a trans girl friend send it to me and we were mutually of the exact same two thoughts
1 - this did not happen, this is "after I came back from vietnam" level shit
2 - if it DID happen, Rowling's social skills are so eroded she genuinely thinks she made a point being weird and uncomfortable
she’s fell off. i don’t think harry potter has the timelessness of a lot of what we now call young adult books but the first few were decent enough boarding school novels that got bad and her fiction writing was awful but it keeps getting worse
I know her books were really important to a lot of people, and very genuinely I do not mean to shit on them. That whole phenomenon hit just a little bit late for me but if that had been different I would very likely been super into it.
But her writing has really never been very good.
It's just good enough that people who haven't read a lot of good writers won't think about it too much. For me it was the first book series I ever gave up on. People hyped it so much, yet it was decidedly average with some way too annoying and grating plot points.
I recall finishing the last one and just going "huh, okay" as a kid because I didn't know how to express how boring it was reading about them listening to NPR for a chapter was
Oh I was all in, I'm not gonna front at all, but I was also a teenager giving it the "well I'm sure all the weird stuff will make sense in the conclusion!" as I bounced against Snape killing Dumbledore
