Oops, She did It Again!

J. K. Rowling’s never-ending attempt to reconstruct what she has built: the infamous ‘Potterverse’. She failed, apparently, miserably.

Source: Getty

As time goes by, people’s demand on pop-culture works constantly changes. They are being more awaken and (forced to be, sometimes) aware of what once considered as sensitive, irrelevant, unnoticed issues like consent, healthy sexual intercourses, LGBTQ+, mental health, feminism, white supremacy, racial discrimination, and so on. Critics increase for old acceptably popular pieces of work — Titanic, for example, was eventually got criticized for the unbearable amount of cringeworthy scenes and male supremacy that showed. To avoid the blow, probably, the infamous Harry Potter universe (effectively: Potterverse) author J. K. Rowling joined the ‘woke’ bandwagon — later when her works were already recognized by public around the world.

“Their relationship was incredibly intense. It was passionate, and it was a love relationship. But as happens in any relationship, gay or straight or whatever label we want to put on it, one never knows, really, what the other person is feeling. You can’t know, you can believe you know. So I’m less interested in the sexual side — though I believe there is a sexual dimension to this relationship — than I am in the sense of the emotions they felt for each other, which ultimately is the most fascinating thing about all human relationships.” (J. K. Rowling)

She was back at it again, ‘waking up’ from her ‘death’ as an author to re-explain her canon and ‘staying relevant’ after years of HP franchised publications. The quote above came from her interview in the Blu-ray DVD documentary for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which context was Albus Dumbledore’s long-gossiped relationship (romantically, if not implicitly sexual) with the villain of the story, Gellert Grindelwald. The thing is, she had never even tried to portray either Dumbledore or Grindelwald as queers themselves; thus, it became a problem when she stated that those two were the ‘representation’ of LGBTQ+ in her story — long after it became popular, getting praises and mocks at the same time. The description was so abrupt Morgan even dared to say that it was a ‘queerbait’ on his article at *The Washington Post. People made memes out of it on Twitter and other social media platforms, from a mere joke about Rowling’s inconsistency of her own universe to explicit hint of normalized homophobia. Rowling had created a two-side sword by her words — which, at a side, successfully awaken people’s consciousness on LGBTQ+ rights and perks of ‘queerbaiting’; and another, which giving birth to a mass claimed that Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s (potential) gay relationship was ‘not acceptable in this economy’ and ‘dangerous, not children-friendly’ as they thought how Harry Potter *had been all along.

This wasn’t the first time of Rowling trying to defend (say — change) her controversial stance and re-establishing her already-popular works to reduce people’s rage and staying relevant to pop culture these days. She was once getting a backlash by casting Johny Depp to play Grindelwald’s role, also being accused as an anti-Semitic and coming up with a ‘quick fact’ on Nagini being an Indonesian (despite the fact that the said nation was still being called ‘Indische’ in 1920s) woman which was cursed to be a snake vice versa, when the characters for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald were being revealed. On top of that: later on Harry Potter, Nagini was turned into a Horcrux by Voldemort, whilst the previous premise in Potterverse stated that Harry Potter was the only human-Horcrux that has ever existed. By that means, Rowling had just destroyed her entire canon of the plot, only to try rebuild it anew.

It must’ve been more acceptable if only Rowling had hinted — if not explicitly stated — those trivias on her characters and plots before it caught people’s recognition (also madness). Problem is, she only said the thing about Nagini being an Asian and Dumbledore’s same-sex relationship after people were upset at her for not giving the Asian characters in her works a proper, well-deserved spotlight; also because people saw Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s scenes in Fantastic Beasts as ‘very gay’, despite her never seemed to plan it out in the first place. It became more like, “Ah, yes, now that you mentioned the gay agenda on Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s relationship — I’d say, that is true. I forgot showing it when I wrote the story. We can, uhhh, turn back and pretend that we’ve knew this all along, no?” Well, if writing had been just as easy, I wouldn’t ever have to apologize for irrelevant things in my own publicized writings. I could’ve just said, “Oh dang, considering your question on A’s feeling towards B while she was married with C; apparently B and C fucked when A was in the kitchen. Come on, don’t be mad, that was just a typo. Let’s start from the very beginning of the work then?” I also found a better explanation on why do people in Harry Potter fandom went mad at Rowling for constantly changing her own story plot, well said by a Twitter user @paragonpostcard at 19 March 2019:

“”Death of the Author” refers to a term coined in a literary essay that suggests that authorial intent is less important than what’s actually presented/conveyed in the text. With JK, she’s making all of the after-the-fact statements despite not being supported by the text. And it makes it seem like retconning or lore expanding in a conscious effort to fish for Woke Points. People’s distaste often stems from the disingenuousness with which she tries to revise her established world because she tries to sell it like this is what she thought all along.”

Source: Twitter

Here’s a claim: I am a fan of Harry Potter and its universe since I was a child, and Rowling’s attempt to fill in the holes that had been in her story since long had disappointed me in a way. It made her seems like a fanfiction writer of her own works. The main issue is her sudden trial to make her works seem ‘woke’ while she could’ve done better: writing a new ‘woke’ piece, for example, instead of ruining her own universe which had been stabilized for years. She could’ve kept expanding Potterverse properly while working on a fresh literate writing, the one that is not anti-Semitic, Asian-friendly, and actually cares about LGBTQ+. She could’ve apologized for the flaws in her previous works, promising something more relevant either in Potterverse or by creating a whole new fiction world, or — if she ever wanted to go extreme — taking back all of her old works and unpublished it. On her choice, actually; instead, she grabbed the thread that has been given to the fandom for years, entangling it, then adding up things she had never planned out before giving it back to the people, saying, “Here, here, I’ve fixed your toy.” Just as Roland Barthes said, more or less: an author dies once their work is being given to the audience. It belongs to them from then. Therefore, the work is eternal as people could interpret and rewriting it according to themselves; and the author, once again, is dead — they are nowhere to rebuild their established piece anymore.