I've seen a shit tonne of death of the author takes on Jk Rowling and Potter and they all seem boring af, and imo death of the author just means there's a cut off point where the information reaching the reader is all you've got, the author can't coach you on it.

This probably relates to being taught Barthes in a class on information and coding theory and the necessity to apply interpretation to any signal, to actively read and make opinionated decisions about how you demodulate it, whether that results in unintended inclusions or not.

I'm pretty sure that's not quite what Barthes meant, but I still think it's pretty right. When you're reading the author is dead, it's you and the text (which may or may not as a text expand to include other known information about the state of the author).

I don't know why people would want to apply death of the author to Potter in terms of forgetting she's a transphobe. It seems a bit grim. Should we forget she drew on very obviously antisemitic, and happy slave narratives, should we forget that even if it wasn't conscious that..

..all those things are rooted in the culture she (and many of us) will have grown up in, with the significances that are attached? Do we forget that that those sorts of metaphors are part of the living language of the fiction we are parsing?

It strikes me as racist and complicit

I think people can enjoy Harry Potter with all its faults. I learned that reading Philip K Dick as a kid. I loved his stories about fucked up future worlds and even as a kid there was a tangible misogyny to nearly everything he wrote. Every female character a backstabbing bitch.

You don't just choose not to read what's right there in front of you. What even is that? Training yourself not to see it? You acknowledge it and move on.