I think it’s time we as a species realize that harry potter was never good. it was just marketable and gave impressionable kids a lot to project onto.
the reason Joanne got rejected by so many publishers isn’t because they couldn’t see her genius, it’s because the one that picked it up was the first one to realize they could market the shit out of houses, wands, magical pets, etc, the setting was a gold mine for getting kids to project themselves into. it didn’t matter that the plot and characters and writing were all terrible. they even kept adding more elements for this later on with things like patronuses. harry potter was never literature, it was always just a marketing scheme.
I think this revisionism of “HP was terrible all along” misses the point.
Yes, there were some shitty, problematic elements from the start (like the goblins), and yes they were marketable as hell, but I’d say the first few books successfully captured some elements of whimsy, and the humor in them hit the right notes for kids. The first few are not great books but they’re also not terrible. (The later ones were bloated and awful tho, imo).
And of course certain books are published because they’re marketable but that doesn’t mean they’re automatically bad books or lack any entertainment value.
The thing is she doesn’t have to have had bad books to be a bad person. Someone that wrote some decent books that kids liked can still be a shitty person and we need to learn and accept that shitty people can and do make good art or at least quality entertainment.
The reason we need to recognize bad people make good art rather than create a revisionist history that every single thing the person has done was terrible, is because we have to be comfortable with criticizing and condemning (and sometimes boycotting) creators even when things they made were beloved to us at some point, even when there was some good or some entertainment value in the things they created.
I think it’s good to look back at her work with a more critical eye but the first few books were actually decent (regardless of yes, a few shitty flaws like the goblins, and regardless of being super merchandisable). That doesn’t change that she’s still a bigoted dickhole. And we don’t have to pretend everything she created was awful to treat her like a bigoted dickhole.
And accepting the dichotomy of “shitty people can make good things but they’re still shitty” makes it easier to prevent ourselves from getting in a mindset of stanning the things we like when a creator is an awful person.
Like it’s just blatantly untrue that they were bad books. if they were bad they would not have 8 movies a fucking theme park, museums, a massive fandom and over 500 million books sold in 80 languages. That’s not just down to them being marketable. Countless similar books have come out before or after that have marketable aspects too that haven’t got nearly as big. Also kids/ teens are not stupid, they aren’t going to like terrible works en masse just because they have wizards in or whatever.
JKis a terrible human being. Absolutely awful and some of her problematic views became aspects of her works. Don’t give her your money. However, although it will piss some people off, re-watching the Harry Potter DVDs you bought a decade ago or reading the books you found at a thrift store years back literally gives JK nothing. Doing so does not make the world more transphobic/ antisemitic or whatever either.
Don’t try and tell people that they are an irredeemable bigot because they still love Harry Potter and can’t bring themselves to hate it. They are not causing any problems. Harry Potter was and still is incredibly important to a lot of kids and young people and no one needs to invalidate that.
Also finding out that a beloved and respected writer is a bigot means their works must be terrible in every way is typical black and white thinking. People don’t ever fit into neat categories.
fascinating how jk rowling claims she doesn’t hate trans people, she just cares about sex based rights, but has said basically nothing about the roe v. wade draft opinion
