I 100% know and understand why we hate Rowling, she deserves all the hate she gets, but why do we hate the work itself? I watched those movies when I was little when they were on TV, now couldn’t care less, and only interesting part to me are mythical creatures/monsters. But I still forgot why do we hate it so much??
Can someone remind me and explain me?
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Great list!
I’ll add something.
Rowling shows poverty in the abstract, not as a relation. The Weasleys are poor, but they have magic! To Rowling, poverty is something that people are because they are ‘moral’ and ‘nice’ or avoid ‘decadence’ and ‘luxuries’, rather than because they are exploited or lacking the essentials.
The Weasley house is shown as a rickety shack, but there’s nothing wrong with it. If poverty is when someone lives in the countryside with a huge plot of land, access to food, water, travel, and energy, etc, with the ability to magic-up infinite bedrooms, then we’re living in parallel realities. If this is poverty, count me in.
They’re only ‘poor’ because they cannot afford the latest broomsticks. This is like saying someone is poor because they have all the essentials including a house, working phone, car, and laptop, but they don’t have the top of the range MacBook or newest Tesla.
Mrs Weasley lives as a struggling housewife. She can magic away any chore! So Rowling includes a faux feminism, which could be read as putting a spotlight on the patriarchy. But there are few material reasons for Mrs Weasley to be a housewife. Maybe to look after the kids, but again, they’ve got magic and wealth. Plus, when Rowling wrote this, childcare was more affordable for the poorest working families in Britain. Mrs Rowling could work if she wanted to but that’s beside the point. Neither of the Weasleys need to work! They are bourgeois, masquerading as the poor.
We are supposed to feel sorry for the Weasleys, but let’s look at their financial situation. Mr Weasley works in a public sector job and makes enough money as a sole breadwinner to maintain a huge family that does not struggle with the basics and lives, again, in a massive detached house on a huge plot of land. We can only feel sorry for the Weasleys if we compare them to the Malfoys.
So Rowling has created the literary framework for millions of well-off liberals to ignore real poverty and to feel sorry for themselves if they only possess a mansion, have essentially unlimited access to resources, and for whom work is something of an option.
This is how Rowling sees and wants us to see poverty and gendered oppression. She is a self-professed pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps neoliberal and has no sympathy for the poor because they would not be poor if they worked hard like her.
Rowling talks about being ‘as poor as it is possible to be in Britain’. But she was never poor. Apparently she cannot see her own privilege – she went to Oxbridge! I’m not downplaying what it’s like to live in a council house, to be truly poor in Britain, raise a child alone, or to suffer domestic violence (I think she left her husband). The problem is that when she lived in a council house, there were council houses and a safety net. That system had problems, still. But even that provision does not exist today. She uses her experiences to judge people living in social housing today. If she could do it, why can’t others? This comes through in Harry Potter.
Not to downplay the bullying and abuse that Harry gets from his uncle, cousin, and aunt, but his poverty is displayed in the same way. Rowling seems unable to imagine real poverty. Even before she reveals that Harry is actually rich, his ‘poverty’ means ready access to food, clothing, shelter, etc, but it’s not fair because he didn’t get all the luxury presents first-hand like Dudley does.
Disclaimer: I’m not saying that neglect is okay if a carer otherwise provides for material needs. But in Rowling’s hands, that neglect is mainly to do with ‘second hand birthday presents’ and ‘a small bedroom’. Millions of children in Britain go hungry and without adult supervision because their parents work lots and earn little, and many children suffer much worse. This is markedly different to the type of neglect that Rowling subjects Harry to.
The abuse Harry goes through at the hands of his aunt and uncle would be enough to warp any real life kid.
Emotional abuse on the calibre that Harry suffers can leave considerable damage to kids that persists into adulthood yet she paints Harry as this well rounded stable child for the most part.
It just shows that the abuse was nothing more than window dressing for her to characterise the obvious baddies and it’s really questionable and a little callous to anyone who does go through said emotional abuse i think.
Trauma isn’t a neat plot point Joanne ffs.
Well said.
To add even more: a race of big nose non-human creatures control the banks. The villainess Umbridge is heavily transfemme coded. The house system essentializes people as inherently good and evil. There are really so many problems with it.
It’s notable as well that Seamus happens to blow something up in every fucking scene he is in. Just another cheeky bit of casual racism from Rowling.
