"Dumbledore is Gay" sez Rowling

Yeah it felt way more like normal conversational drift than a pile on to me. I get what you guys are saying but I don’t know what the alternative is, discussion boards gonna discuss

christ, i'm not calling for a fucking struggle session, just try to be kind and considerate of other people, ok?

xps to emil.y I’m looking at it from the perspective of someone who knows people who absolutely cannot look past their own love of the series, and don’t care about what she’s putting out into the universe.

I think what many are trying to understand is where the lack of consideration has been, as an overall trend? It's a long thread, so maybe I missed several posts.

I would get if this was a Facebook thread and someone had just posted that Rowling was a TERF, and the sub-comments were all dismissive "I never liked her terrible books, this is just icing!" responses....but it's a message board thread, and most of the discussion on the books themselves seemed to follow Tracer Hand's focus on they noticed while reading the books to their kids.

I get the overall point, but I don't see where the insensitivity is happening in this thread. If I missed it, then I apologize, but as far as pile-ons go, this seems rather benign by ILX standards.

nv otm

perhaps its because this is the thread where the conversation occurred and not a generalized Potter thread, but I can attest these same criticisms appeared in Potter threads many years ago almost verbatim. hence why most of the posts I read had an aire of familiarity to them, as I read similar criticisms here while I was actually making my way through the books.

There's an implicit air of superiority when your reaction to somebody being revealed as a shitty person is "I never liked them anyway" - like you can somehow divine someone's badness by disliking their art, and that anyone who liked their art is a foolish rube.

I get that, and I'm guilty of it. But with HP I think there's the added factor that for decades it's been impossible to voice even a mild criticism (like, "Hey, I like Snape but think her other characters are kinda flat) without Harry Potter fans coming after you like you just pissed on their sacred tree. When a work of art is so beloved people cannot tolerate any criticism of it, there's going to be a backlash, and I think a lot of the "I never liked them anyway" is coming from a place of "Hey, we're in a thread where it's okay to say something negative about these books? Sweet, I've got some thoughts I've been saving up."

Not much different from Star Wars and Donald Trump then

thr answer to who like to eat fermented butter = everyone

oh, it gets worse, he can't even use the same verb twice, burped is good once, then it becomes this ridiculous game of searching for new verbs, they have not thought it through at all.

As a college comp teacher, I spend so much time correcting the damage done by idiots like these. So many obedient students writing unreadable crap because they've been told "said" and "asked" are bad words.

― Lily Dale, Saturday, December 28, 2019 8:47 PM (yesterday)

As a middle-grades comp teacher, I also work to undo this damage. It's pre-existing, and I blame a series of terrible SAID IS DEAD posters/worksheets that were disseminated in the wake of the 2000s Writer's Workshop classes proliferated by Columbia Teachers' College.

http://mjgds.org/classrooms/2ndgrade/files/2014/04/Said-is-Dead.jpg

continually grateful i went to journalism school where you better have a good fuckin reason to use a word that isn’t “said”

lol otm

mouthfarted

"stated" = hate 4ever

I wage unceasing war against "stated." That and "individual."

lol we used "stated" a lot at my job when we were summarizing phone calls for escalated situations. mostly because who really cared about the literary quality of what essentially amounted to the "begat" segment of the New Testament.

due to the fact that begat was said by Jehoshaphat

'flatly stated' has its uses :P

(if you're a CLICHEMONGER)

"dicked" should be used as a synonym for "said"

posts very much in please stop

woulda made the Bible juicier

you want me to explain why, in the recent wake of a beloved children's author publically and openly aligning herself with an ideology that denies the existence of and seeks to erase me, people like me, people I care about (with, i should add, no small measure of historical success), i'm upset that the reaction has been "Yeah, she sure is a jerk! Now, about that writing style of hers..."

no, i don't think i can do that, sorry, never mind me, i'm just being an Overly Sensitive Trans Person again, forget i said anything, thanks.

look, i'm also the person who whenever the topic of gridiron football comes up starts talking about CTE. i'm just that sort of a, err, hufflepuff. terribly sorry.

my wife (who is 46) got an MFA a couple of years ago and the preponderance of Potter fans among her cohort (who were all about 15 years younger than her) got really super annoying (to her).

