Questionable Authors with Important Contributions (Part Two: Problematic Present)

*Since recording this, the Hogwarts Legacy game has come out. Please see the show notes. Warning: this is a painful topic. Yep, we're talking about JK Rowling. The idea of separating an artist from their contribution get's a lot more complicated when that artist is still alive and profiting. Is it even possible? Ludlow Adams and JS Gariety open a dialogue about this difficult and uncomfortable question. Explicit Content: May contain mature language or themes Production: Maxwell Gariety Music: The Silent Grove by Axletree Licensed under Attribution 4.0 Show Notes: NY Times article from 2020 Should You Play Hogwarts Legacy If You Care About Your Trans Friends? By Stacey Henley *Notes post-release: There was some "we'll have to wait and see how bad it really is" in this podcast. Well, since recording, the game has come out, and the unfortunate update (if you haven't heard) is that it's pretty bad. Actually worse than early reports seemed to reveal. This response to the trans character, Sirona Ryan. A review that suggests the game isn't that great, anyway. And the antisemitism? It's proving to be A LOT more overt than initial reports suggested. And here's a quote from Charlie Jane Anders's email newsletter that hit my inbox last week (this, for me, sums up pretty well the struggle with separating JK Rowling from her work that we discussed in this episode): "...she's gone to great lengths to make her art inseparable from herself. Other authors seem to fade into the background a little bit more, especially as their books and adaptations get more and more prominence. I know tons of people who obsess about Murderbot, but who don't know that much about Martha Wells, for example. JK Rowling made a choice to center herself in the discussion of her work, starting with how her "rags to riches" story was used to market her novels... "We really need to stop turning authors into celebrities, y'all. It's toxic and shitty, and leads to bad behavior at least some of the time. One of the many problems besetting the publishing industry is this star system, which turns a handful of authors into supergods, and keeps everyone else, even pretty successful authors, in a lesser category. Even if someone wrote books that are really, really good and they're selling like hotcakes, let's reserve resist the impulse to turn this person into the One True Author To Rule Them All. Especially when there are so many authors — including marginalized authors — who deserve even a tiny fraction of that level of hype."