JK Rowling has challenged Scotland’s new hate crime law in a series of social media posts - inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.
The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.
She said “freedom of speech and belief” was at an end if accurate description of biological sex was outlawed.
Earlier, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf said the new law would deal with a “rising tide of hatred”.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.
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Ms Rowling, who has long been a critic of some trans activism, posted on X on the day the new legislation came into force.
It’s becoming harder and harder to be a Harry Potter fan nowaday.
I don’t really understand what it is about X Formerly Known as Twitter that turns previously respectable people into, well, this.
Everybody should take a break from social media once in a while, it’s better for your health.
It doesn’t turn these people, they were shitty all the time, they just get a platform on X so it becomes visible
Part of it is that having a large captive audience hanging on to your every word really starts to amplify toxic characteristics in those with the predisposition for shittiness. Like Musk or Trump, their descend only came when they became active on social media.
Twitter is a horrible thing.
Trump thought the day the Twin Towers fell was a good time to mention his property was closer to the tallest building in New York. That very evening, on the news, in 2001. Here’s a link.
I really dont think Rowling started off this shitty. From what I’ve heard it sounds like she has baggage regarding men she hasnt dealt with and its led her down this incredibly shitty path
The books have some really problematic themes that add up over time. If HP ended with the first book, they would be a curiosity, but they add up and JK had a really crooked world view when she wrote them. It’s likely her editor soften them in the beginning, but they had less control as they got more popular.
They were always awful. They just needed a platform where they could blossom into the terrible people they always were.
Yeah Rowling has been a notorious TERF for many years now.
sorry to join the little dogpile, but its not X, those are her beliefs.
There are a LOT better books out there then childrens books about wizard school, which she absolutely lifted from Jill Murphy.
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Have you read the books as an adult? If that wont kill your fandom, I don’t think anything will.
I mean tbf, the books were written for children. If you don’t like them, then maybe it’s because they’re not for you anymore. Or are you referring to something else?
I possess the books and movies, and never interact with the fandom or the author. There is zero need to. Let the art exist in isolation.
NEXT POINT: the stories have their own issues regarding certain portrayals but that is aside from the context of “new developments” a la the author’s modern opinions on things outside the plot of the books.
I miss when my biggest problem with JK Rowling was her desire to keep writing new material for Harry Potter, but instead of ya know… making spinoff books, maybe do a TV Show, maybe get in touch with Archie at some point for an expanded universe comic: I mean God knows they need the money after Sonic went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back… oh right Warner Bros. owns the franchise… so I guess DC could have done the Expanded Universe comic?
No instead of doing any of that she just randomly dripped out plotpoints from the internet, and always stuff that made no fucking sense… like
“Dumbledore was gay the whole time, despite the fact that I NEVER HINTED AT THIS! Also Wizards don’t have toilets! They shit themselves and magic away the poop! By the way, Hermonie was always black despite the fact I always described her as being pale skinned!”
The “Dumbledore was gay” was especially infuriating because she wrote the “Fantastic Breasts” movies, and instead of expanding upon the Dumbledore’s gay thing at all, they just use the “They’re just really good friends!” cover, ya know, the one that’s an amazing progressive way to imply that without running afoul of the “Moral Majority”… in 1992…
But the medal ultimately goes to “Hermonie is black!”, because the only reason she came up with it was to try to better canonize the “Cursed Child” play… which wound up having a black actress play Hermonie.
Instead of doing the adult thing and admitting that most writers accepted by the mainstream are white, and therefore an overwhelming majority of characters in fiction are white, and that’s… kind of not good as it shows the bias we’ve given in favor of one specific group over all others, and that maybe in the future we’ll have more racially diverse character casts… but until then, because we have more white characters than white actors, sometimes white characters are going to be played by non-white actors, and even if that’s not how we typically envision the character… Get over it.
No instead of doing that, she just felt the need to make another fucking retcon and claimed she intended to have Hermonie be black the whole fucking time! I hope they fired the moron who cast Emma Watson for the role in the movie then… that talentless hack who knew nothing of the books… checks notes Joanne Kathleen Rowling
I’m sorry but it takes a special kind of narcissim to attempt to retcon, not just a fictional work, but reality itself!
That’s squarely in the realm of “doesn’t matter”.