rush i used this thread as the general one because it seemed like the most recently posted in, that’s all. happy to talk about any aspect! believe me after reading every line out loud i have a lot of Opinions

god, anita bryant is such a corny-ass singer

Part of this I think is not "Rowling's writing is bad" but "Rowling's reactionary bullshit is heavily implicit in the work" - without saying "haha can't believe you fell for this". Like a bunch of posters on here I don't hate the books; it seems to me that almost every fandom involves a degree of consciously overlooking the bullshit until it gets to be too much

sorry rushomancy, really feel that the "well I never liked her anyway" argument is not being made by anyone ITT, and neither is the "anyone who likes her is an idiot" argument, ftr I have a lot of friends / relatives to whom the books are important, some of whom are trans and are struggling with this stuff. It was the same discussion about "is this person's badness reflected in their work", which is important to have, and involves discussion of the books. then I did admittedly go on a tangent about my son's teacher, this was probably unnecessary, but hope it wasn't taken as a slight against anyone, except said teacher who has apparently been fired now, I have just learned.

apparently been fired now

"Caloo! Callay!", he yodeled.

to be fair she was probably fired for the shocking incompetence rather than the "said" thing

one hand washed the other

you want me to explain why

not really

good luck to ya rush but ppl can dislike her or anyone for whatever reason divorced from your personal reasons for boosting her and thats rly about it

part of this is the argumentative skip -- here I am talking about The Discourse more than any individual poster -- from "she has said some pretty awful terfy things lately" (inarguable) to "this reactionary stuff filtered into the series" (probably, I haven't read them so I can't really weigh in) to "lol harry potter fans hell yes love getting an excuse to mock them" (subjective, doesn't follow from anything, and suggests that maybe people wouldn't really care about what rowling said if it didn't give them a segue to dunk on people for doing things they find personally gauche) and also, apparently, to "rowling is the one responsible for sixth-graders being asked to generate synonyms for 'said'" (?????)

Lot of the posts itt are funny to me cause I’m finishing off the year reading Stephen Kings on writing whose advice (never use anything *but* said) feels much closer to orthodoxy ime

"lol harry potter fans hell yes love getting an excuse to mock them"

have at me with the irrelevance of the "said" discussion all you like, fair enough.

suggests that maybe people wouldn't really care about what rowling said if it didn't give them a segue to dunk on people for doing things they find personally gauche

no, it really doesn't suggest that

almost as if there are people always looking isnt it

nobody has said or even as far as I can see implied this
― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Sunday, December 29, 2019 4:39 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is why I put the disclaimer about "this is more The Discourse than any individual poster" because I fucking knew this was going to happen, but spend more than like 5 minutes on twitter and you'll see it

it did sound very like you were talking about the discourse in this thread, especially after the fourth point related to me and my son.

I haven't encountered these bad takes on twitter, but I prune my follows heavily

I have never read these books, they seemed a bit ... gingerbread to me as a kid, but I gather a lot of LGBT people like the books and feel at home in them, must be an unpleasant experience to hear the author make these comments.

FWIW said comments seemed more in ignorance than malice to me - the whole tangle of feminism and transgender rights and all that is something it's a blessing not to be directly affected by.

Like to me, it seems p reasonable to say gender is what you want it to be, and also reasonable to say it isn't. Probably because this is academic to me. I'd hate to be reading these debates whilst being under discussion myself.

Sex and gender are different things fwiw

Yeah let’s get into it

In this thread of all things.

rowling's comments are absolutely not in ignorance - she didn't say something stupid that demonstrated she's just completely clueless on trans issues, she said something that makes it very clear she's aware of the trans rights "debate" that's happening and is directly aligning herself with the transphobes. maya forstater, who rowling's comments were in support of, has gone well beyond any confused-but-still-harmful "reasonable concerns" into shit like writing essays comparing the idea of using preferred pronouns to date rape drugs.

no one who's been paying attention really shocked by rowling's mask coming off though since she's had a reasonable history of liking tweets by those types, followed by her publicist going "oh she says that was just a mistake :)" whenever it gets brought up

The TERF label is weird because I don't think anyone would describe her as a "radical feminist," she's just a garden variety reactionary transphobe.

Her politics have been shit forever so I don't know why it's a surprise.

TERF as a label has gotten a little divorced from its origins these days but that's because transphobia masquerading as 'feminism' has somewhat moved away from those roots too, making things a fair bit more muddled. as a movement it still has ideological ties to the transphobic side of 70s radical feminism etc. even if the parts of their 'feminism' that don't relate to transphobia are nearly completely divorced from it now, so i don't think it's an entirely inappropriate term (people who insist on calling people like trump a 'TERF' are just bizarre though) but i'm happier just to say transphobic 'feminism'.