Harry Potter and the Rotting Decay of J.K. Rowling

As an icebreaker during a zoom call today, the host encouraged attendees to pick a nerdy field of interest and discuss it with a small group. The choices were several, including Lord of the Rings, anime, Star Wars, Marvel/DC/comics, Pokemon... and Harry Potter.

In western civilization, Harry Potter is this century's most significant cultural touchstone. It jumpstarted an entire generation onto fantasy novels, inspired millions of kids to read, and led to a boom of young adult fantasy novels that continues to this day.

While it's been a long time since I've been around those who are still unabashedly all about Harry Potter, four of the six people in my room cited that as their preferred fandom. I tried not to bristle, but it's hard when the vast majority of the public remain blissfully ignorant of what Harry Potter has come to represent to those in the know. The book series ended in 2007 and the movies in 2011, forever encasing Harry Potter in amber, a property that will never change.

But that ignores the malign existence of its author, J.K. Rowling.

While there's been nothing major that's propelled Potter forward, this series is nevertheless not going away. Audible is currently putting out full cast adaptations of the series, and the first trailer for HBO's upcoming television series adaptation dropped this week (the first season will be out at the end of this year). I'd link it, but there are two great reasons not to:

• 1) I don't want to give it the clicks and free publicity.
• 2) For anyone who's seen the Harry Potter films, there's basically nothing in there that that's new.

This is one of those posts I don't really want to write. I don't want to go on a tear about how the most significant cultural object since Star Wars makes me feel gross. I don't want to live in a world where this narrative that informed nearly a decade of my life and acted as signposts of my youth is now something I can barely stomach mentioning.

But one of the lessons of J.K Rowling's signature text is that we shouldn't be afraid to name the evils we see. Refusing to name or engage with such a thing can give it power to grow unattended and unencumbered. Deference without challenging means that when a thing returns, it might have amassed more power and following than it would have otherwise.

To quote another totemic text, the 2nd Doctor in the 1967 Doctor Who serial "The Moonbase" laid out one of the signature lines of his entire tenure:

"There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought"

J.K. Rowling is one of those things.

How to become a billionaire

J.K. Rowling is a story of true success. As a beneficiary of the U.K.'s social safety net, she remains one of the great rags to riches stories in my lifetim. Single mother. Living on welfare. Writing a book. Getting published. Turning the initial image of a boy on a broomstick into a billion dollar fiefdom.

One of the slyest things in Rowling's career was make her deal with Warner Bros. The books were always going to be a phenomenon, and signing over the rights to making films was inevitable. But Rowling's utilized with what must have been an absolutely insane legal team to make critical demands that ensured she stayed in control of her creation. For an example of how granular she was in her details, the partnership includes a clause in her contract that none of her published books will ever have covers without her approval. It means there's never been a tacky published edition of Harry Potter with Dan Radcliffe's (or any other actor's) face slapped all over it.

This expanded to the deal she and Warner Bros. struck to bring Harry Potter to Universal's theme parks. A pretty good write-up of the deal is here, but Rowling retains final approval on just about anything Potter that goes out into the world. And with that level of control, it means she's making money hand over fist, day after day.

All of this has made Rowling incredibly wealthy. The books would have set her up anyone for life, but a cut of all box office, streaming, and home video sales have compounds that number. Throw in a cut of all merchandising, which includes wand and robe sales at theme parks, toys, games, and tchochkies from stores, and everything in between and it's exploded into an unfathomable amount of money. And nothing she's written in almost twenty years has moved the needle on that.

This ocean of money flowing into her pockets will persist indefinitely, for so long as her stranglehold over Harry Potter remains.

How to spend money like a billionaire (and become a wretched person in the process...)

Rowling herself has long identified as a feminist, with liberal credentials and an avowed dedication to Britain's center-left Labour party. It's easy to think of her as one of those "good" billionaires, who values the social safety net and champions important social causes.

