When you say, "to hell with JK, but..." before announcing that you continue to contribute to her wealth, you are hurting more than helping.
I saw someone say "money corrupts" about her, and maybe, but that's not what's going on here. Her unexamined biases shine through in the Harry Potter series. Maybe she'd otherwise have had to examine the ways in which she propagated harm, but her success made her feel vindicated. Regardless, the crappy worldview is front and center in the Harry Potter books.
For contrast, look at The Hunger Games, which took the same sort of artificial tribalism that the Hogwarts houses uses, and points out how it's a construct used by the ruling class to dissipate our collective power. Rowling (I think to the surprise of thoughtful fans) ends the series continuing to embrace the Hogwarts houses.
It (defending JK Rowling's work while condemning her) reminds me of people claiming that Elon Musk wasn't always like this and/or that they couldn't have known prior to, like, the Thai cave rescue tweets. (And plenty of people who bought their Teslas after that, who still wanted to say they didn't know until, like, 2024). Seems like a digression, but it feels like it comes from the same impulse. The "I like Harry Potter" and the "I like Space X" impulses both come from a desire to accept what capitalism deemed okay to feed us and is close enough to aspirational to scratch that itch. We don't like seeing our desire for a better world thwarted at every turn, and so we settle for profit-driven- I'm getting all worked up. I love space-related science, and think it absolutely sucks that Space X is sucking up the enthusiasm for space science rather than space science for the public good...
It's ok that people wanted to like these things and ignored the red flags because they wanted to like the things. But when people say "we couldn't have known" it feels like gaslighting the people who were saying "this is bad" 20 years ago.
