This book is the final instalment of J.K. Rowling's series. The reason I have said so little about these books in my posts is that the franchise is so ubiquitous that it seems redundant to offer an explanation. Also I'm not going to give a lengthy chunk of reflection on "separating the art from the artist" when it turns out that the author of a series I enjoyed quite a lot as a kid (hence my recent rereading of it - I wanted to see if it was as good as I remember) has committed herself tooth-and-nail to making life painful for trans folks; my reason for not doing this is that Jessie Gender has already done it very thoroughly.* Weirdly for such a self-proclaimed defender of women, this doesn't seem to have filtered through to JK's female characters, as Caroline Easom elucidates (she also has a very long video breaking down the thirty characters who teach children the worst lessons). Moreover, I'm not going to dissect all the problematic elements in the books themselves, because hoots has already done that perfectly (see too - Ember Green also covers its ableism) - and I'm not even going to complain about how the magical franchise has morphed into a grotesquely needless corporate behemoth, since verilybitchie has that covered - nor even the reasonable assertion that the series isn't even that original, as Caelan Conrad explains, or even the far more in-depth critique that Sheep In The Box has done. If you're curious, yes I did enjoy rereading them, but I was also far more aware of ways in which they kind of suck more than its fandom gives it credit for - to wrap up I'll leave you with Ursula K. Le Guin's reaction to reading the first one: “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.” I don't think I'm likely to ever feel the need to revisit this series, so I'm giving all seven to my Hungarian friend who is weirdly obsessed with them but has never read the actual books.
* I know I'm linking a LOT of YouTube video essays in this post but honestly the great folks of leftist YouTuber communities have done far more to dissect all that is wrong with Harry Potter far more than I could hope to. I'll unapologetically keep editing this post to add new ones when I stumble across them.
