January 16, 2024

"As her work has shifted, a generation of Potter enthusiasts have been increasingly disillusioned by Rowling’s evolution from saint-like Labour Party-supporting children’s author..."

"... to polemical political activist, seemingly obsessive about the tabloid media, Scottish nationalism and, most provocatively for her millennial readers, gender-critical feminism. It is a disillusionment that Rowling shares, but for all her books’ world-weary criticism of a political world polarised by social media, they show little self-awareness.... In another world, JK Rowling could be a character in a book by Robert Galbraith: brittle, insecure, cruel. When she assumed the Galbraith pseudonym a decade ago, Rowling was putting on a mask. The mask of anonymity, the mask of detachment, the mask of adulthood. But on another level, she was taking off a mask – and showing herself in full, nasty glory for the first time."

Writes Nick Hilton, in "JK Rowling, Britain’s gloriously nasty novelist/Her electric Robert Galbraith novels portray a Britain populated by paedophiles, domestic abusers, rapists and terrorists" (The New Statesman).

78 comments:

rehajm said...

When you have sod off money like Rowling you have no incentive to comply with the irrational demands of twenty somethings...

Jaq said...

"This bear is an evil beast, when attacked, it defends itself" - French proverb.

TaeJohnDo said...

"...portray a Britain populated by paedophiles, domestic abusers, rapists and terrorists."

Sounds like non-fiction to me.

Dagwood said...

I thought the Galbraith novels were supposed to be fiction.

chuck said...

TL:DR -- Rowling doesn't follow the party line.

tim maguire said...

Ho hum, another radical elitist journalist trying to pretend his extremism is normal and the normies are fringe. Yawn.

n.n said...

Social progress and liberal ideology in transgender trends with dreams of Herr Mengele. What is the female's place on Uranus?

Temujin said...

Meh. She's merely reflecting the UK she sees around her today.

Quaestor said...

Rawling exposed the ruling class, therefore Potter must be destroyed.

Thoroughly predictable, is it not? I very much doubt the British left’s hatred will affect the Harry Potter empire one way or another. Think of it this way, did Boomer fascination with The Lord of the Rings spawn an equal fascination with Roman Catholicism?

wild chicken said...

Ooh! Sounds interesting...I must look up this Galbraith fellow, and subscribe to his newsletter.

Kate said...

2016's #nastywoman brigade would like its hashtag back.

Balfegor said...

In another world, JK Rowling could be a character in a book by Robert Galbraith: brittle, insecure, cruel.

"Brittle, insecure, cruel" seems like an excellent characterisation of Rowling's critics, at least what I've seen of them on Twitter. I don't think it's a particularly apt characterisation of Rowling herself. "Insecure," especially, is the give-away that this is probably just projection by the author of the article. I think neurotic and insecure people regularly fantasise that people who appear enviably confident and secure are secretly riddled with insecurity, and that the gibes, insults, and criticisms they hardly acknowledge really get under their skin. But this is pretty much just a fantasy that weak or impotent people construct to reassure themselves that they really do matter to the object of their attention. Like an ugly man obsessing over a pretty girl from the shadows, or a journalist obsessing over Trump.

AlbertAnonymous said...

How does this person know that “a generation of potter enthusiasts” became disillusioned?

This drivel is all projection all the time.

Media is propoganda!

Strick said...

"...portray a Britain populated by paedophiles, domestic abusers, rapists and terrorists."

Except for the Britain part, you could say the same of Micheal Connelly or nearly any other detective novelist (not to mention John D McDonald, Robert B Parker or Lee Child). Where but the seamy side of life is the modern noir detective/sleuth supposed to work?

Dude1394 said...

LOOKAT ME!!! MY OPINION IS IMPORTANT!!!
Nope, no it is not.

Saint Croix said...

So there are two sexes, men and women. This is how babies are made. A man has sex with a woman, and she gets pregnant.

Feminism came along, and created this thing called "gender." Gender is the politicalization of sexuality. For some people -- academic people -- gender has replaced sex. There is no biological sex anymore. There are only theoretical gender constructs, built by your mind, an infinite number.

