Episode 129: Letting Harry Potter Go
In episode 129, Elizabeth and Flourish talk about J. K. Rowling’s unremitting transphobia—and how beyond no longer engaging with her work, they don’t want to have anything to do with the Harry Potter fandom anymore, either. Topics covered include the rise of TERFism in British feminist media, Tonks’s beloved status amongst trans and nonbinary folks, and viewing the books’ regressive gender politics through the lens of JKR’s recent commentary. And they puzzle over one big question: How do you put the Harry Potter fandom behind you without disowning your past fannish self?
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:04:39] Go to HankGreen.com in order to “get you where you need to go” (to buy An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor)!
[00:06:45] Our interstitial music is “What Happened In The Past Doesn't Stay There” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:08:16]
(Perfect illustration from @LLW902 on Twitter.)
[00:14:36] Our wonderful listener A. J. Hall has written a very detailed explainer about the case that JKR tweeted about!
[00:15:57] The now-deleted “hand slipped” tweet:
[00:16:16]
[00:17:34] If you must, go read JKR’s manifesto. Since she wrote that post, she’s also gone off on Twitter again, and signed That Letter in Harper’s magazine arguing against “cancel culture.” So, you know, she’s basically kept digging that hole.
[00:26:17] Aja Romano’s Vox article is called “Harry Potter and the Author Who Failed Us.”
[00:30:42]
[00:31:57] We discussed affect in Episode 127, “A Fan of Fandom.”
[00:36:13] Our Harry Potter Special Episode was #1, “Harry Potter and the Curse of the Neverending Canon.”
[00:37:14]
[00:41:36] If you, too, somehow still feel like testing your Harry Potter minor character knowledge, that Sporcle quiz is still online.
[00:44:30]
[00:48:56] A transcript of the cast commentary track for LotR, proving Elizabeth’s memory to be infallible.
[00:51:34] Emily Nussbaum joined us for Episode 105.
[00:52:17] We discussed Round One of JKR being TERFy in Episode 116, “The Year in Fandom 2019.”
[00:56:24]
[00:58:00] Later, as Flourish was transcribing this conversation...
This exchange represents a new high-water mark in Elizabeth trolling content!!!
[00:59:27] It’s actually Schulz who says “I know nothing,” but it’s the catchphrase every human being says at Flourish anyway since Colonel Klink doesn’t really have a catchphrase. Here’s some actual Colonel Klink:
[01:00:35] We talked about the OTW’s response to racism in fandom in Episode 128, “The K-pop Narratives.” Read the statement they finally put out for yourself.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #129, “Letting Harry Potter Go.”
FK: Oof.
ELM: Oeuf?
FK: Oof. That’s what I have to say about this. Oof.
ELM: Like the French word for “egg”? Oeuf?
FK: [laughs] No, like the English word for “I’m tired.” Oh, man.
ELM: Oh, you mean like I would say “Ooooof.”
FK: Yeah, like, oof.
ELM: Oof, yeah.
FK: Yeah it’s been, uh, it’s been a thing!
ELM: It has been quite a thing. You know, when all of this started, a month ago now, I remember thinking “Oh, it’s too bad, like, we won’t be able to talk about it because we have our episodes schedule and we had a week off and all that.” But she just kept going? And so it wasn’t like, it wasn’t like—I’d initially been like “Oh, we’ll have had some time to reflect,” but she like, continued to do things the whole time, and so like, my feelings haven’t changed, they’ve just gotten even like firmer. And angrier.
FK: Ok, wait wait wait. “She.” “She.” [ELM laughs] It’s possible there are some people who are listening to this who have blessedly been ignorant of J. K. Rowling’s, like…
ELM: You’ve been on a social media blackout since, for the last year…yes. J. K. Rowling, J. K. Rowling…so the very short one-sentence summary is, J. K. Rowling had previously hinted that she was a transphobic person, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, and in early June she tweeted explicitly about it, and a few days later she posted a quite long and detailed blog post explaining how she feels.
FK: And how she feels is transphobic.
ELM: [laughs] Right. So, obviously, I think most people are aware of this story who listen to this podcast, you have probably either had your own feelings if you were or have been in the Harry Potter fandom, if you are a trans or non-binary person or any gender nonconforming person, if you’re just a human in the world who doesn’t like watching a previously beloved author with an incredible amount of power cause harm to people who are particularly vulnerable in the world.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But like, we want to talk about it because I think that we have—we have complicated feelings.
FK: Yes. I would, I would say that. I think that’s very true.
ELM: Maybe it’s because Twitter can’t really capture a lot of nuance, but you know, like, I—there were some pieces that I thought were pretty good too, that people wrote. I haven’t read anything that really addressed a lot of the stuff that you and I have been discussing privately and what we wanna talk about here, and so…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Even though it’s been a little while, I feel like it’s important for us to have this conversation publicly.
FK: Yeah, it’s an ongoing thing, I think, for anybody who is or has been in the Harry Potter fandom, especially people who have been in there for a long time. It was important for people when they were kids. Like, this is not something that you can just look at and talk about for five minutes and then move on, you know what I mean? Like, this is a continuing thing, for better or worse. That’s, that’s what we’re talking about today.
ELM: Before we do that…
FK: Before!
ELM: This is truly exciting.
FK: We’re doin’ something!
ELM: We are doing something. We’re doing something new! This is our very first advertisement.
FK: Aaah! We got an ad, guys!
ELM: So, do you want to deliver it?
FK: Sure, I’ll deliver it. [clears throat]
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Well, now that novel is out in paperback, or at your library, and also for cheap in audio form. And the sequel and conclusion of the story, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, is out to sparkling reviews.
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ELM: That sounds great, honestly.
FK: That’s a delightful ad!
ELM: Yeah!
FK: Yeah, I’m in! [laughs]
ELM: For reference, when this comes out, only our Patrons will hear it on July 7th. Everyone else is gonna get it on July 8th. But still, it’s out! If you’re listening to this?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: It’s out.
FK: I’m excited!
ELM: That was great and uh, you know, for the record, if people wanna advertise with us, we’re open to it!
FK: [laughs] It’s true, although now we are going to have to stop saying that we are entirely and solely supported by listeners. We have now also been supported, in a very small amount compared to the amount we are supported by listeners, by Hank Green.
ELM: Yes. Yes. Thank you Hank Green.
FK: I mean, he’s possibly a listener too, I don’t know.
ELM: Good to see you again, Hank Green.
FK: [laughs] There we go. OK! Now that we’re not offending Hank Green, in case that he has been listening and not just heard about our podcast as a thing to advertise on. All right. Well, should we take a break before we dive into something much less exciting and fun than Hank Green’s new book?
ELM: Yeah. You just reminded me what the episode was about, I was like “Ha ha ha! ...Oh.”
FK: All right. Well, we’ll chat in a minute!
ELM: OK.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back!
ELM: Yep.
FK: So.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I think we’re gonna start by talking a little bit about the context of J. K. Rowling’s transphobia. Because I think actually that’s kind of important, because you, Elizabeth, have been much more connected to the British conversation around this than I am, and have…
ELM: British conversation, yeah.
FK: ...informed me of a lot of this. Yeah. You, that’s you connected there.
ELM: The discourse. British discourse.
FK: Cause the discourse is not necessarily obvious if you don’t, if you don’t follow a lot of British media people and you’re not British and you don’t have a context—if you’re an unreconstructed American like me, I think that a lot of the stuff in what JKR said seems like “What the fuck?”
ELM: Yeah. So, I mean, I don’t know how deep we wanna get into it. Like, obviously there’s a long history of complicated ideas about gender and sexuality where the feminist movement and the queer rights and queer studies movements have intersected. Right? [laughs] Go all the way back! So the history of feminist thought…no.
