Many years ago my good friend Felix asked me if I’d write about J.K. Rowling for his site, which I gladly obliged. That article is long gone now and, frankly, I’m a much better writer so I proposed taking another swing at it. When I originally wrote it I focused on the most obvious issue with Rowling. Since then, though? Oh my god, the flood gates of negatives regarding her has been opened nonstop.
She’s an unapologetic TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) who seems to spend the majority of her time doing whatever she can to hurt the trans community. Joanne wraps this terrorization of the trans community up in a pretty lie: that she’s doing it to protect women. Trans women though, their welfare is not her concern. But we’re not here to focus on her most well known wrong doings, we’re here to talk about plagiarism.
You see, many years ago (decades even) a talented writer named Neil Gaiman wrote a comic series called Books of Magic. It was about a young boy named Tim Hunter, who wore glasses, had messy brown hair, , a pet owl, and was supposed to essentially be the chosen one. He would be tutored by powerful magicians/sorcerers/wizards and so on. If these concepts and ideas all sound familiar to you, they very well should as Rowling stole them for her own work. Most blatantly, she stole Tim himself and gave him a different name. Ah, but where would a hack bigot find the perfect name? Well, she stole from one place, why stop there, yes?
Troll (1986) is a B-movie mostly known for it’s “sequel”, 1990’s Troll 2. It’s a film that most people always attribute as being one of many Gremlins knock-offs despite it not resembling it in any way. No, the movie is really about a young girl being abducted by a troll who then takes the girl’s form to plague the hapless residents of an apartment building; one such resident being the girl’s older brother, who is our protagonist. He befriends an old magic practitioner, wants to learn the craft himself, and his name is Harry Potter Jr. Oh yes, that’s right, Joanne got the name for the main character of her much beloved franchise from a B-movie where a troll pretends to be a little girl and turns Sonny Bono into a forest. Tat really happens, please go watch Troll, Phil Fondacaro gives a performance in it that is far better than anyone should expect from a film associated with Troll 2.
And I wish I could say it all ends there, but we should know better, right? She clearly has had no original ideas thus far, why start now? The Worst Witch? Nice, let’s yoink that and run it through a mulcher, reassembling it alongside these other stolen parts. Why try when it’s so much easier to take? This is the Rowling I got to “know” all those years ago as I researched for that original article. The thief who got rich off of barely disguised ideas she stole wholesale from more talented professionals. Yes, I just said the writer of Troll (Joanna Granillo) is more talented than one of the richest writers alive. All of this pales in comparison to the rampant anti-trans sentiment. But that’s not all, no, it gets worse.
While her hatred of the trans community is incredibly bad, I feel like she uses it to distract from her other big issue: she’s woefully antisemitic. The goblins in the Wizarding World franchise (as it’s apparently being called now) are transparent caricatures of the Jewish people. Or, I should say, very racist caricatures of them. From the obvious associations with how Jewish people have been portrayed as have large noses and hoarding wealth (the goblins literally run the banks), to more easily overlooked details like the large Star of David visible in Gringotts. She took a large page straight from the Nazi playbook in how she depicted them, meaning we should probably add that to the pile of things she stole from, I suppose.
Suffice to say, this article is just me recounting details that I learned many years ago and it will most likely not change the minds of any of her most fervent supporters. The same supporters who sent me hate mail for years after that article, telling me how terrible I am for making up lies about her and that I should end my miserable existence. Today, these same supporters clutter my Twitter feed as they go after trans friends and allies in much the same way. Nothing has changed, they still spew frothing bile in defense of Joanne, almost like they hope she’ll notice them and give them some fleeting sense of joy by acknowledging them.
Immortan Joanne will not lead any of you to Valhalla, no matter how loudly you be her to witness you. She will just sit in her castle, surrounded by her unearned wealth, and she will laugh because she knows you’ll always throw yourselves into the firing line for her. All because she stole some ideas. That’s just sad.
In the wake of the new wizard game coming out, Twitch has seen a massive spike in trans streamers being harassed. Joanne has all these articles coming to her defense, with her explaining how misunderstood she actually is. And I’m just sitting here looking at all of this, staring at this wall of letters, wondering to myself why people rally behind an extremely bland looking game that only benefits a bigoted old TERF and no one else. Anyway, go watch Troll (1986), it’s a fun watch and supporting it doesn’t mean giving your money to a blonde gargoyle sitting in a castle on her hoard of unearned money.
Later days.
would have been a better article if you left out all the lgbt stuff. that doesn’t have anything to do with her lifting ideas
bob dole, it’s in the title of the article: “How a Bigot Got Rich Off of Other People’s Ideas”