While we're at it, as someone with a broken doorbell, I'm getting damn sick of knock-knock jokes. NOBODY UNDERSTANDS MY STRUGGLE.

"For years they committed a treason of birth control in this country, seeking to dry up our bloodline. Lineage is very important both economically and spiritually,"

Yeah, I feel the exact same way about the queerbating (only I wasn't sure if you could queerbate after the fact) and the having her cake and eating it too, like, idk, it kind of feels like she's trying to get points for not being homophobic and she didn't write any LGBT characters and she had a ton of opportunities to…

Dude, I'm not saying it has to be in the book, or that Rowling has shirked some innate duty to be ultra inclusive in her writing. I've said elsewhere in the thread that I think the books are huge successes at being exactly what they try to be, and that I have no actual beef with her leaving out what she left out. This…

Sorry, I accidentally hit "publish" well before finishing that comment, so you've responded to an incomplete version of it here. The finished one is up now.

Of course half the people at Hogwarts drove a Ferrari F40! Because you can say anything you want AFTER you wrote your book to add to it to try and pull in more sales!

Really disappointed with what amounts to defending erasure. That's not cool. I don't care if Rowling said it, I don't care if it's meant to be subtext. I care that it's not depicted, it's not included, and she wants to claim inclusivity.

That's bullshit. It tells me that the straight actions are suitable for the page,…

I mean, she's hardly going to say no to that question.

I'm not saying there weren't black characters, I'm saying it's not comparable to the X-Men in terms of diversity and the roles of minority characters.
Rowling puts minority characters in the background. Yeah, Dumbledore was gay, but Rowling never addressed that in the books. But, even in the 70's and 80's Mystique's…

If I have to imagine queer and trans* back-stories for characters that are the equivalent of background tabula rasas, that's probably a good sign that the creator(s) of a work aren't exactly big on representation.

As a giant queer, I never found Dumbledore's orientation clear. The announcement of it was a farce. I guess if I had just squinted a little harder whilst reading ...

And yet we saw plenty of people being explicitly straight.

How so?

I am a diehard HP fan, but there is no real argument to counter the fact that LGBTQ people are not well represented in the Harry Potter books, they just are not. In fact, they are not well represented in most mainstream literature, so it's understandable that members of the LGBTQ community would feel upset by this. I…

Look at it in a broader sense: gay characters in children's media are almost non-existent. You say Rowling could have chosen to include unambiguous gay characters if she wanted... but she didn't include them. And neither does any other prominent creator of children's media.

I don't really mind an author saying "gay people exist in this story universe", but it's so weird, I mean, isn't it kind of a given? If the world is like ours and has people like ours, of course gay people exist.

I think magic changes the power dynamic for women. Magic doesn't require brute strength or more muscle to work. Historically IRL, any woman seen as dangerous, too cunning, too powerful, too unwilling to go with the status quo, was called a witch.

You can say it, but you can also say there were robots in Hamlet's Denmark, they just weren't in the plays. It makes about as much sense.

You can include gay characters without focusing on homophobia. X-Men, while not focusing so much on racism and sexism, still managed to include black and female characters.

Ah, more retroactive continuity that she's decided to add years after the last book was printed because she didn't have the balls to put it in when she was rolling in the sweet, sweet paychecks.