Unfortunately, Rowling's definition of women falls into a narrative band of acceptability, and any person who doesn't conform to her tight, traditional standards is someone she qualifies as a "Muggle".

(To give an idea of where this is going, notice how easily she drops that as a slur...)

This has resulted in her becoming the most high profile anti-trans rights individual on the planet.

There are many other sources that have written about this extensively, There's an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to her political views. When others have challenged her positions, she's publicly lashed out, covering anything from public fights with Daniel Radcliffe, disavowal of long-time advocate Stephen King, and a high profile attack on Emma Watson (despite Watson trying to be as diplomatic as possible). She's started an organization with the express purpose of furthering her anti-trans agenda, meaning there is a funnel that flows any money she brings in from Harry Potter right back out the door towards any initiatives that might help erase trans, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and more people from society.

If it seems like this is not enough, one of the big stories at the 2024 Olympics was of Rowling leading a high profile charge against the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, painting the gold medalist as some misogynist man punching other women for sport. Who gives a shit that Khelif was raised and identifies as female. She doesn't look it. She doesn't conform. Weirdly, Rowling stopped screaming about it publicly around the same time Khelif filed suit against her and others slandering her character.

This whole situation is so awful that there are entire posts on reddit where trans individuals ask questions like "Why does J.K. Rowling hate us so much?". There is research that laws like those Rowling pursues have (upon enactment) massively increased the suicide rate among trans individuals, especially young people. This on top of the already per-capita higher rate amongst the queer community relative to the non-queer population. This is especially awful given Rowling's status as famous as a children's book author whose words matter. Impressionable young people read her work while trying to learn about and discover themselves. Having to navigate queerness can be a politically and socially fraught situation (not to mention physically dangerous) and is hard enough without the world's most famous author screaming about how some people don't deserve to exist. That their lived experience and psychological/physical/emotional struggles are a plague on society. And wrong. And that they are sick and need help.

Imagine what that must do to a kid trying to discover their identity.

If Rowling's words have caused even one person to even attempt to take their own life, is that not enough pain and suffering?

She has to know this, but also? She's made it clear she doesn't care. Rowling wants anyone not embracing to their gender assigned at birth to conform to her bigoted view of women and how they operate. If one of these people die, it's one less person she needs to argue with.

It would be so easy for her to just not. To shut the fuck up. Or have casual odious views like most people. Transphobes exist in the world. Creators have odious views. We can still enjoy their work. But her militant zealotry is so far beyond that. Rowling has transformed herself over the last six years from beloved children's writer into be the most vile, high-profile, virulent, monstrous anti-trans bigot on the planet. Filled with disgusting self-righteousness, she persists in this vicious, unceasing fatwa to erase trans people from both public spaces and private existence.

And she wants everyone to know this.

Being transphobic is literally her brand now. That will never, ever change. And she is never, ever going to stop.

And because she's fused Harry Potter to her very existence, that means Harry Potter has turned into an anti-trans initiative, regardless of the text itself.

Bleeding into the real world

Rowling's crusade has grown so undeniable that it's become a regular topic in any interview with anyone associated with any Harry Potter projects. Nearly every person associated with the series has to answer questions about the controversies surrounding Rowling and her comments. In every interview. Anyone hired to work on anything Harry Potter will probably release a statement explaining why they're taking on the project and how important it is to the larger culture. It almost always comes down to legacy. Weirdly, Rowling almost never gets a mention.

Warner Bros. has to release such statements with startling regularity, justifying why Harry Potter is a thing they're continuing to build on even though Rowling finds herself embroiled in some high-profile scuffle every month or so. And it's not like they can just come out and say "the money we're making from the boy wizard and is owl is far more valuable to us, our shareholders, and our bottom lines than the life of any trans person out there who might be in any way harmed by her words or actions". And I can say that because it's the implication from their behavior. Harry Potter has made Warner Bros. so much money off the movies and merchandising alone that they can't even release a statement supporting trans people at all. The best they can do is talk about how great it is when people are tolerant and inclusive.