FK: Oh my God.
ELM: No. So I will say that, you know, it’s been going on now for decades, but definitely within the last decade in British mainstream feminist conversations there’s been a growing vocal strain of transphobia. They use terms like “gender critical,” and it’s embedded in those structures of power within British women’s spaces. Including within queer spaces, there’s a lot of quote, like, “LGB-without-the-T” kind of movements going on. And some very grossly transphobic rhetoric and people putting up awful stickers and things and famously at the London Pride Parade—I think it was two years ago now?—there was an explicitly transphobic lesbian group was leading the parade, and people were like “What on Earth is going on here.” So that’s not to say that it’s all straight women, but it is a conversation that is largely led by straight, white women, and obviously cis women.
But basically this has been endemic to the British media conversation, and the way it often goes down—and you’ve seen this over and over again over the last decade or so, and it’s, it’s changed a lot now because it’s so foundational and so fundamental to the conversation about feminism and gender in the U.K., is you’ll see a columnist kind of like tip a toe, kind of in the—like, float it, in like a, you know, a line.
FK: Just a little, a little—yeah.
ELM: And then like, people are like “Wait, what?” And then within like six months they’re writing like outright transphobic headlines and saying that, you know, that people are brainwashing children or whatever, et cetera, et cetera. And I should say that it’s not just women, famously just this past week finally Twitter has banned Graham Linehan, who is the person responsible for—Americans are probably most familiar with The I.T. Crowd, but in Britain he’s definitely the most famous for Father Ted, which was a sitcom back in the day. And he’s been aggressively transphobic for years on Twitter, and actively attacking trans people and finally Twitter banned him, which has been nice to see, because he was definitely violating the terms of service.
But you know, all this context is to say that when I talk, you know, I’ve written for British publications for years, including frankly ones that also published transphobic writers of the sort that I’m talking about. It’s hard to write for a legacy British publication that hasn’t done that. I definitely feel bad to be published alongside some of those people.
Initially a year ago, I wanna say it was, when people started to say “Wait, is JKR transphobic or a TERF?” Because she had faved some tweets—sorry, “liked”? I guess we call them “likes” now, I’ve just learned? Liked some tweets?
FK: [laughs] Pressed the heart button.
ELM: Yeah, and I, you know, it’s cynical but my immediate reaction—and you can vouch for this—was like “Yeah, well, she’s a white straight British woman with a lot of money of a certain age.”
FK: Yeah, that was your reaction. And that’s not—
ELM: It still is!
FK: —intuitive necessarily to someone who’s not, like, familiar with that context.
ELM: Yeah, and like, definitely none of my friends in the U.K. were particularly floored by this. Because like yeah, you know? The media conversations, people in very high positions of power within the media…not to say that other industries are immune from this, but like, you know, that’s the one that’s very very visible because people are putting their ideas directly into columns in The Guardian, stuff like that.
FK: Right, absolutely, absolutely. And from, you know, from a purely American perspective I think it’s a little startling because JKR is—I mean, she’s been in support of various things that seem like they are kind of liberal to people in the U.S., and usually people who are kind of liberal in the U.S. don’t tend to take, like—on a broad scale, I think, they can be transphobic, but they don’t tend to have that like, gender-critical like, central aspect of like, their—you know what I mean? People don’t usually say “I’m feminist, but also—” I mean, some people do, but it’s not like the central tenet of like—
ELM: Absolutely.
FK: —people who are outspoken feminists or feminist organizations in the U.S. So it feels kind of out of left field if you’re in the U.S. and you don’t know about this.
ELM: Right, and I should say, because I was, you know, when I try to contextualize this for people, like, there have been many liberal commentators in the U.S. over the last few years who have written explicitly transphobic things.
FK: Sure.
ELM: But it’s often like—I remember just after the election, you know the kind of like, Boomer man who writes columns? You know, that kind of vibe, right?
FK: Yeah, I do.
ELM: Ostensibly liberal people saying like, things like, “Trans people are a tiny tiny minority in this country: are we really gonna continue losing elections just to protect them?”
FK: Right.
ELM: That kind of rhetoric, right? Which is also incredibly harmful, you know, and also transphobic. But it’s not—it’s not founded on an idea that transness or non-normative gender is an explicit threat to your gender? Often it seems like those guys, when they say stuff like that, it’s—they’re not even connecting the two. They’re like “Oh, that’s foreign to me.” And I think there is something specific about the way women do it, women I think often spend more time thinking about gender. Right? And they see the world through a gendered lens because women. You know, because—
FK: Yes.
ELM: They’re the marginalized gender, right? So it’s like, I understand why, but it’s just like—that line of rhetoric is, is missing from our national discourse. Which is good!
FK: Right, or when it is there…
ELM: For us.
FK: Right, or when it is there it’s like, explicitly a conservative line. Like, the bathroom bill stuff.
ELM: Yes, I’m talking about amidst ostensible liberals.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: Because I think the thing that’s been so jarring about this for a lot of people is that I think thinking even with all the endless lists of not-particularly-progressive things in those books, people tend to think of her as a liberal person. You know? Not a super-progressive person, but a liberal person. Right? And there’s something that feels very very conservative about these beliefs. But I think that’s what’s hard for people to wrap their heads around is that a lot of people can hold, can say things like, you know, “I’m liberal and these are my feelings about gender,” right?
FK: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
ELM: So then following the timeline, it was around I wanna say October, November of last year—she explicitly tweeted something that said, it was “I stand with,” and it was a person who had been involved in a lawsuit because the person she stood with, metaphorically, was transphobic.
FK: Yes.
ELM: And there was a lawsuit involved and I honestly don’t remember the details of that.
FK: I believe that she had refused—I believe that she had been fired and one of the issues was that she had refused to correctly gender somebody?
ELM: Really!
FK: Was that right?
ELM: I don’t know.
FK: That seems—we’ll put something in the show notes about this. I think that that was what it was.
ELM: Yeah, the actual details of the case. Anyway, it was basically an explicit, like, flag in the sand kind of—sand? Do you put flags in sand? That’s probably not a great term either. It sounds like colonization.
FK: A flag…yeah. A…
ELM: Line in the sand.
FK: Line in the sand!
ELM: A flag on the…
FK: Beach?
ELM: Hill.
FK: Hill. Anyway.
ELM: I don’t know. And that’s when I think a lot of people had to do their initial reckoning. A lot of Harry Potter fans past and current. That was nothing compared to what happened, like— [laughs] Just like, what on earth?! My, all right. People were talking about how it was calculated, nothing seemed calculated about those tweets to me. To me, first of all, like a week prior it was in early June, late May, she had copy-pasted like half a tweet into a tweet about her new children’s book?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And it said something about like “they call you a TERF” or something, and everyone was like “What?!” And she was like “Whoa whoa whoa, my hand slipped! I was typing somewhere else and I copy-pasted that in,” and it was like, “What are you doing?!” But then Saturday night it was like 10 p.m. British time—
FK: She, she, I mean, yeah.
ELM: My theory was immediately like, she’d had a few. But I don’t know, she might’ve been stone-cold sober. But she read an article in The Guardian that described people who menstruate as people who menstruate. This enraged her, because she—even though lots of women don’t menstruate, and lots of people who menstruate are not women! Just, just for clarity’s sake here.
FK: Yep!
ELM: Like, lots of women don’t menstruate, also. Like FYI.
FK: It’s true!
ELM: Menstruation is not a good defining feature of womanhood even in the biological sense. So.
FK: Nope! Nope!
