ourloveislegendrarry:

whyyoustabbedme:

JK Rowling only said Dumbledore was gay because there weren’t any risks, the books were finished. Now she’s decided they aren’t, there are risks again and she’s chosen the same spineless path she’s used to. She is no LGBTQ ally.

I don’t know about all of you, but this is the last straw for me. I love and will continue to love Harry Potter and drarry, but J.K. Rowling is not a person I support anymore. At all. 

There’s a French philosophy called la mort de l’auteur – death of the author. You can read the very lengthy Wikipedia article on this, but the basis is that every work has the ability to be received and interpreted in a million different ways, and so to interpret the text based on the author’s life and intentions would impose a limit on the text. I’ve seen it used more recently as a way of reconciling with a work that you love going in a direction that you think is awful (see: The Cursed Child), and instead deciding that your personal canon is the correct canon. I’ve always believed that J.K.’s characters got away from her, somehow twisted themselves into new beings, using her as a vessel to tell their own stories. How else could we have seen our Draco Malfoy, so deserving of a redemption arc, put down on by the one who wrote him this way?

I find the best example of this in fandom Pansy. Lovely, snarky but so big-hearted, which is not necessarily how she is in the books – but is how she has grown to be in our fandom, so much so that any Pansy that is legitimately cruel in a fic throws me off. J.K. Rowling’s version of Pansy was awful and unfair – we have taken her back. As we will take everything back.

She owns the trademark, their names. That’s all. She does not own them in our minds and our hearts. Harry Potter is bi. Sirius Black is pan, Lupin is gay, Draco Malfoy is gay af, Parvati and Lavender are in love, Albus and Scorpius are meant to be together, and Dumbledore is gay. Not because J.K. said, sometime ago halfheartedly in a tweet – but because we decide. 

Kill the author. 

@staganddragon – I would love to hear your thoughts on this, if any