All because Rowling's universe isn't just a cash cow. It's a fucking herd from which the studio can tap an endless stream of capital.

Even if Warner Bros. desperately wanted it to, this is not going away. And yet, there's something inspiring about the company and those associated with Harry Potter that joining in Rowling's rhetoric or explicitly endorsing her beliefs is too far. And that's in a world where trans rights are not exactly supported by an overwhelming majority of the population. They avoid. They dodge. They deflect. Everyone knows that Rowling has simply gone too far.

All this became unavoidable (for those chronically online or engrossed in the fandom) in 2020 when she drove off the fucking cliff.

Supporting Rowling in any capacity is morally abominable, to say nothing of being her dedicated patron like Warner Bros. is. And to hold this position is so dangerous. In a conversation with a friend a year or so ago, he was talking about how Warners not speaking our or cutting ties creates an unsafe environment for any queer person involved with Harry Potter. It's especially dangerous for all the kids at the center of the series who have yet to really discover or come to terms with their gender or sexual identity. As they grow up, statistically at least a few members of the cast will start to identify as queer at some point in the future. There is no guarantee Warners will defend them should they reach such a crossroads. Worse, there is no guarantee Rowling will not attack those who work to bring her world to life if they speak against her.

When it comes to Warner Bros., the cast, or anyone who refuses to stand up and speak out against harmful behavior is tacit permission for that harm to continue. To anyone working on Harry Potter now, Rowling's vile behavior is acceptable, or at the very least tolerable.

All of this is reason enough to not want to partake in the Harry Potter show or go anywhere near its now toxic existence. A video game came out and it's been popular enough, but a lot of the discourse was about whether it was right or not to put money into Rowling's pocket. Sure, there is incentive to support the many, many artists and technicians who worked on the final product, but no one owes these workers anything. If that's a concern, people should make sure to purchase other low selling video games to help keep those studios afloat too.

And any bonus most make from good sales is going to be far less than the rewards Rowling reaps from its success.

Ethical consumption

The longer creators spend time in the world, the more audiences get to know them. In some cases this can be great. Parks & Recreation creator Mike Schur seems like an affable, well-meaning individual who's trying to be a good person (especially in the wake of The Good Place), and it seems like James Cameron has managed to remain demanding without being an absolute terror on his sets.

On the other hand are those like Neil Gaiman, whose issues have manifested in shocking and disturbing allegations of sexual misconduct (not linking these because I don't recommend looking these up without knowing that they are extremely graphic and grotesque; if you're curious, go google it). Glen Weldon of NPR wrote about what to do when presented with evidence that (if even partly true) can necessitate a complete break from their work moving forward. It's impossible to rewrite the past, and hold oneself responsible for problems unknown.

One of the benefits of the media explosion of the past century is that most people are now (in some small way) patrons of the arts. As a pop culture sponge, this opens a question of what is or is not tolerable to support. While there should be a separation of art from artist and good art can come from bad people and demanding artists be saints is a great way to shrink the number of artists to near zero, there comes a point where an artist's context actively informs their work. At that point, patronizing that work is an endorsement of the artist themselves.

While it's still tremendously difficult to weather Rowling's relentless assault on the trans community, her atrociousness revealed a moral clarity that made it extremely easy to walk away from Harry Potter without ever looking back.

Which... is weird, right?

It's odd that something so intrinsic to my love of fantasy and books and multi-volume series became something I could immediately detach from my persona or interests.

Why?

Rowling's always written problematically...

As fandom turned on Rowling, all of Harry Potter's more unsavory elements snapped into focus, and it became impossible to turn a blind eye to criticisms about racism, sexism, and more.

Most obviously are the goblins running the wizard bank Gringotts. They are a miserly, greedy folk, with long claws, wizened faces, and long, pointed noses. It's not far off from classic anti-semetic stereotypes. There's also the conflation of physical grotesquerie with evil, especially when it comes to women's apperances.

