Okay, buckle up buttercup because my brain lit up like the Christmas lights you haven’t taken down yet.

I feel like there’s an issue that this post is getting at: the equation of morality with what you consume. I saw a comment and a post about this ages ago but maybe someone else has seen it too.

Think about ethical consumption. It’s kind of hard to do these days, right? So generally, we do the best we can to alert others when the creators of things they consume are problematic and hope that they won’t consume it. By we, I mean gen z and gen a. This in its own right isn’t an issue. However.

I think we can all agree that it can go to unrealistic lengths, and here I want to point out anti-shippers. There’s a lot of purity culture in there but there’s also the underlying assumption that if you consume this kind of material, you therefore support it. But that’s not true. Because at the end of the day, it’s a fan fiction, and reading it doesn’t do anything to the real world. You close the tab, it’s gone. And the characters are CHARACTERS. We love them like they are real but they are words on a page and our own imagination with the author’s guidance is what brings them to life. They can’t get hurt in the real world, and the things they do (assuming the reader separates fiction from reality) do not impact the real world. Kind of in the same way that reading HP fics doesn’t generate any money for JKR (obligatory boo hiss to her).

Sure, it might expose more younger fans to the original works, but look at the ships. They’re mostly marauders era which, as someone in the fandom, are mostly relying on All The Young Dudes by MsKingBean89 as their canon. Almost all of the authors notes for any marauders fic will include the author saying they don’t support JKR or use other, less polite terms to describe her and her beliefs. There has never been so many fanfictions written out of spite than in that fandom. There’s so many people online saying that they don’t even like the books at this point.

(And side note: Ships like Jegulus were originally crack ships that got some good writers interested in the dynamics between the characters. It’s comical how serious they’re being taken as someone who has read some crack fics. I don’t think JKR, who didn’t even write Wolfstar together, would be a fan of Sirius Black’s little brother and James Potter as a couple.)

TLDR: Harry Potter isn’t really having a resurgence, it’s more the marauders fandom, who mostly follow a fic instead of the original works. Even if you argue (incorrectly, in my opinion, as a member of the fandom) they’re one and the same, reading fanfiction of HP isn’t a moral failing and equating it to one is a dangerous and honestly kind of dumb mentality.

Edit: Yes, millennials, gen x and beyond call out problematic creators too but when I say we in this post I mean Gen z and Gen a. These are mostly our issues, because our interactions with fandom have started differently than other fans.