I'm neither.
Transgender rights discussion
- Thread starter crappycraperson
- Start date
I'm neither.
Well then you'll have to elaborate what exactly you disagree with. Preferably focusing on his major points.
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I disagree, but I'll keep this sort of argument in mind for the future when I'm up against opinions I disagree with.
I recognise the thumbnail. I think I lasted 30 seconds when I viewed it ages ago.
I've no idea if JKR is a raging bigot or not or whether she's just guilty of creating well-meant, but lazy, half-baked characters.
I can confirm that Chinese names can be confusing though. It's been something I've been very wary of since moving to Asia. Sometimes my ethnic Chinese colleagues are not sure what gender a person is from the name and now and then are not totally sure on which is the surname. It's normallly surname first but with say Park Ji-Sung you saw it written both ways round, particularly when in English.
1hr50?
Wow, I thought it was going to be around 10 minutes.Four million views. Feck me.
She took one of the most popular Indian surnames and gave two first names to it. Thats all the research that went in there. This Cho Chang controversy is the worst I've heard of. Ridiculous doesn't begin to cover it. Michael Chang was Chinese, let's call him Korean because his surname isn't Chinese, wtf..
I've no idea if JKR is a raging bigot or not or whether she's just guilty of creating well-meant, but lazy, half-baked characters.
I can confirm that Chinese names can be confusing though. It's been something I've been very wary of since moving to Asia. Sometimes my ethnic Chinese colleagues are not sure what gender a person is from the name and now and then are not totally sure on which is the surname. It's normallly surname first but with say Park Ji-Sung you saw it written both ways round, particularly when in English.
1hr50?
I mean she is clearly ragingly bigoted against Trans people.
Going to be one of the highest selling games of the year. Point, the online outrage bubble has much less influence than those participating hope.
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i guess nuance is in the eye of the beholder
Why quote my post about tiling? You think she made sure that scene was shot in a building with a star shape on the floor to further her antisemitic agenda?
I think you were being un-nuanced about what others think.
But that’s different to what I’m moaning about in social media. Whenever people argue about something there will be disagreements about issues, or misunderstanding about each other’s point. C’est la vie.
What pisses me off is the the constant need for “the enemy” on social media (whether that’s a public figure, or someone you disagree with) to have no nuance whatsoever. A black and white, one-dimensional, bogey (wo)man. That seems a new(ish) phenomenon. Once the decision was made to take down Rowling for her thoughts on trans rights, the next step was to twist all available evidence into making her also a racist antisemite. Nobody is allowed to be complex, or to have good opinions alongside their bad ones. That’s what I mean by lack of nuance.
I'm not into all the details of this, so this is more of a general comment, but once you discover someone is bigoted against a certain group, is it that big of a stretch to consider they might be bigoted against other groups?
This is nonsense man. The populist media at large have been doing it forever, often without the right of reply afforded by social media.
I think the point he's making is that no-one in this thread is saying this. There's a difference between saying that an author has a habit of lazy tokenism and careless stereotyping/commentary on social issues which impact minority groups, and saying they actively hate those minority groups.
Also, the idea that this has all popped up since she went off the rails with the anti-trans stuff is simply inaccurate. These criticisms have been kicking about for over a decade now and largely came from fans of the series, rather than detractors (detractors usually don't care enough to be critical!). Although frankly, given the sheer scale and popularity of Harry Potter and how basically everyone under the age of 30 has read it, it would be weird if no-one was talking about it - they're not fantastic books but they're clearly culturally important.
Obviously, what's changed with her anti-trans stance is that a lot of people are less likely to give her the benefit of doubt.
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Not in this particular culture war skirmish. Which is essentially pitching trans activists against feminists of a certain age. Whose politics would generally be fairly left-leaning and progressive on other issues. Obviously racists/bigots are going to pitch in on the same side as the TERFs but that doesn’t seem to be why Rowling got involved.
Fair point. Caricaturing those with differing politics to you is not a new phenomenon. But, as you say, that was usually by media organisations with political agendas. It’s depressing seeing ‘normal’ people adopting the same attitude.
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The clumsy name is key to it having the opposite effect. Especially in these times of instant research. Give an a African character a made up iliterative name and its clearly racist? We are jst not as familiar with other racist tropes maybe?
This is a good point, but I never make it having not read a single line of the books.
I'm not sure I see any substantive difference between "Parvati Patil" and "Cho Chang" that would make one more objectionable than the other. They're both names that clearly indicate the racial background of the character in what could perhaps be described as lazy, but surely no worse than that.
I simply can't agree with this. Some effort is better than none, and holding a children's book written in the early 00s to an exacting standard seems excessive in my view.
Well put.
The early 2000's wasn't the dark ages. I'm not saying hang her, just that it's not really inclusivity if you can't be bothered to research a name. And Rowling could have easily got an authentic name if she had any interest in doing so.
Fair enough. I think I'd say it's still some level of inclusivity, but we're splitting hairs and largely in agreement at this point.
I'm happy with that.
OK, I've watched that video someone posted a couple of pages back that was almost 2 hours. Some silly stuff there, sure, even the guy admits some are a bit of a stretch, but in the second part of the video I think he focused on a few things which are probably very revealing of the way Rowling sees the world, and that's about how things tend to stay the same in the end.
