• @i_dont_want_to@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8110 days ago

    Her work did really speak to me as a young gay child in a place where it wasn’t ok. That being said, fuck the author. Haven’t gone to the park, haven’t seen the new movies, haven’t played the new games, haven’t given her any money in well over a decade.

    In this day and age, I can easily find entertainment elsewhere. Anyone else that loved her work can do the same.

    • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆
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      2910 days ago

      …but really must tell others of us with less personal investment about the nature of what and why. I knew she was controversial and probably a bad person due to headlines in the periphery, but I didn’t know she is a genocidal monster type of a person. H.P. was a little late (in film) for my childhood, but it is still good to know why exactly she is to be avoided at the peripheral awareness cultural level.

  • @Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca
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    6810 days ago

    They are…billionaires. That is the common denominator of horrible people. They think that because they are rich beyond measure that their opinions should rule the world. The world would be a much much better place if we were rid of the pestilence of the billionaire class and maybe the ‘$100s of millions’ class. No one gets to being a billionaire by being completely honest, law abiding, fair, moral and ethical. Rules must be ignored in the quest for superlative riches. Those rules are only for those who haven’t become rich enough to ignore them. Even if they seem like benign benefactors, scratch the surface and you will find they are, without exception, evil.

  • @Goretantath@lemm.ee
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    4010 days ago

    Fuck rowling, i pirate ALL her shit. Ill do what i want with the I.P. and nobody can stop me.

  • FundMECFS
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    3710 days ago

    Also it’s not just a trans thing.

    JK is incredibly ableist and regularly mocks disabled people. For example one of her latest books is basically painting all chronically ill people as malingerers.

  • @joel_feila@lemmy.world
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    2910 days ago

    This is why i call it separating the artisr from the finance, the art is just unavoidable collateral damage.

    Perfect example. Hp Lovecraft is dead he gains no money, rallies no crowd, calls no lawmaker. JkR does still, she does gain money and spends it trying to make the world worse for people.

    • @Kickforce@lemmy.wtf
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      1010 days ago

      Yeah and Lovecraft came to see his racism was wrong before the end of his short life. Rowling so far has only clamped down harder on her detrimental bullshit.

      • Bizzle
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        510 days ago

        Is that true? I’m an HP Lovecraft head and had never heard that

        • @Thomrade@lemm.ee
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          910 days ago

          In his later letters to, and I could be wrong about the recipient, Robert E Howard he lamented that he wasted so much time being afraid of other cultures, and recognised his xenophobia as ignorance.

          • @CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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            28 days ago

            Yeah, and you can see it in his fiction as well. While in earlier stories characters literally kill themselves or go insane because they are not racially pure, the narrator in “Shadow over Innsmouth” looks forward to his final transformation into a fish person:

            I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

    • @OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
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      19 days ago

      Lovecraft is problematic for other reasons.

      The problem is that what makes his work good is this pathological fear of the other, that he interlinks with xenophobia and notions of racial purity in his fiction.

      You can’t love the art and hate the author with Lovecraft, you have to accept they’re both pretty fucked up.

      • @joel_feila@lemmy.world
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        19 days ago

        All true. They are not the same Hp was about as xenophobic as you can get.

        But ido disagree with that last part. I can read and love his stories but never learn anything about him. I can’t unlearn about him.

        • @Timecircleline@sh.itjust.works
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          29 days ago

          Have you read Herbert West: Reanimator? I think that one in particular had an especially problematic description of a black man. I had to put down the anthology for a bit when I got there.

        • @OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
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          19 days ago

          Several of his stories are outright racist though.

          How do you go about loving that without acknowledging there are issues?

          • @joel_feila@lemmy.world
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            19 days ago

            Same reason i can love a villain as a character. Just because i love a of work of fiction or fictional characters does not mean i endorse the mesaage.

  • @Rose@lemmy.zip
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    2410 days ago

    “Influencing” is putting it mildly. Funding organizations with political power is a lot more than that.

