[ SECRET POST #6969 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6969 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 16 secrets from Secret Submission Post #995.
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)]

Doing it in your head doesn't. It's perfectly normal and harmless for someone who grew up on the books to go back to that worldbuilding, think about it applied to other fandoms etc.

It's bringing it up in a group where people may have been hurt by the groups and policies noted friend-with-literal-fascists JKR hurts that can get thorny. Because, you know... a lot of people have been deeply hurt by the things that she does with her money, while she's palling around with nazis. And keeping her culturally relevant by talking warmly about hp nostalgia adds to the cache she has with which to harm real people. And the nicest thing that someone hurt by her has to say isn't going to be very nice-- at best, 'read another book'.

OP probably doesn't WANT the people they know to criticize their reading habits-- I'm sure OP HAS read other books, but read these particular books during a formative time as a reader if not as a person. And, I'm also sure OP doesn't want to bring up a topic that might hurt someone else's feelings, or make OP seem untrustworthy by association. So, as an ex-hp fan who has been hurt and seen friends suffer material harm based on what the author has done, I think OP is taking the right tack by keeping those thoughts to themself, and I think fandom secrets is a good place to just... let the cat anonymously out of the bag if it's something they're sick of keeping wholly bottled up but don't want to talk about to the people they know.

Like... I get it-- it's easy to say 'well, X children's series is better in this way and that way, and doesn't have the same weight to it in terms of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, etc'. But if you grew up reading hp and now you're an adult, and you never read, say, Percy Jackson before... then it's not the same to get into it and it's not the same to sort people into their camp factions. You can't just transfer everything that was meaningful about an old fandom to a new one, even if the last thing you want is to publicly associate yourself with an abhorrent author. And the thoughts you think inside your head aren't harming people!

+1

[(Anonymous)]

It’s genuinely lovely to see this level of nuance, hitting lots of points of ambivalence, so thank you for that!

Re: +1

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you-- like, it's a really difficult situation and it's very easy to have that knee jerk reaction when her name or her work comes up! But at the same time, you know... I'm not going to pretend that that work didn't mean something to me once despite the problematic issues it always had. And while I certainly HAVE begged people to read another book, it's not because I think an adult who grew up with those books hasn't been reading other books since-- when I've said it, it's usually been specifically begging relatives to pick different books to pass on to their kids. There's no time machine where I can go back and get super into Animorphs when the other kids were on hp, and not everyone has had the same sharp severing of goodwill that I have. To me, the main thing is that OP isn't bringing the books up to people who will be hurt by the unavoidable invoking of jkr's current terfdom, her flirtations with literal fascists, etc.

[arcanetrivia]

+1

I haven't read the Potter books since maybe 2010 or 2011 and haven't even dabbled in the fandom in some years now, but the urge to assign Houses still sticks around.