Even after the heroes defeat the villain who was a wizard supremacist, the elves are still slaves, the non-human creatures are still discriminated against and the evil house slytherin goes on existing even when all their staff basically joined the nazi. People have certain characteristics that don't came from their personality, but also their social status, as if they were just a thing that is and not a result of social factors. Individual people progress and do heroic and amazing things but the system as a whole tends to not change at all.
She seems to be someone who doesn't like societal change and in the books characters are mocked for being too activist or suggesting something really needs to change. Interesting parallels with how she seems to ally with people connected with ultra-conservative groups.
It was actually an interesting watch (or listen, it's basically a podcast).
Even after the heroes defeat the villain who was a wizard supremacist, the elves are still slaves, the non-human creatures are still discriminated against and the evil house slytherin goes on existing even when all their staff basically joined the nazi. People have certain characteristics that don't came from their personality, but also their social status, as if they were just a thing that is and not a result of social factors. Individual people progress and do heroic and amazing things but the system as a whole tends to not change at all.
She seems to be someone who doesn't like societal change and in the books characters are mocked for being too activist or suggesting something really needs to change. Interesting parallels with how she seems to ally with people connected with ultra-conservative groups.
It was actually an interesting watch (or listen, it's basically a podcast).
I hope you won't read the wheel of time like ever.
Amazon trying to make it palatable for "modern audiences" is going to be hilarious to watch.
Seems a stretch, actually. Do you necessarily conclude that the author of the hunger games is a raging revolutionary because katniss wants to destroy the system, rather than being the moderate republican she appears to be in real life? Would Rowlings fantasies have been more or less satisfying for kids, if at the end she'd torched the familiar world she'd been painstakingly building for 7 books. Lord knows what this guy would conclude about the extreme revolutionary ideologies of George Lucas, the billionaire capitalist filmmaker, based on a reading of star wars, whose preoccupation again was mainly to tell a rollicking story for kids.
I don't know how you can draw any conclusions about Rowling's personal "desire for social stability" based on her writing a happy ending for kids, of the goodies winning, the baddies losing and everything going back to normal.
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I haven't read or watched the hunger games, but if the author expresses political opinions and associates herself directly or indirectly with revolutionaries the same way rowling associates directly and indirectly with reactionaries and ultra-conservatives, then I don't think it would be a stretch to say she identifies with destroying the system.
I don't know any political opinion of george lucas. Rowling chose to enter the political arena, so it's only fair to analyze her work taking that into account. If she's an active political person, that will obviously permeate her work, most likely without her even being aware of that.
Many books for younger audiences identify an injustice and the heroes work to fix it. Rowling wouldn't be torching her world if the good guys found a way to free the slave elves or allow the centaurs to have basic rights.
The argument that someone's creative output isn't reflective of their worldview may be true of some people, but it's categorical not true of Rowling. We're talking about an author who's latest novel is about a talented and successful woman who gets murdered after being accused of racism, ableism and transphobia by online trolls. Wonder where that idea came from.
The Lion King is a conservative defence of hereditary monarchy, to be fair.
Spot on. And don't forget that she is raging transphobe that just so happened to write a crime novel about a man who cross-dresses in order to kill women.
Lucas has been pretty open about how Star Wars was conceived as a reaction to Nixon's presidency, and the Vietnam war.
Since the elf is a discussion point, the free elf is one of the heroes of the book and wouldn't have been a hero of the book had he not been a free elf, surely that's the message to take away from that part of the book for people.
That idea obviously comes from spending way too much time balls deep in the most emotionally overwrought culture war on social media. You’re putting the cart before the horse if you think this novel is anything other than a response to being relentlessly piled on on Twitter over the last several years.
The Lion King is a money making venture, but the stories it's inspired by are very old and written by people in favour of hereditary monarchy. I would be very surprised if Shakespeare was some radical anarchist, for instance (not to go all Simba = Hamlet, but the story is clearly in there.)
I haven’t read anything of hers since the last Harry Potter book so that may be right but to lay this claim to her based on the Harry Potter books is grossly inaccurate.
Point being there’s a clear chronological timeline of events here.
HP books > online back and forth > new books reflecting her online back and forth.
So you don't think she holds these views?
I'm not sure what point you're making here. I'm saying that she has a habit of inserting her political views into her writing, that particular book was just an obvious example.
Is your contention that she didn't (attempt to) include and address political and social themes in the Harry Potter books? I think she'd be the first to disagree with you there.
Beyond that, there are plenty of examples of viewpoints presented in the Harry Potter books which are mirrored in Rowling's commentary on events in the real world. An obvious one would be that Hermione's attempts to fight for elf emancipation are presented unflatteringly in an attempt to satirise "do-gooder" activism. Another would be her habit of describing unsympathetic female characters as "mannish" (her words).
Obviously now the genre she's working in now gives her more scope to shove her political shit in, but the main difference is that she's now a public figure who spends lots of her time spouting off on Twitter. People can therefore see the clear connections between her current obsessions and the content of her work "in real time" in a way which wasn't available 25 years ago.