There's also the presence of side characters like Dean Thomas and the Patil twins, token non-white characters with minimal characterization but who nevertheless serve as checkmarks to ensure that Harry Potter isn't an alabaster white series. The upcoming television series has attempted to go further, casting a black man as Severus Snape. This follows on the casting of a black woman as Hermione in the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

(There's currently a debate on the new Hermione actress's ethnicity. Regardless of what that might be, she can pass for white such that it can placate anyone who might take issue with "woke" casting...)

But even if you set all of this aside, the subtle racism, fat-shaming, and traditional gender affirmations of the book... Rowling's transphobic jihad against a marginalized population, there's another problem that's going to mean that for all its cultural relevance, Harry Potter itself is currently strip mining its way into a waning of its cultural standing.

It's not that Harry Potter isn't good...

Following the conclusion of the series in 2007 (and then the movies in 2011), only two other major Harry Potter works have followed.

The less well-known (and less-experienced) is the aforementioned play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Written by Jack Thorne from a story by him, Rowling, and director John Tiffany, it's the only canonical work that explores the next generation of students: Harry's son Albus and his relationship with Draco's son Scorpius. The play itself is fabulous and very different from other Potter projects. Still, the entire play feels beholden to the original series, with the two boys traveling back in time to alter the series' events and changing the future in awful ways. The character also travel all the way back to the night of the Potters' murder to stop the villain from changing the future and preventing the series from happening.

Not that most of this matters. The ticket cost, scale of the play's production, and the complications of a two-part story means a much smaller audience relative to the millions who read the books and saw the movies. It could be the best thing in Harry Potter ever. It will always feels like a minor work if that.

The Fantastic Beasts films are more well-known, expanding the Wizarding World of Harry Potter by teaming Rowling up with veteran Potter director David Yates to explore the rise of Gellert Grindelwald and young Albus Dumbledore's conflicts in stopping him.

Rowling said there was a plan to do five films, but by the time the third film came out, Warner Bros. announced they weren't actively developing more. With the films being as expensive as they were and each successive box office shedding hundreds of millions of dollars with each release this isn't exactly a surprise. And... it also doesn't help that Rowling's repugnant transphobia kicked off after the start of the third film's production but well before its release. That press circuit was a PR nightmare.

There are a number of reasons Fantastic Beasts didn't catch on. The characters didn't sparkle. The hook of "dude who travels the world studying magical creatures" is far less engaging than "kids at a wizard school". And the prequel of it all felt like Rowling was answering questions rather than expanding the world.

More than that it just felt.... so lacking in creative ideas.

This is the biggeest problem with Rowling's work. She might have created something wondrous and spectacular, but that was the limit of her genre talents. She created the bare minimum of what she needed and then moved on. She pounced on any opportunity to recycle a previously introduced idea. Her magic system is crude, with plot needs dictating whatever new spell she needed to have. To activate, characters say a word. Barring some minor intent issues, magic happens. Four books in it's not exactly clear what magic there was left to learn when it came to what it could do. On top of that, the magic has no cost, breaks the laws of reality (without explanation), and comes from shouting spells and waving an arm. Not exactly tiring.

Much of Fantastic Beasts is trying to introduce new monsters, but Newt Scamander still has a pet niffler. It's not like she added much to the world beyond that. Screenwriting is a hard job with different demands than a book. It requires more action, more propulsive momentum. More visual storytelling. More specific and contained character arcs.

Put simply: Rowling struggled to write a good Fantastic Beasts film because screenwriting is beyond her talents.

It's not a big leap to go from there to the other points in the books where she ran out of ideas. Goblet of Fire features a giant maze as the Third Task. It should be spectacular, but Rowling can only scrounge up enough brain power to turn what's supposed to be a relentless series of trials into a handful of incidents. Harry learns "Expelliarmus" in the second book, and it winds up as the final action beat at the climax of the series. Because it's the best spell he learns? Nah. Because it's a defensive spell? No. None of those reasons. It's because she never bothered to give him other, better spells over the books between those two moments.

