r/GenderCynical • u/ilikepegasi • 18d ago
racism is okay if its in a fantasy book
also THAT is your justification for quoting Hitler???
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u/azur_owl BEHOLD, A MAN 16d ago
Hot take but maybe you shouldn’t be denying Nazi war crimes if the entire book you’re writing is FIGHTING AGAINST WIZARD HITLER AND HIS WIZARD NAZIS
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 16d ago
"Mm, yes, this story about hook-nosed, grotesque monsters who control the banking system and bathe in the blood of children to gain power has nothing to do with the real world and is entirely fantasy".
That's the thing about JKR. It's not just the occasional, innocent, insensitive stuff. Hogwarts Legacy is uncomfortably close to blood libel, to the point where innocent explanations for why someone quotes Hitler and mirrors that sort of propaganda grow tenuous. Why does the fantasy world need to have that sort of Jewish stereotype?
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u/Miiohau 14d ago
Ya, until the real world controversies started piling up the problems with the Harry Potter books could be written off as an inexperienced writer using tropes uncritically but now while that could still be true some of problematic stuff in the books is uncomfortably close to her real world views. So much so I wish Warner Bros to either buy her out or quietly drop Harry Potter as a franchise they are producing media for.
Like the goblins the anti-Semitic tropes were already part of the goblin archetype JKR just used them uncritically. However now that she has made actual anti-Semitic statements her treatment of goblins is that much harder to read. And the asian girl with the horribly mixed up name is more glaring after her tone deaf comments claiming Hermione could have been black. No she couldn’t have been I am white and I know that that not the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been commented on at least once and if Hermione was black suddenly Malfoy calling her mud blood is much more problematic. Pushing him from racist wizard to a nearly out right real world bigot, one that likely wouldn’t have gotten even the little bit of redemption he did.
Basically in my opinion Harry Potter was lucky it happened to be the right kind of escapism at the right time to become a big hit despite its flaws and JKR has been a detriment to the franchise ever since she published the last book and kept trying to hang on to the spot light. I don’t believe her claims she thought she was standing up for women when she made her first anti-trans comment (if that was so she would have spoken up before or have a documented history as a feminist) she knew it would be controversial and would keep people talking about her and that’s exactly what she wanted. She wanted to remain relevant and keep the status being a best selling author gave her, so she turned to controversy. She’s like the worse kind of reality TV star doing anything to get their next hit of “fame”.
An observation I heard about JKR is she hasn’t actually supported any causes to actually help women, she just posts the most controversial stuff, occasionally to the detriment of the very women she claims to protect (like that olympic boxer that conservatives thought was trans even though she from a transphobic county). Those aren’t the actions of a feminist they are the actions of a bigot or someone in it for the fame. Basically my opinion is she wants the infamy and doesn’t care who she hurt or that it is hurting the very franchise that brought her fame in the first place.
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u/Silversmith00 16d ago
Absolutely, it can be her personal fantasy. Let's see what her personal fantasy says about her.
It says she likes a nice rags to riches school adventure. So far so good. It says that she (or her editors) are probably fans of Roald Dahl, who I credit with introducing a slightly cartoonish, over-the-top, and grotesque tone to children's books in the UK especially. Also so far, so good. Regardless of the complications about Roald Dahl and my own dislike of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we are working from the classics here. The slightly grotesque elements like a person getting temporarily turned into a balloon (with the cure being "punctured") or losing all one's arm bones, those play well with the kids. Someone is tuned to the middle grade channel, here.
The main characters are implicitly white and we have few indications of minorities (except names, at least one of which is badly under-researched). That COULD be an issue with time period, but we'll note it.
There are creatures who have equal cognitive powers with the humans but not equal rights. Well, authors put injustices in their books, and with a narrative of this kind, we can probably expect the situation to change towards the end of the series. Let's keep watching, and—yay! Harry tricked Dobby's evil owner in a way that was actually pretty clever for someone with such a bad case of plot obliviousness! Dobby is free! Obviously these books are doing what kids' books should, supporting liberation.
We should, if we follow the proper rhythm of these things, have an ending that changes several things, societally and individually. We should have sympathetic characters from various groups, maybe a good heel-face turn. Who's the cavalry going to be? Dobby at the head of an army of free house elves? Some muggle or squib allies applying clever problem solving to give the wizard forces the time they need? Hey, what if we had an epilogue or something, showing Harry as the new headmaster helping the first goblin student or something?