What people refer to as TERF ("trans-exclusionary radical feminist") is really just a woman saying that she's a woman and she knows what a woman is. After politicizing sexuality for so long, the "radical" idea is really just an old-fashioned idea: women have the capacity for baby-making.

Feminism, which used rhetoric and words to negate the baby long ago, is now seeing its rhetoric and ideology and political games used against women. Your biology is denied, your status as a woman is denied, via the political constructs that feminists devised decades ago.

Rowling isn't a radical, she's conservative. She should jettison gender ideology and all the crap that goes with that. Gender is a useless and made up academic word -- like "race" -- it's a ghetto of the mind.

Actual human sexuality is a real world phenomenon, by which humans reproduce and create new human beings. It's highly important. Gender and race are stupid political concepts, and people who abandon them are both smarter and happier humans.

SGT Ted said...

The article is nonsense. A smear disguised as a critique.

n.n said...

gender-critical feminism

The female sex with a womb for our Posterity, breasts to nurture their evolution, with a husband/father in marriage... men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature.

iowan2 said...

Will the trolls show up and identify which positions Rowling takes that are so extreme? I'm at loss. I think I remember she had a dust up, refusing to go along with men pretending to be female.

I just assumed it was a natural, human, 'sour grapes' response, because that's how humans react.

So there must be more issues. What issues?

n.n said...

Men, women, and our Posterity are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus. War of the worlds.

Cappy said...

She's not wrong.

Dogma and Pony Show said...

Sounds like Rowlings is the female equivalent of Elon Musk: hyper-accomplished, rich, world-famous, and unwilling NOT to speak her mind. The left HATES this. They need hyper-accomplished, rich, world-famous people to get with the program (like Zuckerberg, Gates, et al), not use their time in the public spotlight to point and laugh at the king who's wearing no clothes.

Bill Crawford said...

I am enjoying her Galbraith books. I think the first two are still available in Kindle Unlimited.

SGT Ted said...

"alienating her largely left-wing millennial fanbase with gender-critical politics."

This notion was shown to be pure bullshit when the trans fascists tried to boycott the Harry Potter video game, all the way to Wired magazine giving the game a 1/10 score because of bullshit that had zero to do with the actual game play itsel, along with Kotaku trashing the game because of "transphobia".

What the trans fascist boycott actually did was cause an explosion of pre-order sales.

When the trans fascists tried to intimidate Twitch online streamers from streaming the game, it backfired causing record breaking viewership for a single player game.

This opinion piece is little more than an attempt to re-write history to claim that the only fans that JK Rowling ever had were the trans fascists who tried to appropriate the Harry Potter universe as a pro-trans playground, because, like wizards, they are different and special. This opinions piece is a monument to trans narcissism.

Jaq said...

"'Brittle, insecure, cruel' seems like an excellent characterisation of Rowling's critics"

"Who smelt it, dealt it," is the best rule for understanding their propaganda.

EAB said...

What a bizarre article. So many of these types of articles today really, at the core, have nothing to say. I’ve read all the Strike books, as I read all the Potter books. Similar trajectory in that the first two were straightforward stories, but as both series advanced, they became more complex and darker. Definitely more complex. Ink Black Heart was very creative.

As already noted, don’t all of these types of books (detective ones) expose the dark underbelly of society? Read any Ellroy? Any Chandler? I’ll show you underbelly.

The author makes an assumption Rowling isn’t self-aware. How does he know? Does she only identity with the character of Robin Ellacott? I doubt it very much. Can an author really write a character without understanding the character at least on some level?

ronetc said...

I have read all seven of the Galbraith novels. The mysteries are pretty good, but the real strength is the still-developing while-remaining-chaste love story of the two lead characters, a masculine man and feminine woman. I guess that is the problem.

William said...

I've seen the movies, but I've never read any of her books. Has anyone here ever read a J.K. Rowling book? Why would any adult want to read a Harry Potter book? The movies are reasonably entertaining. In the movies, there's not much in the way of pedophilia although I suppose the efforts to murder those children can be characterized as a form of child abuse....So far as I know, Rowling's conservatism consists mostly of a few mildly critical comments about transsexuals. I don't think she's transitioning to a Maga Republican, but I suppose the writer feels that just the smallest deviation from the one true faith is heretical. It's like the 19th century Anglicans who felt that too many flowers on the altar were a form of creeping Popery.......What are Rowling's views on Scottish nationalism, and how can views on Scottish nationalism make you brittle, insecure, or cruel.