This endless churn of old ideas has become the representation of Harry Potter. If it feels like there's a Harry Potter resurgence, it's because the last film came out almost a decade and a half ago and Warners is now trying to milk their investment in Rowling for more cash. What is the point of buying access to one of the most profitable universes of all time if it's not serving as a vehicle that will print money?

But... where's the new?

Fantastic Beasts flopped. Cursed Child was a hit for the lucky few who've seen the finished product. Rowling could easily go out and make a new thing in the Wizarding World or continue the story of Harry Potter with Harry et al as adults. Or continue the story of Albus & Scorpius. If she wanted to make the world bigger or move forwardl, no one would say no. Certainly not a publisher. And certainly not Warner Bros. (budget contingent). And it's not like she doesn't want Harry Potter in the world. The aforementioned resurgence (which she had to approve at every level) supports that she's more than happy for the world to continually receive endless adaptations of her opus.

Not doing that, though, raises a lot of questions about how one trick her pony is. She could spend her resources on building new Harry Potter and using that output to fund her atrocities. Instead, she'd rather focus her energy on erasing trans people from society, milking her legacy for every cent to further her goals.

And the thing is... Fantastic Beasts' failure indicates that Harry Potter in its current state is something that cannot support an ongoing shared universe. There are already markedly few who can actually support that infrastructure. Marvel Studios comes off of decades upon decades of characters and storylines and soap opera. Same for DC (even though we've yet to see them sustainably pull their shit together). Together their respective histories are their own R&D department.

Disney thought it could do the same for Star Wars. All the books and comics in the expanded universe proved the galaxy-wide possibilities storytellers could explore, but that's proven tricky. The entire theatrical experience crashed five films in and it's impossible to know the full popularity of the Disney+ series. Via Dark Universe, Universal tried to do it with their Classic Monsters canon, but that blew up in their face on the first step. Game of Thrones probably could support indefinite low fantasy stories on HBO, but George R.R. Martin's output is low enough that they will eventually run that well dry and have to make something original.

Quite simply: Harry Potter cannot support a sustained, ongoing series because J.K. Rowling has not created something that could sustain it. More importantly, it seems beyond her capacity. The series itself pushed her imagination to its limits and where the mythology lapsed grew gaping holes in its storytelling. By the fifth movie, all fights between wizard folk consist of worldless slinging and deflecting bolts/ribbons of light at each other. Other, clever spells that Rowling introduced as one-offs never really came into play, even though the visual medium of film would lend itself to things like a spell that makes one's legs dance the tarantella.

Expanding to the logistics, Hogwarts is a school with.... how many students? And how many teachers? And how often are they interacting? Four houses across seven grade levels is 28 sections that need to somehow fit into a (being generous) 12 hour day where every class is roughly an hour. Even if they doubled up classes so that two houses filled a classroom at one time (which rarely happens and seems to take up a double length), that's still 14 sections worth of students in that same time frame.

For Rowling, the magical world expands only as far as she can see. The Ministry of Magic is an institution of bureaucracy and government, but explaining how it makes a population of its size operate at scale (regardless of magic). When Rowling moved the setting to America for the first Fantastic Beasts movie, the wizarding world across the pond was even more threadbare. The government in place was barely a blip on the radar despite needing to serve a larger continent of magical folk. In the books, Rowling created the word "Muggles" to define those without magic powers. For Fantastic Beasts she comes up with... "No-Maj" as in "No Magic". How long must that have taken her?

Even if the series were to expand on the books, to do so would be outside the scope of the core narrative. Centering on Harry's perspective as she did allowed Rowling to get elide a ton of robust worldbuilding. Outside of a few books' opening chapters, the only time Rowling shifts to another character's perspective is during a Quidditch match in the first book (the one where Snape is muttering countercurses to keep Harry's broom from bucking him off).

