Another thing about this – or maybe it’s the same thing but just louder –
The other thing. There is no Harry Potter without its creator. Why? Because she’s the one who created it. That thing they love so much? (I don’t love it, myself, so I can take a detached view of the fandom and the ardor.) That thing they love so much is the work of the woman they think they hate so much. You can’t have a Harry Potter without its creator, because that would be something completely different. The creator isn’t incidental to the creation; she’s prior and essential.
Their adoration of Harry Potter means they adore her, whether they know it or not. This isn’t her fingernails we’re talking about here, it’s the product of her mind. In their passion for Harry they have a passion for Jo. It’s idiotic that they think they can split the two.
But then they think they can split people from their sex, so there you go.
Check out this thread if you want a furious denunciation of the Times for publicly trashing JKR.
Comments
7 responses to “Splitting”
#2 to my mind, is disturbing.
“Lianna is a harmony of flavors” – when people talk about woke cannibalism, I didn’t think it would be this literal.
People, and I can’t believe I have to write this, are not food.
And I’m not entirely joking here – I get that the ad means she’s a varied and multifaceted person, that it isn’t literal, but it highlights how these people think.
They think of themselves not as individuals but as a collection of labels, the herbs and spices of identity that substitute for having an actual personality. Sorry, not sorry, but that just isn’t appealing. It is creepy.
Bruce G, I can see how people might view themselves as a collection of labels, being as they’ve grown up in the internet world where Google, Facebook, Twitter, et. al. have sorted and provided not only the content but the context of their lives.
I was talking with my 87 year old mother (I’m 66) the other day and we recognized how we were both living fossils in this new world, being people who know what now amounts to ancient history and can still remember it.
J.A., my husband and I (he’s 68, I’m 61) talk about the same thing. The other night we were at a play where a joke is made about Levittown…we were the only ones who laughed. No one else got it.
And as for Harry Potter, yeah. The writer creates the creation; they don’t just happen to put their names on the books that have created themselves, and if you put the name of, say, latsot on the cover it would be the same book. That isn’t how it works. And they probably wouldn’t like latsot any better, come to think of it.
That James Barry thread is absolutely wonderful.
“Lianna is a fetishist” is the sentence that came to my mind on seeing this image. Am I using the word fetishist wrong?
A silly article that crossed my news feed described the people who were bothered by the ad as “JK Rowling fans” and said they were “miffed”. Missing the whole point, I think.
Missing it by miles.