Speaking of self-inserts, remember when she wrote that detective story with long segments that are just people on Twitter accusing the main character of transphobia?
Her brain’s just fully melted at this point.
her books are basically implying her terf beliefs, some have said the goblins represented jewish people.
some have said
Oh you mean someone might interpret the sinister race of greedy hook nosed goblin creatures who run all of the banks as possibly being influenced by anti semitic tropes? That’s news to me!
I feel like I was in the minority that saw that for the first time in the movies and was like…dude how fucking outright antisemitic can you be in a children’s movie?
I had never watched the movies or read the books as a kid because my parents thought they would make me turn to satanism and so I was horrified watching a friend play lego harry Potter and I see this anti semitic stereotype hoarding gold so I was like “bro what is that” and he was like “oh yeah that’s a goblin they run the wizard banks” and I was like “so wait a race of evil creatures with giant hook noses run all the banks in Harry Potter? That’s sketchy as fuck” and he was like “Huh… Never noticed it before but yeah that’s messed up”
Don’t forget that the first version of the movie had a giant Star Of David in the middle of the floor of Gringotts. And yes, while that is a real bank with the Star Of David on the floor, maybe it would have been a good idea to not have it framed in shot if you’re already being accused of antisemitism.
The globins follow a lot of harmful Jewish stereotypes but I’m not sure it’s obvious whether they’re intended as racist caricatures or if it’s just bad writing. It’s not unreasonable to assume that though when you put it beside much more blatant examples, such as calling the black guy “Shacklebolt” and the Asian girl “Cho Chang”.
JK leans heavily into things “biological nature” or “Born Nature” as a reoccurring theme. Hagrid is inherently violent and Voldemort’s villain back story being he was a rape baby.
Absolutely, I just meant to point out that there’s far more blatant examples so no need to couch your language in phrases like “some have said”. Goblins have been antisemitic caricatures in fantasy for a long time so it’s easy for a bad writer to just regurgitate existing tropes, meaning a racist writer can use that as a shield, but it’s much harder to justify naming your black character after slave imagery.
Seamus Finnegan,
Hot take; the reason Seamus Finnigan kept accidentally blowing stuff up was because JK Rowling wanted to be racist towards Irish people… She literally has him blow up a bridge
I started watching the movies again and I’m almost done and it’s fascinating. If you ignore the harry voldermort stuff and look at the wizard world, there are so many parallels with trump and the administration.
The more power voldermort gains (and even for JK he represents absolute evil), the more the world changes.
First its influence over the ministry, influence over the education system (Delores). Influence over the press, and killing press that is negative about the government. Locating half blood wizards (there’s a parallel with immigrants), I’m not at the end so I don’t know if the lock up halfblood wizards.
That’s just how is Fascism.
Any Fascists-like regime, fictional or not, works the same.
May she be sent to Azkaban for the rest of her life.
Give her to the centaurs.
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My contribution to the world is that I didn’t write any racist, terfy kids books, or simp for anyone who did.
So that’s at least better than you, I suppose.
She is a successful author. She’s never been a great author. Great authors know how to write with originality and imagination. JKR merely took a handful of fantasy and British empire tropes, put them in a blender with ideas ‘inspired’ by vastly better writers and with the help of a PR team, created a marketable franchise.
Along the way, she became consumed by an utterly irrational hatred which is now creating a horrific world for the people she targeted with her marketing money.
Yes, let us defend the billionaire bigot from a mean word online.
How does boot taste?
Your condemnation is cheap. I see a collection of great books and movies. And then I see you here, anonymously whining. Three guesses which impresses me more.
How about you separate the author from the works? You can think her books were great, but it doesn’t change that she’s extremely bigoted.
Then you haven’t seen her twitter platform, listened to years of trans advocacy for her to stop cheering on the brigading of bigotry or you just don’t care.
Ostrich head in the sand, boot in the mouth or apathetic bystander to bigotry. Whatever the cope it’s past time defending her. Enjoy your wizard shit quietly.
Maybe write your own masterpiece and I will take your secondhand outrage more seriously.
Maybe writing a masterpiece doesn’t excuse the harm one continues to perpetrate. Also my outrage is not secondhand. I am part of the community she has been campaigning against.
So, the only difference between Hitler being good or bad is the number of paintings that he managed to sell? Wow…
I wondered when Hitler was arriving. Bravo.
Only other successful authors can criticise successful authors behaviour now? fuck that.
The fact she wrote a masterpiece has no bearing on the fact she is a total bigot in social media.
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Dude unapologetically espouses a transphobic bigot, we’ve seen what impresses you chud, it isn’t a goal worth attaining.
Wow, I mean the first like 3 books are actually quite good (there was a void for this kind of writing, “serious” fantasy, and still exist IMO), but the rest was just mediocre. Especially from book 5 and onwards.
The films? They are so bad it’s not even funny.
The first movie is pretty good IMO, but that’s because it gets to introduce all of the creative (if highly derivative) world building.
Past that, they rely more and more on quality of writing more than merely existing in a neat (if a bit nonsensical and still highly flawed) world. So… yeah, entertainment value dips off pretty hard.
Fair enough. As for the films, flawed yes, but I like their vibe.
You forgot “and then she went bat shit crazy.” I mean, she was questionable already (and I’m talking about her behaviour and being a terrible judge of character, not the books), but this is a whole nother level of nuts.
She’s not really a great author? She’s an okay children’s author, who a lot of us have a tie to because we grew up with the series - but a great deal was tied into shred marketing. Scholastic and Warner Bros have a good deal of responsibility in making the series what it was.
The Deadly Hallows and the Horcruxes are both the most massive ass pulls in history. Cut most of books 5, 6, and 7; make the prophecy true but applicable to Neville; have Harry die at the end. Infinitely better.