Leland said...

Other generations are looking at that one generation and wondering if they realize the treacherous path they are taking. Those other generations were taught to listen to their elders as they have wisdom gained from those extra years of experience and are aware many fads of the moment fade so don’t do anything permanent.

Howard said...

I guess she's not quite as appealing since she is no longer a homeless single mom struggling to make it in a toxic capitalistic patriarchy.

BarrySanders20 said...

This Witch Trials podcast is excellent. Rowling is unafraid and refuses to bend the knee to these freaks. They think she's a traitor, and traitors (and apostates) must be dealt with severely as a warning to the rest.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

The collective left do not like it when you lift up the shower curtain to their sexual abuses.
Including Child abuse.

Xmas said...

The irony of the Rowling situation is that she is basically defending the "safe spaces" for women that progressives created over the preceding 30 years. Her progressive politics hadn't changed.

But the window shifted, and she became "far right". And now that she is outside the hugbox, her politics are changing because the people she would normally support are attacking her.

Zavier Onasses said...

"The mask of anonymity, the mask of detachment, the mask of adulthood."

In gender-fluid writing, a sentence can lack a verb and still be a sentence.

Ron Winkleheimer said...

"Has anyone here ever read a J.K. Rowling book? Why would any adult want to read a Harry Potter book?"

I have read all of the Harry Potter books and I did it because I found them to be fun reads, except for the last one. To much camping.

Yancey Ward said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Yancey Ward said...

William,

I have seen the movies but not read the books, too. I also haven't read the C.B. Strike novels, but have seen about half the tv series, which I like a great deal.

And another commenter above has it right- Rowling has barely gotten a foot off the plantation and now faces a metaphorical death sentence.

Aggie said...

Well, now. On the basis of what I'm reading here, and choosing not to read there, I might just have to read me one of them Galbraith novels. Good work, Nick.

Paul Sand said...

The real problem with the Strike books is that they've gotten very very long. The last one I read (Troubled Blood) was 927 pages. When I saw on Amazon that the next one (The Ink Black Heart) was 1024 pages, I said... nah.

hombre said...

"JK Rowling, Britain’s gloriously nasty novelist/Her electric Robert Galbraith novels portray a Britain populated by paedophiles, domestic abusers, rapists and terrorists"

Think Rotherham and Londonistan and go from there.

MadisonMan said...

@William, as it happens, I am just now re-reading all the HP books. I'm in the middle of the long one now. Cedric hasn't died yet, in other words.

WK said...

I read the first Harry Potter book. Family rule when the kids were young was you needed to read the book (if there was one) before seeing the movie. I never got past the first one. Choosing hat separated the borderline delinquent kids into one house, popular kids into another and averages into yet another. Once there you were stuck. At least in middle school kids develop their own groups instead of being forced. Hogwarts taught both good and bad spells with little moral guidance that I could discern. Harry and his crew always broke the rules and were rewarded. The Slytherin kids even when they tried to follow the rules seemed to lose out to the Gryffindor kids due to Dumbledor changing or ignoring the rules. Voldemort wanted war with the non wizard world (I think) but I could never see to what end. What would he win? Hogwarts seemed like a place where adults manipulated kids to their benefit. Wasn’t a fan.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

William, books provide an enjoyment all their own and Rowling is exceptional at weaving story lines and arcs into entertaining prose. She wrote like she was speaking to adults and that turned out to appeal to young readers as well who appreciated stories that were not dumbed down. Can’t say I was ever attracted to juvenile fiction even when I was young. In the tradition of H G Wells, Dafoe and Dickens, Rowling wrote compelling stories that had big themes: can good triumph over evil, what is my destiny, did the people who “mistreated” me actually act for the greater good and prepare me to be an adult.