ELM: She… [laughs] she was like, she tweeted an angry thing being like “If only there was a word for these people, like, wibbin? Woobin?” She was clearly like—she read the article and just like went off. She was mad. And then people were like “Whoa, whoa, transphobic,” and then she was off to the races. And she started quote-tweeting them and being like, “My friends are messaging me saying ‘woo, go you!’ and all this. ‘You’re really speakin’ out!’” It was clear she’d been having these conversations privately for years and they were foundational to her conversations about gender.
FK: Which is pretty much what you had been saying that you assumed was going on from the beginning, so you know, you get the booby prize of being right.
ELM: [laughs] For basic observations of, of conversations in the United Kingdom! And then three days later she published, after trying to defend herself on social media, she published her manifesto on her website. And it was awful, and it was also really illuminating. It actually really contextualized a lot of things for me in her work and her beliefs that were blank spots.
FK: It really did.
ELM: That I—I think frankly, I mean, we should go into this a bit. Some things that I think other people I know in the fandom filled in more generously than I did, I think that—I mean maybe we should talk about this explicitly instead of just using vague language.
FK: Yeah, sure, sure. So I think that one of the, um, one of the biggest things that a lot of people I know who are non-binary like me or trans, and I, really imprinted on, was Tonks in the books, initially, right?
ELM: Do we have to explain who any of these characters are? Maybe we should! There might be people listening who are interested in this conversation who aren’t familiar with Harry Potter.
FK: I was getting there, I was gonna go there. I was gonna go there.
ELM: All right, all right. Well also because movie Tonks is so nothing, she’s got like five lines.
FK: Right. So Tonks is a character who has an inborn ability, she’s a Metamorphmagus. She can change her appearance to like, anything at whim. And a lot of people, when she was introduced—and she’s sort of punk and like, you know…
ELM: She’s got pink hair, like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: She was like kinda tomboyish, like. She’s super clumsy, real clumsy, classic.
FK: She wears clothing with like music, with like bands on it, you know.
ELM: She’s also like, in the eyes of like the 15-year-olds in the story, she seems cool and young, whereas like Remus and Sirius are 34 and Tonks is like 25 [laughing] and they’re like “They’re elderly and she’s young and cool,” and it’s like, “Why is everyone’s perception of age so strange in these books?” But that’s fine.
FK: And so I think for a lot of people, myself included, even though Tonks never actually changes into a person of any gender other than female, the fact that she had the ability to change her body made me—and a lot of other non-binary people and I’m sure trans people—like really, “Oh yeah. That’s my, that’s my character.” You know? “Yeah, that one!”
ELM: I wanna dig into this a little bit because this is something that’s been really interesting for me to learn. Because I—and I find this often, this with other transforming characters. And people talking about how those are meaningful, you know. Like, trans people I know talking about how those were always very meaningful for them, the idea of transformation. But Tonks—JKR never said anything about gender.
FK: Yeah, it’s true, she didn’t!
ELM: And I think that for, like, you know, like—there’s so many transformations in the Harry Potter books, right? Like, all the animagi—ani—magi? I—
FK: “Magi,” I think it has to be “magi.”
ELM: It’s a word I’ve literally typed thousands of times. But you know…
FK: Yeah, Sirius-lover.
ELM: [laughs] That’s me! And Remus, as a werewolf, and the other werewolves, and…
FK: There’s the Polyjuice potion, and…
ELM: Polyjuice potion, exactly. And this idea of, you know, transformation is so fundamental because I think it’s also a very fundamental theme in folktales from all over the world, right? This is like a huge, a huge foundation of our storytelling. But to me, who had thought a lot about gender long before I ever read the Harry Potter books, they didn’t say anything about gender. And so like to me, I never ever connected a character who does funny transformations, turns her nose into a pig’s nose, into anything about gender, and to me the simple act of transformation isn’t enough.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know that I felt like it was enough, but I think that at that point, when Tonks was introduced there was still a lot more of the books to go, right? And one of the things that had been true was that each book seemed to be opening up a new vista of possibilities in her world.
ELM: “Vista”!
FK: And I was incredibly disappointed—yeah, vista. And I was incredibly disappointed with what Tonks’s story ended up being, and I think a lot of people were too…
ELM: Well, I was also, without any expectations, I was then disappointed.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: For anyone who hasn’t read it, basically what happens is in the fifth book she’s this fun punky young, you know, tomboyish clumsy, like, cool person that Harry’s like “Hey!” And then in the sixth book she now has like, mousy brown hair and she’s really like, sad sack, and so Harry spends literally three-quarters of that book thinking that she was in love with Sirius, her cousin, never once is he like “Her cousin?” Which I think he would’ve been, right? He’s from the Muggle world!
FK: He is from the Muggle world.
ELM: I know these wizards are like, into their cousins, but he woulda been like “That’s weird. That was her, like, relative, like,” you know? I don’t know, I thought he would have mentioned that. Harry’s dumb, he’s an idiot, right, so he was like, you know, “she must be in love with her cousin,” but no, turns out she was actually in love with Remus the whole time, and he rejected her and so she was a sad sack, and she called herself Tonks—that’s her last name. Cool! Tonks! And he called her “Dora,” cause her first name is “Nymphadora.” So it’s this very soft feminizing name.
And then they get together, and then in the seventh book Remus does wildly out-of-character things, I thought, when he offers to abandon her—cause he seemed like a pretty loyal guy. And then they both abandon their own child to go fight in the final battle and they die.
FK: Yep!
ELM: In, in JKR’s words, they die so there can be another orphan who has a better childhood than Harry did as an orphan.
FK: Yep. So…
ELM: Pretty bad! Pretty bad!
FK: That was, yeah. And I think that the thing is that like—to me the transformation aspects of that opened up so many possibilities and she seemed so interesting and like, there could be so much, and that Harry as we know is an idiot so who knows what would be in the later books—and then it was like “Nope, none of those things were there,” right? And obviously like, there’s a difference between actually thinking that that stuff is there, and thinking that the possibility is there and being excited by it, do you know what I mean?
ELM: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
FK: And I think that what was sad for me was that like, it felt like—I mean, this is my experience of the Harry Potter books overall, honestly, and I’ve talked about that on this podcast before, was reading into them and having my own mind supply so many things about them, and then having the reality be…not just not what I expected, which is, “not what I expected” is fine, but I think now I can say genuinely worse, you know? [laughs] Like…and normally I don’t like to make that kind of judgment, because I feel like a lot of times fans are like “Ugh, it’s just not what I wanted.” But sometimes it’s also worse. [laughs]
ELM: So, not to take us too far afield, but one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently is the kind of study I’ve done in academia in the English department, which I’ve talked about a little bit on here, but a lot of the work I’ve done and the classes I’ve taken and the kinds of papers I’ve written have been about reading for social values and social norms in the texts of certain periods.
FK: Mm-hmm, right.
ELM: So like doing it in conjunction with history. Specifically I was doing this with 19th century British literature and imperialism, right? Which has been a super relevant area of knowledge in the last month. [laughs] I mean also in the last hundreds of years, because this has been foundational—
FK: LOL.
ELM: But you know, whatever. There’s a, there’s a line that I think is less productive, which is, you know, reading the primary sources of these writers and trying to use their personal beliefs to read into the text. Because it’s more complicated than that, and I think it’s good to have that background, if you are studying a writer, to read their letters, to read their diaries, to really understand the way they saw the world, but drawing a very direct one-to-one comparison, saying “Well, right here in this letter to his brother he said this thing so obviously this was what he meant when he wrote this thing about this character in this book,” right.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: That’s very facile, I think. That should just be one piece of the puzzle.
FK: Right.
ELM: That being said, I think it’s really important to understand the writer and the context in which they’re writing and the world around them. And so I take all of this to this thing we’re talking about right now, and say, you know, I often think—you know, all through my time in the Harry Potter fandom, especially after I lived in the U.K. for a few years and started to see how much a lot of the Americans I knew in the fandom were really misinterpreting a lot of this stuff—because those are very very British books and they’re founded in this kind of British middle-class-ism. You know, and there are good elements to that and bad. Like, she’s very good at, you know, showing the smallness of British middle-class life and the, the fear embedded in there.
