the best part of the entire star war is when han is posing in ep iv as a stormtrooper and he’s cringing bc he knows it’s gonna come out of his mouth oh no there it fucking is “we’re fine. how are you? “ and then the look of pure agony on his face and he physiclaly doubles over bc he is the most cringe worthy man in the galaxy in that moment
no, the best part is that Harrison Ford improvised that phrase.
My FAVORITE THING is researchers who wholeheartedly embrace the Ms. Frizzle aesthetic and wear their field of study on their literal sleeve. Everyone in the invasive crayfish consortium has tiny lobster-print shorts or socks. All the middle-aged dad scientists here at the lab have shirts with fish and/or fishing tackle patterns on them. My moss specimen and ammonite earrings keep getting noticed by women who are wearing silver fishbone-shaped or native plant-themed earrings themselves. Every single person on the outreach team has at least one shirt with an anchor pattern on it from Old Navy, and almost all the younger researchers have tattoos featuring their research interests – one fisheries biologist has a half-sleeve of native species she literally uses as an outreach tool. We are self-aware and having a blast with it, honestly.
You know what? No. No, Hatsune Miku did not write Harry Potter.
J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter. And we need to accept that.
Harry Potter isn’t some pure unproblematic beacon of perfection that we can just choose to erase the scummy author from and enjoy without guilt. Harry Potter is very much rooted in Rowling’s view of the world. The blatant antisemitism in the portrayal of the goblins, the entire race of slave creatures that actually really like being slaves and Hermione’s attempts to free them are largely played off as a joke, the almost complete dearth of canon characters of color (and then when she does put canonical characters of color in, they’re… Nagini…), the complete lack of respect for other cultures (the Japanese wizarding school literally translates to “Magic Place” in Japanese, Cho Chang is not even remotely a proper Chinese name, don’t get me started on her usage of Native American folklore), the almost complete lack of LGBTQ+ characters, the “Dumbledore is gay!” baiting, the lycanthropy-as-HIV metaphor that involves one of the werewolves intentionally infecting as many people as he can, with a preference for targeting children, no less…
These are all very much present in Harry Potter. They’re not things you can just ignore. And they’re there because Rowling wrote them in.
I know you read Harry Potter as a kid and loved it. I know when you read Harry Potter as a kid you probably didn’t even notice how shitty all this stuff was. I certainly didn’t. But you can’t go back to that time. You can’t go back to when you were 10, when you were consuming this media and loving it uncritically without notice or regard for its more problematic elements. You can’t go back to being a kid again.
And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re required to wholeheartedly condemn this important part of your childhood. You can still enjoy these books while acknowledging that they’ve got some really shitty things in them. You can enjoy Harry Potter as a mature adult. You don’t have to be a kid again to like it. And you’re perfectly allowed to hate on Rowling for her shittiness, past and present, while still loving Harry Potter.
So don’t say Harry Potter was written by Hatsune Miku. It wasn’t. It was written by J. K. Rowling, warts and all.
