"Dumbledore is Gay" sez Rowling

ya rly xpost

nice of jkr to make the reveal after she's already ended the series and sold 15 gajillion books. woo yay and all, but also kind of having yr cock and eating it too.

OTM. I find it hard to believe she's really like, "Oh, he's always been gay, I just didn't bother to mention it before."

ppl get *christened* harry?

the fuck, people.

it's like christening your kid dave.

'christened' to troll tuomas; insert whatever equiv you might want.

What?

To troll me how?

no other thread

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/books/a-detective-storys-famous-author-is-unmasked.html?smid=tw-share

That is one of the coolest things ever. It must have been really gratifying for her to get reviews minus all the usual "for grown ups, Harry Potter, mature, change of direction, blah blah" BS.

yeah gonna buy this to see what the fuss is all about

Don't expect a trans retcon in the Potterverse:

https://www.out.com/transgender/2019/12/19/harry-potter-author-jk-rowling-comes-out-terf

Yeah she’s been a fucking mess on this for years. Think I read somewhere she’s friends with W1ngs 0f Sc0tland?

That seems unlikely as she's anti Scottish independence.

You’re right but I am sure there’s some weird connection between them and some really objectionable people? Let me check this out

They both live in Dorset perhaps?

jk rowling has been a terf for years. she is also very friendly on twitter with "brian spanner" a unionist troll account that has tweeted at multiple female snp msps calling them cunts

don't want to link to wings over scotland but he details her literally @ing the brian spanner account 200 times.

xp ok thank you, that’s who I meant!

Here we have positive proof, if any were needed, that writing a series of wildly popular and lucrative children's books does not guarantee one has the ability to think sensibly about every issue that arises in a society. Other than her being rich as Scrooge McDuck, why would anyone regard her opinion about this as worth repeating?

That's Twitter for you.

now fantasy fans can have the same crushing disenchantment and disappointment in their authors that sci-fi fans have had to deal with since forever.

to me it seems unlikely that an angry entitled millionaire soft Tory would be a terf

sister is watching the TV adaptations of her detective books and dear god do i hate Rowling on a near visceral level

this is a brief interruption to my "more positivity" resolution, she pushed me into it

I've almost finished the last book with my kids

- She refuses to use the present subjunctive, which is infuriating

- She has a remarkably small stock of ideas

- Her conception of what magic is, and what wizards and witches are, and what they’re for, is weirdly stunted/unarticulated. She starts from a base of adorable cliches i.e. cauldrons, broomsticks, wands, but they never turn into anything interesting. They’re trappings. There’s a bank, a prison, a series of schools with terribly important exams but.. what are these wizards actually expected to do with these powers?

- Technically she’s quite good imo. Good sentences. The language flows. It’s extremely easy and satisfying to read aloud. And she always gives a clue as to what sort of voice to use i.e. Flitwick’s “squeaky voice” etc

- I don't buy Hermione and Ron at all. Ridiculous

- Harry and Ginny I do buy, depressingly. Harry supposedly cares about her deeply then manages to spend the entire last book without her. Would have served him right if she'd ended up among the dead

- They did Hagrid dirty. He starts as this cool big old gamekeeper who takes a shine to Harry. quite quickly he becomes The Crying Guy. oh he’s huge and rough- but he has a sensitive side! he’s just a big old softie! who’d a thunk it??? if i have to read one more time about the large tears rolling down Hagrid’s cheeks, each big enough to fill a teacup etc I’m hurling the book out the window

- speaking of, I never, ever need to read about Harry’s scar throbbing ever again. twice, three times- it’s enough. when he wakes up in the white mist-world talking to dead Dumbledore and he reaches up and doesn’t have a scar i was like 🎶 HALLELUJAH

can’t wait for my wee girl to be old enough to want to read these and then spend years trying not to yell about how all harry does is defend his elite private school and the horrible racist status quo it supports from having to make any sort of change and then grows up to be a cop so he can do it some more

and also that rowling is a blairite terf

I read all the books and enjoyed them but nothing stopped JK's horrible politics and generally shitty world-view soaking thru. She did one of her usual Twitter "body-shaming women is bad" things a couple of months ago which a friend approvingly shared and I bit my lip because I didn't wanna be that guy but I was gagging to shout about how she wrote seven books where one of the marks of the Dursleys's wickedness is "lol they fat"

She is a fucking mare, don't start me on this detective shite.

https://i.imgur.com/1AlWxfi.jpg

lol

lol

(for the record, gender is real)

if j.k. rowling tried to make an album based on the harry potter novels it would be so fucking awful

btw I didn't get into all the house elf / snape's hooked nose etc stuff because I figure it's all been hashed out plenty; ditto everyone being straight; but yes it is EXTREMELY PROBLEMATIC.

lol when dobby dies and rowling tries to make it into a Big Moment and has harry really drinking in his grief, it all rings so fucking hollow.

