Anytime anything popular gets dragged here there’s always a few “let people enjoy things” and “don’t ruin peoples fun” and “don’t be a weird cynical hipster” and what have you.
Except for the most popular series of children books in history. For whatever reason that’s apparently weapons free for Hater Team 6 to go to town on. I’ve seen people say was shouldn’t ruin peoples “favorite toy” when it comes to sports, Twilight, Marvel Movies and astrology, but what makes those sacrosanct and Harry Potter fair game?
This applies somewhat to Hamilton too.
You may say, “let people enjoy things.”
I say, ":bugs-no: "
“Let people enjoy things” is a type of liberalism and doesn’t really fly here. Media criticism is important, and people discussing the media they enjoy will generally include acknowledgements of the problems with it — otherwise, it invites criticism from the forum at large, which is acceptable.
“Let people enjoy things” as a concept means “don’t think critically about this work or point out its flaws because I like it” which really isn’t how leftists operate. You can certainly enjoy things despite their flaws, but you’re not given a free pass to stan the slavery apologia musical or the terf series without acknowledging all of the things that are fucked up about it.
HP in particular is a hard thing for most of us to continue enjoying to any degree, given that engaging with HP in this day and age is a tacit endorsement of transphobia and we love our trans comrades and hate bigotry.
JK Rowling is an actively campaigning bigot and the franchise historically centers her as the grand visionary guiding it all. And the pro-slavery shit was always appalling.
People hate Twilight for all the wrong reasons, but it is a remarkable multi-faceted gem of fucked up bullshit. But Meyer (probably) isn’t a loud, active bigot against people I love, so I have more fun revisiting it.
It’s an honored pastime.
I went from superfan to antifan very quickly. Probably after a Cracked article. People righteously tearing it to shreds taught me a lot about reading with a critical eye, so it’s an interesting barometer for me.
JK Rowling is an actively campaigning bigot
I kinda feel like we were hatin on it before she came out as full blown TERF.
Also isn’t Meyers like a hardcore Mormon? Pretty sure she has Garbo opinions, she’s just smart enough to keep them on the DL.
I think that was general complaining about nostalgia culture and adults carrying their regressive childhood passions forward as totems of their identity. Then she became (or always was, honestly) a transphobe.
Meyer absolutely does, they come out in the writing. I revisit it to remind myself how much awful shit I missed as a kid and how it fit into the zeitgeist of that time, but also to sus out what drew me to it in the first place, since I’ve had a wide range of opinions on it.
She’s been a known TERF for like a decade. The first 2-3 years of it were her dog whistling transphobic shit, trans people calling it out, and then cis libs saying trans people were overreacting.
That stopped around the time she wrote that whole novel about the crossdressing serial killer man that murders women in bathrooms.
It was really funny watching all the people who defended Rowling either delete their tweets, publicly self-crit, or admit they were also TERFs lol
Honestly that might be a part of my hate for Harry Potter. A bunch of losers decided their make believe baby book was more important than being against bigotry.
There is a certain type of person that their identity is a children’s book that finished over a decade ago.
It doesn’t bother me that much but I find it a little strange.
I’d say that the main issue is probably because the vast majority of people in the imperial core just aren’t taught media literacy in school, so they have no idea how to engage with a narrative beyond something that tells them how to think, with a clearly stated moral at the end ala Aesop’s fables.
Of course, that’s intended in a capitalist society, because if kids were taught how to think critically, they would criticize that which exploits them. :thinkin-lenin:
During the height of the Cold War, the CIA funded creative writing workshops in Iowa to promote ‘show, don’t tell’ in writing specifically to undermine left-wing movements . On sites like Snopes, they’ll say something like: “No, it’s false, ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ isn’t CIA propaganda (The CIA was just funding the workshops that made it possible :big-cool: )”
It was absolutely intended to prevent Marxist / Socialist / Communist ideology from becoming commonplace in working class America. It also has the added benefit to the upper classes of being able to more easily manipulate the working class by presenting ‘show, don’t tell’ as an ‘educated’ writing tool, and that they, too, can be part of the ruling class as long as they make sure to obfuscate any ideologies, philosophies, or understandings of class structure.
This attitude, unfortunately, still prevails today. Telling your audience directly about what is happening is considered “poor writing” in western academics, and so it’s automatically dismissed without considering the material conditions under which it was written.
