"Dumbledore is Gay" sez Rowling

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'.

all attributions are bad, regardless of the verb

Yeah there are a few problems with chucking 'TERF' around, I think that word needs bringing to heel a bit - the discussions around girl's sports and women's prisons have to happen, and 'TERF' gets used to hold up those discussions. On the other hand actual TERFs don't do themselves any favours eh

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

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Sunday, December 29, 2019 6:43 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

not everyone who has shit politics is necessarily transphobe but i’m glad you see her clearly

The issue I had with the rumors of her transphobia was it was based purely on Twitter follows and handfuls of retweets. It did paint a picture that she was probably someone who at least sympathized with TERFs, but I don't like the precedent that might start cancelling people that are more ambiguous cases based on iffy circumstantial data.

I don't really feel bad for Rowling in this case because if she had mischaracterized, she had ample opportunity to clear things up and opted not to. Fortunately she removed any doubt with her actual Tweet

Yeah there are a few problems with chucking 'TERF' around, I think that word needs bringing to heel a bit - the discussions around girl's sports and women's prisons have to happen, and 'TERF' gets used to hold up those discussions.

i have no problem with just saying 'transphobe' instead because most of those scaremongering about things like women's sports, bathrooms, etc. are not particularly interested in discussing the issues and more interested in promoting anti-trans bigotry

I have no problem with saying TERF because it really pisses TERFs off

@UFO yup the RF bring in unnecessary associations. As you can be RF without being TE.

P.s. When I say the discussions around sports and prisons need to happen, what I mean is they need to happen and also are horrible and prone to hijacking by transphobic honkers. Imo the only people that matter here are the kids on the running team be they trans or cis and the prisoners likewise, really they should have a place to sort things out away from the honkers

Seems that JK's transphobic twitter nonsense was just the warm up / research phase for this

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/09/14/jk-rowling-new-book-cormoran-strike-troubled-blood-killer-dresses-woman/

luckily nobody's giving free publicity to her

ok soz

no one is going to read that thing, just like no one reads any of her other 'adult' books

The BBC will be along shortly to throw her another few grand tho maybe

no one is going to read that thing, just like no one reads any of her other 'adult' books

― akm, Monday, September 14, 2020 7:18 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

there's a built in audience for this one though

I hear way too much about this hack’s antics and I’d never even heard of this series before today. “Cormoran strike” certainly sounds like an adult book for adults tho I’ll give her that

sorry to report that these books are bestsellers and already have a 4-series BBC adaptation

Adults are fucking idiots tbf

I was trying to find global sales figures for the Robert Galbraith books but the only concrete figure I discovered was from 2015 - 1.5 million copies of the first two books sold in the UK alone across print/digital etc.

how do i shot moon? (Noodle Vague)
Posted: 15 September 2020 at 10:19:41
Adults are fucking idiots tbf

It is odd that when this thread was started, JKR was presumably seen as some kind of daringly progressive person for implying that some of her children's book characters might be gay.

It always seemed a cowardly lie, either it's in the book or it's not.

having read the books with kids recently, the handling of romantic relationships in general is one of the worst aspects of them (and obv there is plenty of competition there) - it's not like she is keeping sex out of it to keep the books PG-rated, it's like she is completely clueless about emotional development, which is weird because all the other teenage books on sale seem to have that in their DNA.

could've saved herself the effort of writing this 900 page book by just retconning voldemort as trans.

i've read the first 3 of these galbraith books and the first two are fine but the third one was a bit boring. and yes they sell really well where i work.

I wonder if their audience is mostly crime fic readers or Rowling stans

crime fic i think. most of the customers seem too old to have liked harry potter, at a guess i'd put the demographic at 45 yrs and older, based on one airport bookshop. i've never read the harry potter's but liked these well enough. tbh i churn through crime fic p easily and my standards aren't high. think i read the first 20 lee child's in the space of 3 months during the quiet season.

could've saved herself the effort of writing this 900 page book by just retconning voldemort as trans.

still eminently possible tbf

Not enough being said about how ludicrous a name Cormoran Strike is, tbh

ludicrous names are kind of a cornerstone of detective fiction tbf

We can only be grateful he wasn't called Cormorant Transhate

this name is some way down the list of bad things associated with this writer

it isn't even anything like the worst name they've come up with

It's hilarious how loads of people guessed Robert Galbraith was JKR before it was made public because of the distinctively shitty style.

Was trying to give her the benefit of doubt about all this—like, I was assuming she is a reasonable and humane person who somehow was not getting how much she was hurting people—but this is straight-up trolling.

I seem to remember there being a fuss about her being outed as Galbraith, because she had wanted to succeed under a man's name to prove the feminist point that it was easier for a male writer to be taken seriously.

I'm assuming her next book will lean heavily on a subplot about people on the internet being VERY mean to Cormoran Strike.

maybe cormoran strike will write some tedious and derivative kids books