies in it I’m not going to bother debunking them all) that it’s pointless to argue here. Maybe spend your energy on something else, you’re giving her more mindspace than she is doing actual harm to the community. And she’s probably making very very little off of HL as a whole. Warner Brothers owns the majority of the copyrights around the HL universe, unless it’s theater or books, JK Rowling’s website even says so.

i’m going to respond to this with the respect you didn’t show me, and address all your stupid points. jk rowling repeatedly peddles transphobic bigotry, writing a book starring a transphobic caricature as a villain and another about the creator of a popular franchise murdered partially for being viewed as transphobic. she repeatedly insists that trans women are a danger to cis women, which is not a belief backed up by any facts. she shares the writings of many different transphobes, lies about the persecution they suffer (in particular claiming maya forstater was fired unjustly just for having beliefs, when in fact it was that her contract wasn’t renewed because she kept harassing specific people associated with the organization (including potential customers!) and refused to stop when asked) and continually associates herself with radical transphobes who openly call for the culling of transgender people, platforming them and openly encouraging people to support them monetarily. some examples of her transphobia can be found here, and details about the people she associates with can be found here. i know it’s bad form to link a youtube video but the alternative is telling you to listen to 200 episodes of the shrieking shack podcast that mostly just make fun of how offensive the house elf plotline is and things of that nature as they gradually document all jkr’s bullshit in real time as it happens. i need to spell this out for you because despite claiming to be aware of her transphobia you also claim she doesn’t do much “actual harm to the community.” she is doing actual harm to the community. there is no debate about this. if you argue otherwise you are wrong

jk rowling very openly states she believes that her fans all believe the same transphobic things as her, and that support for her work is the same as support for her beliefs. so every person that buys and plays hogwarts legacy is, regardless of how much money she makes off of them, granting her transphobia weight. it is admittedly a little ridiculous to harp on someone who is a billionaire already making money from a game she’s only getting relatively small amounts of royalties from. because of this if you go back and reread my original post you might notice that isn’t my main complaint there. when a new harry potter thing enters the spotlight and people buy it they’re reminded harry potter exists and are going to be more likely to go back and buy a new copy of the books or the movies or merch that she’ll get more royalty money from. when a new gundam tv show aired you could see more gundam merch being sold off store shelves. when a new star wars movie comes out people remember the old ones they liked, this is not difficult to understand. in addition they will continue to be more active in the fandom, keeping harry potter in the public eye and increasing the amount of people she views as backing her up and being on her side

so jkr is clearly giving the transgender community a lot of focus, treats support of her work and associated products as support of her views on the community, and is making money off of the game even if much of it may be indirectly. i’d say i’m giving her an appropriate amount of mindspace given the sheer amount of vitriol she has for those like me

This has been debunked time and time again. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the actual CAMPAIGN AGAINST ANTISEMITISM. She’s so against antisemitism that the fucking Campaign Against Antisemitism says “So it is with JK Rowling, who has proven herself over recent years to be a tireless defender of the Jewish community in its fight against antisemitism, for which we are immensely grateful”.

It’s you that are seeing antisemetism. It’s not there. It’s a folk tale that has evolved over actual centuries into tales that go beyond the original tropes. Maybe instead of getting into arguments around this stuff you should look into the history of it and realize that, just because something looks bad, doesn’t mean it is.

i already addressed the second bit above when talking about the substack, but the first bit is very funny. what are they talking about? how has she proven herself to be a tireless defender of the jewish community? as far as i can tell it’s just that she tweeted about jeremy corbyn and the associated stuff there, and perhaps you won’t be surprised that i don’t think that’s enough. i didn’t know speaking out against politicians you didn’t like gave you carte blanche to be as bigoted as you wanted! the campaign against antisemitism is a volunteer organization that i do not in fact believe unthinkingly. they are clearly in many cases motivated more by a sense of zionism than any actual commitment to antisemitism which has been called out by other jewish organizations, and (though i cannot say for certain) it seems likely that’s part of why they stood by rowling despite the blatant bigotry at play in her work

and to repeat myself: goblins are not inherently antisemitic! the problem comes when you say they run the banks and add a couple other tropes in there for good measure!!!

maybe you should actually research the history of things rather than just looking at pictures and comparing. It’s quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They’re not.

my claim has never been that jk rowling has always been a secret neonazi who was subliminally planting messages in her books back in the 90s to make children antisemitic. my claim is just that she put a lot of very blatant antisemitism in her books, and that it was made worse in the game. maybe everyone involved was in fact trying to sneak antisemitic caricatures into public discourse! maybe it was all an accident and everyone was just too stupid to recognize it or realize it needed to be changed! i can’t say, all i can truly talk about are the results, and the end product is what i would call undeniably antisemitic if it wasn’t for dipshits like you who deny it. again, this is not me complaining about just one thing, this is about a whole lot of things coming together in a perfect storm.