But reading that fucking manifesto, it was like—it was like it really, and in conjunction reading Aja Romano’s commentary, they wrote a piece in Vox, and it was like it unlocked everything—all the absences in those books around gender. And I’ve always found those books very regressive on gender, and always chalked it up to “These were written by a woman in the ’90s who had, you know, had read second wave feminists and that was it, hadn’t thought too much more about it,” but actually it was like—go to therapy! You should go to therapy. When you read that manifesto it was like, there’s so much going on here. Right? And I don’t know that I necessarily want to get into the details, like…
FK: Honestly, yeah. Cause, I mean—she talks about experiences, her own experiences of abuse, and being abused does not justify abusing other people—I’ll put that out there—but it did make me feel bad for her because I felt like, God, you are living in a very dark place. If this is how you feel all the time? Then you are living in a place that is incredibly dark and incredibly sad and incredibly cramped, and I am lucky enough to be in a position where I can feel sorry for her. You know. Because I don’t feel personally like—she can have those opinions and I, I feel gross about it but I don’t feel like, scared by her opinions. I can feel sorry for her. And not everyone’s in that position, you know what I mean? Not every trans or NB person is in that place.
ELM: I think you can feel sorry for her and also feel angry at the—
FK: Yes.
ELM: —danger she’s putting people in.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: She’s a human being, and… [laughs] News flash: she’s a human being, and there’s so, so much vulnerability and, yeah, and sadness in that post. Right? And you can, you can want her to try to fix herself to—just for the sake of fixing it! You know? In addition to saying, “I wish she would stop feeling this way so you would stop causing harm,” right, I also would like her personally to, to not feel the way she feels. You know? But like, I—I don’t know her, so it’s like, I don’t know. What’s my place here, to be like, you know.
FK: Yeah, I do want to jump back really quickly—
ELM: Even though I was just like “GO TO THERAPY” very flippantly, but like, do it!
FK: You can hold both these things in your heart. [laughter] I do wanna jump back though because to your point about Americans, like, misinterpreting or having their own read on the books, I think that that was very insightful because when I think about, like, the way that I interpreted Tonks, I think about my own situation at the time that I was reading about Tonks, which—I was in high school when that character was introduced, and I was struggling because I knew about the concept of being genderqueer, I knew the concept of being nonbinary, but it seemed like a completely impossible thing for me to ever express about myself. Because I knew about it, but it felt like it was too—it was too far. It was too different. It was too scary. Right? In my context, it was scary enough to say that you were a lesbian. Saying that you were—even saying that you were bi was maybe too scary because people would mock it, right. And talking about genderqueerness, you could talk about maybe really lightly, or as a way to be like, provocative, but seriously? Never.
So for me, reading it in that context, and not knowing anything, anything, not even the tiniest bit about the context of Britain at that time, having absolutely no clue, even though the internet existed—still really no clue—I saw that character like, just purely through my own lens. So of course I, of course I, you know, added all of my own feelings to it, do you know what I mean? Of course I was like “Oh yeah she’s only doing these things, but if I had that power—and she’s only doing those things, maybe she’s constrained,” I don’t know.
ELM: I don’t think that, that particular point I wouldn’t put too much cultural context. You know, like, I think that—I could see that same character being written by an American in the ’90s and it reading the same way, you know? You know, I think there’s a long, long history of—there is on the male side too, but of people writing like, tomboyish characters or kind of butch girls into stories and then feminizing them as they grow into puberty, because that is the, the way of things, you know? It’s like, “Oh yeah, we were all like that at a certain age, but then of course when you hit a certain age, you’re supposed to start having the correct feelings, and then you set aside your,” I mean, the freakin’ Toy Story movie did that in a montage that makes me cry every time because of that song! You know the one I’m talking about, right?
FK: I do. I do.
ELM: With Jessie? [sighs] Second Toy Story. So I don’t know if that’s particularly culturally specific. I think that what you make me think of though—and I think you’re seeing a lot of this now, too—is people look for what they need in the media that they’re looking at, and sometimes it’s not that complicated or it’s not what you need, like—at the same time I was reading Harry Potter, I was reading books by adults for adults about gender, right? They were works of art that were made with explicit ideas in mind.
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think at the same time I was reading Orlando.
ELM: Yeah, I mean, at the same time I was reading Orlando, right?
FK: I was too!
ELM: To put those two things side by side and say that Harry Potter was saying anything intelligent about most things, but you know, about the nature of gender or about transness or about gender-nonconformity, it’s, it just would be bonkers to me then and now. Because one of them was so deep and the other one wasn’t saying much at all.
But, this is bringing us back to what we talked about two episodes ago with the idea of affect, right? And like, you were drawn to Tonks. You found her fascinating, you related to her.
FK: Well, more to the point she seemed like the person that I related to in this book that I had been drawn to—like—
ELM: Yeah, yeah!
FK: I would never compare those two things either, for a variety of reasons… [ELM laughs] One of them being that even though I really love Orlando, like, I don’t have the same kind of like—the affect is different, you know what I mean? For me.
ELM: Whatever you’re going to say about the greatest book that’s ever been written, you can just save it. And the greatest cat that’s ever—the greatest cat that’s ever been created.
FK: I love Orlando, but I never wanted to write fanfiction about it—yeah, your cat is really great. But you know, you know, I never wanted to write fanfiction about it, maybe because I didn’t need to because it was already doing all the things I wanted it to be doing, do you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah. You wrote fanfiction about, you wrote fanfiction about Tonks, specifically.
FK: I did, I did. Because, I think because she wasn’t doing the things that I needed her to do, you know? Because she was the most gender-nonconforming character in this world that I loved, and I wanted her to do various things, and I think even at the time I knew that it was highly unlikely that these things would play out, but I still wanted them, you know?
ELM: Yeah, sure, sure.
FK: So anyway, now whenever I think about this I wanna cry, so.
ELM: Cool, cool. Glad this conversation’s going so well. You haven’t cried yet!
FK: No.
ELM: Yeah, this is—I’m not saying this stuff to denigrate, like, past you, or the past, like, literally hundred people I know who felt the same way as you. [FK laughs] I’m just talking about how, you know, it feels very foreign to me, because it’s just not something that I—I read in those books. And like, bringing it back to like, having the post be the, this kind of unlocking sort of thing, like, you know…now I just don’t understand how anyone could ever read those books and ever think anything except for what she meant, which is embedded in her experience and her worldview.
And like—we should probably take a break shortly, but like, getting into the fandom and what the fandom does from here. Like, do you want to engage with Tonks going forward? Now that you know this like, now that it’s been decoded for you, the secret meaning? Do you feel like you can still own that fanfiction Tonks that you had that was full of hope and interesting and non-transphobic ideas?
FK: Yeah… [groans] Let’s talk about this after the break.
ELM: Cool, take a break, do a quick cry, and then we can discuss it.
FK: Oh my God, Elizabeth I’m gonna stab you! [ELM laughs] OK. Talk to you in a second.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, I have thought about it for a bit, and…
ELM: Hold on! Hold on.
FK: I’ve thought about it for like literally 15 seconds.
ELM: I don’t wanna hear this until you talk about patreon.com/fansplaining! [laughing]
FK: Oh my God, OK.
ELM: Smooth.
