JK Rowling in ‘arrest me’ challenge over Scottish hate crime law
JK Rowling has challenged Scotland's new hate crime law in a series of social media posts - inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.
The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.
She said "freedom of speech and belief" was at an end if accurate description of biological sex was outlawed.
Earlier, Scotland's first minister Humza Yousaf said the new law would deal with a "rising tide of hatred".
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of "stirring up hatred" relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.
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Ms Rowling, who has long been a critic of some trans activism, posted on X on the day the new legislation came into force.
It's becoming harder and harder to be a Harry Potter fan nowaday.
I don't really understand what it is about X Formerly Known as Twitter that turns previously respectable people into, well, this.
Everybody should take a break from social media once in a while, it's better for your health.
It doesn't turn these people, they were shitty all the time, they just get a platform on X so it becomes visible
Part of it is that having a large captive audience hanging on to your every word really starts to amplify toxic characteristics in those with the predisposition for shittiness. Like Musk or Trump, their descend only came when they became active on social media.
Twitter is a horrible thing.
Trump thought the day the Twin Towers fell was a good time to mention his property was closer to the tallest building in New York. That very evening, on the news, in 2001. Here's a link.
Honestly he did so many "Career Suicides" for Politicians that it broke the system, I get that's why he won, but... still how the shit did he not get sunk by his 9/11 response, I mean, yeah he said stupid shit ages ago.. but the dude straight up got 9/11 and 7/11 mixed up.
The fuck did we go from "A weird yell will disqualify you!" to this!?!?
Because the journalists didn't do their job. They should have been blasting the "tallest building" and his weird infatuation with his daughter, but he was profitable, so they let it slide.
I really dont think Rowling started off this shitty. From what I've heard it sounds like she has baggage regarding men she hasnt dealt with and its led her down this incredibly shitty path
The books have some really problematic themes that add up over time. If HP ended with the first book, they would be a curiosity, but they add up and JK had a really crooked world view when she wrote them. It's likely her editor soften them in the beginning, but they had less control as they got more popular.
Not to challenge, just don’t remember the later books, what are some good examples of that?
I stopped reading about halfway though and that was when they were being released. I'd say my mounting issues at the time was the weird pettiness of the good characters, the cheapness of Harry(why didn't he pay for the car he helped wreak? Why didn't he pay rent to the Weasley family?), and books ending with cheap drama(how many times did Harry loose a positive father figure?). If you want a larger breakdown, here's a good one that goes into a lot of detail.
They were always awful. They just needed a platform where they could blossom into the terrible people they always were.
Yeah Rowling has been a notorious TERF for many years now.
Oh yeah it was definitely Twitter that made her a bigot. She was an upstanding and progressive citizen before a website made her bad! /s
That's like saying "I don't really understand what it is about alcohol that makes people racist"
If I remember correctly, it all started when she retweeted something that was a bit ignorant and was called out for it on Twitter, but then she kept doubling down until it got to this point, when she could have just stopped talking about it.
It's not that Twitter suddenly turned her into a bad person, but it definitely brought out the worst in her.
No it just revealed her beliefs to a wider audience. Twitter like all social media doesn’t bring out anything - it’s just a lens that gives the viewer a perspective they might never have seen and these view are then amplified by others who share them. Rowling was always this person, social media just allowed her to share and amplify her views.
I disagree. Social media and the "contrarian" attitude they carry, especially Twitter, can help consolidating and radicalizing your opinions. You get exposed to a very toxic way to carry out conversation (especially on Twitter, where you have constant dogpiling and wannabe famous people who try to "blast" others) so that if they are the only places you discuss about certain subjects, can bring you to shift your views as well.
I am not saying this is the case for J.K. Rowling (I don't know), but I don't think we can immediately discard the idea that the dynamics of the medium also affected the result.
I see your point but there are about a hundred or so thoughts I have a day that I am way way cowardly to record. The position she is in with a large fanbase, lots of money, and interacting with pixels probably contributed to her lack of filter.
So right she might have been intrinsically not a very good person prior but all this stuff hasn't helped her keep a lid on it.
sorry to join the little dogpile, but its not X, those are her beliefs.
There are a LOT better books out there then childrens books about wizard school, which she absolutely lifted from Jill Murphy.
The worst witch right?