The works are done, anything said after never happened
if you ever have a couple hours to spare, i think shaun made a really great video on this topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs
he talks about JK rowling and harry potter, and how many of JK rowlings beliefs/worldviews are embedded into harry potter. he’s very thorough.
Oh yeah it was definitely Twitter that made her a bigot. She was an upstanding and progressive citizen before a website made her bad! /s
That’s like saying “I don’t really understand what it is about alcohol that makes people racist”
If I remember correctly, it all started when she retweeted something that was a bit ignorant and was called out for it on Twitter, but then she kept doubling down until it got to this point, when she could have just stopped talking about it.
It’s not that Twitter suddenly turned her into a bad person, but it definitely brought out the worst in her.
No it just revealed her beliefs to a wider audience. Twitter like all social media doesn’t bring out anything - it’s just a lens that gives the viewer a perspective they might never have seen and these view are then amplified by others who share them. Rowling was always this person, social media just allowed her to share and amplify her views.
I think the mistake we make is thinking that people are better than they are. I probably have some hidden bigotry that I am unaware of right now but given a space to be exposed to it someone would notice and point it out. If you only know of someone from one thing they did you can form an opinion of them based on very limited information. Get to know them better and you find that hidden awful. Twitter is a tool of constant broad interaction and it preserves bad takes long enough to see them. Add a culture of never admiting to being wrong and filtering by who you agree with and you have a cycle of awful that turns perfectly boringly not great but OK people into monsters defending genocide. Maybe we shouldn’t know anything about the author, replace their name with a serial number or pseudonym and let the art stand on it’s own. Though the racist jewish, wait no goblin, bankers was fairly intense tbh.
I don’t like Harry Potter to begin with, but I don’t really have a huge problem separating the artist from the art if the only thing they did was be hateful.
Roald Dahl was a major antisemite, but I still think he wrote great children’s books and suspense/horror stories. H. P. Lovecraft was bigoted about pretty much anyone who wasn’t a white man. Again, a really good writer.
Where is becomes hard to separate them is when they actually do something about their disgusting ideas. Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are pedophiles. I will never watch either of their movies. And I think both have made very good movies. I feel that I was wrong to watch the ones I did.
So yeah, Rowling is an utterly contemptible piece of shit, but if you like Harry Potter, it’s okay.
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There were always questionable elements from the books, like the depictions of goblins and elves. But knowing what we know now, these elements cannot be brushed off any more.
The Elves were directly based off of “Brownies”
It’s also highly unusual that elves were depicted this way, considering most fantasy stories hold them in high regard as being magical beings seeing themselves above humanity for reasons that are normally geniunely sound (Better moral compass, natural magical talents… Whereas in Harry Potter it’s the exact opposite, humanity seems to be the highest creature and Elves feel like to squabble before them…
There’s no way the “Brownie” similarity is unintentional
So what’s a Brownie? Well it was a way of explaining slaves to young children back in those days, to brush off the casual cruelty by lying to kids. Essentially the myth of the “Brownie” was to re contextualize the suffering of the black slave as a magical event, a beautiful mysterious thing to be observed not with horror, but with wonder. A big part of the myth claimed that you can’t give a Brownie anything nice like proper clothing, or else this “breaks the contract between Man and Fae” and they run back into the woods never to be seen again.
“No it’s okay children, they’re magical forest people called Brownies! And they LIKE doing that work for us! Oh and we can’t give them anything nice, or they’ll disappear forever! And you wouldn’t want that to happen! No no, really, they’re faeries, and they like being whipped like that!”
Feeling disgusted? Good, that sickness in your stomach is proof that you’re a better person than JK Rowling.
tl;dr Harry Potter elves are a resurrection of Pro-Slavery Propaganda used to indoctrinate children into thinking it’s okay to treat people like shit. They had to GASLIGHT LITERAL CHILDREN into thinking that black people were magical elves, in order to stop them from feeling bad about slavery… and JK decided to bring that back for her kid’s book.
As much fun as Hogwarts Legacy is, I hope she rots in hell and then is reborn as a transgender woman to learn basic empathy.
Have you never heard of Santa’s elves? Or Elves in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’?
I’ve been meaning to read the latter, and we’re all aware of the former, but there’s a lot of conflicting legends of Santa’s Helpers
Well, there’s elves, then there’s Elves.
While I am not defending Twitter by any means. I feel like what actually breaks people’s brains is becoming a billionaire. You lose all empathy for other humans.
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