I want to talk about this for a second because a connection popped into my mind and I want to articulate it before I forget about it

There's this SNL short with Emma Stone called "The Actress" that I often I think about

https://twitter.com/Nymphomachy/status/1311763310321250309

It might nest better in this tweet

Obv, the joke of the video is that plots to porn movies are generally remarkably thin, and because the gay male porn industry doesn't really have crossover with its cishet analogue, women get played by normal actresses

Like, het porn can generally just fill all its roles with porn actors but gay porn usually doesn't tap into that rolodex

Hence, the legendary "right in front of my salad?!" actress

It's shit work, but you're, y'know, an ARTIST, you want to make your art any way you can

The joke of the short is that Emma Stone comes in there and she's got an entirely different, unique artistic agenda in contrast w/ everyone else working on this project

And as a result, she's the only person putting in the work of thinking through the implications of the text

She's trying (hopelessly) to be, in her performance of this shamelessly stock cuckolded woman character, transformative and responsive to the text, she's trying to add verisimilitude and authenticity to something that functionally cannot exist in harmony with those ambitions

Of course, the humor in the video comes from the fact that she achieves her goal, she creates a moment of genuine authenticity in this hackneyed project, only for it to be totally ineffectual, the director immediately cuts it out

But like... this is kind of what fandom is

HARRY POTTER was a book series that was marketed to hell and back and practically shoved down our throats by schools and libraries and so it became a very universal experience of art, one where you could talk about it and a very large number of people would hear what you said

and here's the thing about fandom

if you've ever written a fanfic in a very obscure or mostly inactive fandom, you've seen for yourself how agonizing it is

You put a lot of heart and soul into something, you put it out there, and there's nobody to read it

It's disillusioning

So even if you don't like something very much, if something is such a shared cultural experience that there's frequent activity in it, you will almost always be driven to create content in that fandom because that's where the attention is, there's the audience waiting for you

This is literally WHY so many people write fanfiction instead of original fiction

Yeah, in certain respects it might be easier but have you ever tried getting somebody to _read_ your original fiction? Good fucking luck even getting your goddamn wife to read it. It's a waste.

Art demands an audience, and fandom is an audience. Universality creates fandom. Therefore, a sufficiently universalized fandom propagates its own art.

HARRY POTTER is very bad. Like gay porn plot bad. Even its edited installments were, effectively, kids' TV screenplays converted to prose, which managed to be sufficiently quintessentially British that Americans couldn't tell the difference between that and intelligent literature

And I think the endearing thing about HARRY POTTER fanfiction, *good* HP fanfiction, was its running undercurrent of discontent about literally every area of the text Rowling cut corners

There's a lot of room for accusations, for interrogations, for deconstructions

I really do think that HP fandom needs to take one for the team and just strike the whole set, shut it all down, find a new series, I don't really recommend anyone read even fanfiction again because the presence of this franchise in the cultural consciousness is an embarrassment

But that said

I do regard this short one-shot fic, WE WERE THE POTTERS, as an apogee of transformative art at least from this fandom

It is deconstructive in a very incisive and confrontational sense https://archiveofourown.org/works/287028 

The narrative of this story seems to be one of the only ones with a sophisticated awareness of how ugly Jo Rowling is as a person, and how much of that ugliness just leaches, completely unfiltered, into the body of the work, into her characters, narration and world-building

Ginny is absolutely monstrous in this story, but the way she's written, she feels like a completely authentic and believable destination of the character Rowling created, because the hideous, unjust politics implied by this story are Rowling's own politics, her world-building

I don't think that the author of this fic, "celestineangel", necessarily consciously understood how much of an excoriation of the author's own politics this was when they wrote it

It's one of those things that's only progressively come into focus in the years since Book Seven

The power of this fic lies in its ability to depict the ugly side of the characters Rowling's narrative voice extols as wholesome, warm and virtuous, the characters that are, frankly, coded as Good and Noble Christians

To show how readily they would make loved ones into pariahs

After all, the Weasley family's alienation of their disabled cousin was textual from the very first book

But Rowling, of course, is not particularly concerned with the voice of the kind of people her beloved Weasleys would alienate, so it's left as a sinister implication

This is an old fanfic, I've returned to it frequently over the years

But with the hindsight of Rowling's aggression towards trans people I can't help but notice all the chilling ways this entirely believable narrative parallels the experience of an actual transgender child

The perspective of Harry as an outsider to a large family, who's just trying to be supportive of his daughter

The feeling of his entire life unraveling beneath his feet as the people he's always loved and depended on, for the first time in his life, become utterly cold to him

For the first time in his life, he fully understands the extent to which the kindness of his found family has limits, the haste to which his daughter has become completely dead to them, the eagerness with which they urge him to completely abandon her

It is painfully authentic

The way the story ends with Harry's family shattered over the stupidest, most senseless fucking thing

His wife having completely abandoned her daughter, his best friend having ghosted him over the family honor, his daughter traumatized and suicidal from her abuse and oppression

Some people might be inclined to call this a darkfic, and in 2011 you might have been able to sell that argument, that this story exaggerated the injustice of the setting to an extreme

But I don't think you can say that anymore

This IS Jo Rowling, this is her worldview manifest

Rowling is someone whose supposed compassion has always been conditional, always been visibly unjustly denied to certain people

An innocent child ostracized by everyone she loves for being too different, for being inconvenient, a stain on normality and their venerable reputation

That is the ESSENCE of Rowling. That's the inevitable conclusion of her articulated values.

And the thing is, these values can be felt on every fucking page of her oeuvre. The people in her fandom have always detected it, and largely, they've never, ever, liked it.

There were a confluence of factors that created the HP fandom as we see it today

Part of it was that the franchise's rise was contemporaneous with the advent of the internet; part of it was Rowling's seldom precedented, laissez-faire attitude towards fan works (cf. Anne Rice)

But honestly?

This may be one of the few times I ever give the POTTER fandom credit for anything, but I don't think this community could have gotten as big as it did if there wasn't so much about Rowling and her books to find fault with, so many implications to think through

Every fanfic author who ever made anything worth looking at in POTTER fandom, inevitably, saw something they really, really didn't like in the books. Sometimes they took an aside to articulate their feelings outright.

That's not uncommon in any fandom but it's UBIQUITOUS here

These books are fun to drag. It's rare for something or someone to be so awful that you can never run out of criticisms to make of them. People have always relished poking holes in them.

So, I don't actually believe most of the HARRY POTTER fandom are fans of HARRY POTTER

That's why I find it such a pathetic sight when transphobic devoteés of this series pop into my mentions to tell me that, actually, the HARRY POTTER books are very smart and well-written

It's neither of those things

It's a powerful meme, an insulting, overgrown writing prompt

Even the people who've devoted most of their time to this series will tell you, and *have* told you, how bad it is

Yes, it does have its share of diehards who have the brains of slightly intellectually gifted skinks, but they're just scenery, they're not contributing anything

If you think about HARRY POTTER in terms of the proverbial Emma Stone character showing up on set and giving it everything she's got, you're never going to see the tacky, half-assed gay porn scenario happening all around her

Ppl have been helping you make sense of the senseless