You Really Need to Move on from Harry Potter, I’m So Serious

Last week, J.K. Rowling revealed her ass, yet again, around a UK supreme court ruling. This ruling being that, when referencing the Equality Act, “women” specifically means “biological women.” Effectively, legally stripping trans-women then status of “woman” in regards to the application of the protections of this act. And I’m seeing people not quite understand why even this theoretically limited application is still a big deal, but that’s not, specifically what this is about. It’s about J. K. Rowling’s position in pushing for this tiger-spray legislation. About her absolutely unhinged reaction to judicial non-issues about the definition of womanhood.
And we’ve been watching this slow descent into madness for years. I’m among the people saying, “stop putting money in her pocket! Look at what she’s using it for!”
But there’s this also this subset that’s sort of retroactively diminishing the quality of the books. This happens anytime a beloved creator reveals a dark side.“They’ve always been bad” etc etc. Or “I always knew it.”
And it’s really important when having these discussions to recognize “no they aren’t” and “no you didn’t.”
If you were one of the vanguards of the Harry Potter books in the 90s and early 00s, particularly if you grew up with them, you absolutely did not pick out the little problematic elements peppered through the series. Adults reading the series at the time didn’t see them. Here we had a story about a young boy breaking out of an abusive home, a strong female main with a totally platonic relationship with the lead, and a bunch of kids fighting back against a fascist government. The only ones who had any major qualms with Harry Potter at the time were the Christian Evangelicals who didn’t like the “promotion of witchcraft.” We didn’t start to actively poke holes until post-series analysis when she started revealing some her counter-progressive tendencies.
There’s a scene in Order of the Phoenix where, when trying to get to the girls’ dorm to get Hermione, Harry and Ron find out that the stairs up to those rooms turn into a slide when boys touch them. The same doesn’t happen with girls going into the boys’ dorms. In text, it’s explained that the founders of the school were just old-fashioned, and you can read a bit of cheekiness into it. That Rowling is trying to show you how socially conservative the wizarding world is in comparison to the muggle one. And it grew a lot of little fan snippets about young trans-wizards being affirmed by the magic of the stairs.
When you look at the bulletpoints of the TERF ideology that Rowling now espouses, those dots connect way differently.
Essentially, if she had just taken her money and fucked off into a cabin in the woods Salinger-style, a lot of the contemporary interpretations of the Harry Potter series simply wouldn’t exist.
So now we have this generation of people who have incorporated their love of Harry Potter into their very identity just for the creator to reveal themselves as a piece of shit. Even as a huge ex Harry Potter fan, I’m very quick to say to say “it’s just a book,” but we still have to at least minimally acknowledge that sort of heartbreak. When you have more distance from the non-cis community, completely abandoning something that was a big part of your personality and life can feel oddly conflicting. So if any given creator can turn heel at a moment’s notice, how do we sort of, longitudinally, prevent or navigate these conflicts?
The first step is don’t let a piece of art become your whole identity to begin with. That’s done through media diversification and willingness to critically analyze even the things we like. Especially the things we like.
Let me hop you through my experience with Harry Potter to give you a sense of what I’m talking about.
Books one through four had me by the nostrils. They weren’t the only books I was reading by a long shot, but there was something about them that really really clicked in a way that others hadn’t. This was common for a lot of kids of that time. I was a tiny little fanatic, and it was something easy to be fanatical about. It was acceptable because other people were into it, too.
The fourth book, specifically, came out in the summer between 5th and 6th grade (age eleven) and was the first time a character died on me in-story. I have some very very strong memory-emotions tied up in those first four books.
The fifth book came out when I was fourteen, in the summer between 8th and 9th grade. In the time between these two books, I had gone through a massive change in the books I was reading and had added a lot more classic science fiction and fantasy to my resume. I read Earthsea and The Dark is Rising. A Wrinkle in Time and Little Women gave me girls to connect to that were actual leads. I had read the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia. I also transitioned into adult books very quickly during that time. In the span of seventh and eight grade alone I read Lord of the Rings, West of Eden, The Martian Chronicles, Gulliver’s Travels, It, Jurassic Park, Metamorphosis. I was on my second read of Flatland. I was getting sci-fi short story anthologies from the library or second-hand shop and gobbling them up. Spent one summer reading my Mom’s star trek novelizations and another what we had of the Young Jedi Knight series. I was in phase II of my Greek mythology era and had added Western European folklore.