The main good thing about the series is its long and time consuming.
The first four books are decent kids literature. “Monster of the week” stories are fun. Hogwarts is very appealing for escapism, the castle and the food are the kinds of place your imagination (and the marketing) can fill in where Joanne can’t.
I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t have a great fucking time when I went to Universal (this was pre COVID, I think she was a bit anti trans then but someone else was paying anyway). I would love to be a Ravenclaw - I can picture myself making a case that I should be allowed in the Restricted Section of the library, or borrowing a Time Turner to take multiple classes at once, or just the feasts (the unofficial cookbook can’t make it real, unfortunately. Most butter beers are fine enough.)
It works when we aren’t thinking too hard. When the characters can be stock, never grow and everything resets at the end. (I started the series with Book 2 as a child, and it had zero impact.)
She just can’t think about larger picture things. Her worldbuilding is ad hoc, based on whatever seems fun at the time. This is very fun when it’s a series of loosely connected one offs. It just doesn’t cohere as a story though.
It’s like The Boxcar Children or Junie B Jones or whatever the one that has like the time traveling tree house or whatever.
Like, I remember being excited to get Order of the Phoenix. I was the kind of Harry Potter fan that showed up to the last two book’s midnight releases, as well as the film. I have been “sorted” in costume. I don’t even feel cringe about this because it was fun. The fandom has made the series much cooler than it actually was. (HP famously got kids to read; playing Quidditch in gym was probably the only moment that class was not pure dhukka for me.) I say on this to make the point that my critique of her writing goes with a general appreciation of the series.
She’s a DM with ADHD. What the story is doing doesn’t matter, we’re just vibing. Some of the ideas are so fun and compelling that we’re bound to explore them further (there is some really compelling Left Behind fan fiction.)
The last three books just drop off in quality immensely. I wonder if some aspects of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are due to “George Lucas” syndrome - the editor can’t say “no” anymore. You can tell she’s trying very hard to make it seem like it was planned - “oh Tom Riddle’s diary was a part of this! Time to come up with a bunch of other McGuffins!”
Harry Potter doesn’t have any overarching narrative in the same ways that Warrior Cats, The Dark is Rising, Deltora Quest, or The Hunger Games series do. I guess you can include Chronicles of Narnia but that “overarching narrative” is literally a metaphor for C S Lewis’s beliefs about world history and religion. (A Horse and His Boy is a book I loathe the the point I seldom engage with the series.)
Voldemort is just a poorly characterized villain. The narrative falls apart because there’s no reason for him to do what he does. This is fine in silly “monster of the week” stories, not overarching narrative stories.
The motivation in the first four books is that he wants to live forever, because everyone kinda does, but he’ll do fucked up and evil things to get there. We can have stories where he is trying to come back but isn’t really a threat, everything is very low stakes.
The last three books try to steer us into the “overarching narrative” course. The big reveals as far as his true character tell us he’s cursed and evil essentially because he’s a mixed race baby, conceived in a rape by someone analogous to “white trash.” He’s insecure of his mixed race status, so he creates a fascistic cult and wants to institute a supremacist authoritarian government.
That is a very fascinating and interesting character, but unfortunately Joanne does not understand race at the level of complexity writing that kind of villain requires. She also does not have the kind of grace and empathy for human beings that are required to write such stories. It’s also not what the series was, so the tonal shift comes across as awkward as the time I used a racial slur in a short fiction piece in high school to come across as a serious author.
And when you compare her work to the standards of adult writing: she had to drop the pseudonym on her mystery novel when it wasn’t selling well. Remember how King did that with some pretty good work? Wonder where she got the idea from. She’s not a fan (anymore…)
She’s not a good writer, and I am saying this as someone who likes* the series.
Some people just want to see the world cringe
hope it ends the same way with her killed by centaurs
Umbridge wasn’t killed by the centaurs, she’s in book 7 and so survived the centaurs. She is last seen surrounded by dementors
She is last seen surrounded by dementors
Hey, just like in real life.
well i still hope jk rowling is killed by centaurs.
The implication is that she was sexually assaulted by the centaurs.
“Well of course they’re going to do whatever we want in the forest. Because of the implication.” -Dennis “centaur” Reynolds
…I didn’t read Harry Potter and can’t tell if you’re joking?
Professor Umbridge was lying in a bed opposite them, gazing up at the ceiling … Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her, either. Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were still bits of twigs and leaves in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed.
‘Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,’ whispered Hermione.
‘Sulking, more like,’ said Ginny.
‘Yeah, she shows signs of life if you do this,’ said Ron, and with his tongue he made soft clip-clopping noises. Umbridge sat bolt upright, looking around wildly.
‘Anything wrong, Professor?’ called Madam Pomfrey, poking her head around her office door.
‘No … no …’ said Umbridge, sinking back into her pillows. ‘No, I must have been dreaming …’
Hermione and Ginny muffled their laughter in the bedclothes.
Huh. Holy fucking shit.
it’s the same jk rowling that had the ghost of a 50 year old woman leer after a teenager while he was taking a bath in the prefect bathroom.
Don’t forget love potions - a girl basically roofies Ron trying to get Harry. Voldemort is evil because his mom drugged his (muggle!) dad, and he left once she stopped drugging him.
Rowling is dealing with sexual trauma, as we know from her eagerness to weaponize it against trans people. But she also seems to have a morality system where anything the Good Guys do is Good, and anything the Bad Guys do is Bad. Whatever happened to Umbridge is something that was so traumatic even the sound can bring her back - and we are showing a character with signs of clear PTSD and with protagonists that think it’s funny to try to make them relive their trauma.
