Rowling Tweets about Asian Rape Gangs

January 2, 2025 by Leave a Comment

In September of last year, I wrote a post in which I listed the three topical subjects and controversies that Rowling never discusses; ‘Is J. K. Rowling a Coward? Three Topics About Which She Will Not Speak.’ Number one on my short list was being called an Islamophobe in which point I named explicitly her never mentioning ‘Asian,’ which is to say ‘Muslim,’ “grooming gangs.”

(1) She is Afraid of Being Labelled an Islamophobe

Rowling tweets regularly about Islamicist crimes against women in Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. These are usually re-tweets of reports from those countries by brave women reporting the abuses.

She never comments on or retweets reports about  Islamicist crimes against women and children in the United Kingdom, cf., ‘Asian’ grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford, and “honor killings.”

Why not? The most obvious and therefore likely answer is because she fears being grouped with “Far Right Extremists” or being accused of fostering “Hate Crimes” against innocent Muslim believers and agnostic ‘Asians’ in the UK.

Her only statement about the riots throughout the UK this summer by nativist gangs against immigrant crimes and the blind-eye of government to these crimes was a retweet about the injustice of attacks on housing for immigrants.

This is an issue about which Rowling chooses prudently or out of cowardice not to express her opinion. Islamicist crimes, per her twixter feed, only occur outside the UK. No crimes against Christians, by the state or by Islamicists, in the UK or elsewhere, are ever mentioned; they simply do not exist in Rowling-world.

On New Year’s Day, Rowling at last tweeted about what she calls “rape gangs” no doubt in response to public outrage of the last few weeks:

She posts this as a breaking story (“The details emerging…”) and does not mention that the rapists are almost exclusively Muslim males and the victims white English girls. (See this twitter thread for the sordid history of “institutional cowardice” and the recent reports that made it “breaking news.”) She re-tweets several pieces posted by others about a heroic feminist journalist in which she implicitly acknowledges that this story “broke” twenty years ago (see here, here, here, and here). Rowling also reposted a piece in which the author claimed the rape gangs were “a problem neither of immigration or a particular religious or racial group,” a bit of side-stepping for which she was immediately called out: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Twitter

Hogwarts Professor Plans for 2025

January 1, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Two days ago I posted the ‘Hogwarts Professor Greatest Hits of 2024’ list with winners in the Most Popular, Best Month, Best Series, Best Podcasts, and Best Posts Not Written By Me categories as well as the post and Rowling Studies podcast I thought the most likely to be remembered as seminal, significant, or simply a signature or token of what this weblog deemed important last year in our niche of literary criticism. Yesterday Elizabeth Baird-Hardy, our Deputy Head Mistress, shared her ‘Long Overdue Thoughts and Thanks after the Wrath of Helene‘ and I know now, though it came on the last day of the calendar year, that it will be the 2024 post I remember most vividly in the years to come.

The two sure things of 2025 at Hogwarts Professor are that we will be discussing at length and in depth the new Cormoran Strike novel, The Hallmarked Man, in September and in March we will be reading and talking about Sunrise on the Reaping, the second Hunger Games prequel. Newcomers to this weblog will be forgiven if they think of our work here to be exclusively about J. K. Rowling’s artistry and meaning. Long time readers, though, are well aware of the work done here by Professor Baird-Hardy and myself about Suzanne Collins’ work; check out the Hunger Games Pillar Post and the Hunger Games category file for the exegesis of Collins’ neglected Gregor the Overlander series as well as her brilliant Mockingjay, the third of her Games trilogy and a work I think as good and in some ways better than Deathly Hallows. Elizabeth’s posts about these books, the film adaptations, as well as the music in both make her, frankly, with Lana Whited, the go-to expert on everything Hunger Games and I am very much looking forward to reading her insights about Sunrise on the Reaping in March.

Real quickly, we have three projects in the works for the coming year in addition to Sunrise on the Reaping and Hallmarked Man conversations. Having looked back at 2024, here is my sneak peek at three of this year’s coming attractions:

(1) A Hogwarts Professor conference on 30-31 July to celebrate both Mrs Murray’s 60th birthday and the exciting new developments in Rowling Studies;

(2) An online ‘Rowling Studies 101’ course, seven weeks in length, in which I will share a Lake and the Shed perspective on seven ‘Golden Threads’ that permeate everything Rowling writes and are key to grasping her artistry and meaning, her global popularity, and her controversial “biology based” feminist beliefs; and

(3) A series of new and updated books in a variety of formats to include audiobooks, bundled packages, and translations into Spanish and French.

