Separating Art from Artist — Thoughts on J.K. Rowling

From a long-term Harry Potter fan who is disappointed, but not surprised.

About a million other people have already written about this topic, and you’re probably sick of reading about it, so let me get to the chase:

You cannot separate J.K. Rowling from Harry Potter.

It is not possible.

Photo by Darshan Patel on Unsplash

(On the slight chance you have no idea what I’m talking about but are still reading this, here’s the TLDR: J.K. Rowling has long been suspected of being what’s known as a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) but was fairly quiet about it until recently, when she began tweeting about the subject, culminating in the publishing of a lengthy post on her website full of both blatant and coded transphobic rhetoric.)

To say that Harry Potter has been a positive guiding force in my life would be a gross understatement.

I, like many children, was swept off my feet by the boy wizard and his companions. My love for HP went a little further than a casual enjoyment, though: at 14, I started to go to Harry Potter conventions, which were more often than not a highlight of my year. I started going to Wizard Rock (yes, that is music about Harry Potter) concerts, traveling out of state 4 times a year for a house show series, and found a community of some of the kindest and most welcoming people I have ever known. My sophomore year of high school, I even submitted a piece of Harry Potter and Great Gatsby crossover fanfiction as my final project in English class.

In the past year or two, I have drifted from the boy who lived, but I write the above to say that Harry Potter holds an incredibly special place in my heart.

So when Rowling decided to publicly attack the transgender community under the guise of advocating for women and sexual assault survivors, I was incredibly disappointed. Angry. Grieving.

I was not surprised.

I was not surprised because I know that J.K. Rowling can be incredibly ignorant, and I know that because her ignorance manifests in Harry Potter itself.

I am far from the only one saying this.

Activists in the Harry Potter community have been loudly asserting their issues with the series from the beginning. In the right spaces, these evaluations have been listened to and processed; in others, they’ve been brushed off or silenced entirely.

If you are a Harry Potter fan and are surprised by the idea that Rowling could be problematic, and I know y’all are out there, you haven’t been paying attention.

I don’t blame you for that.

If some very well-spoken panelists hadn’t presented evidence of harmful aspects of Harry Potter to me at a convention, I wouldn’t have known either.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:

• Lack of major/well-written characters of color
• Anti-semitic caricature of goblin bankers
• Cho Chang’s name (which many consider offensive), stereotypical placement in Ravenclaw (the smart house) while being the only East-Asian character in the books, and she functions almost exclusively as a love interest
• Ableism all-around
• Nagini, an evil snake who gets chopped in half, is actually an Asian woman according to Fantastic Beasts, making her the second of two named East Asian characters in the franchise
• “Magic in North America,” a history of magic in North America published on Pottermore that grossly misappropriates and misconstrues Native American cultures
• Anthony Goldstein, retconned token Jewish character, also stereotypically named
• General stereotypical naming of non-Anglo-Saxon characters
• Remus Lupin’s werewolf status as an AIDS metaphor while depicting his condition as making him monstrous, and the man who bit him goes around biting people for kicks
• Declaring that Dumbledore is gay with exactly 0 in-canon references, and no other LGBTQ+ representation

In response to Rowling’s new declaration, Harry Potter fans who consider themselves allies to the transgender community have been faced with the problem of how to continue loving the thing that they do while holding to their morals, and some have advocated for the separation of the art from the artist, which positions Rowling as bad(problematic) but Harry Potter as good(unproblematic).

I list all of the examples of problematic aspects of Harry Potter to show that that is simply not true.

What I am not trying to do here is say that you need to stop liking Harry Potter because it is problematic, but consider that this is a much more complicated and nuanced problem than Rowling=bad and Potter=good.

Photo by Christian Wagner on Unsplash

Any piece of art is reflective of its creator, and the same is true of J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. This is how art works: something as minute as word choice in a book or color choice in a painting is influenced by the creator’s past experiences and beliefs. The same goes for more significant elements like politics, ideology, and bias.

Thus, you can’t separate the art from the artist, because doing so denies any conscious or unconscious influence on the part of the artist, which in any context where the artist isn’t morally questionable seems almost ludicrous.

I mean honestly, you never see this concept discussed unless people are trying to distance themselves from an ideology that they think is unethical or at least makes them look unethical. When there is no question of morality, no one tries to argue that a creator doesn’t influence their creation because the argument doesn’t make sense, but it can be enough to sate detractors when it suddenly becomes unfashionable to like a particular creator.

So then the question becomes, do you actually want to act as if art can be disconnected from anything to do with the artist, positive or negative, or do you really just want to feel ethically upstanding while going on to engage with something the same way you always have?

Photo by Rae Tian on Unsplash

I’m not here to tell you that you should stop liking Harry Potter. I’m not here to tell you how to feel about Rowling. I am not here to tell you that flawed content does not have any worth. And I am certainly not here to tell you how to love something like Harry Potter while being socially conscious, because frankly, I don’t know how to.

But pretending that the ideals of the creator can be removed from their creation isn’t doing anything productive: it’s making yourself feel better about liking something that, like all human creations, has the potential for flaws while ignoring that fact simultaneously.

This problem of learning to contend with the flawed nature of humanity when dealing with art is not an easy solve, and I wish I could provide some guidance if for nothing else to act as a balm to my own pain.

This is messy, and there is no clear answer for how to proceed.

Just, please keep this in mind: humans are imperfect by nature, and so is art.