The shock! The Horror!
Discussing Film, the totally reliable legitimate mainstream news source, is reporting that, “Known transphobe J.K. Rowling is now reported to be an active exec producer on the ‘Harry Potter’ series where she will be involved in the show’s decision making.”
Discussing Film on X
How dare she!
How dare the woman who kicked off the young-adult reading craze of the early 2000’s stay actively involved in her business? How dare she continue in her beliefs while the world is changed around her? Doesn’t she realize what Harry Potter means to the literally dozens of committed trans activists? Doesn’t she know that when you bought her books you bought her too?
Should an author be allowed to persist in his tight-fisted control of the narrative when the vocal fans are making their demands known?
Of course he should. By the way, that is the correct way to singular third person subject. When writing, one defaults to the masculine if gender of the subject is unknown or being used as a representative of the universal. Feminine is reserved for special cases.
Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley and Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), Warner Bros. Pictures
Rowling has been conspicuously active in the continuation of her Wizarding World, to the point that her control over the Fantastic Beast scripts may have crippled the series by structuring them according to the conventions of a novel instead of a movie. After all the books were published, she told fans that Dumbledore was romantically interested in men. Fans can find out the magic spirit animals of all their favorite characters. Hermione has been race swapped in an official stage play in which Rowling had oversight.
It seems Discussing Film was fine with all those things and the control Rowling exerted over them. Now that feminism must include rights for people who are confused about their gender, second or third-wave feminists like Rowling who believe there is an immutable difference between men and women must be publicly shamed from society.
Ralph Fienes as Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Warner Bros. Pictures
READ: The Harry Potter Franchise Reboot: Here’s What We Know So Far
I’ll digress for a bit here to point out the ridiculousness of terms like “phobia.” Properly understood, a phobia is a persistent excessive fear of something. Phobias are crippling anxiety disorders and contorting the language of a scientific discipline to cast aspersions of people is exactly what happened to the word “retarded.” Except that calling someone a retard is course mockery at the expense of the defenseless, calling someone a “phobe” is an attempt to shame someone and remove them from public discourse.
To those who keep “phobic” as a bullet in the rhetorical chamber it is no different than totalitarians of the past. Which is to say it means someone I don’t like who’s saying something I can’t refute on a fair field.
Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2010), Warner Bros. Pictures
Ultimately, what the boys who cry “phobe” want is to take whatever is already popular and make it theirs, then claim it always was. After all, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. “Star Trak has always been progressive!”
Maybe, but they usually gave a pretty fair hearing to both sides and let the audience see a nuanced universe. Kirk was based and once performed a wedding in what was clearly the Enterprise’s chapel, on the other hand Picard was an atheist socialist.
Kirk also once mused that it will be interesting to watch a planet convert to Christianity in the equivalent of Earth’s 20th century. Babylon 5 was definitely liberal, but it was the brand of ‘90’s liberal that distrusted government power. By the way, Garibaldi makes Kirk look like Noam Chomsky.
Garibaldi holding Grandma’s Smith and Wesson while musing that the death penalty should be brought back and applied to a whole bunch of crimes.
Depending on the day Princess Leia was either a girlboss or it’s finally time to put women front and center in a galaxy far, far away.
If the last decade is any indication, a focus on divisive progressive messaging cannot create compelling fiction. It lives as a parasite draining life from the host. Its adherents and apostles are so fixated on their grievances and destructive quest to make their oppressors submit that their vision of the future has nothing new. Left to their own devises they would recraft our world endlessly never making anything new, but repurposing what is.