That in addition to posts here on a daily basis and new Rowling Studies podcasts hosted by Nick Jeffery. I’m hopeful that 2025 will be the most exciting year in Hogwarts Professor’s 20+ year history, at least the busiest since the madhouse period following the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Thank you for being the audience for what we do here, and, in advance, for sharing your comments, hopes, and critique of all we do!

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Long Overdue Thoughts and Thanks after the Wrath of Helene

December 31, 2024 by 2 Comments

First of all, I must apologize for such a long radio silence. While I am not the most prolific poster among our distinguished faculty, I do try to post more frequently than I have of late. As many of you know, I live in western North Carolina, a region hard hit by Hurricane Helene on September 27. Since that time, I have           been trying to collect my thoughts to share as well as my thanks for those of you who have been thinking of and praying for those in our region who have been so severely affected over the last few months and who are still struggling. Unfortunately, I have had trouble doing just that, both due to the new constraints on my time and my own lack of mental focus. But as we approach the end of the year, I wanted to finally share the experience of the storm and of the remarkable generosity and support that I have witnessed here in the mountains of western North Carolina. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Elizabeth Baird Hardy Tagged With:

Best Hogwarts Professor Posts of 2024

December 30, 2024 by Leave a Comment

As we approach the conventional calendar’s end and the beginning of the ‘New Year,’ it’s an edifying custom to look back at the twelve months behind us as well as to look forward with hope in anticipation. I have spent the better part of the day in the review part of that effort; I’ve collected many of the more interesting of the 165 posts at Hogwarts Professor in 2024 into nine categories, from ‘Most Popular’ to ‘Most Important,’ and written a brief introduction to each of those pigeon-holes.

My conclusion after a day of sifting, sorting, smiling, and wincing? It’s been a very good year in the Rowling Studies niche of literary criticism and Hogwarts Professor has continued to be a leader in that nook of serious reading. I am very grateful for the thousands of readers who join us here on a daily basis and I am especially thankful to those on our staff who contribute posts and to those in our audience who comment regularly.

Let’s start our end of year review with the posts that generated the most comments in 2024.

Greatest Reader Response

Posts at Hogwarts Professor do not generate a lot of feedback, curiously enough. Much of what we do get is the written equivalent of a “crank call” on the telephone; last week, for example, I was accused of being an “oligarch” dedicated to crushing the Oppressed. As a rule, I do not approve those comments.

Two posts this year, though, caused a flurry of responses and I pretty much left the floodgates open despite there being a decent amount of name-calling in the feedback. Both of these posts were about the rumor that Paapa Essiedu had been cast to play Severus Snape in Bronte Studios/HBO+ adaptation of the Harry Potter novels for television. This not-yet-confirmed choice was controversial because Essiedu is a black man.

I explained in these posts why I thought this was a good idea, even brilliant given the obstacles the new shows must clear to be successful, and how the choice of  Essiedu differed from John Tiffany’s decision to cast a ‘Black Hermione’ in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. With one exception, our readers disagreed and were disappointed in me for not condemning the Woke tokenism of this casting. De Gustibus.

Best Series of Posts: Pregnancy Traps

I decided in early October to write a series of posts about the Pregnancy Traps and other instances of “coercive” love that appear as plot points in Rowling’s work. I expected it would take me a week or two to write up the ten I counted in my ‘How Many?’ introductory post.

Nick Jeffery and I just finished recording a ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast on this subject that I think will be sent out to Substack subscribers later this week. The survey has taken me a lot longer to complete than I thought and the series does not yet have a proper written conclusion, in which I hope to explain how important this is for understanding Rowling’s work.

The obvious point in this regard is the quantity and the quality or centrality of Pregnancy Traps in her stories. With respect to their importance, in Rowling’s ‘Big Four’ works — Harry Potter, Casual Vacancy, Cursed Child, and the Cormoran Strike mysteries — “coercive” love in the form of a Pregnancy Trap are either the point of story-origin or the climactic event to which all the story-elements lead and at which they converge.

And the number of them! I listed ten in my ‘How Many?’ post. After reviewing the Cormoran Strike series in two posts (‘Four Strikes’ and ‘The Last Strikes’), I’d found fourteen and Nick brought up one I’d missed during our podcast. Check ’em out:

  1. Charlotte Campbell’s pregnancy trap for Strike, her fiancée?
  2. Marlene Higson’s trap to win Josiah Agyeman
  3. Fenella Waldegrave’s affair with Michael Fancourt?
  4. Mrs Laing’s pregnancy trap for “One of the Local Policemen”
  5. Jeff Whittaker’s pregnancy trap for Leda Strike
  6. Ornella Serafin’s pregnancy trap for Jasper Chiswell
  7. Raphael Chiswell’s trap for Kinvara Chiswell
  8. Lucca Ricci traps Gloria Conti via pregnancy
  9. Sarah Shadlock’s Trapping Matt Cunliffe
  10. Janice Beattie’s Failed Trap of Her Son’s Father
  11. Jago Ross’ Coercive Love for Charlotte Campbell
  12. Mazu Wace’s Pregnancy Trap for Alex Graves (and Jonathan Wace?)
  13. Belinda (Bijou) Watkins’ Pregnancy Trap for Andrew Honbold QC (or Strike?)
  14. Ryan Murphy’s Pregnancy Trap of Robin Ellacott, her fiancée?

