Nope I do not agree to that. I haven’t invested a lot of time studying Adam’s views, but from the little that I’ve read, his conclusions show an irrational fixation with black people. I can readily point to quoted statements that show his racial bias. Not that I consider myself a spokesperson for the African American community, but I don’t think any of us are defending his comments or the importance of his art to pop culture. (That said, I don’t think there are black-led efforts to boycott him either. He is such a minor figure in the grand scheme that it doesn’t make sense to treat him like a big deal.)
It is much more debatable whether JKR is the grand wizard of bigotry some are portraying her to be. There is a wide diversity of viewpoints regarding her beliefs, even within the trans community. While I would be surprised to a see black YouTuber with a large following speak out in defense of Adams, trans defenders of JKR are not uncommon. Buck Angel is one them.
So no, not the same. You are comparing a minor celebrity to a major celebrity. You are also comparing someone who has made obviously prejudiced comments to someone who, IMO, has not.
I think so too. And I think most people on this message board can see what distinctions are relevant to this thread, and which aren’t.
You tried to use King to back your opinion, ignoring other portions of his work in order to do so. None of us can speak for King; he’s dead. But his whole work should be considered.
I’m pretty sure I’m not going to convince you. Or @YWTF.
Modnote: OK, here’s the deal. You are thread banned from this thread. You are being instructed to stay out of threads that are touching on Trans issues and J.K. Rowling. This is board-wide.
This is probably going to get knocked up to the Modloop though I think a thread ban here is enough.
Everyone else, if the thread isn’t about Trans issues or J.K. Rowling and YWTF is participating, don’t bring it up. But this thread was clearly about both, so no one did anything wrong.
In the end, ISTM it adds up to, “you’re not being a true ally” does not equal “you’re bigoted trash at everything in your existence”, that is entirely in the listener’s head, and s/he needs to get over the need to be told “you’re not bad.”
The person(s) negatively impacted by bigotry are entirely entitled to pass judgement about allyship by THEIR standard.
It is entirely up to the “listener you” to decide whether in that, they are failing their own standard of what they want to be, and should act to make it otherwise. But if you are OK with just being friendly and 97% on-side, then fine, be so, good, that works for you. Just know inevitably someone will not be satisfied and they don’t owe it to you.
As far as Hermione’s actions towards the elves, I got the impression that it was sort of an analogy to “white-splaining”. She came off as very patronizing, and didn’t seem to care about learning anything about the elves themselves, or their culture. She just seemed to assume, “oh, they’re brainwashed, they don’t know what they’re talking about!”
There are ways of being an ally – but Hermione’s was really, really not helping. Quite the opposite.
I also thought the elves were based on the whole myth of the Brownies? Or was I wrong?
I can see where you get that; but it seemed to me that it wasn’t only supposed to be funny because Hermione was being ignorant, or even willfully ignorant; but was also supposed to be funny because she was meant to be going on about something that didn’t really matter.
I do think it was based on the brownie stories – but I think it warped that sort of story quite badly. In the versions I’ve seen, it wasn’t at all that the brownies or similar beings were enslaved unless they were given clothing – it was that they were doing humans favors of their own free will, and were insulted by being given clothing, so they quit because of the insult. That seemed to me to mean ‘we like being naked, it’s our proper culture, how dare you try to turn us into imitation humans by getting us to wear clothes!’ Which is nothing remotely like what’s going on in the Harry Potter books, in which the house elf is shown as being pathetically grateful for being granted the gift of a dirty sock. That comes across as seriously nasty, to me.
Wasn’t that just the one elf though? The rest were insulted by Hermoine trying to stash clothes around for the elves to find and be liberated. So I’ve read in other discussions – not read the books personally. In the game, the whole house elf thing isn’t touched on a ton. There’s one who hangs out in your area (he’s Hogwart’s elf though, not yours) and has a couple stories about how his previous masters were dicks but he’s super happy to be chilling in Hogwarts these days. You run a couple quests for him but don’t seriously get into the nature of the whole house elf thing. You also meet a couple other who mainly serve to point out that some wizards are real assholes. “Some wizards are real assholes” is actually the main theme of the game when you get down to it.
In general though, it’s not well defined in game and sort of confusing. I don’t know if that’s how it plays across the books/films. But they also don’t play much of a part in the game’s story so it’s not as though you’re working to keep the house elf repressed or working to liberate them. You’ve got enough going on with dudes trying to kill you and stuff.