anyways i wrote like 1500 words about how you’re wrong, and didn’t even get into all the other ways the books are fucked because that wasn’t relevant to why you were wrong. i could have talked a lot about slavery, i hope you appreciate my restraint. i hope you’ll have the decency to shut up and go away, or even better be convinced of the error of your ways, but i doubt you will

i don’t know why i’m responding to this, but whatever. doing this all in one post, but i’m responding to both of yours, which is why this is so long. it’s also long because i’m actually responding to the things you say, which isn’t something you seem to know how to do

first things first, that substack you linked. many things wrong there. immediately, you’re invoking ‘i know a jewish person who says it’s fine.’ ok, on my end i know jewish people who think it is extremely not fine. in fact they were the ones who explained to me why the goblins in harry potter are problematic. second, having read the article it just blatantly lies in its base premise.

Goblins, the fantasy creature that has existed in various incarnations for centuries, may have initially been based on antisemitic stereotypes - short, big noses, greedy money-hoarders. Therefore, fantasy that depicts goblins (even if in a complex or sympathetic way that subverts some of the tropes) is automatically inherently antisemitic because goblins are representing Jews, and doing it in the most harmful stereotypical way possible. (note that I have yet to personally see this standard applied to a fantasy series other than HP)

this just isn’t a claim anyone is making. the claims about harry potter are much more specific about that. there are antisemitic tropes in the water surrounding goblins, but jkr ramped that up dramatically. this author just breezes past the fact that the goblins are bankers which is a whole lot more specific than a generic greed! people don’t say that shit about tolkien (as much, because people do rightly point out problematic elements in tolkien’s goblins quite a bit if you don’t ignore that to try and lie about how people are being mean to a bigoted billionaire) because tolkien goblins don’t run the banks!!! this shit is so blatant it’s unsurprising anyone trying to carry water for rowling has to just ignore it

she also claims that there’s no actual child kidnapping in the game, and that if there was it would be fine because other fantasy stories contain bits where people kidnap children to use their blood. i’m pretty sure the first point is untrue, because i can find many references to the goblins wanting to use the main character (who is 15 years old, so firmly a child)'s blood for a ritual, but i haven’t played the game and am not going to so i suppose it’s possible everyone referencing this just made it up in some kind of mass hysteria for some reason. but crucially that second bit is such bullshit it doesn’t matter. the problem is taking all these things together! when you have someone stealing a child’s blood for a magic ritual that is not problematic or blood libel on its own, but it becomes so once you have it done by members of the greedy hook nosed race that run the banks and don’t think it’s possible to own property and prefer to eat raw bloody meat and stab the heroes in the back and have stars of david on the floors of their banks. that shit is antisemitic, a lot more so than the culture broadly already is.

similarly it isn’t a pogrom when violence against goblins happens in other fantasy media because those goblins don’t run the banks and aren’t nearly as coded!!! what are you even fucking talking about!!! anyways as you can see i read her whole piece and it was all wrong and poorly argued. next!

sorry this is so long it had to be split up anyways, despite my efforts. you’re just too wrong to fit into the character limit!

ok fine, i’ll try and be as clear as possible

sometimes things are bad and are bad at their core (both because they financially support someone who is doing so much to make the world more transphobic than it already is and also all the antisemitism, racism, classism, misogyny, transphobia, and just plain old bad writing decisions at the core of the story) and we just need to let go and stop participating in the fandom because it inevitably leads to people saying shit like “oh i can just buy this harry potter game even though i know jkr sucks and this gives money to her that she will use to fund bigotry, it belongs to the the fans now!” when it doesn’t, as long as jkr is alive it’s her space and spending time in it will eventually lead to money making its way over to her!!!

and the game itself is bad because it’s about the goblins, who have long been noted to be fairly antisemitic caricatures in harry potter, being swarthy hooked nosed creatures who run the banks, have a long history of pogroms being run on them, have different moral values around ownership (very similar to accusations of judeo bolshevism) and have a literal star of david as their symbol in the films. and in this game they kidnap children for ritual purposes which is just straight up blood libel

if you still aren’t sure what’s antisemitic here and you somehow aren’t a bad faith poster, look up judeo bolshevism, look up blood libel, look up images of antisemitic caricatures and compare them to descriptions of goblins in harry potter. there are so many antisemitic tropes in there it’s impossible to imagine no one was aware

sadly it still shovels money into her pockets and is about the cabal of hooked nose bankers stealing children to perform rituals