Eugh, another goddamn overthought JK Rowling post…

It occurs to me that I spend a lot, and possibly an unreasonable amount, of time mocking Harry Potter across various platforms.

But, at the same time, I make comparatively little reference to JK Rowling’s public descent into single-issue TERFdom — including endorsing literal fascists and, since this was first drafted, a tiny bit of socially acceptable Holocaust denial.

Remember how she left the endorsement of Matt Walsh because she was only praising his ‘What is a Woman?’ thing, but deleted every nice thing she said about Stephen King? No one thinks that’s… A Bit Weird?

There’s a few reasons this enduring clusterfuck is lower on my priority list than “good god, wizard-boy book bad”.

First, I think everyone I know and respect are already aware of Rowling’s descent to madness. They do not need reminded of it, nor their consciousness raised to it. For those with much more skin in the game, they probably don’t want a constant reminder that a prominent public figure would cheer on their genocide, backed by a coordinated media campaign to manufacture consent for it.

I also don’t think there’s much chance of convincing extant Rowling fans that what she does is bad. It’s been a few years now, so the thousands of people clogging up King’s Cross on September 1st have already indicated that this is not an issue for them. They’ve either decided that this obsessive hatred of trans and queer people is not a deal breaker, or worse, it’s something they would actively endorse.

You also have to bear in mind the usual retort: “what has she said that’s transphobic?”

Noting that I grabbed this screenshot after her long and weirdly specific denial that the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was destroyed by the Nazis. It’s also under an article that did not, at any point, mention trans anything.

It’s a rookie error to assume this is an honest question and a throw-down for you to provide evidence: It’s a statement to say that they don’t believe it’s a valid accusation. They will already be aware of what you’re going to say, and will have the rationale for why it “doesn’t count” pre-loaded and ready to go. Their model of reality includes Rowling’s opinions on trans people, and it precludes the idea that those are, in any sense, bad. There’s little arguing with this. You’re more likely to get traction with creationists and their highly movable definition of “transitional form”.

But another reason is that I don’t see her current obsession and main creative output as that surprising, nor is it remarkable.

Let’s compare with the usual author that crops up in these situations: the late Terry Pratchett, and a bit of a counterfactual thought experiment.

In 2017, long-time assistant and partner Rob Wilkins hired a steamroller to destroy Sir Terry’s hard drive, to permanently eradicate his unfinished manuscripts in accordance with his will. It’s hard to see all hope of ever seeing Raising Taxes get crushed, but it was The Right Thing To Do.

But, let’s think of an alternate reality for a moment. A proven revelation rocks the world: Pratchett had his hard drive destroyed to cover up the existence of countless essays on how Jews secretly rule the world, how LGBT+ people should be sent to concentration camps, and his opinions on the inferiority of lesser races. Perhaps even worse was on there.

In such an eventuality, I would — hopefully obviously — be beyond devastated. It would be a struggle, but the Discworld collection would be going on a bonfire for essential closure. But that hurt would be incomprehensible not just because someone I admire transpired to be a Total Wrongun, but because of the complete betrayal.

Pratchett’s novels are full of “militant decency”, respect for all life, and doing the right thing despite the difficulties. The text and subtext alike skewer homophobia, class oppression and racism (in deeper, more complex ways than “the green people hate the blue people…”) with unmatched fervour. There’s a reason his quotes appear so frequently in social justice circles.

The idea that the man himself thought otherwise…?

Such a thing would be so monumentally in opposition to every word he preached, in fiction and non-fiction alike. That is why it’s unthinkable, and — with as much philosophical certainty as I can muster — never going to happen.

By contrast, Harry Potter is flooded with so many red flags that the headlines should never have been “beloved children’s author turns out to hate trans people” and more like “we’re shocked it took until 2019 for her to come out and make it obvious”.

This is a series with shocking levels of casual racism, a visceral hatred of fat people, apologia for slavery and, of course, arbitrary morals where goodness is determined by the colour of your scarf and not the content of your actions. And none of this develops or changes through the series. At the start, Beloved old Hagrid magically disfigures a child for the crime of being mildly annoying (and fat) and faces no meaningful consequences. While the last thought to run through the hero’s mind before the close of the text is whether his magically indentured slave, from a lower race, should bring him a sandwich.

