Why I Dislike JK Rowling & Harry Potter

This post is probably going to seem petty, but it’s something that comes up quite often in my interactions with people my age. I dislike JK Rowling, I dislike Harry Potter, and I do not want to hear about your new Harry Potter plushie, wand, or video game.

People are often shocked by how strong my feelings are on this topic. They wonder why anyone would hate the writer of their beloved childhood book series. If you don’t follow Rowling online (or people who won’t shut up about what she said), then I can see how it would be easy to ignore all the controversies she generates. Some people I know are aware of the controversies but don’t care that much about her being a TERF because of their own political views. Even ignoring her much discussed political views, which I find naively hurtful at best and hateful at worst, I still find her distasteful and don’t enjoy her works.

So, because I often find myself as an outlier at parties for having these views and I don’t like repeating myself, I thought I would write this post summarizing how I feel as well as why I feel this way.

I am going to paint some broad strokes about how I feel about things without going into a thousand citations of this character, that character, what scenes, etc. because frankly I don’t enjoy these books/movies and I don’t think they warrant the attention. It would be a special type of masochism to spend all that time engaging with something I don’t enjoy just to tear it down more precisely.

So why don’t I like her…

She Punches Down

Rowling consistently makes fun of people being fat and uses it as the butt of jokes. Almost all of her character who are described as fat fall into negative stereotyping.

This isn’t something I noticed when I was younger because I wasn’t particularly attuned to it. I was a scrawny kid who was on the other side of the jokes. But speaking with a friend later in life, who happened to feel they were the punchline to these jokes, I realized how mean spirited it all was. He was, as a child, reading a book ostensibly targeted at him that is consistently picking on and describing physical attributes he feels he possess in a negative light.

This mean-spiritedness pervades her writing. She writes with a lot of internalized prejudices that she makes no attempt to understand or address.

She Writes About Slavery In A Really Weird Way

I’m just gonna be blunt, everything with the house elves always pissed me off. Even as a child it seemed stupid.

The writing around this topic in the books is so weird and the justificaitons that have been given in interviews and by fans online are all pretty off the wall. In particular Hermione is ridiculed and shown to be silly for caring about the elves.

In a interview in 2000 Rowling said this:

E: But here's where it shows up: Hermione and the rights of elves. Civil rights becomes a theme in Goblet of Fire.

JK: Oh yeah. Yeah.

E: This is a real issue.

JK: Yeah, that was fairly autobiographical. My sister and I both, we were that kind of teenager. (Dripping with drama) We were that kind of, 'I'm the only one who really feels these injustices. No one else understands the way I feel.' I think a lot of teenagers go through that.

E: In Britain they call it 'Right On' or something.

JK: Exactly. Well, she's fun to write because Hermione, with the best of intentions, becomes quite self-righteous. My heart is entirely with her as she goes through this. She develops her political conscience. My heart is completely with her. But my brain tells me, which is a growing-up thing, that in fact she blunders towards the very people she's trying to help. She offends them. She's not very sensitive to their…

E: She's somewhat condescending to the elves who don't have rights.

JK: She thinks it's so easy. It's part of what I was saying before about the growing process, of realizing you don't have quite as much power as you think you might have and having to accept that. Then you learn that it's hard work to change things and that it doesn't happen overnight. Hermione thinks she's going to lead them to glorious rebellion in one afternoon and then finds out the reality is very different, but that was fun to write.

E: And you're working in these issues that, for you as a person, are obviously crucial to your life. I mean, these issues about race relations and civil rights.

JK: You know, children are interested in those things. They are. It's not just me. I think they are.

So the motivation for the house elves storyline was to show how young women can get overly self-righteous and should “grow up” and accept slavery as an institution of society? I think if this was the point there would have been some other way to do this without making light of something as serious as slavery. Maybe there are points that could be made about how slavery is a complex system that can’t be ended with a “glorious rebellion in one afternoon” but in my opinion that’s a story of it’s own that deserves more nuance than the house elves really got.