I finished the game today and, while it’s perfectly legitimate to not play the game because of Rowling, the thematic complaints about the game are mainly just nonsense. Classic case of “Tell me you haven’t played Hogwarts Legacy without saying that you haven’t played Hogwarts Legacy”.
The only thematic complaints I’ve heard are about goblins and antisemitism. And they didn’t sound super compelling. But i haven’t gone looking. The big issue is how comfortable you are supporting Rowling, i think.
Been a while since I read the books. But again, in the old brownie stories I’ve seen, the clothes have nothing to do with the brownies being “liberated” because they weren’t enslaved to start with.
Depicting slaves as being happy about their slavery is an old trope and also pretty nasty.
I haven’t played the game, and wasn’t commenting on that; only on the books.
It’s perfectly possible that Rowling just wasn’t thinking about any implications of how she depicted the house elves, and is consciously vehemently against human slavery. This kind of failure to think things through is quite common, and people who don’t think aren’t necessarily being deliberately evil. But it’s still a problem.
For all my complaints about her books, world-building ain’t among them. There are elements of her worldbuilding that don’t make a lick of sense (Quidditch, economics, etc.), but she’s really, really good at building her world fractally: each new book opens the reader up to a new aspect of the world and develops it in great detail.
Which is why the slavery is so jaw-droppingly gross.
Yes! The books have:
Another race of sentient creatures kept as slaves.
“Bad” wizards who are mean to their enslaved people.
“Good” wizards who are nice to those they enslave.
Reformers who are shown to be ridiculous for wanting to overthrow the system.
Happy slaves who resent anyone trying to change the system.
Most importantly, nobody who’s enslaved who takes the lead in trying to change the system.
It has all the gross tropes of antebellum mythology.
We must read different sites. The published reviews on reputable sites I’ve seen have been largely positive of the game. The main exception being the “review” on Wired which was just someone ranting about how they used to love Harry Potter but now they can’t support Rowling. They barely mention the game itself then give it a 1/10, obviously based on their feelings about Rowling and not the game. But, for example, none of the twenty PC game reviews on Metacritic have those complaints.
The thematic stuff is more from forums and social media where many of the comments read as though everyone got the same anti-game press kit and are just repeating what someone else told them. Which makes a fair bit of sense since I doubt these people want to pay $60 to develop their own opinions based on experience.
That’s my amateur read on it. She used the idea of the brownie as a starting point and used the house elf thing to let Potter be a hero in freeing Dobby but didn’t bother to think through what this said about the magical world in general. We’re talking about a series of YA fantasy novels being picked apart by modern academia at this point. It’s legitimate to find out distasteful but I don’t think it’s an intended theme.
As a reason to avoid the game, it barely pings since the game has barely touches it on depth. Without second hand knowledge of the world through cultural osmosis, I’d have let the game pretty confused on what the deal with house elves is.
It hardly takes “academia” to be taken aback by running into “happy slavery” in young adult fiction. I read a lot of YA fiction, and a lot of fantasy, but I’m hardly a critic. Just a reader. Still, i notice that these days, some YA protagonists have sex, or acquire birth control. That’s new since i was a young adult. And slavery just isn’t something that the good guys are comfortable with in most modern YA fiction.
I’m sure it wasn’t an intended theme. I’m sure she didn’t think much about it. But that makes her an extreme outlier. Most of the authors i read are more self-aware than that.
I read the rest of the books anyway. And mostly i enjoyed them. But it was a niggling thing that bothered me about the books, the world, and Rowling.
Because Rowling probably just didn’t think about it doesn’t mean that other people shouldn’t do so.
I think kids should read whatever they want to read – and that their families and teachers should point out problematic things about what they’re reading. Not to stop them from reading everything with anything problematic in it, which would be most of existing literature whether aimed at teenagers or not; but to encourage them to think about it, and to realize how easy it is to unthinkingly accept things that shouldn’t be accepted.
Just wanted to say that my reference to academia was to say that the HP novels have received a level of discussion and dissection most novels, much less YA literature, never get. It wasn’t to imply that the only ones talking/thinking about them were seventh graders and Harvard literary professors.
Yeah, because they are so popular. But these particular problems don’t require academia to notice them. They are things that many seventh graders and a large fraction of the adult audience noticed on their own, I’d guess.