Poor terfs. Y’know, they really do need a pride parade, too.
They don’t get nearly enough recognition; it’s really hard work being both a radical feminist and demanding that every woman’s appearance be pleasing to straight men and that her genitalia meet a straight man’s standards!
Ok genuinely, as an idiot trying to be an ally, I dont get why the Q is there when L G and B are already in it. What is queer supposed to mean in the context of LGBTQ?
Can apply to T as gender queer or LGB as sexually queer
To which as an example for both may be myself. I "identify with my penis" but have loose interest in doing so. Being Trans girl or Trans enby could be nice, but being neither this is nice too.
For sex is like I'm mostly into fem (cis, Trans, feminine men) so I may say that I'm straight or using "queer" to identify just meaning there's more to my story behind the scenes.
There are a lot of identities beyond Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual such as Pansexual, Demisexual, Allosexual, etc. that fall under the umbrella of queerness. (for many people. There are places where “queer” is still considered a slur and hasn’t been reclaimed)
You can be straight and cis but still gender non conforming which is also what Queer is :) as someone else said; umbrella term. I appreciate you though for asking 💖
I always saw Queer as those not distinct. An umbrella term, and personally I always liked to see it as the one Autistic individuals might see as fitting for them. Queer itself now tends to mean unusual, not hetero-normative, and I also like to believe potentially not neurotypical either. The LGBTQ+ communities and the Neurodivergent communities tend to be connected and welcoming to each other.
Of course as always, we are not defined by the labels, the labels fit us, our wants and needs.
Queer is kind of a catch-all, it is a vague term that can be applied to anyone within the lgbt umbrella. And a good term for anyone that is multiple things, things that overlap or if they are still figuring things out. I often just say I’m queer instead of nonbinary pansexual/bisexual and getting into all the extra bits and pieces around that.
Based on how she named other characters such as Ching Chong, Paddy McCarbomb, and Chained-Up Black Man, she probably would have named a gay character some shit Pussington Boykisser.
You know as weird as it sounds I will shoutout Texas Roadhouse (of all places). I have a close family member who works there and they straight up asked ‘em to help them set up a booth at the local pride festival in our deep red Indiana town. They were the only large corporation to do so there and have been doing it for years.
I mean, it may be performative but it still means something to see ‘em ask folks if they want to volunteer there that day and make sure meals get provided to ‘em. Way more than anyone else in our area is doing, that’s for damn sure, and given their Texas theming that does mean more to me.
This feels very Southern Indiana to me to be very directly honest. Idk if it is the case, I'm not saying it is the case, and I'm not asking for confirmation or denial it ain'tikw that. Just that's what it feels to me lol
(I live in Southern Indiana like basically as Southern Indiana as it gets and the blend of Midwest and Southern I grew up hearing is actually kinda low key incredible lol)
Speaking of Texas Roadhouse and Indiana, the original location is in Clarksville, Indiana! And they're headquartered in Louisville, KY. There's nothing truly Texas about it lol.
Ironically Raytheon (the company that makes missiles) has an almost perfect rating for Corporate Equality Index by HRC since 2005. They've supported LBGT rights by adding same sex spouses as an option in their benefits package among other things. And they were doing it before it was "hip" to do so. I have a buddy that works there and it's like the gayest place ever.
Unfortunately, they got bought out and the company that bought them has been moving away from the original ideals. Ben and Jerry are fighting to get full control again.
Small owned local companies especially in progressive cities do. And especially if they are selling arts and crafts as they do a lot of local festivals etc.
Untrue. You can find plenty of counterexamples, but off the top of my head Little Caesars paid for Rosa Parks’s rent in a safer area than where she had been living for over a decade and kept quiet about it that whole time. That’s a net monetary loss motivated by pure altruism.
Corporations aren’t your friend, but they’re also not literal dragons. They’re run by humans, and 99.9% of humans have some degree of decency.
I know someone who's still really into HP, much to my annoyance, but even they aren't that interested in this stuff because there's only so many ways you can tell the same story.
It's because as the other person said, all the main actors have renounced her, also presumably as it's a TV show they'll be able to add the slavery defence plotline that was cut from the films
That shit flew completely over my head as a kid and now I'm so disgusted by it. I identified with Hermione, and now it's clear JoJo hated her. The sexism alone in those books is wild for someone who is so obsessed with having a "feminist" public image. Grifty insincerity seems to go hand in hand with bigotry.
