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#fandoms will throw a fit if you ship gay characters in straight relationships but ppl shit aro characters and we r told to shut up
redysetdare · 9 months
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A character looks straight into the camera and says "I'm not interested in romance" and people will still say "No, it's not confirmed they're aromantic!!!" "They could change their mind!!!" "it's a challenge for them to overcome!!!" "They'll have character development that makes them fall in love"
It's like they are given the most blatant answer to a character romantic orientation and they actively ignore it. all the while all it takes is subtext for people to speak as if it is fact for a character to be any other sexuality.
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yenneferw · 6 years
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Can you please rant about jk Rowling she’s fucking awful with her queerbaiting, racism, and transphobia. Like I need someone else to validate me for not liking her
absolutely i hate her!!!!! this is a REALLY long post but she’s written so much and she’s been in the spotlight since her books got famous so like… there’s a lot to talk about i guess. anyway @ jk rowling get ready to be called out 
racism
first of all on this valid bitch of an i hate jk rowling post, the ilvermorny houses. it’s like…. Big cultural appropriation of native american ideas and stories, twisting them to fit her narrative for harry potter and completely disrespecting their history and origins. the history she creates for north american wizards is shit too, saying that native americans would “primitively” practice magic until europeans civilized them with wands (even tho…. it’s like really impressive to do magic without wands in her universe??? like sounds like the native americans were way ahead of europeans, but ofc she twists her own narrative to make the natives primitive). her whole history or north american wizardry also apparently just follows white wizards immigrating to north america and shit…… 
this video is……. a really good poem on the stereotypes and fetishization of cho chang and there’s no way i can reword what the speaker says bc she says it too good so,,, watch it
jk rowling is also really good at speaking out about racism when she wants to on twitter and yet all of her canonical poc characters in the books are background characters. i know hermione is black in the cursed child play, but that feels a bit like the dumbledore thing to me, like they never actually talk abotu it in the books? and if she wanted hermione to be black why didn’t she have any protests about emma watson being cast? if she wanted harry to be brown why didn’t she have any protests about daniel radcliffe being cast? i don’t know if she had any say in that, but i guess she had a say in insisting that the actors had to be british, so if she cared about making a main character poc, why did she not have any qualms about the cast, even in retrospect, even respectful ones like “i love daniel and emma to death but in retrospect i wrote them as characters of color”?
like she didn’t have to push dean and cho and the very small characters of color to the side but she did. she didn’t have to stereotype cho but she did. there are no poc in fbawtft, or there aren’t in the movie at least – and if she’s so happy about johnny depp and can speak out about that relentlessly, but she wanted there to be characters of color in fantastic beasts, why can’t she speak out about that? 
like the cultural appropriation is enough to see that she’s clearly a racist asshole who doesn’t care about the cultures of people who aren’t white, but it’s also clear to see in the background of her writing that she doesn’t care about research for shit if it’ll help to respect people of color in her stories, and she certainly doesn’t care to ensure that there are important characters of color for people to look up to when they read her books or watch the movies about them 
transphobia 
i guess she liked a terf’s article on twitter? like i dont’ knwo how reputable my sources on that were or if she meant to, but if she did, yikes
and from what i saw of the article it was Deep Terf Rhetoric, and tbqh i wouldn’t put it past her to have meant to have done that
i’ve seen ppl saying harry potter has transphobic aspects to it as well but i couldn’t find anything under all the times she’s “defended” trans ppl on twitter like idk i can’t take anythign she says on twitter by heart bc everything she does feels performative and fake af, and i haven’t read the books in like four years so i can’t say for sure based on my own memory 
also she wrote a trans woman in a more recent novel and she’s apparently totally impulsively violent like wow great way to conform to nasty stereotypes about trans women lmfao
like esp bc of this i wouldn’t put it past her to be a terf
homophobia & queerbaiting
saying! dumbledore! is gay! after! the fucking! book series! is not! representation!!!!!
even if she HAD make him gay during the series, he’s not good rep??? he was a manipulative asshole who let a child stay in an abusive home becuase he was too big of a dumbass to think about a way around the issue so that a little boy could live in a home full of people who treated him fairly. so uhh?? the cishets can fucking have him, i don’t WANT him in the goddamn community. 
but she thinks that she’s not homophobic bc he’s the only gay character who never even got to talk about being gay, who we never see in a relationship with a man. like throwing gay ppl scraps isn’t?? rep??? it’s queerbaiting you dumb bitch @ jk rowling…. 
she specifically said herself that werewolves are meant to represent diseases like AIDS, and characters like fenrir greyback are predatory werewolves who want tos pread around the AIDS-like disease, conforming to 1980s homophobic stereotypes against gay people for “wanting” to spread around AIDS like how can you in one breath say you want to bring light to diseases like AIDS and in the next make a character who literally models homophobic stereotypes with the same disease?? 
also, remus was supposed to be gay apparently, but he “changed and fell in love with tonks” like ok first of all bi people exist, second of all why would you write a straight person who’s supposed to basically have AIDS when that sounds a hell of a lot like “predatory gay man infects poor straight kid” like there’s SO MUCH wrong with that, and yeah you kind of have to dig into it a little bit to get there, but when you’re writing about risky topics and you literally admit to it, you need to be WELL-VERSED on what you’re writing about!! and to say you’re writing about AIDS is deeply mixed with gay history! and to say that the main character who is a werewolf was SUPPOSED to be gay and then pretend you’re NOT associating it with gay people is just… such cognitive dissonance, or maybe really ridiculous ignorance
also, dumbledore is dead. so even if he was good rep, and it was within the books, he’s fucking dead. another buried gay, fuckos! pile em up! 