There’s a lot to unpack in there — for instance, I’m intrigued by the possibility that Murphy will convince Robin to get married and try to seal the deal with a pregnancy during their engagement in parallel with what Charlotte did to Cormoran at the start of Cuckoo’s Calling (though, yes, I think Robin may be sterile) — but the sheer volume of these examples and their importance in the story-lines of each book is astonishing.

Which points to the unexplored ‘Lake’ aspect of this prevalent plot point; why does it have such a prominent place in her fiction? Nick and I discuss this in the Rowling Studies podcast coming out soon and it will be a touchstone of conversations, I think, in 2025.

Rowling Studies Podcasts

For more than twenty years, I’ve wanted to have a dedicated Hogwarts Professor podcast but it never happened. I did years in yoke to Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet shows (all of which was very pleasant, FYI) and hoped that it would be something we could do here, on our terms. Nick Jeffery has made that possible with our ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast and each of the five shows we have done in 2024 (the missing link there is the Pregnancy Trap piece about to be published) has our signature Fourth Generation focus on both Rowling’s Lake and Shed.

Speaking of which, how about the best biographically focused or ‘Lake’ posts and those more about her artistry and literary allusion, her ‘Shed’?

Rowling Biography: Lake Notes

Two of the points of emphasis that distinguish the Fourth Generation of Rowling Studies from the first three are an insistence on an opera omnia or everything-she’s-written focus (rather than just Wizarding World Stories or one book, usually the latest, or the novel in queue for publication) and discussion of the connection, if any, between Rowling’s life events and core beliefs and the stories she writes. The posts above are about Rowling personally and about the connection between her life and work, the “pain to brain” aspoect of her inspiration, as she put it to Lev Grossman in 2005.

I also wrote posts about Rowling’s more open statements of what she believes and thinks. It was a year of triumph, frankly, for Rowling in her battle against Trans Rights Activists (TRAs) to protect children and adolescents from surgical mutilation and chemical castration (“Gender affirming care”) and to protect women by keeping women’s safe spaces for women only. See The Daily Wire‘s review of her take-down tweets throughout 2024: J. K. Rowling Says What Everyone is Thinking – A Year in Review. I covered a lot of that, but in the three posts above this paragraph I tried to highlight more important statements Rowling made in long form, albeit on social media.

Rowling Bibliography: Shed Notes

That being said about Hogwarts Professor’s commitment to Lake or biographical matters, we haven’t given up on her Shed artistry and its elevation of her work’s meaning from the individual exteriorization of psychological issues to the universal agonies of human existence and relationships. The four posts above confirm this weblog’s place as the online locus for conversation of Rowling’s deliberate craft choices and the effects each has on her readers, e.g., literary alchemy, ring composition, psychomachia, etc., as well as her literary and artistic influences.

I write most of the posts here at Hogwarts Professor; last year I wrote more than 150 of the 167 that went ‘up.’ Before I get to the posts that are I think are the most important of the year, the ‘take-aways’ or the answer to the question “if you could only read one 2024 HogPro post, what would it be?,” I want to highlight two other writers that contribute regularly at Hogwarts Professor.

Beatrice Groves

Dr Groves has her online archive of posts she has written and podcasts on which she has spoken, the ‘Beatrice Grove Pillar Post,‘ at Hogwarts Professor, a collection updated regularly by Nick Jeffery. She writes for a variety of Potter and Strike fandom sites in addition to this weblog but I think she shares her most challenging and interesting work, usually speculation about the next work in the Strike series in light of new twixter headers, for our page. I love the alchemical exegesis and Strike fandom loves everything she shares here.

Nick Jeffery

Nick Jeffery is the host of our Rowling Studies podcast and the Invisible Man behind many of our posts that don’t sport his name in the byline. A post I wrote up about the difference between Black Snape and Black Hermione, for example, all derived from a throw-away observation Mr Jeffery made about an interview John Tiffany made about Cursed Child‘s “Hermione-gate” in a 2017 interview.

