no video game not a SINGLE VIDEO GAME ABSOLUTELY NOT ONE FUCKING VIDEO GAME is worth alienating or hurting your trans friends and families, or communities around you, who are continually fighting EVERY DAY for their right to simply EXIST, please listen to their voices

jk rowling could have easily and uncontroversially been remembered as the most beloved children’s author of all time but she took a detour and is now being defended by a totalitarian war criminal dictator. anything is possible

Que Putin salga en defensa de JK Rowling, hablando del bulo de la "cancelación" me parece de lo más poético, unidos por ese odio a lo LGTB. Y no es solo a lo trans. Recordemos que en el mundo mágico de Harry Potter todos son heteros, como en la Rusia de Putin.

The "you can't criticise JKR because she gave to charity" line is absurd for in many ways but one of them is that even she herself is aware that rich, awful people often give a pittance of their wealth to charity to seem good & buy influence, because she has a character like that

I hate that I still know enough about her books to even remember this, but she fairly explicitly critiques this sort of person in the form of Lucius Malfoy. It's established almost immediately that he gives a lot of money to the magic hospital.

But it becomes very quickly obvious he just does this as a way to keep up a good public face and to buy money - it's a essentially a bribe. Which is exactly how big donations to charities often work in real life (my mum worked for a very big charity, I've done volunteer work)

irl it's also very often, in large or in part, as a tax dodge (especially when it's their own charitable foundation - which JKR has)

And to paraphrase Clement Attlee, if the rich want to help he should pay more taxes to fund public services instead of giving to charities on a whim. People shouldn't have to depend on charities!

Charities in a large part exist to assuage the guilt of the rich and make it seem like there's an actual solution to avoid any real helpful change for people

JKR at the very least understands the initial premise of this idea, that the rich use charities for PR and to buy people off, somewhere deep down in her miserable rotten soul, because she wrote a villain guilty of the exact same thing she now does

As is usual for her, though, the critique doesn't go very deep beyond the superficial and there's no actual challenge made to the system that allows this

In fact I have little doubt in mind if challenged on this idea now, Rowling herself would manage to completely misunderstand what is wrong about what Malfoy and her do, and say "actually it's evidence that he's not such a bad guy after all"

The villain / The real villain