newly, HBO Max Officially announced it will be alive Harry Potter The series as a multi-season TV show. during Discovery Warner Brothers press event, and described the initiative as a “decade-long” project to bring in novels on the small screen, hoping to create a faithful interpretation of Book Seven series. author JK Rowling is set to executive produce.
io9 nothing to write about Harry Potter. We do not cover Fantastic Beasts Movie series. We don’t report on the Wizarding World, Universal Potter– A themed garden expansion. We don’t write about JK Rowling. We can, there is nothing to stop us, but go back in 2020—Although large areas of our site are devoted to the fantasy genre—We decided that we It will not perpetuate the cultural capital To a woman who vigorously and unapologetically advocated for transgender disenfranchisement and targeted trans women in particular, under the guise of defending the rights of cisgender women.
Whatever Rowling’s intentions, beliefs, or true feelings about trans people, the rhetoric she has shared and supported in recent years about gender identity has been echoed by Self-Identified Radical Feminists (TERFs), and used to legitimize transphobia. sexuality as a major topic of debate in the United Kingdom And across the world. Three years agowhen Rowling launched a series of Transphobic tweets A. was released refute Against accusations of its anti-trans rhetoric, io9 unofficially decided to further Rowling’s work with continued coverage — and for the most part stuck to our non-Rowling editorial direction. But choosing not to cover the announcement of a new show or a new trailer Fantastic Beasts Film differs in choosing when and how to discuss it Harry Potterfan base and their evolving relationship With Rowling’s frequent and controversial commentary.
I want to ask you not to get excited about Rowling’s potential decade in the spotlight for a series you wrote about 30 years ago years ago. Some people, of course We are excited about this. To be completely fair, I don’t necessarily blame them; the Harry Potter Books were very important to a great many people of my generation. They were enthusiastic and charming. They taught people how to read, and returned adults to books. Groups of friends formed around midnight to read. Week-long parties and celebrations centered around release dates, first for books, then for movies. Many people, myself included, have grown up alongside Harry and his friends; I was eight when the first book came out in the States, and I was 11 When the first movie was shown. Harry Potter She inspired us to write, read and survive. nothing –Even Rowling –Could do to take those memories away from us. They are precious, they are ours, and they are not up for discussion.
I am 32 years old now. I am no longer a child. I still have the first Harry Potter A book I was absolutely talented. It’s an American first edition print since 1998, and it sits below my modest collection of Virginia Woolf’s first editions. (TWoo! I have two. I save for a third.) I still appreciate those books –But it was firmly in the past. Moving forward, I will not kill my memories of Harry Potter–Forays into role-playing forums, fans you’ve written, dates at the movies. I’m killing the part of me that fantasizes about any attempt to experience those defining moments again, to feel, for a second, as if I were a child, magically transported to Hogwarts – a place where your friends will support you, your family will find you and monsters creatures with blood under their claws – and that is worth supporting. JK Rowling. Even beyond the direct involvement she would have in shaping the series, this new HBO Max project will put money in the pocket of a woman who has repeatedly shielded criticism of her transphobic comments with a defense claiming that the fortune bestowed on her by Harry Potter Shows that the People support her comments. In her latest case of transphobia, on the podcast JK Rowling’s Witch Trials, The transgender rights movement equated to death eaters In her novels, the distinctly villainous faction of dark wizards who infiltrate the upper echelons of magical society and government to work for Voldemort’s restoration, purging “impure” witches and wizards born of non-magical parents. There is no feeling worth supporting this. Nostalgia doesn’t deserve trans rights.
You killed my affection for Harry Potter. I buried him. I refuse to allow space for this series in my life. Because as a trans person, as a friend of trans people, as someone who has dated, go out with him, hold handspartied withsupported, walked withAnd I love trans people.It’s worth more than Rowling’s. It’s worth more than Rowling’s world. They deserve to open and sew the wound, and move beyond the children’s story. Real people are harmed by Rowling’s rhetoric, and giving her stories more space in our cultural consciousness does harm to one of the most marginalized groups of people in the world.
When asked if HBO Max was concerned about Rowling’s opinions affecting the new series, Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max content declined to comment, saying those issues were “Online chat. It’s true that a lot of the conversation about transphobia in particular happens online, but the effects of transphobia And the conversations that happen offline are very real. These conversations take place around dinner tables, in schools, in taverns, in police stations, in courthouses, in lawmakers’ chambers. Mutant bodies are legitimized from existence –Medical and life-saving gender-affirmative care is denied and criminalized. This is not a problem on the Internet; It’s just a problem. And, in my opinion, this bland, perverted answer is a coward’s response to a call for accountability.
Since it seems like the Bloys only recognize online conversations as legitimate if they’re about numbers in their HBO Max bank account, it’s up to the rest of us to cut loose. Harry Potter out of our lives. Ex-fans, those of us with latch tattoos, those who still remember Pottermore persona, their fan ships, who cherish their Universal mobsters, who, to this day, still keep their Hogwarts house on file. It’s up to us to refuse to indulge in that nostalgia, and to refuse to give JK Rowling space in our lives. Kill your fictional darlings, and keep your memories.
She has millions to her, she has her charities, and a Thilarious, her dirty detective novels that don’t sell until she reveals she was the one writing them; She doesn’t need fans. She would love them, but she doesn’t He deserves us, because we are lovers Rowling’s work here and now admires a woman who believes discrimination against trans women is an act of feminism and praise. You can’t separate who she is from what she’s done, and her despicable use of her as a shield means that even the fandom is safe from her. No matter what Warner Bros. thinks, , Harry Potter He must die – and die with us.
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