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.)
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1135087.html.