Yeah, all of these.
The ‘death of the author’ argument is one I agree with. We should judge the books independently from the author. If Rowling was horrible but the books were excellent, then the books are excellent (and under a better system, people could enjoy the books without worrying about supporting or vindicating the author).
I don’t even think Rowling had an agenda when she wrote the books - she was run-of-the-mill liberal ignorant when she wrote them and it was only after fame hit her that she was drawn into taking a side. But still, if we judge the books independently of the author’s intent they are stories that justify an unjust world and steer the audience towards rooting for that unjust world’s continued existence.
I always struggle with the disconnect between artist and author myself because I can’t not see how there views bleed into their work. That said even when viewed separately to her bigotry the books aren’t great period as you said.
By no means am I a Harry Potter fan. I have been a very weird person since childhood, that never took pleasure in reading these fantasy novels other classmates did, but preferred better and valuable stuff to read and research and learn more.
But, is is simply not the case that Rowling made the whole story in an archaic castle setting with the flying broom fantasies? We can critique it in a realist way, pointing out the immoralities or the lack of revolution or all of those quirks, but these are stories that just exist as figments of imagination by these authors.
My idea is that completely ignoring these stories is the best way to nullify their importance, because these stories have archaic roots, and you can do nothing about castle world fantasies.
I don’t see anyone shitting so furiously on Tolkien and some of tje same stuff could be said about him.
I know you can critique it, but I mean, we could also critique Star Trek and everything in existence, if you understand that art is a product of its historical time we can understand why it contains certain unpleasant elements. A lot of what was produced from today into the beginning of time has something criticable, but as lomg as you have an attentive mind and can isolate that I do not see anything wrong with it. People like to think we already live in Utopia and this should not exist, but sadly we don’t and we will continue seeing this kind of stuff. Rowling is nothing more than a product of this, a deadbrain liberal who stands for, mostly, what is wrong. True, Tolkien is dead and we cannot read shitty tweets unlike J.K., though.
What’s interesting is that Tolkien himself might have agreed with some (not all) of the criticisms in the article. It seems he had, toward the end of his life, certain misgivings about The Lord of the Rings, particularly the concept of the orcs as a wholly evil race. For his planned sequel, or rather prequel, to The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, he experimented with several ideas: orcs are not real living beings but inanimate puppets, they are living beings whose minds and individual wills have been fully overridden by the Enemy, or they are demons taking on physical form in mockery of human nature. He never resolved the issue, or finished the book. It was published after his death (though in somewhat incomplete form, and with heavy editing) as The Silmarillion.
The basic problem of Tolkien’s world has always been this. His stories began as a private hobby, and a way to cope with the stress of having been a combat veteran in the First World War. They were imitations of the ancient epics he had read as a student, and which he studied in his capacity as a professor of linguistics and comparative mythology; deliberately “primitive” in tone, they cribbed a lot of elements from Germanic, Irish, and even Slavic mythologies. Elves, for instance, are the Tuatha de Dana of Irish folklore; orcs are the Fir Bolg. Now one can accept certain things in an ancient mythological setting – we recognize them as relics of another time and place, a sort of pre-scientific explanation of the natural world – that in a novel do not come off nearly so well. And as Tolkien’s invented world slowly morphed into a series of three giant novels, the harshness of an iron-age (or simulated iron-age) mythology came more and more to the fore. He tried to soften it, and for the most part succeeded, but at the price of a lot of interior consistency. People have noted how a lot of the socially problematic aspects of LOTR are not so much explained away, but rather hidden, by a sort of virtuoso authorial sleight-of-hand.
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Lord of the Rings and Hobbit are at least good and leagues better than Harry Potter… I even like it to this day.
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Apart from all the reasons everyone has listed, she’s also a TERF piece of shit and a loud and outspoken one at that. She’s contributed heavily to the normalisation of transphobia in the UK by giving liberal reactionaries someone “important” (🤮) to rally to regarding their bigotry and legitimised her view point and by extension others by virtue of her poorly written and bigoted children’s book. The BBC gave her an award for a particular article she penned on her TERF views and it was quite publicised so her role in the state apparatus of demonising and scapegoating another minority group are fairly significant.