and i’ve heard there’s a shit ton of queerbaiting between harry’s son and draco’s son in cursed child? which like…. may just be subtext, but there’s a huge section of the fandom who’s all about harry x draco (i have not good feelings about that ship personally but to say it’s not popular is to never have seen anything in the fandom), and she must know that? like she’s not oblivious is she? so why would she like…. put subject between their sons? ?? it feels like it’s a bone to “hey i never gave you harry x draco, so here are their sons, who i’m also never going to give you” 
also? if grindelwald WAS dumbledore’s bf at some point, what does that say about what she thinks about queer men? he’s deeply predatory and preys on credence in a very creepy way that plays on stereotypes about older gay men preying on younger gay boys, and he’s also a disgusting villain played by johnny fucking depp, an abuser (who SHE SUPPORTS) of all people. what does that say about what her mind goes to when she thinks about gay men????? 
i don’t actually know her role in those films, but she has said she loves depp, what he’s done with the character, and where the darkness of grindelwald is going in the first movie and its sequels, so even if her role is very little, she supports what is being done. 
also…. um apparently newt scamander created a werewolf registry…. a little honest to god werewolf registry in the fucking 40s….. ??????????? what r we supposed to think here, about a registry of discriminated ppl in the FORTIES…….????? and that’s the protag of fantastic beasts… cool it’s fine it’s fine
ableism
when talking about irredeemable characters like voldemort, she literally said that “whether it’s a personality disorder or illness” they’re not redeemable…. !!!?? here is a post on that subject with links to the sources of the interviews she said this in. 
i don’t know where to put this bc this could be any number of things but i just thought about this so i’ll put it here: the thing that’s created in fantastic beasts, where it’s like basically a personification of anguish from suppressing magic – that’s quite blatantly a reference to any number of minorities, like gay people suppressing their sexuality, trans people suppressing their gender, the mentally ill and disabled pushing themselves too hard or trying to ignore/hide it… and credence was vilified and killed and the protags weren’t even… really sad about it?? and the ministry of magic never really THOUGHT About that they just killed him….. and that’s okay…. that’s fine… they’re just going around killing a bunch of KIDS who are inconvenient to them and who basically symbolize a whole number of oppressed groups. cool, it’s fine
you could also make a point that werewolves also represent the mentally ill, and all the same fucked up shit basically applies here
she also said that everything that muggles can get can be cured by magic, thereby effectively giving some bullshit reason for not actually having any disabled or mentally ill characters, also assuming that it’s not totally ableist to just…. “cure” all that? she didn’t say it specifically about mental illnesses and disabilities, but it’s clear to see that with her attitude on “irredeemable” mentally ill people, she would 
fatphobia
most fat characters in harry potter are shitty people. the dursleys, pettigrew, and umbridge – all characters we’re supposed to find deeply wrong, the ones we’re supposed to hate the most other than, like, voldemort. like…..? a lot of the other fat characters are all “matronly” like molly weasley or stubborn and “lazy” like cornelius fudge who allowed voldemort to rise to power. like what’s that supposed to say about what she thinks the extent of fat people is? stubborn, evil, or motherly? 
she actually has a character grow fatter and fatter based on how shitty she acts towards harry because of a magic mishap. she also usually describes the nice fat people as “plump” and “pleasant,” while she describes dudley as “so much like a pig” that he couldn’t even be turned furhter into a pig when it was attempted, or as a “killer whale,” or vernon dursley as “having no neck”
her fascination with abusers
exhibit a: she loves johnny depp, she loves him for the part of grindelwald, she praises what he’s done for the character, she praises his casting. he’s abused his wife..................
exhibit b: she loves dumbledore. he is constantly manipulating harry and not actually helping him get out of difficult situations at home or at school, putting him and the other kids in danger multiple times, not talking about important information to keep them safe, like?? 
exhibit c: snape. a fucking nasty ass creep to lily. neville’s GREATEST FEAR. like i dont’ even need to talk about this, we all know snape, dumbledore, and johnny depp are shitty lmfao
and yet she named harry’s kids after dumbledore and snape, like they didn’t fuck harry’s life up, especially snape, who terrorized him and his friends. 
in conclusion fuckos
she’s nasty!!!!! i was going to do a section on sexism but i can’t find anything – i think she’s too much of a White Feminist to be sexist, probably. likely she cares more about researching feminist issues than she does about researching native myths before she steals them for her own gain lmfao. there is the fact that she supports an abuser like johnny depp, tho! 
she is constantly like… going against all this on twitter too lmfao, like it’s hard to find good articles on her shittiness on the first page of google bc most of it is “jk rowling defends trans people against transphobic tweet, jk rowling defends muslims against islamophobic tweet, jk rowling defends [this group or that group]” and yet she includes so much bigotry hidden in the details of her books and what she says about her books. like i know some of this isn’t quite on the surface, but ultimately when you write a book with subjects you don’t really know about, your inherent biases are going to be apparent under the surface, and since she’s such a famous author with so many books and so much spotlight on her, if you dig in a little you can make easy conclusions/clearly see what she thinsk about minorities. so it’s really fucking annoying that she’s so “good and progressive” on twitter because it’s obviously performative so she can get the progressive points required for more people to buy her shit. like that’s the best word i can think of to describe her: performative. 
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