I see the movie has Tim curry in it. I'm sold. Appreciate the recommendation
Dude.... my friend's and I get together (video conference) to watch the film every year in late October. It also features Charolette Rae (the matriarch on Facts of Life) Dianna Rigg (Queen of Thorns on Game of Thrones) and Fariuza Balk (The Craft, Waterboy etc.)
The Worst Witch was a series of books though that Rowling absolutely read before "coming up with" a boarding school for magic using students, but get this: In Rowling's imagination its BOYS instead of girls who are the main focus, and the protoganist is the messiah instead of a girl screw-up with a heart of gold. Its not in the film but there are houses with colorful characteristics, the protoganist is from a non-magical family and the scary, raven haired potion teacher seems to hate the protoganist while the kind, grey haired headmaster is patient and understanding. She has two friends in the invisible (to non magic users) castlesque boardings school thats surrounded by a forbidden forest where she hangs out with two friends, one who's straight laced and academically sharp and the other who's a bit goofy.
Anyway Tim Curry does a musical number
I think the mistake we make is thinking that people are better than they are. I probably have some hidden bigotry that I am unaware of right now but given a space to be exposed to it someone would notice and point it out. If you only know of someone from one thing they did you can form an opinion of them based on very limited information. Get to know them better and you find that hidden awful. Twitter is a tool of constant broad interaction and it preserves bad takes long enough to see them. Add a culture of never admiting to being wrong and filtering by who you agree with and you have a cycle of awful that turns perfectly boringly not great but OK people into monsters defending genocide. Maybe we shouldn't know anything about the author, replace their name with a serial number or pseudonym and let the art stand on it's own. Though the racist jewish, wait no goblin, bankers was fairly intense tbh.
Have you read the books as an adult? If that wont kill your fandom, I don't think anything will.
I mean tbf, the books were written for children. If you don't like them, then maybe it's because they're not for you anymore. Or are you referring to something else?
As a kid in the target age range, I bailed after the second or third time Harry gained and lost a positive father figure. There were mounting little issues and the longer the books got, the less rewarding the payoff got. But even I assumed that setting up normalized slavery in your world would lead into a story line that denounces it. Instead, JK didn't address it in a positive manner and we ended up with HP Adults writing essays defending House Elf Slavery.
Fair enough. Probably also doesn’t help that the civil rights organization that Hermione founded, or rather attempted to found, was called SPEW. As in, synonym for “vomit”
My first time reading them, at the age of like, 10? 11? I was so excited for Order of the Phoenix because it was coming out soon and I'd loved the first one that I got as a birthday gift. I slammed through 2 and 3, then 4 just kept going and felt so bad that by the end I wasn't excited for Order anymore and didn't finish the series until Order was releasing as a film. They weren't even that good as a kid if you read anything else
Here's an excellent analysis of how and why the Harry Potter hype of the late 90s was very intentionally manufactured and sold to kids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBftW7FzOVI
if you ever have a couple hours to spare, i think shaun made a really great video on this topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs
he talks about JK rowling and harry potter, and how many of JK rowlings beliefs/worldviews are embedded into harry potter. he’s very thorough.
While I am not defending Twitter by any means. I feel like what actually breaks people's brains is becoming a billionaire. You lose all empathy for other humans.
The cause and effect may be reversed there.
I mean, it is for most billionaires. But Rowling isn't a businesswoman who got parents money to invest in a company to rob the proletariat.
She just wrote a book that happened to be a gigaseller.
But either way, billionaires have broken brains.
I don't like Harry Potter to begin with, but I don't really have a huge problem separating the artist from the art if the only thing they did was be hateful.
Roald Dahl was a major antisemite, but I still think he wrote great children's books and suspense/horror stories. H. P. Lovecraft was bigoted about pretty much anyone who wasn't a white man. Again, a really good writer.
Where is becomes hard to separate them is when they actually do something about their disgusting ideas. Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are pedophiles. I will never watch either of their movies. And I think both have made very good movies. I feel that I was wrong to watch the ones I did.
So yeah, Rowling is an utterly contemptible piece of shit, but if you like Harry Potter, it's okay.
There were always questionable elements from the books, like the depictions of goblins and elves. But knowing what we know now, these elements cannot be brushed off any more.
The Elves were directly based off of "Brownies"
It's also highly unusual that elves were depicted this way, considering most fantasy stories hold them in high regard as being magical beings seeing themselves above humanity for reasons that are normally geniunely sound (Better moral compass, natural magical talents... Whereas in Harry Potter it's the exact opposite, humanity seems to be the highest creature and Elves feel like to squabble before them..