As for the movies, they were fairly accurate representations of the novels but Hollywood always makes changes to fit their own story telling requirements. I am a reader. The books were better. I prefer taking a story at my own pace rather than the frenetic style of motion pictures.

Narr said...

I read the first couple of Potters, and saw the first two movies. The books were well plotted and JKR has a positive genius for names. But as William notes, they have little to offer mature readers (or viewers) in the long run.

My understanding (and I could be off by 180*) is that she is no fan of Scots independence. It's not my business, though my wife has been there and has Brit and Scottish friends, some of whom want independence. I like to tell her that an independent Scotland would have the whitist, oldest, and poorest population in Europe (NTTAWWT) without the money from the south.

Tom T. said...

Balfegor said...

"...this is probably just projection by the author of the article."

Exactly right. Rowling is always calm and entirely secure on Twitter.

They are engaged at her because because they see her not as an enemy but an apostate. She swings strongly left. She has written with great appreciation about the British welfare state, having been on the dole when she was younger. She did not flee the UK's high taxes, like so many rock stars did. The left loved her because she was one of them.

Thus, her refusal to buy in to the trans movement is seen not just as opposition but betrayal.

Blackbeard said...

JK Rowling's books have been translated into 85 languages and sold some 600 million copies worldwide. Harry Potter is the best selling series in world history.

The New Statesman has a circulation of about 43,000.

I'd say the public has spoken.

JAORE said...

I suspect I would find Ms. Rowling to be quite liberal should I spend any time talking to her. I also think I might find her quite fascinating.

But any deviation from the (fluid) lefty play book is a hanging offense.

Jupiter said...

Does little Nick take it up the ass much? I know it's not supposed to matter, but you know full well it does. There's no misogynist like the one who takes it up the ass a lot.

gilbar said...

i was never a Harry Potter fan.. In fact i've Never read one; or seen any of the movies

A few years ago, i was looking for something to watch (i like British crime/cop shows), and saw there was a series about an English Private Eye, called "Strike" or "CB Strike" or something.
I decided to give it a try; but as i was clicking on it, i saw that JK Rowling was "exec producer"..
I thought: "oh oh!" but started it anyway. It was Pretty Good; so good, in fact, that i went to wikipeadia to find out more.. And found out, that JK wrote the books it was based on.

Since then, i've bought the 1st two books; and would have to say, they're Even Better than the TV shows.
I STILL have No Desire to read Harry Potter (although i DO like the scene with the Hermione Growth Spurt)

Joe Smith said...

"JK Rowling, Britain’s gloriously nasty novelist/Her electric Robert Galbraith novels portray a Britain populated by paedophiles, domestic abusers, rapists and terrorists"

What about the rogering? Does she get into that?

From what I've read, her new books are doing fairly well.

Either way, she has FU money x 100.

A nice place to be...

Joe Smith said...

'What people refer to as TERF ("trans-exclusionary radical feminist") is really just a woman saying that she's a woman and she knows what a woman is.'

No other group would put up with people dressing/acting like another group and demanding to be treated as genuine.

I know, I will wear a hockey puck on my head, dress all in black, and demand that you call me 'Rabbi.' I don't know any Yiddish or Hebrew, I eat lobster and pork chops, but I feel Jewish.

Men who pretend to be women (and vice versa although men seem to be the majority of the problem) are just mentally ill, and society is stupid enough/fucked up enough to go along with it.

It is a monumental 'Fuck you' to actual women.

Back in the good old days they were called cross dressers, transvestites, whatever you prefer.

Most kept this fetish to themselves in the privacy of their own homes. Some out-there types did it in public. Either way, God bless you...I don't care.

But nobody ever claimed to be an actual woman. No man complained about menstrual cramps when he was pushing 40 and needed to start his annual prostate exams.

Pure fucking madness...

Narr said...

Our PBS station runs crappy Brit shows all the time. The latest is "Funny Woman," a small portion of which I watched with my wife (who is a sucker for crappy Brit shows). The best thing I can say about it is that it recreates the looks and sounds of the 1960s very well.

But the crappiest IMO is "Ridley".

Paddy O said...