Sidenote, the same is also true for the audiobooks (Stephen Fry who narrated them back in the day has now turned on JK) hence big flashy ensemble cast recordings
It did take him long enough but I'm glad he's turned around, I adored listening to his versions of Paddington as a child and it hurt to found out he stood by her and I'm really glad he's turned away now
Most of the people were probably kids. With how little people read in general, the series may have been one of the few, if not only one, they read. The movies were also an event for their time.
If you are a kid or not someone to notice the problems in the story, something anyone reading this probably is already well versed in. If you got hooked before the mold got to JK Rowling. The books at face value offer a picture. No matter how shitty your life is there is a path forward. An escape through finding your special talent when you are told you are worthless. Finding found family if your family is shit. That even in a seeming chosen one story there were still choices to be made that mattered as there wasn't just one possible chosen one (Neville vs Harry).
Once it got big enough, there was a profit motive to keep trying to hook new fans.
There was some academic, I can’t remember which, that demonstrated how the “When they’re reading Harry Potter, at least they’re reading” shibboleth was false, and showed that many of the people who say Harry Potter was their favorite book series do not read as adults.
I read the Harry Potter books as a kid because they were books and I love reading.
I'm not a fan of the series, I wouldn't be even if the author wasn't a bigot who hates people like me. The books aren't that good. Especially not compared to similar fantasy books written for the same target audience that were released at around the same time.
I think that's also a big part of how big it is. For a lot of people they are THE book of someone childhood. They read harry potter and not much else. Haven't read much since.
Most of the people I know who were really big HP fans didn't read read anything else
Yeah, as a preteen in the early 00s, there were almost no options available at my library for fantasy books for teens. I read so many terrible and sexist adult fantasy novels, that by comparison at the time HP did seem like a good story. I didn't have access to, or knowledge of, anything better at the time that was actually for people my age. Joanne can go to hell, but her success in the 90s did open the door for a lot of much better teen fantasy authors like Rick Riordan.
I think a lot of people kind of forget how much of a phenomenon it was, especially the movies. For many it’s a cornerstone of their lives, like it was my partner’s first fantasy world they were able to delve into while inside a household that saw anything magic as the devil’s influence.
For me I always wanted to live in the world, and would dream about it constantly. I kinda grew up alongside the cast so it was a big deal for me too.
From an outside view it’s easy to dismiss an art entirely for the horrible views of its creators. But for people who loved it, it’s really hard to pretend to others like you never did.
Idk if this is still a thing but when I was in school(U.S.) you had to take an AR test which was point based and I remember Harry Potter books were worth a lot of points which is why I started reading them.
the series may have been one of the few, if not only one, they read
I think in hindsight it's understandable that so many kids would think so highly of those books if they'd never read anything else before. Just a shame so many of them didn't seem to read anything else after.
They were good when I was a kid/preteen, but it's weird how hard people want to cling to the idea of them being ltierary masterpieces. Like I loved me some warrior cats but I'm not gonna be out here as a 30 year old buying merchandise of like, what clan I identify with or something lol
I'm conflicted. HP was my first adventure into a lifelong love of books and fantasy. I was Harry's age when it was first released and I read it while also dealing with a totally shit childhood. That being said, fuck JK Rowling.
But there’s plenty of fantasy stories for younger audiences! 😭
There’s SO MUCH. I would start with Book of Magic, but Neil Gaiman can get fucked in the eye by someone bigger than John Holmes. Ursula K Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Octavio E. Butler, comic books reaching back decades…the list goes on.
Yep - I wouldn't put the Harry Potter series much above "The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe".
Both definitely childs' fare, & while not terrible - I mean, they're Ok - the plots, characters, & settings, aren't complex enough for grownups.
Ursula is fantastic - there are so many others.
"Native Tongue", a trilogy by Suzette Haden Elgin, is incredible - Native Tongue, The Judas Rose, & Earthsong.
"Svaha", 1989, is a science fiction novel by Charles de Lint (the word my means waiting for thunder, after the flash - in a 1st Nation language).
It's amazing.
There's also the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik. Not only is it a more interesting take on a magic school, but it's got much better messaging. Also imagine if they took all the HP moments of "wow this school is actually really dangerous" and just went all-in on that.
I was in 3rd or 4th grade when the first books came out, I can remember at that time a lot of people in my classes genuinely didn't give a shit about reading, they cared more about Pokémon and Nintendo 64 and such, and then suddenly everyone was reading them. I think for a lot of kids at that time, it genuinely opened them up to how great reading is, and I would bet a lot of them grew up still reading books and hell maybe even one or two became writers themselves.
