2-News

16 — Wednesday, December 9, 2020
The B-Side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

The B-Side: Harry Potter and the Canceled Author

It’s time that we talk about ‘The Fault in Our Stars’

I grew up in a house in the middle of 

the woods, surrounded by deer and trees 
and friendly small-town neighbors, but 
I spent a lot of my childhood immersed 
in books instead. Something about the 
allure of a different world enthralled me; 
magical, fantastical or realistic, I wanted 
the adventure that novels promised to take 
me on. 

Joanne (Jo) Rowling dreamed of 

escaping her troubled marriage. A school 
teacher who thought herself a failure, 
Rowling left with her child and scouted 
for somewhere safe, somewhere she could 
truly get more out of the life she desired for 
herself. At the same time, she put pencil to 
paper and began to sketch out the story of a 
young wizard boy, which had miraculously 
come to her, fully-formed, while on 
a train. Fully shaped by her mother’s 
death and own mental health struggles, 
Rowling finished her manuscript and 
two years later saw “Harry Potter and the 
Philosopher’s Stone” become a smash hit. 

Long before I was able to read on my own, 

my father would sit in a white rocking chair 
and, with my chubby little body on his lap, 
read to me. I can’t remember every book we 
read, though we definitely worked through 
Dr. Seuss and wore down my copy of “Felix 
Travels Back In Time,” and I vividly recall 
us reading through the entire Harry Potter 
series one chapter at a time.

The world of Harry Potter seemed vast 

and alluring, that of a young mistreated 
boy becoming the chosen one in a world 
full of magic and magical creatures. The 
adventures were grandiose and epic, a 
battle of good versus evil wickedly waged 
with wands and incantations. I loved it. I 
wanted to taste a chocolate frog, a barf-
flavored Bertie Bott’s bean and feel the 
warmth of a freshly brewed Butterbeer. I 
wanted to live among the characters, who 
even at the height of their angst embarked 
on daring adventures while attending the 
coolest boarding school imaginable. The 
series of seven bestselling books and eight 
blockbuster films became a pop culture 
staple throughout the world.

As I got older, I found myself returning 

to Harry Potter during times of comfort 
and hardship. The first film premiere I 
ever attended was “Harry Potter and the 
Deathly Hallows - Part 1.” My friend and 
I were two of the only non-costumed 
people in line. I saw the play “Puffs, or 
Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a 
Certain School of Magic and Magic” off-
Broadway twice and am dying to see both 
parts of “Harry Potter and the Cursed 
Child” on the Great White Way. During a 
difficult year, I completed a whole re-read 
of the entire saga and watched all the films 
again. What started as a silly children’s 
series became a cultural touchstone for 
many people’s adolescence. I know that my 
friend is clearly a Slytherin in all the best 
ways possible, or how to pick on someone 
because they’re a Hufflepuff to a tee. 
Playground talk about our dream houses 
— I’m a Ravenclaw obviously — became 

a real discussion of how our personality 
traits fit into these fictional constraints. 
Our generation didn’t just grow up with 
Harry Potter, Harry Potter grew up with 
us. 

My Dad used to hold me as I nodded off, 

lids heavy with the magic sleep of a child’s 
day gone by. As I got older and bigger, I 
would lay down in my racecar bed and 
listen to him preach the exploits of Harry, 
Ron and Hermione. The chair older than 
I was would always squeak. After each 
chapter was done, he would close the 
book — he magically always knew where 
we were in it — and come over and kiss me 
goodnight. 

Things started to get weird after 

the series was done. Rowling, rather 
than letting everything sit pretty and 
untouched, started to mess with the status 
quo in a hasty attempt to answer questions. 
Sure, there was a Jewish wizard, his 
name was Anthony Goldstein and he 
was a Ravenclaw, next. Oh no, wizards 
absolutely do not take off their entire robe 
to use the bathroom, they simply shit into 
their pants and wave it away with magic, 
duh. There were LGBTQ+ students at 
Hogwarts, you just never saw them. 
WAIT, now Dumbledore is gay. How’s that 
for representation? It would be comical if it 
wasn’t so pathetic. 

But the slope of Rowling’s quick retcons 

soon became slippery. Suddenly all the 
malicious subtext hiding within the books 
became prominent once people bothered 
to go below the surface. Why did these 
wizards exist only in England? Why was 
the history of magic so white-centric? 
How come Cho Chang and Dean Thomas 
were the only two prominent people of 
color in an entire school of students? The 
faults crumbled into fissures and soon 
working through the world of Hogwarts 
became a game of dodging potholes. 

