You’ve come to the right place, doll face. I agree 100%. JKR is only inclusive when fans bring up the fact that the series was actually very non-inclusive.
For example, a fan tweeted asking about any Jewish students at Hogwarts. So she tweets back one single character that was maybe mentioned in passing one time who’s last name happens to be Goldstein…of all names, of course…Dumbledore is gay? Whoop-di-do, Jo. It ain’t representation unless I see actual supportive content. Why make Dumbledore gay when you had several other characters that were CLEARLY BEING QUEERBAITED! Characters that had chemistry with other same sex characters and that showed obvious signs of being involved romantically with another character of the same sex? Why Jo!?
I’ll tell you why. It’s because Jo was not as “progressive” as she wants the young readers of today to believe…Now, I’m going to take you kiddies on a little ride back in time, so I hope you all have your time turners with you. Go ahead and spin those Time turns back to the lovely year of 2003. The year that Order of The Phoenix was published.
Holy. Wolfstar. Batman.
the ship was quite a bit smaller before the release of Ootp, obviously because the two didn’t interact much in PoA until the scene in the shack where they are more focused on capturing Peter than they are on each other, although there are a few things said and done between them that got enough of us on board. We weren’t quite a ship yet…more of a lifeboat…but we were there. Then Order of The Phoenix came out and Sweet Merlin’s Lacy Knickers were Sirius and Remus just FLAUNTING the fact that they were a couple all throughout the book. Those of us already sailing were going NUTS! Message boards and fanfiction archives were blowing up with content. Our tiny little boat transformed into a glorious ship with its sails high and proud! We were the biggest, most popular and most commonly recognized as canon ship in the fandom. Everyone just basically assumed they were a thing now.
Sirius gets killed off.
Okay…
Well, this sparks the “Bring Black Back” fanfiction movement. Thousands of cleverly written stories about how Sirius would escape the veil of death as return and he and Remus and Harry would live happily ever after. I guess you could say we were in Sirius Denial.
But regardless of if we thought JKR really would bring Sirius back somehow, we were also positive she would announce that Remus and Sirius were in fact a couple.
Never happens.
In fact, Remus marries another character that we were hoping would give us some LGBT representation: Nymphadora Tonks. A character he has really never had any interaction with or has ever shown any interest in whatsoever. It was rushed, it was completely out of nowhere and it was just uncomfortable.
Message boards are blowing up again. People are kind of pissed off. Not that Remus couldn’t be bisexual, of course that’s a valid possibility, but again…representation doesn’t count without concrete supportive content.
There was reason to believe, and I’ll have to find some of the old message boards from back then that had supporting evidence behind this theory, that JKR had Remus marry Tonks to purposely sink the Wolfstar ship. The popularity of the ship was giving her bad publicity from anti LGBT people and parents who didn’t want that content in what was supposedly a “children’s series”…she erased the only LGBT representation in the books and claimed that Remus had never before been interested romantically in ANYONE before Tonks.
Sooooo no, we can’t even claim Remus’ bisexuality and that he was with Sirius before Sirius died.
Now…time hop to 2009 when The Half Blood Prince movie was filmed. LGBT was becoming much more widely accepted and it was becoming more and more frowned upon to be against it. JKR is on set one day and they are filming the scene where Dumbledore meets Harry at the train station after Harry speaks to the pretty girl in the coffee shop. Dumbledore had a line he was suppose to say about how he had a girlfriend at Harry’s age or something like that.
“You need to remove that line.” Ms. Jo-I’m-So-Progressive-Rowling says. “Dumbledore is gay.”The internet goes wild.
LGBT REPRESENTATION IN HARRY POTTER!
ITS A MIRACLE!
ALBUS DUMBLEDORE, ONE OF THE GREATEST LITERARY CHARACTERS OF OUR TIME, IS HOMOSEXUAL!
She even gives us the pleasure of telling us his old fling’s name.Okay Jo…but WHERE!?
I repeat…
REPRESENTATION DOESN’T COUNT WITHOUT SOLID SUPPORTIVE CONTENT!
YOU HAD CHARACTERS WITH SOLID SUPPORTIVE CONTENT!
BUT YOU SAID NO!
YOU KILLED ONE AND MADE THE OTHER ONE SUPER FUCKING STRAIGHT!
“I never mentioned Dumbledore being gay because it wasn’t important to Harry’s journey.”
Okay. That’s perfectly fine. No one was asking for a flaming stereotypical Token Gay Character. We were just asking for something we, as LGBT readers, could relate to. You didn’t need to have Sirius or Remus ANNOUNCE they were gay or in a relationship because you’re right, that’s not important to the storyline and a person’s sexuality shouldn’t be a defining characteristic.
But if YOU, Jo, wanted to announce that ANY CHARACTER WAS GAY after the series was completed, you could have easily picked Wolfstar or Deamus instead of randomly telling us that Dumbledore totally liked men.So here we are. Back in our current year of 2017 and we have a new series in the fandom. Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.
And oh Glory Be To Thee, Queen Rowling is going to grace us with Dumbledore and Grindlewald at long last. Isn’t she sooooo progressive? Isn’t she such a great ally? It only took her 20 years, 8 books (including Cursed Child), 9 movies (including Fantastic Beasts) and 3 major queerbaited couples (wolfstar, Deamus and Scorbus) to finally give us a solid representation.*drops mic*
I love HP but also, this.
Also Cursed Child was soooooo queerbating don’t even get me started
@shlip I just made a whole separate post about that XD
hey! feel super shit nd got no one to listen to me rant so.. hi! basically i can’t seem to get ppl to understand that i REALLY like harry potter. But that there are faults to it (erasure nd shite representation) I also cannot stand jkr??? like everyone praises her for like substandard things? saying ‘dumbledore is gay’ in one interview and ppl flip their shit and is like ‘she’s a great ally’ nd i’m like no she’s one of those Straight Allies™. ahh sorry
Publié
Fuck JKR 