So by the time the fifth book came out I had a lot of incredible work to compare it to. And I kind of didn’t like the book.
I thought Harry was kind of a whiny little bitch. He was under a lot of pressure as the chosen one — which I think, now, is actually a clever bit — and I should have, theoretically, connected to that emotionally. Instead, I was a real-life teen under massive amounts of real-life pressure without the benefit of being a wizard, so it just made it a lot harder to feel bad for him. And there were a number of things that, while they hit the right emotional notes, felt contrived when I got a little distance post-read.
All of this new analysis was born from my emotional and intellectual growth. If I hadn’t experienced more art, I might not have felt the way I did about it.
In the space between the fifth and sixth book, I grew a lot of fatigue about being seen as “a Harry Potter kid.” I had other things I was interested in and felt like I had been boxed into this very one dimensional external interpretation of self.
So by the time the sixth book came out, it became, for me, a “kid series” that I still keep up with for fun. And even though the flaws were starting to reach out to me more at sixteen, I enjoyed the book a lot more. I think it repaired a lot of the things I didn’t like about the fifth book, but I was also emotionally drifting from it, at that point.
The seventh and last book came out when I was eighteen, freshly graduated from high school, doing an internship at a research lab. To give some context to my literary journey at the time, the book I read right before The Deathly Hallows was Lolita.
At this point, finishing the series was just completing a quest set forth by a younger version of myself. I went to a big book launch event at the mall, had a fun time getting third place in the trivia bracket, and prepared to say goodbye. It was very sad, but we had already known this was coming for almost the entire lifetime of the book. I had per-grieved sufficiently.
Then I hated the seventh book so much, I lost almost all my emotional attachment to the IP pretty much immediately.
And that reaction is a direct result of growing up and growing out of the what the series had to offer me, and that’s….fine? That’s an okay thing to happen. I re-read Sorcerer’s Stone about eight months later for a college class, and I still generally enjoyed the book. I still think it’s a solidly constructed middle grade book. It just didn’t evoke the same feelings anymore.
Then from there it just got…weird. We all watched it.
The Dumbledore was gay reveal felt…odd, to me. At the time I didn’t know how to verbalize it, but it was because I had seen him as a sort of sexless character. I had also consumed gay media at that point and knew real-life gay people, and none of it felt right or authentic. If being gay was so important to his story, why wasn’t it mentioned in the book itself? What did it actually add to the story after the fact? Basically, what was the point?
Within the next yearish, if I recall, she announced Pottermore and developed Ilvermony. By then I had enough experience with fantasy worldbuilding (including my own) to think “what the fuck is this?”
I fell out of active fandom, but still saw the remaining movies and the first of the new Fantastic Beast films. I bought her fist book after Harry Potter, even though I never got around to reading it. I played one or two of the mobile games. For me, the IP became “oh this is a fun thing to play with for nostalgia’s sake, but boy has it gotten dumb.”
When she started showing her ass, the first time, it was easy to drop everything. Why? Because I had grown up. Because I had plenty of other things to plug the nostalgia hole. Because I had other things to consume and enjoy that scratched roughly the same itches.
There is the key. It’s not about enjoying a “childish” thing as an adult but rather being unable to move on from it when it might be called for. Of making the whole of your identity the love of a singular piece of pop culture or media.
I put myself through a thought experiment of “what artist would I have a hard time giving up if they turned out to be a problem?” Neil Gaiman was on the short list, but I was sure that would never be the case. Turns out, when challenged, it was actually really easy. Because, again, I have other authors to read.
What it comes down to is the ability to partake of art without making it your whole person, of enjoying the output of an artist without developing a parasocial attachment. Being able to maintain identity independent of external pop cultural forces.
You have to be able to recognize that great art can from terrible people. That while you can never truly separate art from the artist, an artist is very capable of hiding the worst parts of themselves behind a smokescreen when you’re not looking for it. You can still take the good from the awful, conceptually.
Because it’s not just art where we benefit from being able to make that distinction. It’s politics. It’s philosophical ideology. It’s even scientific social theory.
And the way to do it is with critical analysis and exposure to things outside the immediate bailiwick of your given experience thus far.