this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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You wouldn't expect such insane ideas given who wrote HP.
spoiler
/sDidn't notice when I was in the Goldilocks zone growing up with these books and movies. Emotionally I'm still sad she turned out rotten.
Kinda similar feelings about Orson Scott Card.
She's not rotten. She only not perfect.
She hates Trump. She donates to the Labour party. She is pro women's rights. She is pro gay rights. She is pro trans rights with one exception. She doesn't want trans women in women's sports.
So there's a long list of Left views she aligns with and one that she doesn't. It's indictive of leftists that everyone must meet absolute cultural purity or be evil. Meanwhile the Right will pick one thing such as hating foreigners and anyone that's on board with that is good no matter what other ideas they also have.
I stopped at pro-trans rights with one exception, because even thats not true. You cant even lie properly.
She said that the Nazis didn't burn any books on trans people or persecute trans people. Weird hill to die on. Her tweets are blocked in Germany for holocaust denial.
Rowling doesn't believe that trans people are people.
She mostly seems to believe in the Status Quo. Specifically the Status Quo of the mid to late 90s.
She seems to view any deviation from the status quo as evil, even attempts to make the world a better place, because she doesn't want the world to be better, she wants it to remain the same.
She's just as much an enemy of progress as the average conservative.
Mid to late 90's was Tories, no gay marriage, and no immigrants. She's a Terf. Everyone focuses on the Trans Exclusionary and ignores the Radical Feminist. Radical Feminism was not "status quo" of the 90's
“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.”
https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy
She's not horrible. But she could be better.
Wrong
I don't see the radical feminism in any of her writings.
I see enforcement of the Status Quo.
Fuck, Harry's main goal in life is to be a cop.
Her entire message is as follows, there's nothing wrong with the system, just the wrong people are in charge.
Also, if you remember the culture of the mid to late 90s, it's exactly the sort of shit that Rowling is in love with. A sort of romanticized version of the 90s, just like most conservatives want a romanticized version of the 1950s.
I'm out of the loop, what's up with Orson Scott Card?
The base Ender series didn't seem to have a lot of issues, and I was surprised when one of my friends said he had nothing to do with Card because he was Mormon.
Then I read the Shadow series (side story in the Ender universe), and whooooo-boy. There was a section with one of the most brilliant genetic scientists of the age talking about how, despite being gay, he chose to marry a woman because the most important thing, the only way to really participate in humanity, is to make babies. Beyond the homophobia, beyond the absolute what-the-fuck about life being meaningless without having kids, he had a genetic scientist in the future who lacked the imagination to figure out how a gay man could have biological children while being married to a man. Something that gay married people are completely capable of doing right now.
He's a Mormon and the church teaches him to be a bigoted homophobe basically.
Sanderson veils Mormonism better, but seems to be very progressive... hiping he doesn't fall off that train.
He's also friends with Howard Taylor(or at least did 18 seasons of a podcast with him) who is also mormon but writes a reasonably hard scifi comic. I don't recall if there was any direct or implied bigotry that wasn't treated as a bad thing, but I don't recall any specifically lgbt characters either. Some races didn't really have sexes, or didn't have sexual dimorphism iirc, but it's been a while.
Woah Sandy Branderson is a Mormon?
Think about Mistborn, and words only being true when etched in metal...
He is, doesn't hide it, and goes about researching stuff he shouldn't religiously agree with by interviewing people of those beliefs/experiences instead of using his own perceptions, from what I've seen and read of his process for Stormlight (where iirc, a gay relationship is seen as more normal and acceptable than a woman having a hand exposed).
Whatever the balance is, my impression of Sanderson that of a stable individual. I would be surprised if he suddenly regressed, barring something like a traumatic brain injury of course.
I do think that cult holds him back creatively. He can write a truly horrific scene that I can barely get through about an enslaved man hauling war bridges on his back day after day, but no birds and the bees.
Well, he has wrote people having sex, just not the scenes themselves, in both Warbeaker and Mistborn. I think in all those cases they were married though...
I think OSC just wrote a compelling book by accident. Lender's game was pretty good, speaker was... Readable, but xenocide is hot garbage and I gave up on children of the mind because I lost any faith that it would be good after struggling through xenocide.
A Planet Called Treason was pretty good.
I actually liked Xenocide, it was an interesting juxtaposition of his writing arguing one ideal and his own xenophobic personally held ideals.
I read basically everything he put out until the 2010's? Been awhile. Won't again because I know none of it will hold up lol.
I did like some of the ideas in Shadow when I read it as a teen, especially the galaxy wide internet becoming sentient with god-like powers. FTL travel by teleporting outside the universe and then back in at a different location was wild. Especially with the twist that if you think of anything while outside the universe it could become real. So, Ender accidentally poofs a version of Peter his brother as he remembers him into existence, a tormenting sociopath.
Or a worse one I guess. The real Peter is making a hegemony back on Earth in the Shadow side series following Bean another genius kid, who can't stop growing until it kills him IIRC.
I mean, poor Bean's descendants got another set of gene editing that fixed the growth issue, but tossed in the most severe form of OCD ever, and then thrown into a ~~racist~~ romanticised, version of Japanese culture to keep them from questioning things or trying to fix the OCD.
It really doesn't surprise me that the author is shitty though, it is fairly apparent from their writing/ the way they portray most worlds being governed by Catholics a good thing.