Different Timezones…

911onabc: Setting the record straight – @/oliverstarkk IS British, has always been British, and will always be British. (x)

RATE MY BRITISH ACCENT (x)

Okay, real question here:

There are people who actually worshipped JKR and there are people who gushed about her because she wrote Harry Potter and they loved Harry Potter who literally knew nothing about her that wasn't in the author bio on the dust jacket. I think fandom oriented people tend to forget how big a population the latter was! But Harry Potter was so huge at its peak that it had a lot of casual fans who deeply, deeply loved the series, maybe even knew the trivia of the actual books inside and out, but never engaged with the fandom side of things or dove deep into meta information. There were normies attending midnight release parties, the series was that big.

I'm saying this because I sometimes see this air of doubt online that people who buy HP house merch can really not know about JKR's obnoxious public bigotry. But lots of people love Star Wars and don't know anything about George Lucas unrelated to Star Wars. I'm not blaming anyone at all, I think it's just easy for people who have spent most of their lives in fandom culture to forget that when something gets big enough there are normies participating in events and activities typically reserved for hardcore fans. Again I'm putting a caveat for the UK because she's fairly active in politics over there, but a lot of people don't follow politics of countries they don't live in.

Tbf, I do know people who still buy it who know and "feel conflicted about it" and I think with some of those people (many of whom are genuinely compassionate people in other arenas of their lives) it's just that it feels less immediate, maybe because they don't personally have any trans friends holding their feet to the fire, idk. I'm continually amazed that my sister, for instance, still buys this stuff. I also think it's the social pressure coming from the kinds of in-person nerd groups (and especially ones that are primarily or entirely straight cis people) she's in where being super into HP is a big part of that.

But there are a ton of people who genuinely don't know, and even those who do know (as it's now getting covered by mainstream news outlets pretty regularly) don't know what's being said.... but they have heard other stories about people on Twitter "cancelling" celebrities for petty nonsense reasons, and so they often assume that's what must be the case here, too. I've told people like this what she's actually said and watched their faces drop in real time.

So among all this is perhaps a lesson, perhaps the one you should have learned as a child from The Boy Who Cried Wolf but that it seems fandom continues to not get.... that "cancelling" people for petty bullshit, like wild-ass interpretations that no one who isn't ass-deep in your Discord personality cult's headcanons would read a particular tweet as saying, or jokes people made 20 years ago that they've since apologized for profusely, and so on, makes it much harder to get your cancelling taken seriously when it's over something genuinely heinous and actually necessary. Offline people hear "Twitter hates this person for being transphobic" and they think that means that someone wore a pussy hat to a protest or something equally inane. I can't tell you how many times I've seen actual trans people cancelled for transphobia by the Twitter crowd (like ContraPoints, more than once because she made a video about trans rights that attempted to meet people who aren't totally sold on it yet where they are, rather than preaching to the choir). Then maybe we wouldn't need a long list of receipts of JKR's awful tweets and the right-wing bigots she's friends with to explain to people that it's serious this time around.

#i think especially zoomers forget also that she had a pretty sterling progressive reputation for a long time#like we dunk on the dumbledore gay reveal now but in 2007 even doing that post-publication in an interview#one that involved a bunch of fans including little kids asking her questions about the characters btw#was a pretty huge fucking deal for children's literature @cardassiangoodreads

I think younger people forget, or don't know, that Harry Potter was liberal-coded in the 90s and early 2000s, less because of the entry-level "accept minorities" messaging of the books than because conservatives fucking hated it. Conservative Christians are still around (they're pretty prominent in the attempts to ban abortion) but in the last ten or fifteen years a lot of the overt Christianity has been dropped. In the 90s and 2000s conservative Christians were running the table on the right. And they hated Harry Potter. They hated J.K. Rowling, and she was on the receiving end of more than a little really nasty misogyny. The Dumbledore gay reveal was always in the context of her already being a target to the exact people it would infuriate, and I've been frustrated for years by people forgetting about that when they dunk on (we can still dunk on it though 'cause it's funny).

The reason this matters is a lot of liberals internalized "we like and defend J.K. Rowling, the people who think she's evil are insane" for like a solid decade, and then suddenly an entirely different set of people was calling her evil for an entirely different reason, and it gave offline normie liberals whiplash. If you don't pay a lot of attention and all you hear is people think JKR is the devil, it's easy to assume it's just as unearned as the last time.

And honestly I think the main reason this even matters all that much is she's actively funding transphobia. A lot of authors of famous works were horrible bigots. We still read their books, we still talk about their books, we still buy their books. The difference is that JKR is alive to profit from her work and use those profits for harmful ends. That's where the focus needs to be.

I like to think that after leaving Buck's apartment in 7x05, Eddie took a moment in the hallway to pull out his phone, ignore all of Marisol's messages, and open his conversation with Tommy so that he could send -

When Buck calls, do yourself a favor: pick up.

Please lol Buck is such a little shit trying to get a rise out of his boyfriend

Look at his face

These are the faces of a shit stirrer

When people say acephobia doesn’t happen in the queer community😒

911onabc: Setting the record straight – @/oliverstarkk IS British, has always been British, and will always be British. #911onABC

"fandom rules should be about how you treat other people in the fandom, not how you treat the characters of the fandom"

exactly!!!!

kennethchoi_: Question: Do you know what the leading cause of death is after heart disease and falling off water slides…?You’re right, it’s dehydration!!! So, stay hydrated out there. And for the love of God stay off all water slides

Don’t mind me, I’ll just be blasting this at the polling station when I go to vote!

bring back tumblr ask culture let me. bother you with questions and statements

reblog to let people know it's ok to bother you with questions and statements

kenny is like yeah i love bucktommy because it seems like tommy makes buck happy and he’s finally found love- well i think he’s finally found love. also did you know i love lou ferrigno jr and we’ve been friends for years, he’s so talented and funny and such a good actor i can’t wait to work with him again