There's no way the "Brownie" similarity is unintentional
So what's a Brownie? Well it was a way of explaining slaves to young children back in those days, to brush off the casual cruelty by lying to kids. Essentially the myth of the "Brownie" was to re contextualize the suffering of the black slave as a magical event, a beautiful mysterious thing to be observed not with horror, but with wonder. A big part of the myth claimed that you can't give a Brownie anything nice like proper clothing, or else this "breaks the contract between Man and Fae" and they run back into the woods never to be seen again.
"No it's okay children, they're magical forest people called Brownies! And they LIKE doing that work for us! Oh and we can't give them anything nice, or they'll disappear forever! And you wouldn't want that to happen! No no, really, they're faeries, and they like being whipped like that!"
Feeling disgusted? Good, that sickness in your stomach is proof that you're a better person than JK Rowling.
tl;dr Harry Potter elves are a resurrection of Pro-Slavery Propaganda used to indoctrinate children into thinking it's okay to treat people like shit. They had to GASLIGHT LITERAL CHILDREN into thinking that black people were magical elves, in order to stop them from feeling bad about slavery.. and JK decided to bring that back for her kid's book.
As much fun as Hogwarts Legacy is, I hope she rots in hell and then is reborn as a transgender woman to learn basic empathy.
Oh sweet summer child... You better not know about elves in folklore...
And even if we only look at Tolkin's Elves, who basically are the base of the whole modern conception of them, they certainly aren't better as a general rule. Some of them are really shitty fucks.
I'm guessing they watched the LOTR movies and said, "yep. That's what people thought elves were."
Have you never heard of Santa's elves? Or Elves in Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'?
Well, there’s elves, then there’s Elves.
I've been meaning to read the latter, and we're all aware of the former, but there's a lot of conflicting legends of Santa's Helpers
I’m very torn on this issue, like I 100% agree on Polanski and Allen(especially Woody not that Polanski isn’t incredibly shitty too but most of his work isn’t about sexualizing minors, whereas the primary and ultimate love interest for Woodys stand in character in Manhattan is a child). I might, and big emphasis on might watch Chinatown or the Ninth Gate again after he’s dead and in the cold cold ground, but I damn sure won’t pay for any of them if I decide to make that call.
And I only say this because there have been so many shitty people in Hollywood and the movie making business in general I think it’s impossible to watch most without supporting someone awful. Weinstein produced a ton of great films, Brando anally raped Maria Schneider in Last Tango and the scene we see is the one and only take if memory serves(I don’t watch that film anymore but I still watch the Godfather every few years), Kevin Spacey and Brian Singer are predators but I’m sure I’ll watch the Usual Suspects again at some point in my life.
I obviously don’t besmirch anyone that simply can’t bring themselves to engage in art by people we know to be bastards. But I kinda look at it the same way as buying a pair of Nikes, there is certainly a lot of profit from suffering that produced those shoes but I don’t necessarily think anyone is a bad person for wanting some new Jordans
Honestly learning everyone in Hollywood is a fucking creep explains a lot about how genuinely disturbing the actions of male leads in "Romantic Comedies" tend to be
Try half the shot in a "Romance" movie in real life and even at the time most of them originally came out, you'd go to jail and no one would feel sorry for you.
My bigger issue with Polanski is that he should have been extradited decades ago.
100% agree, he should be locked up
Edit: the following isn’t what I think about him, but I do think he’d have been more likely to suffer the proper consequences had the Manson family not murdered Sharon Tate, it in no way should give him any sympathy or protection and it’s pretty fucking gross that it does, but I don’t think it’s a non factor
Yeah honestly if history remembering who Edison and Dahl were didn't sink GE and Wonka, Harry Potter will be fine... but fuck, she did suicide her own legacy
I don't think you can ethically separate art from artist when the artist is still alive, profiting from their work, and using those profits to further causes that you abhor. JKR doesn't limit herself to expressing her views on social media.
Even there, I think it's a grey area. I was already in middle school when Roald Dahl died and I'm Jewish, but my dad (who was remarkably sensitive to antisemitism in almost every other case) still read me his children's books. He did profit off of them and he shouldn't, but it's hard to deny that books like James and the Giant Peach or The BFG aren't amazingly good children's books which don't themselves have any bigotry issues (Willy Wonka not so much re the original Oompa Loompas) and it would be hard to say that children shouldn't have been reading books that good just because the guy who wrote them was horrible.