FK: If you’ve been enjoying the fact that Elizabeth has been almost bringing me to tears as she does in almost every episode, if you really love that aspect of our dynamic, the way that you can support this podcast is patreon.com/fansplaining. Although we did read our first-ever ad this time, I think that you can probably guess that one ad is not enough to support a podcast like this, and we are so grateful to everybody who supports us. And when you support us on Patreon, there’s lots of exciting rewards that you can get, and the rewards are going to start shipping out again this coming week…
ELM: Openin’ up!
FK: Yeah, because New York is openin’ up! So, uh, we—
ELM: Sort of. Just a little bit. Not too much.
FK: Yeah, just a little bit. Just a little bit. There may be a couple of delays as we get things rolling again, we need to actually order some more of those adorable Fansplaining pins, and those are coming from China, so we’ll keep you updated on that.
ELM: Yeah, I don’t know about that.
FK: Anyway, so there’s some pin rewards, there’s some special episode rewards…
ELM: Yeah, let’s, let’s just say in non-material goods, $3 a month or higher gets you all the special episodes. There’s many of them, including our very first one, which was also about our disappointment with the Harry Potter franchise.
FK: But in a different direction!
ELM: In a different way, four years ago. And we also, when the lockdown started we started doing this series called Tropefest. And we put that on pause over the last month for obvious reasons. I do want to do more Tropefests, I’m not sure when those will resume, but…
FK: I’m feeling good about some more Tropefests in the horizon.
ELM: OK! Well, we can think about some tropes. What should come next? We’ll see. So yeah! All those are available to you if you’re looking for some things to listen to while you sit alone. Maybe outside? With a mask?
FK: Outside!
ELM: But mostly alone.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Or with your household.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Which for many of us is just one person.
FK: And a cat!
ELM: Yeah, but like, you know.
FK: Yeah. It’s not the same.
ELM: It’s better.
FK: Yeah, I mean, you know, Pepys put on two pounds which is a lot for a dog of his size cause he’s so chill now cause we’re with him all the time.
ELM: Wow! Does he look completely different?
FK: The vet said that he is finally at a completely healthy weight.
ELM: Congrats, Pepys!
FK: Yeah! He’s a good boy.
ELM: Meanwhile, Orlando had to wear a cone for a week because she has an issue with her fur.
FK: Our pets are having very different quarantine experiences.
ELM: Not thrilled about it, neither is she. So. It’s fine.
FK: All right. So before we move back on to the topic of the episode, we should also mention that if you don’t have the money or don’t want to, there’s lots of other ways you can support us—by sharing the word about the podcast or by contacting us, fansplaining at gmail dot com. You can get us on all the major social networks, we’re fansplaining, or by calling in to 1-401-526-FANS and leaving us a voicemail. And, uh, we read some people’s comments on-air! So you know. Share your thoughts.
ELM: All right. You ready to get back to the sad topic?
FK: Yeah, OK. So having thought about this a little more, I think that…I have no interest in reading the Harry Potter books themselves ever again for sure. Because I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to do that without, without feeling like—yeah. No. I don’t think that’s gonna be a thing for me ever again. Or watching the movies or going to the theme parks or watching Fantastic Beasts when it comes out.
ELM: That’s not, we’re not gonna…
FK: When I have had to engage with this at work, I have asked co-workers to work on it instead of me rather than me having to. Like I’ve literally been like, “I don’t think I can work on Harry Potter right now for my work.”
So I think that I may still be able to read—in fact I know I’m gonna still be able to read a couple of like, very divorced from the original story fanfics that I have already read in the past that are like old favorites that have almost nothing to do with the original story. And I know this because I, in support of your “Rec Center” this past week, you asked me for a rec and I was like “Well the only one I can think of is this Harry Potter fic” and so I’ve been rereading it. And the reality is it has, like, very little to do with actual Harry Potter, so. That’s been fine for me.
But no, I don’t think that—I think that specifically Tonks? I don’t think I’m gonna be able to read fanfic about her. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to engage with that stuff. Because the thing is that it doesn’t feel anymore like—you know for a long time it felt like reading into, reading against the text felt like, cool and a way for me to—it felt like that was a way for me to own it and make it my own thing, right? It felt like—frustration and fascination, I’m fascinated by this world and like I’m frustrated but I’m gonna read into it and so it doesn’t matter what’s in the actual text, like, I’m gonna put stuff in it that I care about.
And even after like a lot of bad stuff had happened in this space, I still felt like, you know, transformative fandom will help me own this thing that I love and that’s been so literally central to my whole life. But, it’s past that tipping point for me now. It just doesn’t feel fruitful. It doesn’t feel like anything. It feels like it’s just giving more play to that, you know?
ELM: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been on this page with the Harry Potter fandom for years. Especially stuff that is pretty far afield from canon, which is most of—not most of, but like, a lot of what I encounter on my feeds, because I’m still, you know, I came back into the fic fandom in 2016, so I have a lot of Harry Potter people on my dash, so I still see what people are up to. It’s been hard for me…I’m not in this fandom so I don’t wanna be like “don’t do this!” But sometimes…have we talked about this on the podcast? I don’t know, I’ve definitely talked about it with you privately. It’s like, give Harry any kind of body you want, or gender, something more internal, or neuroatypicality, anything like that that aren’t external—and I think that’s great. I think people should continue doing it, especially stuff that doesn’t just feel that it’s kind of like it’s kind of overlaying an identity marker on him without ever mentioning it again, which I have definitely encountered.
FK: Right. Or there’s absolutely no, absolutely nothing about it except he looks down and he has brown skin and that’s it!
ELM: Yes. “Harry looked at his brown hand.” This is the, you know, I would make this critique about, you know, queerness as well. I definitely think there are a lot of fics where people are just like “Yeah, he’s, he’s gay.” And it’s like, “Am I gonna get any words about this? No?” Like, and I know a lot of people like that, because they’re like “Oh, it’s just not at issue.” And I’m like, I don’t know. I want a sentence, you know? I wanna know how we got from the Harry Potter in the books to this chill, gay Harry Potter who’s like, really cool with it. Like, you know. Et cetera, et cetera. We’ve discussed this before.
But I’m seeing people writing fics about characters I barely know, the ones I remember because there was like a year when I did this Sporcle quiz, “Can you name the 200 most frequently mentioned Harry Potter characters?” And you get really down into the background characters, you know? And I’m like, at what point—like, is this, is this about engaging with this world? Like, again, it feels like it’s giving her more play. You know? And it’s like, I don’t wanna stop people from…endlessly cycling through this franchise. It’s just something that appeals to a lot of people, and I’ve talked to friends in Harry Potter fandom, and they say “This is just a thing I like and I don’t know how to stop liking it,” you know?
But for me it’s like poisoned, you know? It’s like Sherlock for me. I don’t want to ever read Sherlock fic ever again, like, I don’t want to think about those characters. And that, that’s more about the fandom. But still, it has the same effect of like—
FK: Yeah, totally. Totally.
ELM: If you just sent me a Harry Potter story right now—and I think that like, some of your sadness feels very real to me in the sense of like, I imagine for you—tell me if this is how you feel—it’s partly about the person that you were when you really loved it, right?
FK: Mm-hmm. It is, it totally is.
ELM: I still strongly relate to Sirius Black, as shameful as that is! But so much of that, like, and I still do! Even now, we’re the same age as, like, I’m the oldest that Sirius ever was, which is very upsetting to think about.
FK: Oh man.
ELM: Snape too! We’re almost to the age—
FK: I know.
ELM: —Snape’s maximum age.
FK: I know.
ELM: Elderly Snape over here. But like a lot of my Sirius feelings are also about, like, being a teen and being very mentally unstable and you know, being institutionalized, and like, I don’t wanna hate that part of my life. I don’t wanna hate what that character meant to me at that time, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah. Absolutely, and I don’t—I don’t wanna hate, I mean, there were so many things also about—it’s not just about the character, it’s also about the whole fandom and the experience of being with people in the fandom, you know. For better or worse Harry Potter fandom—
ELM: Well, I wasn’t with any people. But OK. Continue.
