At this point her twitter is pretty horrific, yes, but some people would benefit from seeing how she got there and putting it in context.
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Cake day: November 23rd, 2023
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Right or wrong I am able to separate the art from the artist.
Me too, but I’d still prefer not to have my money go to people actively spreading bigotry where possible, especially when those people believe it means you support them. Like, it’s one thing when the author is dead, or even when they’re only partly involved in creating a given work of art, but I’m done with Rowling and her work unless and until she either dies or comes around on her views. Not to mention that separating the art from the artist only goes up to a point. I was a big fan of David and Leigh Eddings’ books in my teenage years but when I found out how abusive they were to their foster children, I just could not separate that. No way. I have kids. The Eddings were put in jail for child abuse in the fucking 1970s when it was normal to beat your kids with a belt. I cannot separate that. Same as how I don’t want to read anything by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Controversial take, but I think people underestimate how bad the backlash was to her original essay and how that might have affected her psychologically, combined with the fact that that that has never stopped happening since.
She started falling apart before she got sucked down the transphobia rabbit hole. Don’t forget that just before it dropped she’d blown up for her weird tweets about the Harry Potter universe about wizards publicly shitting themselves and had her attempts at writing other things repeatedly flop. She clearly liked both being a beloved writer and being a twitter personality, and I think her insecurities over both of those things left her open to being drawn into the terf cult.
This article from a while back by Scalzi about the surprisingly common phenomenon of SF/Fantasy authors losing their minds always comes to mind when I think about how Rowling wound up where she is now.
So the thing is they only got anywhere after someone leaked that they were written by her while “wearing manface”, to use terf-adjacent terminology. The first book she wrote for adults under her own name had a resoundingly mixed reception. It seems to me that she was trying to do a Steven King and prove to herself that she wasn’t just coasting on her own name, and failed pretty miserably at it.