I just don't know how to feel about such things. At what point is a work so good that it transcends how horrible the person who made it is? I don't have an answer there.
As I said, I've never been a fan of Harry Potter, so this particular issue does not apply to me in this case and I honestly do not know what I would do about it if I did.
I don't know the extent of Dahl's antisemitism, and am not currently inclined to research it. I also enjoyed his stories growing up, as well as Lovecraft's, and lots of other authors who held views that I strongly disagree with. I don't think all art created by deeply flawed people is worthless, by any means.
However, I strongly disagree with the notion that a piece of high-quality art is some kind of ethical trump card; it's a bald-faced cop-out. Providing material support to someone who habitually crusades against an oppressed minority isn't a gray area because you(rhetorically—I don't mean you, personally) like their stories. Art is everywhere. There's really no dearth of excellent stories written by people that are either dead, or don't spend their time stirring up hate.
I don't mean to suggest that the work somehow justifies the abhorrent views of the author, just that sometimes art transcends the artist. It's in no way a universal thing and maybe it doesn't and/or shouldn't apply to Rowling's works. I only read part of the first book and I didn't enjoy it, so I personally don't think so.
But my post was more about not beating yourself up about liking something made by a terrible person.
Yeah, I feel like we're mostly talking past each other. Cheers!
And I agree, that would be silly.
I possess the books and movies, and never interact with the fandom or the author. There is zero need to. Let the art exist in isolation.
NEXT POINT: the stories have their own issues regarding certain portrayals but that is aside from the context of "new developments" a la the author's modern opinions on things outside the plot of the books.
Yeah, like, I don't know what Frank Herbert or J.R.R.Tolkein's stances on trans rights would have been either, and it doesn't impact me reading their work at all.
On the other hand, I do not want to give this person any money, so there's that. I won't be spending money on her stuff.
There are nautical ways
Frank Herbert I imagine wouldn't have been a fan. Dune really sets up a battle between natural+religion vs. atheism+technology.
I miss when my biggest problem with JK Rowling was her desire to keep writing new material for Harry Potter, but instead of ya know... making spinoff books, maybe do a TV Show, maybe get in touch with Archie at some point for an expanded universe comic: I mean God knows they need the money after Sonic went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back... oh right Warner Bros. owns the franchise... so I guess DC could have done the Expanded Universe comic?
No instead of doing any of that she just randomly dripped out plotpoints from the internet, and always stuff that made no fucking sense... like
"Dumbledore was gay the whole time, despite the fact that I NEVER HINTED AT THIS! Also Wizards don't have toilets! They shit themselves and magic away the poop! By the way, Hermonie was always black despite the fact I always described her as being pale skinned!"
The "Dumbledore was gay" was especially infuriating because she wrote the "Fantastic Breasts" movies, and instead of expanding upon the Dumbledore's gay thing at all, they just use the "They're just really good friends!" cover, ya know, the one that's an amazing progressive way to imply that without running afoul of the "Moral Majority".... in 1992....
But the medal ultimately goes to "Hermonie is black!", because the only reason she came up with it was to try to better canonize the "Cursed Child" play.. which wound up having a black actress play Hermonie.
Instead of doing the adult thing and admitting that most writers accepted by the mainstream are white, and therefore an overwhelming majority of characters in fiction are white, and that's... kind of not good as it shows the bias we've given in favor of one specific group over all others, and that maybe in the future we'll have more racially diverse character casts.. but until then, because we have more white characters than white actors, sometimes white characters are going to be played by non-white actors, and even if that's not how we typically envision the character... Get over it.
No instead of doing that, she just felt the need to make another fucking retcon and claimed she intended to have Hermonie be black the whole fucking time! I hope they fired the moron who cast Emma Watson for the role in the movie then.... that talentless hack who knew nothing of the books.. checks notes Joanne Kathleen Rowling
I'm sorry but it takes a special kind of narcissim to attempt to retcon, not just a fictional work, but reality itself!
That's squarely in the realm of "doesn't matter".
The works are done, anything said after never happened
She's been this way long before X became a thing.
Meh it’s weird you hang your tastes on others