I'm still mad about Hermione and Ron btw - there is absolutely NOTHING between them for like four books. Ron's an idiot. it comes from nowhere. no little clues, no key moment where Ron does something unexpectedly gallant, nothing. it's like jkr really doesn't know her characters. Hermione and George I could see. Ron and Parvati. we're starting to get into that second tier of jkr character now though, the characters with no personalities of their own. God knows how I ever managed to differentiate the voices of Dean and Seamus.

I don't think it's that weird that there's nothing between them at ages 11-14, but then as teens they couple up. All the couplings in Harry Potter seemed as stupid as inconsequential as teenage love so often is. And then at the end it turns out they all married and stayed together forever, and that's when it became shitty...

yes, THAT’s when it became shitty, otm

look it isn't the place of fiction to explore characters' motivations or give them any kind of internal consistency

On the plus side, everybody on my feed has stfu about Harry Potter for once

Teens don't have internal consistency :) That's one of the few things Rowling got right, actually. #Bookfiveisthebest.

neither true nor an excuse for bad lazy writing tbf Fred

my biggest problem with the books is that she uses this phrasing fucking non stop: "well its xxxxx, isn't it?" I swear someone says this on every page.

well, it’s rowling, isn’t it?

She uses "ejaculated" a lot

neither true nor an excuse for bad lazy writing tbf Fred

― Bojo Rabid (Noodle Vague), 28. december 2019 17:38 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's definitely bad and lazy, I'm just saying, it's not because the teens are oblique and acting inconsistently.

I also love that they make fun of Muggles for approximating magic, meanwhile they have to wait for an owl to show up to get a message from someone

Also quidditch is a stupid game, only getting the snitch ultimately matters

Also they use Time Turners to give Hermione special privileges and save a hippogriff

Also love killed Voldemort

probably worth noting that Hitler was a big fan of Karl Friedrich May who was sort of the JK Rowling of that era, but his famous characters were rugged German cowboys!

Also quidditch is a stupid game, only getting the snitch ultimately matters

you could develop a tactical approach to quidditch that tried to negate the glaring hole in its structure as a game but you wouldn't bother because it's fucking stupid and this is the best you can come up with despite millenia of superpowers

probably worth noting that Hitler was a big fan of Karl Friedrich May who was sort of the JK Rowling of that era, but his famous characters were rugged German cowboys!

― calzino

fuck karl friedrich may, that fucking terf

I am also reading these with my kids and have also had many thoughts, which have nowhere else to go apart from this thread.

* After book 3 she seems to have been too important for an editor to intervene, huge books aren't a bad thing, when they have less content than short, better books, like the first one, that should be a clue.

* Yes, the worldbuilding is really sloppy and not well thought-through, the interaction between wizards and muggles could have been a strength, instead it's almost wilfully stupid and makes no fucking sense. These muggles live among them, many are from muggle families, why then do they understand them so little? what do they make of films? or all the culture of the last 100 years for that matter? and the food is obviously english food of the 20th century, what is the reason for this? also a hundred other things, so obviously a rich seam of ideas, neglected completely.

* one of the big themes is class but it's handled so badly throughout, the moral seems to be that public schools should accept a few poor and / or foreign students but they must conform to the school's traditions, as a former teacher she has very old fashioned ideas about education.

* and related to this in terms of politics, there is a decent effort made towards showing their government to be corrupt and their media completely compromised, but the obvious baby step from that to advocating systemic change is never once attempted, it's like she feels a need to defend this often horrible world she has made, because questioning its logic means questioning her own poorly thought through concepts.

* the relationships stuff is both icky and prudish, she does not want any sex in there at all but feels for some reason that it should be covered anyway. hermione and ron is foreshadowed in TGOF and THBP but it never convinces at all. in TDH the story naturally comes around to a place where harry and Hermione feel like they are about to pair up, but she never lets the story tell itself and these moments are always wasted.

I have lots of other thoughts too, but main one is that I will try to get younger son into something else if possible.

I took it as friendly advice for JK who has screentimed herself into embracing Holocaust denial

holocaust denial seems to be inevitable for the obsessive transphobes, hopefully rowling manages to get herself into legal trouble somewhere from it

A tweet thread explainer on a couple of Rowling’s anti-trans holocaust denial exchanges in the last day or so.