Just for how much it dominates liberal book culture. It’s like OH MY GOD, TRUMP DID THAT THING LIKE VOLDERMORT AND THE OTHER GUY IS DUMBELDORE !!11!!1!!, just extremely obnoxious. I’m sure it’s not that unpleasant of a read, but fiction books that thick were never my deal, per se so I just found it funny to rag on the manchildren who use it as a moral compass.
Oh, because of the libs comparing it to real life, they do that with Marvel too and basically everything, now I understand, that’s annoying as fuck…
go to the readanotherbook subreddit (if you’re on reddit), it’s funny af. It’s basically the kind of people we’re talking about.
edit: hngggg elenski noooooooo!
Well, Putin is Harry Пјотр then…
Its copaganda. The state is taken by fascism fairly quickly but after the big bad is defeated Harry joins the wizard FBI.
Some of bad guys are corrupt, ultra wealthy families that follow super powerful wizard hitler but of course there is little discussion around class having anything to do with this. In fact Harry’s family is also rich, but they’re good because they didnt follow wizard hitler.
It also attempts to make a point about how fascists hate the “unpure” half wizards and non wizards, which is bad according to the book. But there is no real pushback. Non wizards are pretty much helpless, powerless, and fully subject to whatever wizards want to do. So the message ends up being that anti semitism,racism,orientalism etc is morally wrong but fully justified by the material world.
And of course the whole house elves just want to be slaves bit.
Most people just don’t like it because its British young adult fiction (i feel like YA is almost inherently controversial, and British implies its got racism in it) and written by a transphobe billionaire. Its got a buffet of problematic qualities.
Lots of good criticism from everyone else so I’ll just add this. The magic system is dogshit.
🐕 💩
There’s a lot of it, as you can see in the other comments.
I personally just hate her writing, especially her ludicrous naming sense. This thrown me so much off that i stopped reading at half of book one. For context, i can read even the dumbest books, but retched at this one - it was THIS bad.
Would you rather read the entire harry potter saga or 3 of rothbard “most acclaimed” works?
Honestly, Rothbard. I would also retch but at least for objective and not silly reason.
Same. I’ve gotten through dreck like Lost Horizon – noble Tibetan monks preserving their culture against the ravages of modernity – but couldn’t finish Prisoner of Azkaban. That’s the one Harry Potter book I’ve looked at, and I never looked again.
Libs worship it because of its undialectal portrayal of some sort of “lone savior” and they just hedge all their hope in that
Because it’s badly-written lib shit.
I don’t care about it but if you want to hear why it’s lib shit you can watch Shaun’s video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs
I know its like 3 hours but srsly good run down of the philosophy of the series and rowling herself
I do think overly hating Harry Potter is just a meme, just like hating Nickelback or Twilight was, only specifically on the Left regarding HP.
Me personally I (please don’t judge me) read the Harry Potter series (I’m not exaggerating) some 12-15 times as a kid well into my adolescence. It was just escapism and it meant a lot to me as a kid, and there’s probably still some bone in my body that gets emotional hearing some of the music.
I think hating Harry Potter is very valid for a lot of reasons, beyond JKR being gigacringe there’s also plenty of cringe sprinkled throughout the series, but also it’s kind of an overdone fad and I would just hope said people also appreciate how, if you set this standard, 90+% of mainstream media is so, so terrible. At a certain point I’ve learned I just have to accept that almost everything we love has major, systemically informed flaws, it’s okay to enjoy them it’s okay to hate them but personally overhating on anything just leaves a bad negativity cloud with me so I avoid it besides the occasional joke.
Twilight is mega racist Mormon propaganda. The less you know about it, the better
Yea, Rowling is an absolute bigot, but I didn’t get the hate towards the work itself. Also, when I was little, I watched the movies a number of times, whenever they were on TV. And yes Twilight is a meme by itself…
It’s mostly ironic hate because some libs can’t stop comparing it to the real world. There were some pretty yikes characters in there, like the big nosed, greedy banker goblins. But I like the old PS2 games.
I played Lego one
I do not separate art from the artist, but if I did, I’m just tried of seeing it being everywhere.
Over-hating Harry Potter is cool as long as you hate all these other overdone overmilked shoved in your face franchises
Like Marvel? I dislike them too
Shaun the skull man did a pretty good video on why Harry Potter sucks asshole, I would recommend you give it a peek
Watched it just yesterday.
I read and listen to fantasy audio books. Right wing and libertarianism is rife in that genre.
I will comment that the fatphobia on the books is bizarre. These are children’s books.
