Thank you! It’s been super disheartening to see people get excited about Harry Potter all over again, just as it was to see friends buy the video game a few years back. Many people who want to ostensibly call themselves allies are more than happy to engage in Nostalgia over Solidarity.

I read the Harry Potter books as a child. I enjoyed them a normal amount. I think I dressed up as HP for Halloween one year. But then I grew older and I “graduated” to other fantasy, as I would generally expect someone to do.

Now when I think about Harry Potter, I always think of Ursula K Le Guin’s comments:

Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style

UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.

You would answer atrocity with atrocity and call it progress. Tell me, the families of those you “re-educate,” do you expect them to allow you to do this without a fight? And others of conscience who object, will you imprison them too? How many would you murder to reach your ideological purity? When you’re done, will you look in the mirror and recognize that you, too, are impure?

Tired, stressed, but ultimately content. Living in America is frightening currently but it’s the weekend and my partner is on my lap. Life contains multitudes.