Lanna Michaels (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lannamichaels) wrote2020-07-16 05:41 pm
lannamichaels) wrote2020-07-16 05:41 pm
Entry tags:
Irrelevance of the author
This is not directed at any person or event, because it's something I've seen come up in various places and various reasons for longer than these things usually last for and I am deeply confused about it.
So, JK Rowling said something transphobic. I do not know what it is. I only know about it because people have mentioned it in other places. I have made the choice not to go look what it is. Do you know why? Because I don't care. And, because I'm not on twitter, this is not hard at all to do. It has blissfully passed me by while I ignored it and didn't give a fuck about it.
Harry Potter is a huge phenomenon and Rowling may own the copyright, but she doesn't own the cultural impact. A fuckton of people have read the books. A fuckton of people have seen the movies. I promise you, if you go play quidditch or mention HP in a fic, that does not mean that you agree with everything Rowling has said on twitter. And if someone does, that says a whole lot more about them than about you, I promise.
Like, this may be huge in some part of twitter (which I don't know that it is, but I suspect is the case from the footprint it has left), but twitter is not the cultural impact of Harry Potter. I promise you that my relative who spent months and months and months reading the books to her kids does not know about this nor do the kids. They enjoyed the books. The books are divorced from the author's media presence as far as they are concerned, because the twitter account is in no way linked to the physical copies of the books that they own. Plus, there's also kinda a lot going on in the world.
There are a lot of times I feel like I should finally actually get around to writing up that post on Every Author Is An Antisemite Read Their Books Anyway message that I got from my fourteen years of day school, where the only book that someone ever came and justified to our classroom why it was on the curriculum was The Chosen. But seriously. It's not even that you don't have to approve of an author's opinions to read their books, it's not even that you have to know what they are to read their books, it's all of it. You don't have to care about their opinions!
Yes, things come through in the books from the author's opinions; this is why when I did my English BA, I got so annoyed that I ended up saying things like I wanted to take an ice pick to the English canon to get rid of the entrenched christianity, which is probably still a worthwhile goal. Harry Potter could also stand to have the entrenched christianity taken out of it with an ice pick!
But you know what? Reading the books does not say anything about you other than that you are a person who read the books.
And I don't have a fucking clue what "support" even means these days, the way people use it, but let's be real, the last time I "supported" JKR was the last time I gave her money, which was when Deathly Hallows came out and I bought it, and that was more than a decade ago. I was at a meal once where someone was talking about no longer supporting JKR over something she had said on twitter (yes, this was back when we had meals) and I honestly could not figure out what she meant by support, because there was nothing coming out at the time that would involve giving her money. Defend her as a person? As a writer? Listen to what she said? Pay attention to her at all?
Guess what, I have not paid attention to JKR in years, and you can too! It's really great. Look, she pretty much lost me forever when she had a perfect spot in Deathly Hallows to say Dumbledore was gay and didn't take it and still wanted points for it anyway. She has always had opinions worth ignoring, it's totally fine to jump on the ignore JKR bandwagon!
Also I don't know if there's an author in the world whose opinions I pay attention to, at all. It's possible the last one was Neil Gaiman and I stopped paying attention to him when he was dating someone Wikipedia says he married in 2011.
(iirc the only author I have had positive personal interaction with is LMB who reached out to me after my deeply weird, extremely-short-lived experience on her mailing list that made me flounce. And even there, I have no idea what her personal opinions are on anything! And don't really care! The author is irrelevant.)
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I do want to say, though, that Rowling is in a somewhat unique position among authors, meaning she has a presence that far outstrips anyone in the middle of the usual brouhahas, and she also represents more than just HP nowadays, as she's become something of a spokesperson for British TERFiness. For example, her screed being cited by a senator in one of those terrible things going on in the rest of the world, the blocking of the Equality Act. So the impact is in this case rather a lot larger than Twitter, because JKR's impact is larger than Harry Potter, which is why the commotion is lasting longer than, say, the storm of idiocy surrounding Tamsyn Muir some months ago.
I also think that the decisions of people who do have a certain degree of power or influence to "support" nor not support JKR who congregate on Twitter get blended in with fandom responses because of Twitter's internal porosity. For example, BookRiot has decided to cease reporting on JKR (arguably a form of support) at all -- this has an actual impact, however small, on non-fandom book reporting and advertising writ large, just as a GOP senator has an impact on American politics writ large, both of which touch on Twitter but aren't restrained to it, because Twitter is the Large Hadron Collider of all sorts of things.
And that is a Twitter problem, because Twitter mashes so many spheres together with no context, but to me it does also indicate that those Venn diagrams reach outside the Twittersphere. So like, fans are one thing, but those fans are also humans connected to other worlds in which this has had an impact, and the jumbled mess that results is the consequence of these worlds colliding.
Anyway, long story short, I think all you say about fandom in particular is true, but I also think that, in this specific case with this specific author, Twitter is a representation of more worlds than just fandom, worlds with hands that have just been forced into changes that are going to have a long tail.
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Because Chaim Potok got put in cheirem, so there was some religiously stuff back and forth on whether to include it, I imagine. I didn't like that book, although I did read a bunch of other Potok books on my own time. I think I liked Davida's Harp? It's been a while. The book I tend to recommend when people talk about The Choson is Erich Segel's Acts of Faith, which I think does that whole theme a lot better.
