#Metaphors in harry potter and the cursed child book movie#
But even still, that doesn’t excuse or explain away the way her post-Potter works are more of the same.Īt this point in publishing, Rowling is like the Mark Millar of young adult/kids’ publishing: she could probably get her grocery list turned into a movie if she included the opportunity for extensive CGI scenes and maybe a cameo from the Rock or Benedict Cumberbatch. Maybe, and here I’m giving Rowling the benefit of the doubt, she couldn’t have gotten Harry Potter published in the 90s with more diverse characters and less allegories/metaphors for oppression. Other writers wrote queer characters into their works, other authors managed to have diverse children’s books during the same period that Rowling was publishing her books.Īnd none of those authors changed the literal face of publishing, writing, and reading. The “it was 1997” excuse for Rowling’s diversity fails only holds a scant bit of water when it comes to looking at the body of her work. She wrote about the violent effects of racism and blood supremacy as well as child abuse and children coming of age in a war torn world.Īnd yet, she “couldn’t” include more than eight characters of color or any queer characters who made It to the end of the series alive or who were queer onscreen?
Without fail, people are more invested in protecting Rowling from criticism she will never see or care about than in acknowledging the way that her writing has continued to erase marginalized people while allegorizing their struggles in order to pad her plot and make her characters more interesting.Įven if I knew (or cared) more about the realities of publishing when I was seven years old, the fact of the matter is that JKR managed to put a ton of atypical things in her “kids’ series”. Rowling’s current and continuing diversity fails, someone always has to show up to remind me how she “couldn’t write diversely because it was 1997”.