Jacie Williams is a junior majoring in communication. She can be contacted at [email protected].Attention all “Harry Potter” fans: Something terrible has happened. Voldemort must still be alive.
He has come back to take revenge because someone very evil must have been the one that bewitched the very well-known author of a set of children’s books.
If it was not him, someone else must have poured some Veritaserum in J. K. Rowling’s tea Friday morning.
What else could explain the statement she made?
While I can appreciate the value of any good book, I do not always appreciate the author. It so happens that in this particular case, the person with whom I have a problem is the “Harry Potter” mastermind.
To the distress of some fans and the great joy of others, Rowling announced the sexual orientation of Dumbledore, the headmaster of the magic school in the “Harry Potter” series.
I personally do not care to hear about real people’s sexual orientations. It is a personal choice, and I do not need to pry.
Why do I care that this fictional character – yes, I know it is hard for some of you Harry Potter fans to accept, but he is a fictional character – happens to be homosexual?
Oh, I know. I don’t. I do care that Rowling is making it an issue now. The series is over. Rowling should have left it at that and quit while she was ahead.
I think that taking away the speculation in books of this nature takes away from the creative side of reading. But what does Rowling care if it gets “Harry Potter” back in the papers?
I really believe that she has held on so tightly to her own little fantasy world, not wanting to give creative licensing to anyone else, that she has forgotten part of reading comes from the audience’s ability to imagine the world as they see it. This does not necessarily mean the way she, the author, sees it.
When I read that she had argued her series was a “prolonged argument for tolerance,” I wanted to laugh. Wait. Maybe I did laugh.
I was not laughing because I do not see any theme of tolerance in the book, but because the tolerance I found had nothing to do with homosexuality.
Voldemort’s followers were not tolerant of the non-magic users, but what does that have to do with anyone’s sexuality?
Tolerance of other ethnicities, which is how I would have read the whole magic user versus “muggle” bias if I had to read deeper into the story, is very different than being tolerant of homosexuality.
Note that I would even only read that if I was being forced to read too deeply into the story. I personally think it is better to leave fiction as fiction and not try to compare it to ordinary life.
Rowling’s move to turn Dumbledore gay now, after the conclusion of the series, does not promote tolerance of him or of homosexual people in any way.
It is just a state of being he happens to be in, which does not affect the plot of the story at all. There is nothing to suggest the sexuality of any of the characters one way or another in the books.
I could understand if there was a plot gap somewhere in the books and Rowling was answering a question that she had not wrapped up in the seventh book, but this had nothing to do with the plot.
This appears to be a scheme either to give the already-disapproving conservative crowd one more reason not to approve or a ploy to get Harry Potter back in the eyes of the media once again.