She Sucks At Systems Thinking

She writes a lot of stuff in a way that I find to be deeply simplistic and uninteresting. Even when we are discussing what is a series of books originally for children.

Wizarding Schoools

An easy example of this is that within the Harry Potter universe there are eight wizarding schools in existence. Three of these are in Europe, one in South America, one in North America, one in Russia, one in Japan, and one in Africa. Woo! The books are generally Eurocentric and I think she only wanted to write about British kids doing British wizard things. I wouldn’t be upset if she choose not to say anything about schools outside of Europe, but they do exist in her universe and exist in a way that flattens every other culture. Do you mean to tell me that the wizards of Taiwan and China are totally cool going to the same school together in Japan? That wizards are somehow above nationalism and power grabs?

I think it’s fine to tell a simple story constrained to Europe, but if you are going to do things such as say there are wizarding schools elsewhere, put some effort in. She half-asses everything that she doesn’t think is important and I think it’s hurtful to people who do think those things are important.

The poop thing

The infamous wizard poop tweet.

Why. Why would you put this out there? Defenders of the wizard pooping tweet point out that the “muggles” of the time would have been shitting in buckets and throwing it into the streets.

But like why did we need to think about this. Why was this warranted? Just off the cuff “wizards break conservation of matter to vanish their shit before plumbing”. Can wizards just vanish anything? Can they vanish a dead body? Does this have any implications for the ecosystem? Does this destroy the phosphorus cycle? Those nutrients were gonna do something somewhere!

Shitting isn’t so outrageous or taboo that this should never have happened but an idea like this has implications. It would be interesting to explore in a fleshed out world where we go deeper into this, not the shit specifically but the idea of wizards using magic to be so above everyone else. Wizards who literally think their shit doesn’t stink (because they magic it away) being smug at regulars would be very funny (to me).

To close out this ridiculous section here is a funny video ProZD made about this.

She Makes Tokens Out Of Her Characters

Whatever diversity is present in her stories feels like tokenism to me. Maybe I just have a chip on my shoulder about the whole “It’s nowhere in the books but btw Dumbledore is gay, ok bye” thing. Again I think if you are going to do something like that it should be present within the story and influence it.

She Is A Multi-Millionaire Who Can’t Help But Tweet

She has so much money that she could never work another day in her life and be happy, but she continues to make her presence known in the world and often for the worse. If she would just quietly enjoy her money we could all enjoy a world where I wouldn’t feel the need to post this because she would just be an author of a popular series for children I don’t enjoy. Instead she continues to be present with wizard poop and TERF posting.

This is probably more of a personal beef of mine so I don’t expect a lot of my friends to understand it. But in my opinion if you make enough money to never work again and you don’t have anything meaningful to say you should just live an idyllic life away from the public eye. If you still have something meaningful to say, more works to create, more impact on the world, then by all means do so! But I don’t really feel like JK Rowling has done that. Unless the impact she wants to have is to generate transphobia.

She is a TERF!

Much has been said about this and if you don’t care about the topic then I’m not sure I have a unique take that would change your perspective. I don’t particularly care to go find and catalog every instance of this but it’s pretty well established that in the best case she is inconsiderate and in the worst case she is pretty loudly hateful.

I don’t go in depth about this because I know some people who still seem to like her, but personally I think she is pretty hateful to be talking about all her controversial views so publicly and so frequently.

In Summary

I don’t like her. I think there are better authors out there even considering the target age range of those books.

At the same time I sympathize with people who struggle to accept that the person who wrote the books that were part of their foundational experiences has become a controversial figure with bad opinions. But a lot of my thoughts on why you shouldn’t base your whole personality on Harry Potter aren’t related to JK Rowling or her transphobia – I just don’t think the books are that good. I think reading the books as they are rather than with rose-tinted glasses shows this.