More to the point, Nick’s area of expertise in reading J. K. Rowling is in her biography, the Lake aspects of her inspiration. He’s perfectly situated for that topic as he lives in relatively proximity to Church Cottage and his awareness of Rowling’s class concerns and perspective springs from his self-reflection on his own upbringing and place in the UK caste system, not as atrophied as many imagine. The push at Hogwarts Professor towards an integrated appreciation of Lake inspiration and Shed artistry leans largely on the insights about Rowling the person he provides (as well as his sobriety in what is necessarily a speculative field) that no one in the subject area — and I know most if not all of the better ones — can claim or have demonstrated.

Before I reveal my pick of the Most Important Hogwarts Professor Posts of 2024, I want to note that we have been posting every day since 5 August this year, Beatrice Groves’ ‘Golden Journey‘ piece. I scrolled thirty four pages of posts with five posts on average per page and noted that every three or four days in the four weeks of September into early October I’d written something substantial. It was far and away the best month of the year. For what it’s worth!

Autumn Blitz

Best in Show

The most popular posts we have here, oddly enough, are those about films or television shows. I say that this is odd because the focus of the weblog is on interpretation of Rowling’s works’ artistry and meaning, her written texts, not the adaptations for large and small screens. A lot of our readers (and those prompted by news aggregators for Rowling stories), it seems, stop by on days of important film or teevee news to see what we have to say. Fair enough.

I think the important work we are doing here, as I’ve said how many times above? I’ve lost count, is the push into the Fourth Generation of Rowling studies, in which we talk about her work in the context of all her writing and integrating at the author’s repeated insistenceinto that interpretation the probable biographical sources of inspiration.

It’s no surprise, then, that my choice for best post and best podcast of 2024 are each simultaneously introductions to and moving-the-ball-forward efforts in Fourth Generation work. The post identifies what I think is Rowling’s signature point of Genius (or ‘G-Spot’) as an artist and the podcast with host Nick Jeffery discusses a Q&A Rowling made called ‘On Writing.’ Both integrate Lake and Shed knowledge and perspective on Rowling’s work and challenge the reader or podcast listener to break out of the one series or next work pre-occupation.

Thank you for joining me on this End of Year Review, and, in advance, for sharing your favorites from Hogwarts Professor in 2024. The HogPro faculty and I thank you for your attentive reading and for the comments you share on what we have written!

 

 

 

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Rowling Equates Gender Affirming Care Conformity with Nazi ‘Banality of Evil’

December 29, 2024 by

Rowling is on solid ground here in this thread, by the way. The euphemism ‘Gender Affirming Care,’ chemical castration and surgical mutilation in plain speech has been demonstrated to result in minors twelve times more likely to commit suicide than those not having these treatments and surgeries, an especially appaling statistic because the argument used to coerce parents into these atrocities posing as medical care is that the boy or girl in question if not “transitioned” irreparably will commit suicide. “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” See the Cass Report for more on this.

The new retort rhetorical strategy evident here is Rowling’s taking the attack to her Trans Radical Activist opponents using their own smear tactics, albeit more subtly and on point. They have repeatedly branded her as a TERF Nazi, going so far as to call her a holocaust denier.

Rowling turns the tables here by noting how a Bio-Ethics report is eerily reminiscent of the language employed by Eichmann and other National Socialist war criminals (and conformist civilians who were never brought to trial) to justify their going-along-with or aiding-and-abetting crimes against humanity. She cites Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil to great effect here in calling out a recently published Bio-Ethics article which moved the ethical goalposts off the playing field and into the stadium parking lot. The new metric for success in gender mutilating therapies and surgeries, believe it or not, is if the patient got what they said they wanted in their initial interview rather than what they experienced consequent to such “Gender Affirming Care.”

Rowling does not say to the TRAs and doctors involved, “You want Nazi criminals? You’re the Nazi criminals, you butchers!” But it isn’t hard to draw the lines connecting those dots. If that weren’t clear enough, she doubled-down on the analogy avalanche later in the day by linking the medical professionals and families pushing and permitting the abuse of what they call “trans kids” or “trans children” with lobotomists, who destroyed the higher brain function of tens of thousands of patients around the world, predominantly women, in the name of mental health:

Five years ago, Rowling posted the tweet heard round the world in defense of a woman who’d lost her job for insisting on biological facts. She spent the better part of two years on the defensive and under a cancellation tsunami. Since that time, reality has caught up with the conformists and medical profiteers — and now Rowling is on the offensive. Her 14 million twixter followers, if her comment threads are any indication, have ‘transitioned’ from a horde-like herd of angry TRAs who were once devoted Rowling Readers to a community very much on board with her biology-based medicine and feminism understanding of “transgenderism.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Twitter