Guest post: It would be so easy to move on
Originally a comment by Piglet on Holy dread.
I can’t get over how pathetic it is. There are so many fantasy novels out there that they could read, including ones by trans authors and with trans characters, yet they’re hung up on this one. It would be so easy to move on and read a different book. I used to love the music of the Smiths, but Morrissey turned out to be such a prick that I haven’t been able to listen to them anymore. That’s OK, plenty of other bands out there. Conversely, I know Jewish opera fans who enjoy Wagner, feminists who love James Brown, CSA survivors who still listen to Michael Jackson. They accept that you can enjoy the music without signing off on everything the artist did and believed in.
But this “I can’t move on and let go of these books so I’m going to steal the credit for writing them” routine is bullshit. As long as they keep reading those books, they’ll know that JKR wrote them and got the royalties for them, and it will torment them because you can never completely lie to yourself. You can’t half-ass a damnatio memoriae, so move on from reading Harry Potter. Hell, JKR herself has moved on from writing Harry Potter – her other projects are selling very nicely thank you very much, because she is a genuinely creative person, while all they can do is plagiarise and imitate and rebrand and steal. Pathetic.
Bernard Levin was an outstanding example for British people of a certain age. He loved Wagner and often wrote about how wonderful his music was in his regular column in The Times (of London).
@Athel –
That made me think of Daniel Barenboim taking Wagner to Israel, too.
On a more general point, I wonder whether the reason they can’t leave Harry Potter alone is that most of the complainants are of the internet-in-the-bedroom cohort. They’re the generation that grew up online, rather than reading. As such, I would not be surprised if HP is the only book/s they have ever read, or at least the only ones that they’ve read aside from those they were required to read at school. Their cultural exposure is, I strongly suspect, highly stunted.
Harry Potter blocks off most of the horizon because they genuinely don’t know how big the horizon is.
And lest it sound like I’m being disdainful – oh, all right then: I am, a bit – they’re products of a culture. We can’t hold them to blame for having intellectual rickets when it’s the culture generally that’s kept them out of the sun.
There are a lot of fantasy novels they could read, true, but they have already read the HP novels, and seen the movies, and bought into the fandom, and gone to the theme parks, and purchased the merchandise, and decided which Hogwarts house they belong to. It’s a pretty big investment. The HP world isn’t going away, which would make it easier for them to switch. The parks still exist, there are more movies, there is a video game coming out. They’d really really like to enjoy all of this, to get back to the delights of fandom, and there it is, thriving despite their rejection. Having a “sanitized” version of HP is one way they might use to trick themselves that they can gain some kind of absolution and go back to being fans. It’s a mental trick, on par with being forgiven by a priest at confession, I think.
There are other books, other movies, other theme parks, other franchises, other video games, but this one is theirs, and they don’t want to let go.
[…] a comment by Enzyme on It would be so easy to move […]
@Sackbut – I had forgotten, or hadn’t grasped, quite how immersive this fandom is, like the fandom for Tolkien.
At least the Tolkienites only get furious at travesties of the works as in the Rings of Power, rather than at Tolkien himself – who is safely dead and not one for political engagement anyway. I suppose social media amplifies all this.