Television's medium allows an exploration of the series to dig deeper into ancillary characters and the larger worlds. Growing up, my idea was to make sure that each season featured one episode (at least) that continued the narrative from someone else's perspective. Like a Cedric Diggory episode during the Goblet of Fire season or a Draco episode during Half Blood Prince. Or maybe even an episode of trying to illustrate how hard it was for Hermione to juggle her time turner existence in Prisoner of Azkaban.

With its new status as closed-loop prestige television, the chances of that happening are extremely low. Why even bother with the strange experiments television can afford when the creative team tasks themselves with keeping something going. But that's too hard. Best to just run it back with a new cast and play the hits. The trailer indicates there's no attempt to freshen things up, to alter the look, feel, and tone of the original films. There's fealty and then there's repetition. This is the latter.

If there's a core issue, (beyond all of the nondiegetic context) it's that if anyone wants more Harry Potter, it's time to just... run the series again. Over and over. Forever.

Sure, Rowling has moved onto her Cormoran Strike detective novels, which align themselves very well with Potter's lite mystery plots and her penchant for creating nasty, embittered, breathing characters. As a character-forward writer, this makes sense, and it's why Harry Potter had such success. It is a good story. It's got great characters and good themes. There are parts of the series that are just unspeakably sublime. Harry walking to his death in Deathly Hallows. Dumbledore reconciling with Harry in his office at the end of Order of the Phoenix. The throbbing wound of Peter Pettigrew's betrayal of the Potters and how that threads the series. The Tom Riddle flashbacks of Half Blood Prince.

And on and on...

There are sentiments and themes I've come back to over and over again. The bit where Harry tells Ron that all of his adventures "were just stuff I did" and not worthy of praise is a solid baseline for of myths happen.

In terms of what she and Warner Bros. want Harry Potter to be, she simply lacks the imagination or willingness to enable a larger, long-lasting project that fits into the modern zeitgeist of the infinitely expanding. She could even hire other writers to collaborate on new st0ries, but doing so would dilute her considerable power over the century's most totemic cultural touchstone.

Warner Bros., meanwhile is in business with not to some fiction writer, but rather a odious troll who spends her days online, screaming about trans people and weaponizing her platform to call out those who disagree with her as "Muggles". As though being without magic is reason for social pariahood.

But this is what happens for a person who refuses to self-reflect, who wants to take the world exactly as it is and never grow. This is a woman who will relentlessly attack a marginalized community 24/7 and cause damage to the world without once thinking she's wrong. Of course her side characters stand out because of how well they paint a picture of bitterness, pain, and spite. She's just reflecting herself.

And because she refuses to grow and evolve, Harry Potter will always be a single line, connecting the boy who lives in a cupboard under the stairs with the man who performs one final, grand magic trick to defeat Voldemort in front of the Great Hall. When that telling has run its course, time to find a new way to start it again. Over and over. In an endless loop. Stripping the flesh off its bones every time. Wearing the grooves on the road into trenchy quagmires. The returns ever diminishing until its audience has nothing left.

Continuing on from this, Harry Potter will slowly wither and eventually die. And it will do so by the hand of one of the most vile, repugnant individuals on the internet.

With this brief look at the state of Harry Potter, think about if any love for the stories can negate any part of what you now know.

Because for me and a whole lot of people who already know and the far bigger number of those who don't, J.K. Rowling is an absolutely unacceptable human being. Her intricate integration with something as universally loved as Harry Potter means she can wrap herself in something everyone loves and present herself as some victim. The two are completely inseparable.

Lucky for us, though, there's far, far better things out there for that massive audience to spend the rest of their lives exploring.

That is more valuable than anything that comes from the wretched mind of J.K. Rowling. Fuck her.

And no, Harry Potter is not worth it. Then again, basically nothing would be.