If anyone remembers the reported story of Rowling being bullied off a Harry Potter forum, we’re you surprised? Her books taught the fans how to do it: that it’s okay to attack and disfigure the people you don’t like, and even send them off to be assaulted by centaurs, provided you think you’re the main character. Or just laugh at them if they happen to display any sincerity towards disrupting the status quo. Her protagonists bully their way through life, and get away with it because they’re on the Right Team. And they’re not fat, of course; otherwise, how could you tell they were the Good Guys from the Right Team?

Rowling’s idea of an anti-authoritarian novel series has the main character become a cop, and the oppressive structures present at the start are still mostly maintained at the end — except, now, it’s under the new management of the Good Guys from the Right Team, so that’s fine and dandy.

All is right.

(at this point, just to throw it out there, Leigh Bardugo’s idea of an anti-authoritarian novel has six Chaos Bisexuals fuck up a bunch of rich people by any means necessary. Even King of Scars, which you’d expect to be full of Disney-like “Ah, but good kings are fine…” has our dashing lead take active steps to burn his own monarchy to the ground. 10 out of 10. No notes.)

Harry Potter, the character, would be the villain in a more competently written series. Sam Vimes would arrest him and figure out what to charge him with later, Kaz Brekker would rip his eye out and feel happy that there’s one less bastard in the world ruining the fun for everyone. Amos Burton would have a “quiet word” over a cup of coffee and within threateningly close proximity to an airlock.

Others have said this sort of thing before. They’ve said it more words, with more citations going down to the sentence level. They’ve said it for years, too. All I’m adding is that when Rowling came out as Queen of The Dickheads, no one should have been even remotely surprised. It’s all there on the page, out in the open for the best part of three decades.

That this all went uncriticised for so long, and that it remains popular despite the critiques now getting more attention, is (to me) far more interesting than her taking the next, utterly unsurprising and (to her) completely logical step and jumping on the transphobic bandwagon. It’s just another unremarkable trope that absolutely fits the person behind this literary dreck.

Have I mentioned I really dislike Harry Potter as a series and have done for 20+ years? Just trying to make it clear…

Can Opening Narration Die Already…

Written with the caveat that I obviously know nothing about storytelling, and am a complete hack, and if I ever drunkenly forward you anything I’ve written, please for the love of god don’t read it.

I’ve just started watching Rebel Moon. And by “just started”, I mean I’m something like 90 seconds into it. It has reminded me that I absolutely hate opening narration in movies. Hate it. Because I think it’s a trope that has proven, time and time again, that movie producers think they’re super-smart galaxy-brained artistes, and that their audience is stupid.

Sure, people tend to have the metacognitive capacity of a yeast infection, but they’re more than capable of figuring out that the tall guy, all in black, wearing a mask, and accompanied by ominous music, who has just commanded a bunch of masked troopers to murder a bunch of scared, unmasked, guys on the smaller spaceship that they’ve mercilessly chased down, is going to be the villain. That requires zero dialogue or on-screen text to explain. It doesn’t need to be that overt, but most audiences would rather be confused (but intrigued) by something for a few minutes than bored for a few seconds while someone reads out the plot or it’s flashed up on screen for us — an awkward moment that is always either too short to take it in, or so long we have to go over it twice.

Opening narration, therefore, can be avoided with some easy — even trivial — filmmaking approaches.

Unless you’ve miraculously avoided it in the last several decades, you probably recognised the above reference as Star Wars — it’s almost a cliché how much it’s the go-to example for overtly establishing who is Good and who is Bad with little dialogue. This is a little ironic because, often, a cliché defence of opening narration will be something like Star Wars. After all, Star Wars has its famous opening crawl: it flies by, in big yellow text, and explains the plot to you. You can’t miss it. The film that I said showcases why you don’t need opening on-screen narration (that I hate so much) happens to be one of the most memorable and famous examples!