FK: Well no, I know, I know, OK. We’re different. But I think it’s a similar feeling in that, you know, so much of—yeah, so much of my teenagerhood and so much of, you know, for me Harry Potter fandom was a way to not be in—it was a way to connect with people outside of the suburb in which I lived. Do you know what I mean? It was like, this was my vista on—I mean—like 20-year-olds. Which is—“vista.” I don’t know why “vista” is my favorite word today.
ELM: I pronounce it “viss-tah,” just for the record.
FK: Ooh. [ELM laughs] Regional pronunciations, go! But no, I mean it was a space where I got out of my suburban life, you know? When I was a high schooler. It was a way that I connected with people and understood that there was, like, a world past—it’s funny, I was like, for some reason The Mountain Goats’ “This Year” was circling around the internet. For obvious reasons. And I was thinking about when I was about that age, I also discovered The Mountain Goats, and like, thinking about that song which is about being 17 and wanting to get out of your parents’ house and knowing that you just have to make it through.
ELM: Such a teen.
FK: I was like, so much of this is related to that. I mean it is, right? Like—and yeah. And so it’s, it’s almost impossible to—it’s hard to, it’s hard to think about where to go from here, if Harry Potter is completely, is dead to me [laughs], then how do I make sense of that period of my life? And I don’t know that I have an answer, but I do know that it’s—you know, I do know that the answer doesn’t involve being part of Harry Potter fandom in the future, because I don’t feel like it’s a safe space for me mentally because every time I dip my toe into it with like, some very very specific exceptions, it just makes me feel gross again.
ELM: Yeah. And it’s also like—I’ve seen some commentary from Harry Potter fandom people, very generic statements and quotes from the books about the power of love and tolerance…
FK: Yeah, no!
ELM: It’s just like, “What?” Like—
FK: They’re also so fucking out of context, you know? Anyway.
ELM: [laughs] Which like—I don’t know. I’m thinking like a lot of thoughts right now too about like, I’m thinking about race in those books, I’m thinking about, you know, the long, long-held critiques, the racialized critiques and the anti-semitism, and how all that was kind of exploded by the Magic in North America stuff where it was just like so blatant, and people were like, “Oh, are we gonna talk about Cho Chang now?” And everyone was like, “Yeah, we did, from like 2003 onwards. People talked about it a lot.” And like, you know, I definitely know people of Asian descent who did not like the books because they were like, “I found this shitty.” The Patils or whatever. “I found this racist and it made me feel bad, and I didn’t want to be there in that space.”
FK: Harry Potter is hardly the only fandom in which this specific thing exists, right? I am reminded of Harry Kim in Voyager who apparently the writers did not realize had to be Korean and not Chinese until like, the show was over.
ELM: Fuck off! Jesus Christ.
FK: Even though the actor of course, who was of Chinese descent, was fully cognizant of this. You know. But at least there’s some acknowledgment of this and people have talked about it and been like “Yeah that was incredibly shitty and racist” and stuff, but since then J. K. Rowling has apparently no context for this? I don’t know.
ELM: She’s literally never gonna address this.
FK: She doesn’t address this, she doesn’t care.
ELM: The reason I bring this up though is like, it’s interesting, I’ve been thinking a lot about “Oh, it’s been problematic all along but you’re still OK reading it,” like, the gender politics within it I found very regressive, extremely heteronormative to an almost comical degree—
FK: It is extremely, yes, that has always been the case. And if anybody thinks that people have not been critiquing this since literally 2001, then—
ELM: At a minimum!
FK: I don’t know what fandom they’ve been in, because that has never been not a conversation. Harry grows up to be a cop who marries Ginny, because everyone has to marry someone they knew when they were a child! Like, I don’t know what to say!
ELM: Yeah, your high school sweetheart! Captain of the football team!
FK: The football team!
ELM: A cop! Marries the head cheerleader, that’s cool!
FK: This is not a new conversation.
ELM: No. But I think if you had asked me, even being fully versed in the rhetoric of transphobia when I was initially reading those books, if they were explicitly transphobic, I don’t think I would’ve said that.
FK: No I don’t think so.
ELM: Because I think this is something that existed in the absence. If she came out tomorrow and was like super homophobic, I would also be angry and maybe not so surprised, cause it’s something else that was also just absent, right?
FK: Yep, completely.
ELM: Saying “Dumbledore is gay” in the most servicey way doesn’t actually erase that, right?
FK: Sure doesn’t.
ELM: You know there’s—like, there’s not, I don’t know. Maybe other people feel like—there’s a lot of homosocial intimacy that I think you can read as queer subtext if you want, but I don’t actually think it’s queer subtext, because she’s not—like, I think it’s pretty clear it’s not, right? But like, I think it’s also like a—an eye of the beholder, when, with the line between queer subtext and homosocial intimacy. And what you wanna do with it. Right? Which is like—you know what I’m saying.
FK: I do know. I do absolutely know. And there’s, yeah. I absolutely know.
ELM: I just thought about—you know that famous, the story from the set of The Lord of the Rings where Ian McKellen told Elijah Wood that Frodo and Sam should hold hands?
FK: Somehow I missed this story!
ELM: I would like to fact-check this, but I read it on Tumblr and they said that Ian McKellen was like, “They should—it would really mean a lot to some people if they just held hands.” And it was such, like, a—such a telling long, long history of like…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Coded homosocial intimacy, subtextual, right? And they were both like “OK! Sure!” [laughing] “We’ll hold hands, it’s fine!” You know?
FK: Thanks, Ian McKellen!
ELM: Right? Y’know? And it’s also like—I think we’ve talked about this before but like, I don’t wanna—now I’m gonna go into the whole history of like subtext vs. text and all that, which is maybe not necessary right now. But like, all of this is just to say that like, being fully aware of Harry Potter’s problems prior to this feels really different to me than like, seeing her post a fuckin’ manifesto that’s like—so hateful. You know?
FK: It takes what—there can be, having problems in a text but not having that context of like, an author’s specific statement about them, gives…it’s not plausible deniability because there’s no denial going on, but it give sa space in which I think it feels like, you know, “OK, we’re gonna play with this.” And now it feels like if you’re gonna do anything that subverts that, then that’s a fuck you to J. K. Rowling. And to me, I don’t wanna make fanfiction purely in the spirit of fuck you. You know? I wanna—I wanna make fanfiction in lots of spirits, and sometimes I guess maybe occasionally fuck you, but not the way that I really usually want to engage with fanfic, you know what I mean? Then it becomes polemical and not, not what I wanna make. So, you know. Maybe, I mean, yeah. Nothing against people who intentionally write polemic stuff in order to say fuck you to people! I think that that’s fine if that’s your jam, but it’s not mine in this context at all, and I don’t know.
I, I can’t see my way to signing anything or issuing any kind of a statement that like, makes it sound like I’m going to be “Oh, we’ll always have Harry Potter. We’ll always love this.” Because no, I’m sorry, we won’t always have Harry Potter. I’m nonbinary and I don’t have Harry Potter anymore! You know? And no amount of, I mean, and people can have their feelings and I don’t—if you’re cis and—I mean, if you’re nonbinary, if you’re trans and it doesn’t strike you this way, you can do that! You do you, but like, don’t include me in your narrative, basically, you know? Because I don’t want to be part of that any more.
ELM: Yeah, you know, it makes me think about the art from the artist conversation. And it’s like—you know, we had Emily Nussbaum on and she wrote, you know, that really interesting piece in her book about Woody Allen.
FK: Yeah, it was a great piece.