  • @idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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    2310 days ago

    Solution? Trans-positive fanfiction that celebrates the parts you’re nostalgic for, but doesn’t financially benefit Rowling

      • @ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social
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        10 days ago

        Trekkie here. People still complain about modern Trek being “woke” unlike their preferred version (which definitely does not talk about “woke” issues through allegory, or something)

        • @EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          710 days ago

          I don’t watch Star Trek, but even I know that the first show was hated in its time for having a black woman in the main cast and would’ve been called “woke” and boycotted for the socialist themes.

        • @Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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          710 days ago

          Which is odd, since nutrek seems obsessed with section 31 and the mirror universe, so fascists should be on board.

        • @Ledericas@lemm.ee
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          310 days ago

          those people are conservatives, and i dont believe they were ever true trek fans, to say that. the problem with nutrek is the showrunners/execs pushing thier own agenda, and “tyring to be offended for thier target audience” of OG trek.

          • @ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social
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            10 days ago

            Again, this is just vibes based. I will not be defending Discovery but Lower Decks is fucking awesome and Strange New Worlds is a solid return to TNG style storytelling. Vaguely gesturing at imagined wokeness is not an argument.

    • @InputZero@lemmy.world
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      1610 days ago

      You would think that of all the non-heteosexual sexualities that asexual people would be the least likely for someone to be prejudice against. I understand that asexuality is a spectrum and any generalization about any large group of people lacks accuracy but, generally I’ve found aces just want to be left alone. Something I think we can all appreciate every now and again. They’re just not interested in romantic and/or sexual relationships. The first decade of my life was like that, I think the first decade of most people’s lives are like that. What’s so hard to understand about people who just don’t feel that attraction?

  • @WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
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    139 days ago

    I never understood all this whinging about J. K. Rowling. I was a big fan of Ender’s Game when I was younger, but when Orson Scott Card revealed himself to be an asshole I dropped those books like a bad habit and everyone I knew did the same. There wasn’t even really any debate over it. Why are we still wringing our hands about Harry Potter?

    • @brognak@lemm.ee
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      169 days ago

      Enders Game (and the whole series) is a bit different, as unlike Harry Potter they are actually trying to teach a lesson in empathy and understanding instead of just being a fun magical romp.

      To this day I have literally no idea how the Orson who wrote those books became the man he did. He lives his life by the antithesis of the ideals he preached.

      • @andros_rex@lemmy.world
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        59 days ago

        He had a stroke in 2011, and I think having two kids die fucked him up. (Some of his early works had sympathetic portrayals of gay men.)

        I’ve always found it amusing that the guy who wrote Wyrms (fourteen year old girl is destined to be impregnated by a monster, and the book is her weird horny journey to it) and Hart’s Hope (where our hero has to rape a teenage girl in front of an audience in order to claim sovereignty over the kingdom, and she turns into the story’s main villain) got so hung up about sexual purity.

      • @Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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        49 days ago

        they are actually trying to teach a lesson in empathy

        S.P.E.W. and mugblood rhetoric seem like progressive topics with real world analogues.

        Her transphobic politics seem to be separate from the HP universe.

    • @Default_Defect@midwest.social
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      69 days ago

      People made Harry Potter their entire personality to the point of their school/house or whatever basically amounting to astrology to them. JK Rowling could shoot their child in front of them and they’d still take any chance to throw money at her they can get.

    • @lorty@lemmy.ml
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      59 days ago

      Because it became a multimedia franchise and fans still want to keep consuming it despite how much she sucks, so there’s a lot of mental gymnastics.

  • @Donjuanme@lemmy.world
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    1110 days ago

    Minecraft Creator notch went the same way, as did Dilbert author…

    I’m convinced there’s a cabal of billionaires that either get dirt on people on the rise and corrupt/blackmail them, or eliminate people who are not corruptable before they get too rich/powerful. It doesn’t take much to kill someone, and neuvo riche probably aren’t prepared for the precautions they’d actually need to take.

