I am honestly a little unsure on how exactly how I feel about people continuing to implicitly support the franchise through things like wanting characters in the roster of this, and much more so through the upcoming game. I expect I really won't know for sure until this stuff is more of a reality and more coverage of it happens; I think I might feel a lot more strongly by then.
For now at least, I think if you just
quietly enjoy the franchise, even quietly buying the new things in it, because of your nostalgia and the need for something comforting in that way... y'know, for me personally I don't think I have
much issue with you? If you are fully aware of what you are indulging in, that certainly doesn't make it all good, but we have much less of a problem. Though the "quietly" there is key. Partially in the sense of minimizing how much attention you're helping to give to the franchise. Given how mainstream it is, your decision to buy it or not probably isn't really going to affect the overall sales (though that doesn't make it pointless to "vote with your wallet" or boycott the game). But I think lowering the visible support it gets and how long attention is paid to things can have meaningful results despite that.
But more than that, also "quietly" in the sense of... I just cannot fucking stress enough how sick I already am of hearing the ridiculous shit people say to defend liking the series both here and elsewhere. More often than not even having the gall to spout it without any shame or remorse right to the faces of trans women trying to talk about the very real costs of her transphobia. Any time I hear someone talk about how it sucks that she's a TERF in the same breath as saying just how inherently important the books are, how they have so much to teach kids about kindness and tolerance, how much marginalized fans benefitted from having the books growing up, how they're special books that got kids to read, how it's fine if you can just separate art from the artist (with or without certain comparisons that invite sign-tapping), how we can't just stop reading them because they're just so special, how much a shame it is that she disregarded her own messages when she became like this... all that just tells me is that no, you actually
do not get the issue.
Because saying that stuff lets me know me something about you very directly: that actually, no, you really do not understand that Rowling is a transphobe, a hateful person, a bigot. You show that you're more worried about the
reputation of the series you like being compromised than you're worried about the very real people that are now being harmed by her rhetoric and influence and money. And that in the process you've missed completely that this means that
the series itself was already compromised. Just absolutely 0 awareness that this development might mean that there's some things
already in your beloved series that reflect her beliefs, that she was always like this, that the feelings you've taken away from it might be more due to your own heart than what's in hers and on the page. That it might be time to think about the things she wrote with a slightly more critical lens than you used when you were a child. That saying "you can separate art from the artist"
still requires you to be critical of the art. But you'd rather ever so politely show everyone your entire ass instead of reckoning with any of that.
And if you aren't going to bother to reckon with it, at least don't make me listen to you proudly say as much.
Tangentially relevant:
There was an entry in this year's Interactive Fiction competition that was about a fandom/fan-fic community that gets blown up when its beloved author reveals themselves to be... rather Rowling-like in her transphobia. It was the game that I rated most highly among the entries I played.
A Paradox Between Worlds is entirely text-based, so lots of reading, but I thought about conversations I've seen here while playing it. The primary mechanic--beyond reading--is choosing whether to like and/or reblog posts.
One of the cool things it does is show how even the smallest social actions online have ethical consequences.
This isn't self-promotion: I don't know the author, and it's free. A worthwhile read for a couple of hours imo.
Ok, kinda weird to stick this at the end of the above post, but...
Wanted to thank you for linking this - it's been a good long while since I kept up with IF Comp/Spring Thing (and even then I usually just checked out stuff Emily Short reviewed, tbh), and this looks good. I'll try to make some time for it soon.