ELM: And it’s like, Woody Allen is such a good example in the sense of like, he’s literally making art about the thing that he’s doing. Like, Manhattan, you know what I mean? And there comes a certain point where you just can’t, can’t engage with that anymore.
FK: Yeah, and I respect people have different points of that, you know what I mean? And I do genuinely respect that and that’s OK, and yet I think it’s also really important that [laughs] that people who don’t wanna give that up recognize that there are other people who do. You know? And who come to the end of their patience.
ELM: Yeah, I think that one thing I would add too—and we talked about this the last time, back in the fall when Round One, which was less severe. Didn’t warrant a whole episode like this did. I will say that I do find the “read this book instead!” stuff very frustrating. Because like, while we both are saying we don’t wanna engage with Harry Potter anymore, that just utterly misses that affect element to it, like—absolutely read those books, right? But like, saying like, “Replace Harry Potter with those books,” is bonkers, because…
FK: It misses the, it misses the history aspect too, right? I can’t go back in time and like, change my—not just my life but also every other human on this earth’s life.
ELM: The lives of millions of people!
FK: Right, such that…
ELM: I think part of this too, like, it’s a reflection of the extreme sloppiness with which we—“we,” we try not to, but like, society is using the word “fans” or “fandom,” you know, when actually like, maybe it’s not sloppiness, maybe it’s just like the biggest tent, right? Like, if you went to a Harry Potter release party and you dressed up and you really liked them a lot, sure you were in the fandom, if you say you were, right? But so many people have read them and found the books valuable and are not gonna have to have the same reckoning as people who were like, deep in the fandom, about how they kind of excise this part of themselves and their history, or whether they can or not, you know?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: If it was just a matter of like—don’t read Harry Potter again regardless! Yeah, read some new stuff! Definitely read stuff by people who aren’t this lady, you know. [FK laughs] Who are not a white lady and a cis lady and a straight lady, you know? All this stuff.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: There’s so many other books.
FK: And it also misses, you know, that a lot of things people put in there, there’s not that kind of a fandom presence, and what are you looking for in this, right? Is it really about the books themselves, or at a certain point is it about—I mean, I know that for some people it is, but for me, like, a lot of it was about the fandom and the interactions. And that’s part of why I’m really enjoying being in Star Trek fandom now, right? Star Trek fandom has so many ways that it’s problematic. Star Trek has been problematic in like, not just in every way, but in contradictory ways, all while trying to hold this like—
ELM: It’s pretty impressive.
FK: —generally progressive attitude, but like, it’s a big fandom, there’s a big tent, everything’s not focused on a single creator, all of the stuff that to me caused some of these problems for me within Harry Potter fandom, where everything goes back to JKR and it’s all about it? Star Trek doesn’t have that, so to me, entering into that fan space gives me a lot of those same things, even though the content couldn’t be more different. Well, it could be more different. But you know. It’s very different! [laughs]
ELM: It could definitely be more different!
FK: But it’s very different! And so you know…
ELM: This is like “Oh, one of them’s science fiction and one of them’s fantasy, they couldn’t be more different!”
FK: Well, one of them’s a true ensemble that takes place over the course of…anyway.
ELM: [laughing] Oh my God, oh my God.
FK: There’s no hero’s journey story in Star Trek…anyway.
ELM: Oh, this is when I have to say “read another book, Flourish!”
FK: You get what I’m saying about this!
ELM: Go read some Virginia Woolf! [both laughing]
FK: You know, you say this at me but the thing that, I mean, could it truly be more different than my favorite of all pretentious books, Wittgenstein’s Mistress?
ELM: Wow, you just try to get your intellectual footing back and it just looked like a big leap! [FK laughing] A big leap up to a too-high cliff that you couldn’t reach!
FK: Anyway, anyway, anyway. Anyway anyway. [both laughing]
ELM: Anyway, tl;dr…sucks…
FK: You get what I’m saying, there’s a lot of different factors in this, and please don’t say “read this book instead.” It’s not like that, that’s not a helpful statement,.
ELM: Yeah, if you’re like “Oh, you liked Harry Potter, here’s a list of other books you could try.”
FK: Yeah, that’s fine.
ELM: But the like “replace the Harry Potter fandom in your head with an interest in this book that very few other people have read and I’m sure is great,” is like, that’s not, that’s not, we’re not talking about the same thing, you know?
FK: Yes. There’s, I’m thinking of this meme which is like—it’s a picture of a pipe, and it says “N’est-ce pas it, chief.” It’s that. That meme. Yeah. I’m sorry, I can’t get it out of my head since I saw this. It’s in my head forever.
ELM: Wow. First of all I got to hear you say like three words of French.
FK: Yeah, I can’t speak French.
ELM: Yeah, I know. [both laugh] It’s fine! But you’re not gonna change your name.
FK: Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I feel fortunate in that “Flourish” to me is like—Flourish came from a nothingness. It’s originally “Flourish” was a screenname and it was Flourish and Blotts Booksellers, and I still own the domain name blotts.org because flourish at blotts.org is a cute email address. But I’m retiring it. I’m gonna slowly switch all of my emails away from this, this, you know, thing that I’ve had forever. And fortunately “flourish” as a word has a lot of meanings to me that don’t have anything to do with Harry Potter. And I don’t feel bad about that at all. The connection to Harry Potter was already so tenuous in my mind that like, eh. So actually, weirdly, that’s like the one thing that I’m not stressing about in any way, because even though technically speaking it was related to Harry Potter at the very beginning—even then.
ELM: I mean, and you did choose it.
FK: And it is also a word.
ELM: Lots of people also like, have the names that their parents give them and their parents were, like, cruel to them. So…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s your name at this point, you chose it when you were like one year old, so.
FK: I was like 11.
ELM: 12.
FK: Yeah. So you know.
ELM: In the womb.
FK: But also, like, it just doesn’t—fortunately it’s not “Harry,” right? Or [laughs] I think that if I had like, renamed myself, if I had renamed myself—
ELM: Nymphadora!
FK: “Dora” or “Tonks” or something—
ELM: “Dora”!
FK: —I would be feeling different about this, but like, even at the time, like, even at the time people didn’t necessarily recognize it as a Harry Potter name, so.
ELM: I’m just imagining you changing your name to “Tonks” at age 12.
FK: Tonks Klink.
ELM: Tonks Klink!
FK: Yeah, fortunately I had more sense than that.
ELM: Yeah, no, none of their names would sound good. “Harry Klink.” “Remus Klink.”
FK: You know, the problem we have here is that names all sound funny when you have the surname “Klink.”
ELM: Not “Colonel.”
FK: [laughs] You know nothing.
ELM: That might actually be the first time I’ve managed to bring up Colonel Klink on this podcast, in 129 episodes plus many special episodes.
FK: That’s shocking because it’s the first thing that anybody over a certain age says to me.
ELM: Oh, I know it. Yeah, I’m sorry. I can truly imagine.
FK: It’s fine! Yeah.
ELM: That was an important television show.
FK: It was.
ELM: In our cultural history.
FK: It was a lot worse for my father, who was growing up at the time that the show was on the air.
ELM: Oh, no!
FK: [laughing] It’s a really uncommon name.
ELM: Yeah, for anyone under the age of 66, Hogan’s Heroes was a popular television show in the ’50s, and Colonel Klink was…
FK: A Nazi! And let’s note, it’s a comedy show about a prisoner of war camp run by Nazis who are all incompetent.
ELM: So fun. So fun. No, it’s really interesting, it’s a really interesting cultural artifact of that time, like, it was made in the ’50s, right?
FK: And Colonel Klink says [comedy German accent] “I know nothink.” That’s what he says.
ELM: [laughing] You just did it with the accent!
FK: Yeah, you have to do it with the accent. Trust me. Do you know how many people have said that to me with the accent? Every person in this entire world over the age of 66.
