Rebutting J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling is a popular punching bag these days, and for good reason. On top of her transphobia, the new Hogwarts Legacy game is riddled with anti-Semitic tropes and imagery. And as the saying goes, even if Hogwarts Legacy wasn’t intended to be transphobic and anti-Semitic, transphobes and anti-Semites are attracted to it.

While I understand all the arguments, Rowling’s downfall is still a hard thing for me to watch. In the 2000s, my daughter fell in love with the Harry Potter series. We bought all the books and toys, saw the movies, and went to the midnight launch parties. And as a writer, I looked up to J. K. Rowling as a hero. Here was someone who appeared to come from nothing and became an international literary sensation. If she can do it, so can I. (Perhaps she’s another example of “quit while you’re ahead.”)

So, as I started my own YA contemporary fantasy series for Fun A Day Reseda, I decided I would write a rebuttal to Harry Potter — the same way Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is considered a rebuttal against C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. But I wouldn’t find it sustainable and satisfying to just twist her universe around. Instead, I wanted to engage with the premise of her universe: a world of magical people and creatures that exists in parallel with our own.