Sure but that's JKR as celeb. To have it go backwards and say that anyone talking about Harry Potter is in approval of JKR's later career as an asshole seems very weird to me.
I agree that it's outside of the twittersphere in that it impacts politics, but that those politicians are, I imagine, all still on twitter. They are taking their positions and doing things, but I odn't see how that goes backwards and attaches itself to Harry Potter, except that that's what JKR is most famous for.
I can totally see every argument that this is a big deal... except for the "this is a big deal because it casts an impact on Harry Potter fandom" part. It's a big deal for transphobia, it's a big deal for x, y, and z... but Harry Potter fandom is... well, it's kinda separate from JKR? I know she's done Pottermore and she's tried to keep as much control over it as possible, and kept trying to shove things back in, but again, the HP fandom is so huge and giant that a large portion can just ignore word of god and go merrily on their way.
Would people who like Harry Potter who aren't on social media have heard of this?
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I do see your point of wanting the author to be dead as a doornail in fandom. I agree! Who doesn't like a nice trans racebent Harry Potter fic? But, "to have it go backwards and say that anyone talking about Harry Potter is in approval of JKR's later career as an asshole seems very weird to me," I think sort of misses my point, which was responding specifically the the parts of your post which were about a) why anyone outside of HP fandom cares, and b) why that outside response might be trickling down into HP fandom when usually it would have died down by now.
"Would people who like Harry Potter who aren't on social media have heard of this?" -- yes, I think that's rather what interests me here. People are, and fans are also real people engaging in non-fannish spheres which are still engaging with JKR because she's a celebrity. If they were watching cable news or getting newspapers on the Equality Act, then they may well have even if they're 80-year-old FOX watchers who read HP to their grandkids. Do major book-reviewing outfits with their own websites count as social media? I'm inclined to think not, and so I feel like people who are receiving podcasts, book news, or reviews from BookRiot will. Or even, sort of a cop-out but still true, the little pieces that have been in the NYT, Forbes, and other news outlets on the backlash have probably reached a ton of people who wouldn't know a fic if it was printed out and dropped on them. Her celebrity is because of Harry Potter, and her celebrity is what makes her trash opinions "newsworthy" outside of fandom at all, so it makes sense that it goes both ways.
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My intended point, which may have been lost, is why anyone in Harry Potter fandom cares.
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I also think that they're flailing around because there's nothing they can actually, really do, for all the reasons you describe, to address this hurt. And whether or not we both agree with why they're hurt, this is a lot to figure out if it's the first time this has happened to them (which would truly be incredible, but never underestimate the ability of people to be ridiculously sheltered), and particularly if they have been "in fandom" but not in transformative fandom, which is yet another set of worlds Twitter collapses.
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The saner versions of the commentary that I have seen do have support = money, which I think is actually part of the reason twitter (and tumblr! omg also tumblr) have gone a bit bonkers. Because the HP stuff mostly is not ongoing anymore (I mean, there's always merch, but there isn't any new media really), fans who want to concretely express their displeasure with her statements don't actually have any way to do that. So instead they're just... signalling really really hard. I think if there were something around to meaningfully boycott, many people currently up in arms on their social media platform of choice would do that, and then maybe calm down about people rereading the books, or continuing to write fanfic, or whatever.
I have also seen a fair bit of pushback on the sort of fan reaction you describe, along the lines of your comments. I have absolutely no idea what the relative volume is, because I deliberately try not to follow ""cancel"" people in the first place. I suspect that many people of your opinion are just not bothering to weigh in, since, yes, why. Most of HP fandom hasn't especially liked JKR for awhile now, it's not like there are huge numbers of fans (especially those of an age to read the books as they came out) hanging on her every tweet in the first place.
As to whether a HP fan not on social media would have heard of it, I think there's been enough mainstream press on it that it's a definite possibility. But it's obviously not been a page 1 story (page 1 doesn't have enough room for the actual page 1 stories as it is), so, no, I think a lot of people just haven't.
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Like, I get it, people who may be new to the fandom or new to JKR are in the position to be hurt by finding out someone who wrote something they love is saying terrible things. But I do not get how it gets from point A to point B in a general fandom sense.
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Also, I'll gladly help with the icepicking, if you want.
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(I'm still not over whatever book it was that assumed I knew when Michaelmas was. I am not their Intended Audience.)
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(Then again, this is also someone who used the word "tribal" to mean "non-industrialized." I asked her, "Aren't we all tribal, really?" and she nearly recanted.)
Wait, that's a thing? Not a thing made up for a book that sounds almost familiar, but an actual thing? Dang.
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Antisemitism? In my political movement?no subject
(I wrote a fic which takes place over winter where there's no mention of that December holiday whatsoever and I'm honestly curious to see if anyone asks me about its absence.)
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(Oh, it's like Christmas? It invades my life with microaggressions beginning in September and even with all my best efforts, I can't completely escape them?)
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I'm not on Twitter, so I'm not giving her a platform, and I'm not buying merchandise or trips to Potter World, so I'm not giving her money, so there's really not any response I can make at this point.
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