Rowling is fairly consistent. Her villains in Harry Potter included an imsecure academic who was easily coopted to evil by seductive knowledge, a vainglorious celebrity author/influencer. And her best was Dolores Umbridge, the government bureaucrat who instituted government mandated education reforms.

She is among the best of the truly post-modern writers, engaging in gray areas whole holding onto complex truth and morality.

And of course her Harry Potter books made one assume that Britain is filled with horrific mind controlling evil witches and wizards who excused and diverted attention from their evil.

Methinks Hilton has a dark mark of his own that's flashing him to condemn one of the most influential writers of our Era and who just happens to be a woman.

Maybe he thinks women authors should stay within culturally prescribed bounds.

Bruce Hayden said...

“What a bizarre article. So many of these types of articles today really, at the core, have nothing to say. I’ve read all the Strike books, as I read all the Potter books. Similar trajectory in that the first two were straightforward stories, but as both series advanced, they became more complex and darker. Definitely more complex. Ink Black Heart was very creative.”

My daughter was the exact right age for the HP books. Her reading ability increased as fast as the books were released. Which meant that it took her 2-3 days to read each one, as they came out every year. What they are, are Coming Of Age books. Which kids love, because it parallels real life. Heck, it is a staple of fiction, and esp Fantasy. Just finished a Coming Of Age series last night.

So, heck yes, I read the books. I would consider parents whose kids obsessed over the books to almost have been negligent if they hadn’t. There doesn’t seem to be that much of a divide between Fantasy and Science Fiction, and from that to actual science. Watch Big Bang Theory sometime, or catch the Fantasy/Sci-Fi references by Elon Musk. That daughter who so obsessed over HP books when they came out ended up with Honors in Physics as an undergrad, and a hard STEM PhD. Many of the friends she was obsessing with ended up similarly- STEM PhDs, MD, DDS, PharmD, etc.

Jim Gust said...

I also have read all the Harry Potter books. I bought them for my children, for whom they were age appropriate at the time. I likely would not have read them otherwise, but I quite enjoyed them, as did they. In fact, I took my youngest to the Barnes and Noble for the midnight release of Goblet of Fire, it was a memorable adventure. B&N was sold out, we had arrived too late, but there were plenty of copies to be had up the street at Target.

I agree that the books were much better than the movies, and that there was too much camping in book seven.

Fred Drinkwater said...

There's a great line from the Brit detective series Midsummer Murders, when Barnaby's wife Joyce suggests they move to Midsummer (nice looking towns, with lots of detective work available). His reaction is something like, "No way! Everybody there is a murderer, rapist, arsonist, or committing incest." A fine bit of lampshade hanging.

Rowling is OK in my books.

Bruce Hayden said...

“ Men who pretend to be women (and vice versa although men seem to be the majority of the problem) are just mentally ill, and society is stupid enough/fucked up enough to go along with it.”

Maybe the difference there is between (very often Gay) guys pretending to be women, and gals trying to become guys. One of the deep dark secrets of the trans movement is that a surprising number (e.g 3 or 4 out of 5) of the recent white on white mass shootings have been by F2M transsexuals. One theory is that their female brains were not wired to handle the aggression that results from Testosterone. Most male brains come with an aggression Off switch. You see this with not just human males, but also with many other mammalian species that compete for mates. The males compete for dominance, then when achieved, quickly stop. Females don’t typically have this Off switch, which is why they are often considered the more dangerous of the two sexes.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

OK, I've put one of the Galbraith books on hold at the local library.

Rocco said...

WK,

Two important things to consider about the Harry Potter franchise:
- First, we see almost everything through the Harry filter - i.e., we see everything through Harry's eyes. When Harry is seven years old, we see everything in simplistic black or white terms. As Harry matures, we see more complexity and shades of grey in later books.
- Second, it may speak with a thick British boarding school accent, but the whole thing is in many ways a prescient satire of the whole education system (including universities).

WK said...
"Choosing hat separated the borderline delinquent kids into one house, popular kids into another and averages into yet another."

If you see the houses through the eyes of a seven year old, yes. But later on we meet Voldemort's right-hand(*) man who was in Gryffendor, and a Slytherin teacher who was anti-Voldemort and grew up and taught at a time when Slytherin was not simply a club of Voldemort's Death Eaters.

