I don’t recall implying it was difficult for me to stop: my comment wasn’t directed at myself. I read the books when I was in school back in 2007 - iirc there wasn’t a controversy surrounding the author back then, or if there was it was all over my head. Highschool me wasn’t really paying attention to current events.
I’ve seen some of the movies since then, but again, if any bigotry was publicly known back then, it was over my head.
At some point, her PR disaster made it into my field of view, and I haven’t engaged with the franchise since. That said, there are die-hard fans of HP, so I make the same pitch to them as I did here: If want to consume the material, do so via piracy to protect against supporting the author.
HP to me was only ever some light fantasy - the value was more in the accessibility than the quality. As you mentioned, there are probably hundreds of similar stories out there… nothing about HP was better than the competition except for the marketing. Super easy to ‘quit’ and not look back.
I don’t understand the super-fans, but I could say the same about anything I don’t have a personal interest in. People lose their shit over sports: I don’t get it. But, my personal disinterest doesn’t mean it’d be easy for everyone to just shrug off if the NFL or something became associated with white supremacy or some shit. If that happened, I’d make a similar pitch about pirating game footage / not buying merch, etc.
Completely abstaining would 100% be better, but people won’t.
I don’t recall implying it was difficult for me to stop: my comment wasn’t directed at myself. I read the books when I was in school back in 2007 - iirc there wasn’t a controversy surrounding the author back then, or if there was it was all over my head. Highschool me wasn’t really paying attention to current events.
I’ve seen some of the movies since then, but again, if any bigotry was publicly known back then, it was over my head.
At some point, her PR disaster made it into my field of view, and I haven’t engaged with the franchise since. That said, there are die-hard fans of HP, so I make the same pitch to them as I did here: If want to consume the material, do so via piracy to protect against supporting the author.
HP to me was only ever some light fantasy - the value was more in the accessibility than the quality. As you mentioned, there are probably hundreds of similar stories out there… nothing about HP was better than the competition except for the marketing. Super easy to ‘quit’ and not look back.
I don’t understand the super-fans, but I could say the same about anything I don’t have a personal interest in. People lose their shit over sports: I don’t get it. But, my personal disinterest doesn’t mean it’d be easy for everyone to just shrug off if the NFL or something became associated with white supremacy or some shit. If that happened, I’d make a similar pitch about pirating game footage / not buying merch, etc.
Completely abstaining would 100% be better, but people won’t.