Wait, there were Lemmy stickers?

Also they have a Matrix room, you can maybe ask there: https://matrix.to/#/#infodesk:fosdem.org

Good question. They have a Youtube channel, but don’t seem to use it that much: https://www.youtube.com/@fosdemtalks/videos

Nice that you enjoyed it!

Interesting, I’ve seen it on other instances too

The core text of Harry potter itself has many ableist (Durdsley), racist (House elves enjoying slavery) , antisemitic (goblins) and transphobic (Rita Skeeter) themes even if it surface level against racism.

That’s the first time I hear the treatment of Rita Skeeter is transphobic. James, Sirius and McGonagall are also able to shapeshift, and they are positive characters in the books.

For the house elves, the whole SPEW plot is designed to both make Ron (and the whole Wizard word as a whole) look stupid and bigoted, and Hermione a bit too self-righteous, as teenagers can be.

Relevant reference: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/122283/why-did-rowling-seemingly-make-light-of-the-house-elf-situation

I’ve seen several times that the fact that the society isn’t changed by the end of the last book as a critic, but do all work of fictions have to uphold their societies? Game of Thrones definitely isn’t becoming a democracy during the books, and Brigderton is as classist as it can be.

Hello,

You can see some initiatives that take the books away from her, such as this one

A trans artist resells Harry Potter books with new covers that omit Rowling’s name. Canadian printmaker and book artist Laur Flom, who is trans, garnered major attention when they began a project of buying secondhand Harry Potter books and replacing the covers with redesigned versions that don’t have J.K. Rowling’s name. Flom then resells the books for £140, according to Yahoo! News. In a TikTok from February 2022, Flom said, “My aim with this project is to engage critically and give an option to people who do still want to enjoy Harry Potter without supporting J.K. Rowling.”

https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy

A link to the version from this person, they look quite nice: https://laurflom.format.com/harry-potter-rebind

You mentioned legislation, I think that is an interesting point. If the books (and the HP universe in general) are so detrimental, shouldn’t they be condemned by countries court for xenophobia and transphobia? It seems strange to me that there are still 2 major amusement parks Harry Potter themed in the US, and a third one in London if you count the former shooting set, with thousands of visitors every year. That just seems so strange compared to the accusations the books face.

I don’t understand how you interpret this to think he approves. Twice now it seems like you are just reaching for “another person said it was okay” without really digesting what they said. Where exactly did they say they were okay with this community? It seems like they very much said the opposite.

I reached out to him in private, I wasn’t going to copy our conversation as it is private.

I was very ready to move that community elsewhere, and I refrained from posting for a week before getting Gabe’s approval.

The admin of the instance we host the community on is a queer Jewish man, who expressed his feeling about having that community on his instance in this comment: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/6746512

He is still okay with us having that community over there.

That’s an interesting theory. He literally comes out of a closet, after all.

Hello,

Thank you for your comment. That’s one of our main threads, “On the sensitive topic of being a Harry Potter fan while acknowledging JKR’s transphobia” https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/9633657, quoting https://www.popsugar.co.uk/entertainment/harry-potter-fans-jk-rowling-transphobia-essay-49214964

Still, there may be a way to enjoy Harry Potter as a trans person or ally. Over the years, many fans have found creative ways to engage with the series’s magic while also acknowledging its creator’s bigotry. In her paper “Transformative Readings: Harry Potter Fan Fiction, Trans/Queer Reader Response, and J. K. Rowling,” Jennifer Duggan, an associate professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway — says that it’s possible to interpret the text of Harry Potter itself in ways that would certainly horrify its writer. “My central thesis—one which has also been argued by other academics like Thomas Pugh and David Wallace — is that the Harry Potter novels are deeply queer,” she tells POPSUGAR. “I mean this in both senses of the term: they champion nonnormativity through the contrast of the ‘perfectly normal’ Dursleys and Harry, and they are, at their heart, a story about a boy with an ‘abnormality’ (as the Dursleys call his magic) who comes out of his cupboard under the stairs and discovers and finds and affinity for a hidden, colourful, queer world. I take this argument further to argue that the novels are easily read through a trans lens, since there is a focus in many of the books on shapeshifting, including several cross-gendered transformations.”

Fandom, she adds, can provide spaces where Harry Potter fans can explore the series’s queer undercurrents while celebrating their own sexualities. “From what I have observed, I have concluded that for the most part, the Harry Potter fandom continues to offer queer and trans fans a positive space,” she tells POPSUGAR. “The two main trends I have seen in fan works are an ‘answer hate with love’ reaction, in which fans focus on trans positivity, and so-called ‘spitefic,’ which are works that are framed as revenge on Rowling for the hurt she has caused. These works are usually trans-positive, too. That said, I fully understand why some fans feel they can no longer engage with the texts in any way.”

Link to the research paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10583-021-09446-9

Small promotion for !harrypotter@literature.cafe

We are now at 43k, so definitely not maximizing

Interesting,thanks for sharing

I meant hardcore leftists

The PDev version is better anyway.

I have a few communities that are still on .ml, I forgot you guys were defederated, maybe I should move them elsewhere

.ml is okay to discuss Linux, the overlap between the two communities makes sense

Sure unless your instance is defederated, we need more ways to control the content without relying on defederation

Hopefully defederation will happen less and less with 19.X allowing users to block instances themselves

I’m in plenty of communities where there are lots of low value posts that would normally be consolidated into a single stickied post for the community but there isn’t a large enough userbase to make a stickied post worthwhile despite there being multiple communities for that topic.

Any examples of those? What prevents those communities from merging?

I do think it would be nice if there was a way for community mods to choose to combine two communities across instances,

If they are willing to cooperate that far, they could as well merge the communities