this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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The Leaky Cauldron
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It's possible to enjoy a piece of media and still dislike the creator. We'd have a pretty dull world if we just discarded everything made by bad people.
Regardless of your feelings on separating art and artist, that's just nonsense.
Have you read Dostoevsky?
How much of the Criterion Collection have you watched?
Ever read Pratchett?
Been to a local theater company's play in the past year?
There are quite literally too many games on Steam to play in a lifetime.
Etc etc etc.
I am a trans woman and am disgusted by what Rowling has become, but HP was the first novel I read as a child, and I read it maybe 7 times before all this bullshit with Rowling begun. I know HP is not objectively great, there are a lot of plot holes, and stuff, but it is still a story that made me dream and still enjoy discussing and humour about this universe. Should I really abandon all this in spite of the author?
Go ahead and separate the art from the artist. You're still a fan of a book that demeans women for having masculine traits, engages in pro-slavery myths, doesn't bother to represent Asian people authentically and uses an asian girl as an object for a white boy to fall in love with, engages in homophobic allegory about AIDS, uses insensitive names for black people, uses racist Irish stereotypes for comedy, plays off rape trauma as funny, mocks anti-slavery political movements, and villifies aro/ace/apla people.
Yeah, those things are in the book, and it is good that people talk about it, and we can even even make memes/jokes about it on this community! It doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a community to make fun of dumbledore's favouritism or a tiramisu that looks like a sorting hat...
Yes there shouldn't be. Harry Potter should be forgotten.
I don't know... Should we just forget about stuff? When I grew up there was kind of a lot of casual homophobia, racism and stuff (and it's not entirely gone). I think it is healthy not to forget how things were and see how we progressed. I do not want to glorify the parts of HP that are bad in the ways that you so well enumerated. But I don't think it is healthy to forget the entire thing. Remember fondly the parts that can be, and see with a better understanding the parts that cannot.
I now rarely think about HP. As previously said, there are a lot of other things to experience. The same way that I rarely think about my childhood, because there is so much to experience rn.
Everything will be forgotten in time. Such is the relentless turning of the clock. I don't believe in censorship, but I do think that we should be mindful of how we engage in preservation. A Lemmy instance is not a museum. Let Harry Potter be interned in dusty mausoleums, to be remembered mindfully. There is nothing mindful about the original post here. Memes are living, breathing culture. Slay the beast.