Then … the infamous Pottermore 

post about magic in early, pre-colonized 
North America. The history was not only 
horribly inaccurate but insensitive and 
white-washed, 
constantly 
comparing 

these Native American wizards to their 
European counterparts in disgusting 
ways. The feedback was loud and angry. 
This wasn’t some little joke Rowling 
could get away with on Twitter, it was a 
targeted attack against an entire people, 
a slight against all Indigenous American 
tribes that only furthered their erasure in 
history. 

Jo Rowling began to play the offensive. 

Her Twitter was used for responding to 
any and all criticisms of her which she 
completely ignored while working on 
the new, glitzy “Fantastic Beasts” series. 
When people questioned why the goblins 
were so reminiscent of Jewish stereotypes 
or why lycanthropy, otherwise known as 
the process of turning into a werewolf, is 
a metaphor for HIV/AIDS, they were met 
with a wall of silence. Even when Rowling 
did something progressive, such as cast 
Black actress Noma Dumezweni (“The 
Undoing”) as Hermione in the original 
London production of “Cursed Child,” 
she backed it up with questionable quotes 
about Hermione’s unruly curly hair and 

brown eyes. Rowling constantly showed 
that she was not only out of touch but 
unable to recognize her problems and 
change. Some people, even those whose 
lives had been changed by Rowling’s 
work, made the decision to cut her out of 
their lives and stop supporting her and her 
work.

Things were quiet for a little while. 

“The Crimes of Grindelwald” was a critical 
flop and Rowling was getting along fine 
writing her Cormoran Strike detective 
novels. Frankly, no one cared about either 
of those projects. But on June 6, 2020, 
the sixth day of Pride month, Rowling 
responded to an op-ed’s use of the phrase 
“people who menstruate” by joking about 
the word woman being erased, effectively 
negating the trans safe space the original 
wording created. She received backlash 
but kept at it, demanding that sex and 
gender be connected and continuing to 
demean the transgender community. 

She was speaking and acting like a 

trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or 
TERF, something a later blog post of 
hers originally titled “TERF Wars” only 
continued to prove. Rowling wrote that 
being transgender was a mental disorder, 
that it encouraged children to change their 
gender before they could change their 
minds and other demoralizing reasons to 
be worried about new trans activism. The 
mask was off, the convertible top down 
— Rowling finally stepped into the light 
as the bigoted woman she was. No more 
pretenses or quick retcons to calm fans, 
Rowling nearly shouted, “I’m transphobic 
and I’m proud of it!” 

Responses flooded the internet, with 

Harry and Hermione themselves, actors 
Daniel Radcliffe (“Swiss Army Man”) 
and Emma Watson (“Little Women”), 
decrying the statements and standing 
alongside the trans community. Rowling 
continued her shitstorm, continually 
denouncing 
hormone 
therapy 
and 

possibly even suggesting that people who 
take medication for mental health issues 
are simply “lazy.” The launch of her next 
book, “Trouble Blood,” only worsened the 
issue by having the villain be a — and I 

absolutely wish I was joking — cisgendered 
man who dresses as a woman in order to 
kill other women. Rowling hates transfolk 
for simply trying to live their lives and feel 
comfortable in their own skin. She had 
picked a hill to die on, but it was turning 
out more like Custer’s Last Stand than the 
Alamo. 

One day, for whatever reason, as my Dad 

and I were at the tail end of “Return of the 
King” (we had moved onto Middle Earth at 
that point) I looked him in the eyes and said, 
“I don’t want you to read to me anymore. 
I can do it.” Looking back now, it was 
heartbreaking. From that day on I’ve read 
books alone, because I felt it was time to 
move on. So the rocking chair sat quiet and 
untouched, until one day I decided it was 
time to move on, get rid of it and put a desk 
in its place instead. 

As I sit here and type this, my 

Ravenclaw bracelet constantly catches my 
eye. I struggle to reconcile this modern 
Rowling with the woman who wrote such 
a beloved, important series of books. I 
can’t whisk away my enjoyment of them 
in the past: There are still a good 15 years 
of Harry Potter affection that remain in 
my memory. But as a non-binary human 
being, I cannot simply sit here and take 
Rowling’s comments as comments. They 
are hateful and demeaning stances that 
hurt deeply to hear. 