But, if you ever pay attention to the text of those crawls, they’re surprisingly uninformative. As prose, they’re often very, very hokey. Possibly even intentionally so. I would doubt that most people can remember much of the text from any of the movies — that might be something for hardcore fans of the “we need to add ‘braces’ to Wookieepedia because an extra was seen wearing them for five frames” variety, but definitely not normal people. What do you remember, though, is the massive “STAR WARS” logo fading away, the horns of John Williams’ score, the crawling text fading into the distance… this is an audio-visual experience, it is setting a tone, a scene. You could stick Lorem Ipsum up there and lose only a few percent of the experience. And, post-1977, this has become literally iconic, so there’s that.

If you don’t get my point, simply imagine this as white text on black. Fading in paragraph by paragraph. Without the music. Or go watch 1984’s Dune with it’s “oh, I forgot to tell you” line.

Because the point of any opening narration — your whole opening scene, in fact — is not to explain the plot, but to explain to the audience why they should care about the plot. It’s almost screenwriting (and general writing) 101 to say that, but surprisingly few films manage to pull it off. Honestly, the number of movies with 9-figure budgets that fail this simple requirement makes you think Hollywood must be covering up a lot of money laundering…

In Brandon Sanderson’s lectures on writing, he states quite clearly — and early on in his series — that you should open a story with a “promise”. He essentially means that you set the tone and expectations as quickly as possible, and you deliver on it. He was talking about novels, but it applies to film, where you’re even more pushed for time but can also access the audio-visual medium, equally well. Obviously, Star Wars does this very well: everything about that opening crawl promises you a bombastic adventure, deliberately modelled on old Flash Gordon serials, and it delivers. The text on its own doesn’t matter. No one cares. But the entire experience does make you sit up and take note about what is coming next.

Anyway, the second thing that sparked off this was that I also recently watched Damsel, the Millie Bobbie Brown vehicle on Netflix and… it’s surprisingly good. Remembering that my taste in tv and movies is basically toilet water, it turns out to be trash fantasy that is (unexpectedly) competently executed. It opens with a black screen and the lead character saying something to the effect of:

There are many stories where a princess is rescued. This is not one of them.

Now, it doesn’t matter what the exact words are (go look up a script if you care), the point is this: it’s there to set the tone of the movie. Normally, with this sort of garbage, you’d expect it to go on at length while she explains who she is and the camera will pan over some wordless activity and, yes, you’ll be fully caught up but… you’ll also be bored, have zero salience for any of it, and will probably just forget the details later anyway. A key thing in filmmaking is cluing your audience into what they need to stash in their long-term memory to pull out later (what is a set-up) and, generally, voice over narration at the start just sucks at that.

Whoo hoo! ✊ Trash ✊ trash ✊ trash!

But Damsel doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t go on longer than the one line. It doesn’t have her say “My name is Elodie and I live in this castle and this is the name of the world I live in“. It restrains itself to stating the theme, and then stops because the rest doesn’t matter. It tells us that this is going to be some fantasy movie, and probably involving a princess, and likely to be a bit dark and moody in places (given that it’s spoken over a black screen) and the rest of the film will probably just involve Millie Bobby Brown kicking ass and getting hurt a lot. Sorry for the spoilers, that’s basically the plot and premise: she racks up injuries faster than Joey King in The Princess.

Anyway…

I got 90 seconds into Rebel Moon, got annoyed by the narration trying to explain the plot, at least the background of the plot, without telling me why I should care about it… and sparked a thought I wanted to write down here. Now, I’ve reached the part where I’d talk about how bad the Rebel Moon opening narration is, but… in all honestly I’ve actually forgotten what it was. I think the words “assassins blade” were used. I forget why. I was mostly focused on whether it was Anthony Hopkins or someone trying to be Anthony Hopkins, the actual content was quite unenlightening.

That said, if the reviews the vibes I get online are correct, I feel that — in Brandon Sanderson’s terms — it has certainly promised something and it will almost certainly live up to it.

I look forward to the rest of it effortlessly ducking below my already-low expectations. As God intended.