What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [5:00-10:00]

and the upcoming HBO TV adaptation. And there are some who believe the Boycott should also extend to any Potter-related activity, such as writing fanfiction, dressing in cosplay, or even just posting memes. Because while Joanne doesn't profit from these things directly, publicly participating in the fandom could serve as promotion for the franchise, or a tacit endorsement of Joanne's views. It might even give the impression you are unsafe for trans people to be around. Sadly, however, the Boycott has so far not been very effective. The Potter brand has been damaged to some extent by the backlash to Joanne, but it didn't stop Hogwarts Legacy from selling 12 million copies. There are some who suggest the cause to Boycott may actually have brought more attention to the game. And while that's disappointing, it's also not very surprising. Transphobia is rampant these days, although I suspect a lot of people who continue to pay for Potter are normies who just aren't engaged with the issue, and either don't know or care to know what it has to do with them. People should participate in the Boycott. I hope more people do in future. But we should also be realistic about what the Boycott can achieve. Joanne is already obscenely rich, and even if the HBO show is a flop, she's gonna carry on advocating against trans rights in my opinion, regardless. It's still important to register our complaint. We can't let this go uncontested. And the Boycott means any new Potter products generate controversy just by existing, which forces studios to put out statements addressing it, which keeps the issue in the public conversation. Even if we can't defund Joanne, we should at least make it as bad for business as possible to work with her. And no matter what the Boycott achieves, I'm still gonna participate, simply because I don't like the thought of even one penny of mine going towards anti-trans causes. But what about this? This is my personal copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. It's a third edition. My mum bought it for me when I was about 10 years old, and it sat on my bookshelf ever since, soon joined by the other six books. Like many fans, I got rid of all my Potter merch when it stopped sparking joy. But I kept this because I guess I might want to read it again one day, and at least this copy was bought long before anyone knew about Joanne's views. Any harm this purchase caused is long since done, and it wasn't my money that paid for it anyway. So if I read this in the privacy of my own home, that doesn't hurt anyone, right? So why does it feel so icky? Well, her prose does leave a bit to be desired. Alongside the discussion about the ethics of purchasing Potter, there's also been, let's call it, a critical reinterpretation. A new wave of video essays, opets, tweet threads and foreign posts, re-examining Potter as a literary work. In other words, making the case that Potter is bad, actually. Now, there's a lot we can criticize about Potter, but bad can mean different things. Sometimes, people mean Potter is artistically bad, it's not just that the author is transphobic, in their opinion. She's also just a bad writer. This often comes from people who never liked Potter in the first place, and are feeling very smug now, but I also see people using this as further justification for the boycott, we should all give up Potter, because it's not worth reading anyway. And I'm sorry, but that feels like a cope. I'm not saying we all have to carry on liking Potter, but just because Joanne's come out as a s*** gibbon doesn't mean her books are any better or worse than they've always been. It's just too convenient to suddenly decide now that her books never had any artistic merit. I don't care if you think her world building is bad, or the time-turners are a plot hole. What has that got to do with transphobia? Other times, however, when people say Potter is bad, actually, they mean ideologically bad. Knowing what we now know about Joanne has cast her work in a new light. It offers new explanations for some of her creative decisions, and it may be that her current views are more apparent in Potter than we realised at the time. Most of us were literal children when we first read these books, and now we know more about the issue she was writing about, not just because we grew up, but because of, well, gestures at everything. Potter used to be on a pedestal, where any criticism was brushed off as intellectual snobbery