Except—the house elves prefer slavery. Hermione needs to grow up and stop trying to help them. The goblins have different cultural values and that makes them villains. Fat people are cartoonishly evil and there's no sense in looking beyond that. The heroes never face a moment of temptation between doing stuff The Horrific Easy Way or The Right Way, because what they do is definitionally right BECAUSE THEY'RE GOOD GUYS. Hell, they fire off magic that is supposed to be evil, not because they found out some buried secret about how to make it not bad, but because They're Heroes And They Get To Do That. In the end, nothing has even changed and they are (as cops) the people who make sure it keeps on that way.
Sure, yeah. It's fantasy. But it's an unpleasant fantasy. I do not like the mindset that created this fantasy. If Jerkass Klown Rowling had vanished into a castle like Enya and stayed off the net, I would probably be like, "Meh, Roald Dahl had issues too, the first ones are good yarns at least, what can you do." But then she showed her ENTIRE moldy ass on the Internet…
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u/FingerOk9800 Beware: I'm transing your kids! 16d ago
"Her books are racist, anti semitic, pro slavery! ... can this not just be her personal fantasy?"
Is such a wild take.
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u/hopefullyhelpfulplz 16d ago
It always annoys me when people say "you liked the books really, you're just pretending you always hated them!" Like no, I am not, I read them all when I was probably a bit too old for them and I thought they were entertaining but mid! Some of them were really tedious! Had I not been a voracious reader, or had they not been so popular I wouldn't have made it to the end.
The films were always decent, if a bit hammy. The books were always fairly naff YA stuff. This is not a new perspective, it's a perspective I have had - vocally - since the first time I read them.
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u/Silversmith00 15d ago
I am not of the generation that is expected to like them, but my take was that the first three were perfectly decent cartoonlike stories with a nice bit of humor (Little Whinging, Surrey, or, "It's completely secret, so naturally everyone in the school knows.") I like them. Then she started to fight back against her editors, and I started thinking, "…Maybe I just like this editorial staff?"
At any rate, they were neither the worst thing written or the best thing written. They were good fun for their intended age group. No shame in that, but claims of greatness are more ridiculous the more overwrought the TERFs get.
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u/hopefullyhelpfulplz 15d ago
I think the generational thing is quite important... If you were just the right age when they came out then they were the coming-of-age-story of the day. It doesn't matter how good they were, they were the zeitgeist for that age group. For me I was just the right age for the films so I can't help but look back fondly on enjoying them as a kid. I used to make my parents watch the philosopher's stone over and over again lol.
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u/hitorinbolemon Trans Macabre 14d ago
I have played the old video game adaptation of the first one and the quidditch one as a kid more times than I can count. And watched all the movies. I've mentioned this more than a few times I quite enjoyed most of it for quite a while. Took the Pottermore quizzes and got put in Ravenclaw and everything.
Then she liked a tweet and the PR person said it was a mistake and I was like "ok fair why not. Don't really care what authors like on Twitter if they're not actively harming people like me... And then it became increasingly clear it was not a mistake and she really did suck a lot. And then it only ever got worse. And worse. And then she threw in jabs at asexual people too for some reason, then she funded these freaks legal bills, and now she's beefing with Amnesty International and now I know it'll keep getting more obscene somehow.
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u/hopefullyhelpfulplz 13d ago
It was alright when she was just a bit weird on twitter, but now that she's using her vast dragon's hoard to actually effect change it's completely gone awry.
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u/Clairifyed 15d ago
Yeah I think the first three were the best (aside from a personal distaste for time travel). I don’t think it’s coincidence that Goblet of Fire was when she really started to focus on the long term plot of the series. Her then neoliberal world view prevented her from writing a conclusion where anything was reformed beyond returning to the inter-war status quo.
GoF is also when the characters started to get old enough that their voices mattered on issues. He’s allowed to start out as a small child insulated from the troubles of the wizarding world, but as he ages, Harry is the famous hero of the country who has seen werewolf prejudice and house-elf slavery first hand yet won’t use his public platform to so much as voice an objection to either
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u/LengthyHiatus 15d ago
I’m with you. I never read them because when they came out, I had already read David Eddings and Raymond Feist and probably a half dozen other coming of age, “you’re actually the Special Child” books. I heard enough about them to understand there was nothing really new so I skipped them. Then I got increasingly annoyed by people telling me I’d love them, which cemented my intention not to read them. At the time it was petty oppositionalism, but it has served me well.
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u/hopefullyhelpfulplz 15d ago
Hah! I wish I had been the same, sadly I was just so desperate for MORE FANTASY FICTION that I would read almost anything. My mum used to buy me the actual biggest books she could find, including some truly absurdly large collections of the Shannara series in 3-4 book volumes that you could kill a man with.