This isn’t an issue for everyone. For 

some people, doing something famed 
literary 
critic 
Roland 
Barthes 
calls 

“Death of the Author” (summarized and 
contextualized brilliantly here by critic 
Lindsay Ellis), can work. The concept is 
that one should divorce the personal views 
and actions of an author from their work, 
stating that their view is simply one of 
many interpretations possible. This may 
work for some people, likely the same 
ones who pay full price to see the new 
Mel Gibson movie and are ecstatic to see 
Felicity Huffman acting again, but it’s 
incredibly difficult for others.

Rowling’s hate and prejudices are baked 

into the text of Harry Potter; there is simply 
no way around that. I am not trying to 
discount any single person’s interpretation 

because if you got something out of this 
series, nothing Rowling or anyone else 
says can ever take that away from you. But 
I find it difficult to think about supporting 
this series the way I once did. I hide away 
my Harry Potter socks and feel a pang of 
guilt each time I think about the Friday 
Forty and how I would probably spend a 
ridiculous amount of money to see “Cursed 
Child.” With a new Harry Potter video 
game set to come out next year, Avalanche 
Studios’s “Hogwarts Legacy,” and the 
third Fantastic Beasts film in production, 
people are going to need to take a stance on 
Rowling sooner rather than later. Either 
they boycott her or support her. 

Now as an adult, I wonder why I ever 

asked my father to stop reading to me. I 
always feel guilty about it, like I broke his 
heart. I can say I never went back to finish 
“Return of the King” either, it just never 
felt right. Time has allowed me to keep the 
memories close to me, but has also allowed 
enough distance for me to see that I made 
the right decision. My dad and I formed a 
different relationship, not one out of him 
reading to me but us reading as equals. He 
started choosing books specifically for me. 
I still do the same for him. We manage to 
find time to talk about whatever he chose to 
borrow from the library this week. As heart-
wrenching as it is, sometimes moving on is 
the right thing in the end.

Personally, I say it’s time to move on from 

Rowling and her TERFy shenanigans. 
Just like with storytime and my racecar 
bed, it’s time to take Rowling and put her 
to the curb. No more chances, no more last 
second sways of the heart due to nostalgia, 
no more “but one more butterbeer,” which 
frankly was never that good to begin with. 
Let’s hang up our brooms, put our wands in 
storage and stand firm together and affirm 
that Rowling doesn’t get another pass. We 
will always have our fond memories. The 
siren calls toward a comfortable but now 
tainted land, and that’s enough for me. 

MIK DEITZ

Daily Arts Writers

SCHOLASTIC

No, John Green has not been 

officially “canceled.” In fact, his work 
remains quite popular: His latest book, 
“Turtles All the Way Down” (2017), 
debuted at #1 on The New York Times 
bestseller list, and in 2018 Green 
confirmed its film adaptation. Last 
August he announced that he will be 
publishing his first work of non-fiction 
in May 2021. So, no, Green isn’t canceled 
in the sense that we have all agreed to 
stop reading his work and unsubscribe 
from his YouTube channel, but he is 
canceled for me. And he has been for 
quite some time. 

To be truthful, I was always a great 

admirer of Green’s work, particularly 
in middle school. His Young Adult 
fiction is known for its young female 
readership, something that held true 
in my school district and friend group. 
I can’t remember which novel I picked 
up first, but “The Fault in Our Stars” 
was undoubtedly my favorite — a love 
story between two young and beautiful 
cancer patients? It was as if its sole 
purpose was to attract romance-giddy 
teens. 

Regardless, by the time I reached 

high school, I separated myself from 
his work and most of YA fiction. 
This isolation wasn’t provoked by a 
controversy surrounding Green, nor 
had I simply grown out of the genre; I 
still loved the glorious romances that 
were stuffed into my bookshelves. I 
was just afraid to admit it. 

It was around the same time others 

did fervently stop reading Green’s 

books because they were “for girls” or 
“not actually that good” or “overrated.” 
Maybe other YA fiction readers have 
encountered the same sentiment — that 
because we enjoy books with cheesy 
friendships or coming-of-age themes, 
we must be superficial. So I can’t blame 
my first dissociation with Green on 
him, but I can hold him responsible for 
the second. 

Unfortunately for me and John 

Green, I was diagnosed with a rare 
form of cancer when I was 17. It was 
an odd experience: The diagnosis and 
the scans and the surgery didn’t feel 
like they were happening to me, but 
to someone else. Maybe another me 
in a different universe, or someone 
else entirely. Either way, like many 
survivors of cancer, I had adapted 
a new perspective. A new way of 
seeing things, both things trivial and 
significant, including the way society 
treats disease and diseased people. 
Especially John Green. 

