See, the moment I realized that HP discourse had changed forever was when I saw a post calling out the portrayal of house elves and everyone in the comments emphatically agreeing with it. My first thought was "oh, so we're acknowledging that now?"
People ignored this shit for so long. I don't remember very many people actually trying to defend it (the few that did failed miserably), but it was something you just didn't talk about. Even when Rowling started making cringe additions to the lore (god, remember when that was why she was controversial?) and it became fashionable to rag on her worldbuilding, it was still considered in poor taste to pry too harshly into the house elf thing. Or the goblin thing. Or the squib thing. Or any of the other things. Because everyone still liked Rowling back then, and so they excused it. Sure, if you thought about it it wasn't great, but it was hardly considered a fatal flaw with the series.
And then Rowling went off the deep end and everything changed overnight. People blew right past acknowledging the dodgy aspects of the series and started declaring them evidence that the books had always been trash and Rowling had always been evil. Suddenly, it was the good aspects of the series you'd get backlash for bringing up.
IDK what I'm trying to say here. It's not like the house elf thing and all the other things aren't major flaws with the books, and I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't boycott Harry Potter and anything else that funnels money to that ghoul. I guess I'm just really frustrated with this approach to literary criticism that bases its entire view of a work on its view of the creator. The view that excuses a book's flaws because it likes who wrote it right up until it doesn't. The view that judges a person's morality by that of the people who made the media they like. I just think that it's a really unhealthy way to interact with media and I really wish the community at large could criticize and boycott JK without engaging in it.
