[ SECRET POST #5784 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5784 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 48 secrets from Secret Submission Post #828.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

And all of it made up completely.

[(Anonymous)]

Nayrt

Nah. But of course you had to show up, JKR isn’t going to stan herself.

Oh wait, she does do that.

[(Anonymous)]

I disagree that it's all completely made up, but I do think that some of it involves considerable reaching, and also that there are a LOT of really ungenerous assumptions being made about the authorial intent behind some of the more problematic elements of her work.

I would personally argue that one of JKR's greatest skills as a writer was in how smoothly she made use of genre tropes. It's one of the things that gave the HP narrative such a lived in, engaging feel. Many readers felt like they intuitively knew the world of the story--all its ins and outs and peculiar little rhythms--because in the fictional sense we did know it already, because so much of it was built of well-worn tropes borrowed from Victorian literature, school-boy literature, as well as the fantasy genre more broadly. So personally I think that in many cases, JKR made the narrative choices she did, not out of any deliberately political motive whatsoever, but simply because she was following an intuitive application of a very well-established pre-existing trope.

That's not to say people can't find her narrative choices problematic anyway. I just think that in many cases where JKR is concerned, people are assuming malice when in reality she just neglected to consider the potential implications implicit to the well-worn tropes she was using. And I guess for some people that's not an important distinction, but for me it is.

[(Anonymous)]

Spot on

[(Anonymous)]

Nayrt

I mostly agree. When it comes to current JKR, she’s full on mask-off, not even hiding her hatefulness. But when it comes to her work, I do think some of the worst aspects are all ignorance of the implications on her part, not put there intentionally for the reasons of bigotry. That doesn’t mean these shades of classism, antisemitism, and transphobic tinting aren’t there, or that people are making them up. They’re not. AYRT is wrong about that. It’s just that she was completely blind to them when she made things this way. This is the woman who thought it was a good idea to add to her lord that indigenous American tribes were actually proto-wizards, and didn’t do any research into why referencing skinwalkers in her work was inappropriate. That always reeked of ignorance and poor thinking to me.

It’s fine if people don’t agree with me and think she was doing it intentionally, I just don’t believe that personally for HP. Her detective novels on the other hand, I believe all the bad shit in them is purposeful.

[(Anonymous)]

I don’t think that most people think that jkr intentionally made the hp books bigoted. But they think that some of her writing decisions were an unconscious reflection of the bigotry she later decided to embrace whole-heartedly. Basically, there are two ways you can go when someone points out that you’re saying something problematic or reenforcing harmful stereotypes. You can try to do better, or you can double down. Jo went hard with option 2.