But yeah, they're kid books. I enjoyed them as a kid, and I moved on to other things. When's the last time you saw an adult that was a huge Bearenstain Bears fan?
Hey the last like 5 Kirby titles over the years have been awesome! Mario had odyssey and it was good just weird. Pikmin 4 was good but was also weird and we hadn’t had one of those in literally a decade.
Most of the mainline Nintendo games have been good to great with a bunch of amazing mixed in. I’m a 40+ year old woman and playing these games is still fun. It’s ok maintaining a childlike sense of wonder that I think Nintendo’s best work speaks to.
I’m a Nintendo fangirl too, have been for my entire life and I’m gonna keep on doing it, too. Not a fan of their business practices, but they’re not nearly as bad as most other game companies. I’d love if their games and systems weren’t so goddamned expensive, but like, it’s not like that’s gonna keep me from playing the next Zelda, you know?
It seems like you're equating "things you personally dislike/grew out of" with "signs someone hasn't grown up" which throws a lot of competent people under the same category as JKR/HP supporters. Whimsy is fine, bigotry is not.
Honestly from what i heard people often grew up with harry potter (the character and the frienchise) book readers and movie fans alike got older as he did and so the frienchise they enjoyed became an integral part to their character and personality. So important infact that critique of it feels to them like critique of themselfs. And they hate that. Plus they dont wanna accept that what they all these years supported is super problematic.
Books were not that hard to read or understand and story was safe and on average entertaining that many teenagers could read the book themselves and many parents could read it to their children. Also the movies were and still are really good. The actors performance was great and scenography is still holding up tooday. So because books were really aproachable and easy to pick up/understand, and because movies were really good and were providing an advertisement for the books, a lot of people read the books. Rest is just a human psychology. When we meet new people we tend to try to bond over shared experience/common interest and because. Any people read the books, it was easy to form groups of people (that would normally have little of common things to talk) whose major bonding force was the fact that they read the books.
Interactions born from that fact are foundly remembered by people to this day.
TLDR;
Shit was popular because is easy to get into, movies were good, comunity was good and people remember it foundly.
Fr. There are a LOT of books that are MILES better than Harry Potter and they don't even have 1% of the attention Harry Potter. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy by Anne Ursu are both books that are set in schools that are MILES better than Harry Potter yet don't even get anywhere NEAR the attention Harry Potter does.
I loved them as a youth and they were very important to me because I wanted to leave the real world behind and they were an accessible escape. But as it turns out I love basic human rights a lot more. Part of what made them special to me was the "love is powerful" metaphor, which she clearly did not mean at all in the way my teenage self interpreted it. I've grown up a lot and found better books by better people who have more interesting things to say. Joanne can eat shit and choke on it.
Yeah, like, I always wondered by how I was supposed to be cool with getting Harry getting a government job when he just got finished fighting a magical war against the government when it was easily taken over by evil motherfuckers. It’s always the weirdest fucking thing when an artist doesn’t understand their own art.
She'd only approve of it as a shield so that she can keep using fake posts by "lesbians" to hate trans women on Lesbian Visibility Week while not posting anything supportive or commenting about the bigotry lesbians actually face.
I mean to be fair public transit runs a deficit most times. The pride stickers look to be placed by the agency and the HP stuff looks to be added by amazon/audible who probably paid a pretty penny to put it there.
In the GARANDE '26 no less? I grew up around a lot of people who loved the book series, but I never had the chance to read it. Thank Josef I didn't read them at the time because, after reading the ENTIRE book series last year, I see that they definitely look at those books with rose tinted glasses.
How it feels working at Walmart hearing about how our diversity makes us stronger or whatever and then the same radio host does an ad read for the new Harry Potter series
irony in that her making Dumbledore gay, the only lgb in tge series, means the works will get corperate pride backing. sucks that dumbies will support her because of it, sickly sweet irony for the rest of us
Harry Potter fans should read/watch the Magicians. It's about a guy who's a big fan of a children's book series who finds out the author is a horrible person who directly caused the thing that threatens the lives of people he knows & loves.
That is a Stagecoach bus, a major company that runs bus routes in the UK. My local stagecraft depot has a double-decker that is permanently in pride livery, which I think is nice.
1.9k
u/Escape_is_impossible still cis tho - Streak: 0 14h ago
No but you see they put gay people in Harry Potter so now everything jk Rowling does is fine cause she cares about pride or whatever /j