Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogenlet's be quite clear about this new #HarryPotter excrescence: it exists because of spite. There's scarcely a single positive reason why this new TV series exists. Rowling wouldn't even exist as a powerful celebrity unless Hollywood hadn't gone to extraordinary lengths to pump life into her slushy derivative fiction—but then the actor who gave a huge fraction of their careers and risked typecasting by consenting to stick with their Harry Potter role for an unprecedented length of time, Radcliffe and Watson especially, were "ungrateful" enough not to endorse Rowling's bigotry.
And THAT is why there is a #harrypottertvseries now. Rowling's hatred of the actors who made her rubbishy fiction into a household name and massive corporate franchise festered and bubbled until finally it boiled over—probably for no better reason than getting heckled worse than usual on Twitter—and she lashed up her bigoted and cultish fandom, and pulled every string she could possibly reach, and appealed to all the worst instincts of her admirers among Hollywood celebrity, until she convinced her sponsors at Warner Brothers (what's left of them) that she was totally worth betting the farm on, again.
WB has already been saddled with the weak and embarrassing "Fantastic Beasts" series from Rowling. Clearly they have been convinced that only a Hail-Mary try at completely rehabilitating Rowling's popularity with a brand-new from-scratch prestige adaptation of Harry Potter would revive the commercial value of the Jo Rowling brand and perhaps enable WB to extract more money from Rowling's less appealing properties.
The grotesque irony in this? Rowling, at one point, flush with her purely commercial success and drowning in cash and adulation, once loftily proclaimed that she was done with Harry Potter. She had Serious Author™ pretensions, and didn't want to be pigeonholed as a mere children's writer.
And now it's all she has. Her "R. Galbraith" work is wretched, hateful stuff. Nothing else Rowling has disgorged has met with lasting acclaim...only Harry Potter, and that's only because Warner Brothers optioned the series for Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking.
I hope this new TV show ends up being a dead albatross round Jo Rowling's neck.
Culture | The Guardian US
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