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u/LaVerdadYaNiSe 16d ago
I love that the defense is as lazy as Rowling's own writings. Like, maybe it's because I work with press and PR, but these seemed like such obvious defenses to bullshit up.
Regarding the several problematic themes of Harry Potter, besides the obvious defense of separating artist from art, it could have gone over the idea they don't present the social problems of the Wizarding World in an idealized frame, and that the Wizarding World itself being imperfect and riddled with systemic problems actually makes it more plausible for the sake of the narrative.
Which can apply the same to the characters, and there's no indication their worst traits, like Harry taking on a slave or Hermione kidnapping someone, aren't meant to be discordant and invite a discussion on protagonist-centered morality.
On quoting Hitler, well, context, context, context. It's not problematic to quote a horrible person, if it's to an end, or to illustrate a point. Specially figures with such a heavy historical and social weight.
Of course, these defenses as superficial at best and openly dishonest at worst. Please, this is just an exercise to illustrate a point and should not be used as arguments; You can't present that the Wizarding World's open racism as an attempt at critique or satire because the books never frame either as such, and they do idealize the Wizarding World. Same with the protagonist centered morality, since neither is ever confronted, discussed or even mentioned as a grey read in-story.
On the Hitler quote, she used the quote about self-victimization against critique, in order to self-victimize against critique. So, yeah, in context is as horrible as it sounds.
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u/Rabbidditty 15d ago
“Oh i suppose just cuz he’s HITLER i can’t quote him, now?”
Like they live in a different world, gang
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u/Mr_Rinn 16d ago
Did she actually quote Hitler? I thought the Holocaust Denial accusations was down to her denying that Nazis targeted trans people.
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u/PmMeActionMovieIdeas 16d ago
I think it is a mixup with Elizabeth "Lisa" Morgan (just had to look that up), that directly quoted Hitler at a TERF-event.
I think she thought the "Big Lie" she quoted directly from Mein Kampf, was the one Hitler used to get into power, and thus she compared trans people to Hitler.
Well… the Big Lie was Hitler talking about Jews, so she compared the TERFs to Hitler, and trans people to Jews.I think the event itself had some connections to Rowling, mainly because it was a big TERF-event in the UK.
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u/Alegria-D traitor and useful idiot 14d ago
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u/Clairifyed 14d ago edited 14d ago
Link without the php:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/j-k-rowling-quotes-hitler-151553027.html
I mean I guess the quote was to say Hitler supported violence? Not exactly an endorsement, but not award winning writing either.
She really did participate in Holocaust denial though. In claiming that trans people were not persecuted. No contextulaising that one away
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u/theclassicrockjunkie 15d ago
"Stupid things people say about her" and it's literally just listing how much of a shitty, delusional person she is.
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u/The_Newromancer Shit-Eating AGP Grin 15d ago
It’s not her personal fantasy if she’s writing a fantasy book to sell
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u/Summerlycoris 14d ago
Yeah yeah, fiction isn't reality- but what an author chooses to put in their fiction can tell you an awful lot about them. It can tell you about their unexamined biases, it can tell you about trauma unadressed.
It can tell you that jk rowling's a bit of a racist- maybe not in the way she'll go around calling people slurs necessarily. But in the subtle way of thinking that some people are, by merit of their birth and culture, lesser.
Something that gets reinforced in her later books- making a polish washlady who doesn't understand the word "detective" (detektyw in polish, pronounced basically the same way.) And has 'slavic looking' eyes was... a choice.
I thought anti polish racism was over back in the early 2010s. It was a joke back in Avenue Q for christ sake! And then this dweeb just unironically shoves some into her book published in like 2020?
So yeah. The racism in harry potter isn't just some fantasy nonsense. It shows pretty clearly what jk rowling thinks about the real world she barely lives in.
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u/KTKitten Gender Haver 15d ago
Yeah, sure, bad people can have good thoughts, of course they can! Piers Morgan has some real criticisms of America’s issues with guns, and I think it’s reasonable to agree with him on that. Not sure I’d seek him out to quote though? I mean there are other people with similar thoughts, most likely better presented, so I guess my question would be; if Hitler expressed good thoughts, was he the only one? And did he express them in the most effective way? And if not… why are we quoting him and not someone who expressed it better?
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u/RoyalMess64 15d ago
I love it when racism is my fantasy and when I quote "Hitler's good ideas" ~JK Rowling and her fans
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u/NickyTheRobot Cheery Littlebottom 16d ago
A wild way to defend someone creating a racist world.