It's been a while, hasn't it?

Doodle reqs ><

I’m trained in literary criticism, I personally study a lot of stuff from people with stupid opinions in my freetime, including opinions about people like me, I enjoy reading in general. What is it about Harry Potter that makes me just not want to come back to it?

I think it’s kind of how it became a part of culture for a while. And at the time it wasn’t criticized as heavily as other things I witnessed, at least from my child’s perspective. Poking holes in media has been a favorite pastime of mine for long time, including with Harry Potter, but the fundamental emotional core of the thing never quite felt flawed.

Yes Rowling put some stupid things in there but that’s to be expected from a white woman in Britain who has had most of her life being taken care of for her. At the end of the day, the intentions always felt solid even if the execution was less than perfect.

Then came the slow eroding of her reputation. I picked up on it before most people did. The moment she went “mask off” in 2020 I and many others were surprised that people saw it that way. She’d been consorting with transphobes for years at that point. In online trans spaces she’d been a known radfem apologist for a long time.

But then she got worse. Like she started materially hurting people with her money. And that’s about when to me I really started to get sick when thinking about Harry Potter.

It’s like. She’s not just a privately bigoted person who accidentally made a story about misfits finding a place that they belonged. She’s taking the power that the marketing machine behind that series granted her to cause active harm right now.

It’s at about that point I no longer found myself with the ability to turn on my critical brain trained in the ways of lit analysis or my casual consumer brain just liking fun things even if they’re bad. I just felt a pit in my stomach. I moved the family copies of the Harry Potter books from my room into the communal family bookshelf and then into my dad’s room because I couldn’t stand looking at them anymore.

It’s not just that Rowling is an author with bad opinions. I’ve read plenty of those. It’s not just that the series isn’t what I thought it was. That’s par for the course of most things you read as a child and revisit as an adult. It’s the combined power of her and her brand being everywhere and inescapable and her currently using the power that gives her for evil. Not only was the core of the series disingenuous but the series itself is currently actively causing people harm and normies just casually walk by it at Barnes and noble vaguely wondering if they should buy a mug for their cousin not knowing or not caring what that actually represents.

I can read dumb shit. I can handle my beloved childhood media being worse than I remember it. I can even handle my favorite authors turning out to be absolute garbage but the level of how all this happened with Harry Potter almost has no equivalent that I can think of because it is so big and so destructive and so intertwined with its author in the way that very few other things are.

The author cannot be dead with Harry Potter because she keeps coming back in to twist the knife. She has implanted herself into the series itself so firmly that trying to remove her from it make the entire thing implode on itself into something else entirely. And she uses that firm rooting that she’s established to materially harm people. People like me just one continent over. I’m sure she’d also interfere in other countries politics if she legally could.

It’s like. You can’t think critically through the full scope and ramifications of something when she hasn’t even stopped twisting that knife of hers. I can playfully stick my tongue out at shakespeares bad opinions because he isn’t alive right now spending his money on bad things. And even most authors alive now don’t have financial knives big enough to make much of a difference.

Rowling though? She can just throw a million dollars at something. It’s no wonder I can’t look at those books. My siblings are being threatened with them. It’s a lot easier to study a knife in a museum than one that’s currently being held to someone’s throat.

HP Fandom isn't just a problem because of the direct financial support. It also continues to infuse the IP, and JKR as a result, with cultural capital and social influence. It gives jkr a cultural relevance that means her words are platformed more seriously and more widely than other authors whose works are not infused with this level of sustained popularity. She has said, very plainly, that she (and the people who will fund her future projects) views ALL Fandom action as support.

how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem

what common file types are

some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)

how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private

how to understand terms of service (hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)

what a cookie actually is

internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl

basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)

common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)

as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on

vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)

how to not get a virus while pirating something

what a temporary email is and when to use one

red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)

an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous

a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps

a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)

It's disgusting this is what we're dealing with, but people are losing money because of some truly evil people out there.

DO NOT TRUST ANY GOFUNDME OR REQUEST FOR CROWDFUNDING THAT PALESTINIAN BLOGGERS HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

At this point I'm fine receiving a bunch of inbox messages asking me to vet x y z so y'all can avoid this shit. But please have some critical thinking!

Whether you wanna read the whole thing or not idc.

REBLOG IT.

Hairstyle Meme :3

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