"Once there you were stuck."

Like the tracking system in large American public school districts? And that's generally how the house system in Britain works. And European tracking is generally more stringent than ours.

"Hogwarts taught both good and bad spells with little moral guidance that I could discern."

Hogwarts taught Defense Against the Dark Arts classes, not Dark Arts classes. At least until Voldemort started terror attacks and Dumbledore brought in "Mad-Eye" Moody to teach the kids how to fight back. And Mad-Eye gives his "Shit's About to Get Real" speech about the seriousness of the subject matter.

"Harry and his crew always broke the rules and were rewarded."

'Breaking All the Rules' has long been a Hollywood tagline.

"Voldemort wanted war with the non wizard world (I think) but I could never see to what end. What would he win?"

World domination by wizards. Barring that, total world destruction.

"Hogwarts seemed like a place where adults manipulated kids to their benefit."

And other adults, too. Good life lesson to learn.


- (*) Yes, there's a joke in there.

Oligonicella said...

Nick Hilton:
JK Rowling, Britain’s gloriously nasty novelist/Her electric Robert Galbraith novels portray a Britain populated by paedophiles, domestic abusers, rapists and terrorists"

It's a reasonable description. So?

Oligonicella said...

Saint Croix:
Gender is a useless and made up academic word -- like "race" -- it's a ghetto of the mind.

The only quibble I would have in a post I otherwise agree with would be to use the present perfect "has become". They didn't used to be mind rot.

Oligonicella said...

Zavier Onasses:
In gender-fluid writing, a sentence can lack a verb and still be a sentence.

And?

Oligonicella said...

William:
Has anyone here ever read a J.K. Rowling book?

A couple, say one and a half. Her ideas are nice and original-ish and her character interactions good but I found her writing description heavy. That's just me. I can certainly see someone enjoying the read.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Read the article.

Sounds like Agatha Christie.

Michael McNeil said...

This sentence, no verb.

mikee said...

Once, as I bought my daughter a Harry Potter novel on the day of its release, the fundamentalist Baptist bookstore clerk asked me very sincerely if I wasn't bothered by the magic and other non-Christian ideas in the books. I explained the novels were very like Kipling's Stalky & Company, English boarding school stories, but with a fantasy overlay. She was comforted by this comparison. I did not get into it any further, which seemed the best way to handle her anxiety.

As to the author, she has "screw you" money from her Potter franchise and seems to enjoy saying that to people now. Well OK then, that's her thing. I might read more of her books if they entertain me. I won't be reading or not reading based on the purported politics of the contents or the author's actual personality, behavior, beliefs, politics, sexuality, or anything else about her other than the printed words she had put on the book's pages. Were I to do otherwise, almost all literature would be verboten, as all humans are fallible and so are almost all ideas, plots, characters, events, ever put in books.

The corrections to bad ideas are good ideas. If Rowling's opponents have them, self publishing is a thing and their better ideas may certainly be promulgated without censorship of ideas they oppose.

loudogblog said...

I did score a really nice box set of all the Harry Potter movies for free from a friend of mine who had decided to wipe J.K. Rowling from her life. (As if J.K. Rowling was the only one responsible for making the movies. Aside from writing the books, she was not involved in any of the movie productions.)

Real American said...

and the "paedophiles, domestic abusers, rapists and terrorists" are the good guys in the eyes of her detractors.

gilbar said...

So this Hilton guy, Robert Galbraith, worries:
the novels portray a Britain populated by paedophiles, domestic abusers, rapists and terrorists

doesn't have ANYTHING to do with Britain, BUT i wonder if this Hilton guy has read any Raymond Chandler?
IF you like gawking at the seamy underbelly of 1930's Los Angeles (and i DO!) you can't beat Chandler

Prof. M. Drout said...

Rowling believes the cant that women have been systemically discriminated against or treated unfairly in our culture and therefore deserve various perks, helpful double-standards, benefits, etc.
But she doesn't believe that M to F trans, when they were just plain M, suffered the discrimination that women did, so she therefore is not in favor of giving them all the perks and bennies that women acquired for themselves over the past 50 years.
Basically she's an ordinary feminist of the writing world circa 1970-2010. What distinguishes her is that she, unlike the majority of her sister feminists, refused to turtle when M to F trans people claimed ownership of the spaces and perks that those old-school feminists had acquired for themselves and, supposedly, other women.