ELM: A German accent! I’m so sorry.
FK: Yeah, yeah. Yep. So, you know.
ELM: I will say, perhaps some young people know it. I have watched multiple episodes on TVLand.
FK: It was on Nick at Nite, also.
ELM: Yes, it was on Nick at Nite.
FK: I have been very familiar, every time it comes on, it came on reruns, there would be a new young person who knew about it and…
ELM: Yeah.
FK: We had to have this—anyway, this is very far afield. I think that we should wrap up.
ELM: Ah, all right. So this is a big topic, those are only some of our thoughts. That’s really all I got here.
FK: All right, well, I think that there’s one more thing that we wanna talk about before we sign off.
ELM: Not directly related, but not completely unrelated.
FK: The Organization for Transformative Works put out a statement!
ELM: Right. So if you didn’t listen to our last episode or you haven’t seen any of this conversation on social media, the OTW, which is the parent organization for the Archive of our Own, alongside Transformative Works and Cultures, the academic journal, and a few other transformative fandom projects, did not issue any kind of statement about Black Lives Matter or Black fans or fandom racism or any of the things that most other organizations had been doing by about the mid, midpoint in June. Just any, any statement. I know most of those statements were not very good, but they put them out.
FK: They existed!
ELM: They existed.
FK: And it turns out, as much as you didn’t want the black Instagram square with white text on it, when they didn’t put out that statement, you kinda wish they had.
ELM: It’s just like, do it and fail, but at least do it, right? So anyway, they then, their like news roundup feature then talked about fandom racism and cited the work of some scholars, including some people who have been on our podcast to talk about racism and fandom, without like acknowledging the OTW or the AO3’s complicity in, in fandom racism, which is a problem. You know? Like…you don’t just get to pretend that the OTW is not actually a part of fandom because it’s, it’s, it is a part of fandom.
So those scholars and some other fans of color were critiquing the OTW, saying they wanted some accountability. We signed an open letter that was drafted by some fandom academics that we talked about last time on the podcast that basically asked the OTW to start having conversation about this, and to hire someone who knows what they’re doing to actually try to address, see what the technical solutions, what the content standards solutions, what the—you know, there’s so many different facets that I think were created unthinkingly by white people without thinking about race, which is obviously racialized, when white people do something without thinking about race.
FK: Right.
ELM: And the OTW put out a statement which we’ll link to in the show notes.
FK: Yeah, and my take on this is: that seemed like a fine statement. It seemed like it did the things that they needed to be saying at this point. They said a lot of stuff about sort of making changes, and none of those changes are going to happen instantly, and so I don’t think we’ll really know how good of a statement it was or how good of a reaction it was until a few months from now, when hopefully we will see some of the things they were talking about being implemented. Cause it takes time to do things.
ELM: Yeah. I’ll also say, the comment section on that post is a bit of a mess, but if you’re willing to wade through the messiness of it, it’s a really really interesting encapsulation of a lot of these topics and how complicated and contradictory proposed solutions are.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: One immediate example I can think of is, in the post—I have seen fans of color over the years talk about this, amongst white fans as well—talking about the potential to turn off comments completely on a fic, that would help protect them from harassment. I saw other fans of color zeroing in on that and saying “That’s the opposite of what I want because then how can we hold anyone accountable if they write something racist?” And there’s no reconciling those two perspectives!
FK: Yeah! They both are extremely valid perspectives! I don’t know.
ELM: So…it’s like that kind of thing and I think because, there are some people who are commenting in bad faith in that thread of hundreds of comments, but there are many people who are commenting in good faith and really trying to work through stuff and offering their perspective and what they would find valuable, so it’s just worth continually reading about and listening to people talking and thinking about, I think.
FK: Yep, and we’re still gonna do more on these topics as the summer goes on. So stay tuned as we have more guests on and talk more about this stuff.
ELM: Yeah, definitely!
FK: All right—
ELM: All right, well—
FK: Joint “all right,” that means it must be really time to end.
ELM: Truly. It’s just sad. I’m looking at my Harry Potter books on my mantel, I gotta move them. I gotta put something else up there. It’s just, you think about how much stuff—like, how much of Harry Potter, even stuff in my brain.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s there because of inertia, it’s there because of history. I, obviously I was gonna put my Harry Potter books in the center of my cute mantel. I’m doin’ the shruggie emoji right now.
FK: Yeah. Well, my version of this is that I have a beautiful handmade Harry Potter quilt from when they came out with all those Harry Potter themed fabrics the very first time, and it has now been given to Pepys. So. I can’t bear to get rid of it because it was handmade, but…
ELM: You’re saying I should tear the pages out of the books so Orlando can like, chew on them and roll around in them.
FK: She would love that!
ELM: What about our Harry Potter sweaters, Flourish?
FK: Oh, I know.
ELM: It’s OK, it’s like 1,000 degrees here. We don’t have to think about that right now.
FK: We’re definitely not gonna be wearing them right now, so we can put off that thought until, uh…
ELM: Just thinking about wearing a sweater right now makes me feel awful.
FK: But Pepys had a little Weasley sweater and I am not going to knit him another one. He wore it out and another one is not gonna be forthcoming.
ELM: He’s gonna be devastated.
FK: He does not know the difference between his sweaters, so he’s gonna be just fine. But he does know that people used to praise him for being so cute when he wore his little Weasley sweater, and he’s gonna be sad that he doesn’t get as much love. But that’s OK.
ELM: Make him another cute sweater, he’ll be all right!
FK: I’ll come up with some other fandom to make a cute fandomy sweater for so it’s catnip for someone else.
ELM: No! Every fandom will let you down, just do something else!
FK: And on that note, I think I’m gonna say goodbye to you, Elizabeth. Every fandom will let you down, so I’m gonna talk to you later.
ELM: OK goodbye Flourish. [both laugh]
FK: Bye.
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FK & ELM: Thank you to everyone who supports us on Patreon and especially Alaine Sepulveda, Amanda, Amy Yourd, Andie Cavin, Anne Jamison, Bluella, Boxish, Bradlea Raga-Barone, Brigid Dwyer, Carl with a C, Carrie Clarady, Chelsee Bergen, Citizen D, CJ Hoke, Claire Rousseau, Cordsycords, David, Desiree Longoria, Diana Williams, Dr. Mary C. Crowell, Earlgreytea68, Elizabeth Moss, Elasmo, Elledubs42, Fabrisse, Felar, Froggy, Georgie Carroll, Goodwin, Graham Goss, Gwen O’Brien, Heidi Tandy, Heart of the Sunrise, Helena, Ignifer, Jackie C., Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Jennifer Brady, Jennifer Doherty, Jennifer Lackey, Jennifer McKernan, Jes, Jess Unrein, Josh Stenger, Jules Chatelain, Julianna, JungleJelly, Katherine Lynn, Kirsteen M, Kitty McGarry, Kristen P., Lizzy Johnstone, Lori Morimoto, Lucy in Bookland, Mareinna, Maria Temming, Mariah Mercer, MathClassWarfare, Matt Hills, Meg, Meghan McCusker, Menlo Steve, Meredith Rose, Michael Andersen, Milarca , Molly Kernan, Nary Rising, Naomi Jacobs, Necropantz, Nia H, Nozlee, Paracelsus Caspari, quietnight, Rachel Bernatowicz, Rebecca Freeman, Sam Markham, Sara, Secret Fandom Stories, Sekrit, Simini, StHoltzmann, Tara Stuart, Tiana, Tilda, Veritasera, Vita Orlando, and in honor of A.D. Walter Skinner and fandom data analysis and One Direction and BTS and Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny and Yuri Katsuki and Captain James McGraw Flint Hamilton!
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