When I reread “The Fault in Our 

Stars,” it wasn’t so I could relate to 
Hazel or Augustus or the other cancer 
patients depicted. I subconsciously 
started reading it on one of the dark 
days anyone fighting illness, whether 
it be mental or physical, knows well. 
I picked it up out of muscle memory: 
I had read it on multiple occasions 
when I was in need of comfort or a 
distraction. It was simply one of those 
times. I depended on the trustworthy 
characters and their cliché remarks 
to provide some degree of relief. 
Something to softly pull me out of my 
reality and into another. 

And the truth is, I both enjoyed and 

detested the book. Lines like “Grief 
does not change you Hazel. It reveals 

you,” and “But I believe in true love, you 
know? I don’t believe that everybody 
gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or 
whatever, but everybody should have 
true love, and it should last at least as 
long as your life does” stuck out to me. 
As tacky as they may appear, they were 
successful in distracting me from my 
metastatic cancer. 

But what also stuck out to me were 

the fallacies. Green invents the therapy 
that keeps Hazel alive. It’s not real. In 
the acknowledgements section of the 
book, Green writes: “The disease and 
its treatment are treated fictitiously 
in this novel. For example, there is no 
such thing as Phalanxifor. I made it up, 
because I would like for it to exist.”

And that’s not fair. Not for cancer 

patients like me whose cancers don’t 
have definitive treatments; not for 
those who live in constant uncertainty 

and fear; not for those who are told that 
we will just have to monitor our bodies 
for the rest of our lives, as long as we 
may live. And I know this is a work of 
fiction; I know that Green is entitled to 
create any fantasy he would like. But 
does fantasy belong in a book about 
cancer? 

Perhaps it is shocking because 

of Green’s other statements: “This 
is 
hopefully 
not 
going 
to 
be 
a 

gauzy, sentimental love story that 
romanticizes 
illness 
and 
further 

spreads the lie that the only reason sick 
people exist is so that healthy people 
can learn lessons.”

But if the only reason his main 

character is alive is because of a made-
up treatment, isn’t he glamorizing 
the scarce miracles and hope some 
cancer patients may have? By keeping 
Hazel falsely alive to share with us her 
newfound wisdom upon Augustus’s 
death, does it not turn into her and 
her experiences becoming a lesson for 
healthy people? 

And Green does not stop there. The 

other principal character and cancer 
patient, Augustus Waters, is said to 
have just been re-diagnosed with 
cancer right before embarking on a 
grand adventure to Amsterdam with 
Hazel. In what world is that possible? 
Having Augustus endure the long trip 
and the exhaustive tours around the 
city while simultaneously maintaining 
his emotional and mental capacity is 
another delusion I cannot forgive. 

It is also difficult to ignore the other 

unreasonable decision to have the two 
cancer patients share their first kiss 
inside the Anne Frank house. Not to 

mention the heedless combination of 
cancer and the Holocaust, something 
like a kiss should — and would — 
never happen inside so sacred a place. 
Did Green think it would not matter 
because it is cancer patients performing 
the act? That they were not normal, 
healthy people, so in turn their actions 
should be excused in exchange for pity?

My particular position might make 

me overly sensitive to Green’s mistakes 
— but that’s another comment I’m sick 
of hearing. My sensitivity stems from 
my truth, as does my criticism. The 
errors of authors like Green do not 
deserve to be disregarded because of 
their merit or their well-intentioned 
ventures 
into 
sensitive 
subjects. 

Instead, that’s exactly why they should 
be held accountable. By putting their 
work and themselves into the world, 
they are inviting both criticism and 
praise. 

“The Fault in Our Stars” is expertly 

problematic because its flaws can be 
easily overlooked. However, other 
errors of Green are not so deftly 
unnoticed: His repetitive usage of the 
same rudimentary character tropes 
and his lack of diversity in terms of 
race, gender and sexuality (noting 
a few exceptions: Tiny from “Will 
Grayson, Will Grayson,” Hasan from 
“An Abundance of Katherines,” and 
Radar from “Paper Towns”) make 
me wonder why Green has been, and 
continues to be, such an influential 
figure in YA fiction, and why he hasn’t 
been canceled before.

Daily Arts Writer Lilly Pearce can be 

reached at pearcel@umich.edu. 

LILLY PEARCE
Daily Arts Writer

But what also stuck 
out to me were the 

fallacies. Green invents 
the therapy that keeps 

Hazel alive

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com