Oh god. Where to begin.
When Harry Potter became a phenomenon, I was a bit too old for the initial hype. I was a sophmore in college. The only reason I came to read it was that I was dumping trash in the trash can and I spied a brand new book before I dumped my trash. It was the first book of the Harry Potter series. I picked it up before I dumped my trash and proceeded to read. I was hooked.
What followed after that was daydreaming about what house I would be in (I now know it is Ravenclaw), and doing midnight book buys with my friends.
J.K Rowling is ruining all of that for us now.
In case you didn't know what happened, J.K is doubling down on her TERF-yness by all kinds of tweets.
To fully understand the problem with this, you have to be a little nuanced. Just a little bit though. You see, all menstruating people are not women. That's the nuance. That is it, right there. That's all you got to do. J.K then doubled down, and used "My black friend said it was okay." Only, with a lesbian.
My husband (and many other people, I am aware he did not coin it) have a saying. "You die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain" In our social media times, you have to die pretty quickly not to become the villain.
This other one isn't a surprise. Stephanie Meyer has always been trash. The only black person in the whole Twilight franchise is an bad guy, who is super ashy (like... he needed some shea butter badly) and didn't have time to get his locs retwisted before being changed. I am not talking about her though. I am talking about the Twilight Fan-fiction groups.
If you listen to our podcast, then you know, the only fan fiction I read is Twilight. Whenever there is a disaster, they band together, writing fiction and raising funds. I tend to struggle with this group of women, because in the entire history of me reading the fan fiction, I have come across a Black Bella, once. And she was biracial. The story was never finished and Bella talked about bbq sauce a lot in the story.
I haven't heard a Black Lives Matter. I haven't heard a rallying call. I haven't even heard support of anything, and quite frankly, I am tired. I am tired of having to bring it up. Being an ally, being a true ally is stepping forward, and none of these women seem to do that. I do remember at some point someone bringing up the fact that no one seems to write POCs in their stories, except for when Zafrina, or the Quileute Tribe (which, they got the severe short end of the stick on this story as well) comes in. And everyone was like "They don't exist in the story." Every single story has characters that aren't in the story, but you still write about their slim milky throats just fine.
Guys I am tired. I AM TIRED and I know Quinzel is too. Can we just have a brief stop on shitty behavior and tired excuses for the rest of 2020? I need a break.