    That and money corrupts (or so we’re told, seems like it’d make as much sense that people who hoard money corrupt)

    • @EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1410 days ago

      You should watch Shaun’s video on the Harry Potter series. He goes into a deep dive of how the books are littered with her political views - even the first one - and how you can watch her become more conservative as they progress and she became more wealthy: the books start out criticizing the system, but by the end, the message becomes that the system should never be questioned.

      Throughout the books are a pattern of borderline racist stereotypes (the black kid is named Shacklebolt, the Asian girl is named two single syllable last names - might as well be named Ching Chong - the 15-year-old Irish kid is obsessed with whiskey and blowing stuff up, etc), but you can also see where her transphobia came from. Everytime she wants you to hate a woman in the books, she describes them as having some kind of masculine features, from a strong jawline to “mannish hands.”

      As people become more wealthy or famous, they’re given a bigger microphone to cast their garbage opinions with and it’s never been easier to tell the world your shitty political beliefs than it is right now.

    • @Shayeta@feddit.org
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      610 days ago

      Money/power doesn’t corrupt, it liberates you from the consequences of your actions. It allows you to freely be fully true to yourself without fear of repercussions.

    • @meowMix2525@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      I think it just takes quite a few moral failings to even achieve that level of wealth in the first place in the vast majority of cases.

      Here specifically, these people are authors and IP holders in a society that places a lot of value in ignorance and in very chauvinist and racist ideas. By hook or by crook, they’ve made something original. They have some merit, and you would expect them of all people to see those societal failings for what they are. To not comment on them, or to uphold them, or to mask them, (arguably all the same thing) is a decision they made in their work. I think we vastly overestimate how easy it is to do that across an entire body of independent work if it doesn’t align with your beliefs.

      It makes sense that a person who has the merits and will to do something like that, again, entirely without challenging such obvious failures (as most in their position would), would be chosen to win the broad favor of a society that desperately does not want to be challenged or its failings acknowledged (esp ruling class, the ones with something to lose and wealth to spare to push these things), and would gain a lot of its wealth. Especially in ye old early-internet world when people weren’t discovered as easily. Then, when their platform is secure, the mask slips.

      It’s not a conspiracy or an aberration, it’s survivorship bias. These people are a product of our society. We have to reckon with that.

      edit: I realized I could expand on what I meant in a few places so I sprinkled a bit more in.

    • @WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      The Harry Potter books aren’t very good. They probably only got enough promotion to become the phenomenon they did because the kingmakers knew what kind of a person J. K. Rowling really was. If she’d actually been a decent human being that series would’ve died in obscurity.

  • @JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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    119 days ago

    It’s kind of too late now, though. Even if we somehow convinced every person on earth to never buy another Harry Potter anything ever again. She’s already got her bag. That won’t go away and she’d continue being a horrible person with the power of wealth.

    Elon’s wealth, on the other hand, exists almost entirely as a fiction of his businesses’ value. He is much more susceptible to being taken down with them.

    • Dr. Moose
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      49 days ago

      It absolutely matters - these people have giant egos and if people start disliking their stuff it’ll hurt them real bad.

      Elon Musk literally wakes up at 3am cause he gets triggered so hard.

      Don’t let them have a good night’s sleep ever again.

      • @JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Somehow I doubt Rowling is losing any sleep over people she hates hating her back. That’s why the streamer harassment campaign over the first game was a bad idea. It lost her no money and turned people to her side more often than gaining allies.

        • Dr. Moose
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          18 days ago

          Nah she’s absolutely losing sleep. These people have all the money in the world and thats what they do with their free time?

    • @axx@slrpnk.net
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      9 days ago

      This is idiotic. If being rich makes you inherently bad, then it’s a highly curable condition: make them not rich. Remove their money (and all access to it via secondary means).

      But don’t try to justify killing people you apparently simply want to kill with flimsy logic.

      But really, neither of these are realistic, they are both overly simplistic solutions to what is a systemic problem which requires a systemic solution.