The transformation of Rowling 180-degrees from hero to devil in about 18 months is the perfect example of how a tiny cadre of internet addicts could leverage social-media-groupthink to force their agenda into the wider world. The Tumblr algorithm triggered runaway rhetorical inflation, and the early Twitter algorithm massively amplified those who produced very frequent content 24 hours a day. That combination turned out to favor people with a particular set of obsessions, and then the journalists who discovered that once they were on Twitter, they didn't need to do any actual reporting, were influenced by the original big fish on the platform, and so crazy ideas got spread into the mainstream as if they really were popular.

The success of the Hogwarts video game despite the unanimous opposition of the internet and journalism shows that the VAST majority of people don't care in the slightest that Rowling is a "TERF," but media people, despite their protestations about Musk, still live almost entirely in their Twitter-bubbles and continue to believe that certain ideas are immensely more popular than they actually are.

Joanne Jacobs said...

J.K. Rowling wasn't a saint, and she isn't nasty now. Or brittle. She's got the resilience of riches.

The Harry Potter books are, at least in part, a parody of "Tom Brown's School Days," Kipling's "Stalky" books and all the other books about boys at boarding school. I enjoyed them, especially the first.

I like her Galbraith books too, though I agree that the recent ones are too damn long.

Mary Beth said...

I have seen the movies but not read the books, too. I also haven't read the C.B. Strike novels, but have seen about half the tv series, which I like a great deal.

I started watching the series because her critics irritated me. Why not help boost the viewership? I ended up watching the whole thing.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Fred Drinkwater mentioned Midsomer Murders and I admit being drawn into this British detective series. I resisted at first because each episode is like 150 minutes, longer than most feature films. My wife prefers the second Barnaby because he’s played by Neal Dudgeon and that’s her maiden name. There’s an extraordinary amount of killing going on in this sleepy rural town full of farmers and city folk who fled London. The location reminds me of Gloucester although the real place has far fewer murders.

Kirk Parker said...

TaeJohnDo wins the thread at 7:52am, beating Dagwood by a mere minute.

Ralph L said...

The main problem with both Midsomer Murders and Morse is that so many bodies drop in succession, the brilliant detectives aren't terribly effective until there are only a few suspects left.

The original long-time producer of Midsomer, Brian True May, was fired a few years ago for defending the show's lack of diversity as reflecting actual rural English villages. Now it isn't quite like the last 3 years of American commercials, more like modern London, but with every other couple interracial.

Rusty said...

The only question, politics aside is, are her novels interesting? I got the whole "Harry Potter" series for my daughter and read them along with her. They are for young adults and are highly entertaining. I'll try one of her later works.
I didn't quit reading Steven King because he's a preachy leftist. I quit reading him because his after " The Stand" and half way theough the "Gunslinger" trilogy was just derivative. "I'm writing to collect a paycheck." kind of thing.

LakeLevel said...

AlbertAnonymous: "How does this person know that “a generation of potter enthusiasts” became disillusioned?"

Anecdotally, my young, geographically diverse, and Liberal relatives at a recent holiday gathering all wanted to watch a Potter movie over every other choice.

John henry said...

At someone here's suggestion I started watching CD Strike last night on prime. Very good.

But it occurred to me, isn't Rowling doing a bit of grandson herself? As Robert Galbraith she is talking a male identity, pretending to be a man. Not only that, she seems to be trying to write as a man talking the male persona. (in the film, don't know about the books)

Why not take the name Roberta Galbraith? Or Matthew something ambiguous like Jackie or Pat?

I'm not complaining. I like what she is doing. I think she does it very well. I have download it the first of the Cormoran strike books and look forward to reading it when finish reading Candace milliards "river of the gods" about the burton/speke Nile expedition (excellent and thanks Ann or the commenter who suggested it)

John Henry

I just find it odd that she complains about trannies while being one herself