The ethics of enjoying large collaborative works of art and entertainment

[zompist]

This position is equivalent to "if some people did things that should land them in jail, then who is pure enough not to be sent to jail?"

Or maybe, more simply, you just happen to approve of transphobia and think it's a minor problem. At least try to understand that for many of us, transphobia really is as bad as other forms of bigotry, and we are not under any obligation to financially support it.

I never said I approved of J.K. Rowling or what she stands for (I don't), I was simply saying that once you start deciding that certain creator's works out to be rejected/canceled/burnt/<your participle of choice>, you have to decide on a line where some creators' work are to be rejected/canceled/burnt/<your participle of choice> where others are not.

Yes, like any moral question whatsoever, you have to make some decisions. Is this hard for you to accept in other domains? You're not supposed to harm other people— if this goes so far as murdering them, you go to jail. But not every harm gets you put in jail. If you can figure that out, why is it suddenly impossible to decide which authors not to support?

Also, are your bookshelves littered with books by Hitler, Lenin, Moldbug, Newt Gingrich, and Ayn Rand? I'm guessing no. You chose not to support these people by buying their books. Travis rhetoric: OMIGOD YOU THREW THEM IN A FIRE. Real situation: you didn't buy their damned books. Stop escalating rhetoric to make not buying books sound like a crime.

[xxx]

ok moral purity is a joke
like Harry Potter's transphobia,
or Tintin's racism,
it's just agitprop by manipulated activists....

meanwhile, capitalism laughs,
dividends flow freely
and the planet sinks under the kerosene of its jet-setters...

ok non-productive sexuality may be a solution,
but a solution to what,
to a better turpitudinal sex life of the upper class,
that imposes this ridiculous newspeak,
or to cancel the thought crimes of the too prolific working class,
in a world without work to feed it,
even of artworks...

I dunno, but something's not quite right,
and yet it's happening faster and faster...

[Travis B.]

This position is equivalent to "if some people did things that should land them in jail, then who is pure enough not to be sent to jail?"

Or maybe, more simply, you just happen to approve of transphobia and think it's a minor problem. At least try to understand that for many of us, transphobia really is as bad as other forms of bigotry, and we are not under any obligation to financially support it.

I never said I approved of J.K. Rowling or what she stands for (I don't), I was simply saying that once you start deciding that certain creator's works out to be rejected/canceled/burnt/<your participle of choice>, you have to decide on a line where some creators' work are to be rejected/canceled/burnt/<your participle of choice> where others are not.

Yes, like any moral question whatsoever, you have to make some decisions. Is this hard for you to accept in other domains? You're not supposed to harm other people— if this goes so far as murdering them, you go to jail. But not every harm gets you put in jail. If you can figure that out, why is it suddenly impossible to decide which authors not to support?

The difference between sending people to jail and rejecting a creator's works is that the former is (at least supposed to be) guided by laws whereas the latter is subject to individuals' moral judgements, which can be far more fickle than the rule of law (at least in theory). Take the canceling of Richard M. Stallman for instance - he did nothing illegal at all, but was hounded out of the FSF for expressing some unpopular opinions (some of which were largely misunderstood, and then amplified by certain individuals' social media megaphones, in the first place). One does not get a fair trial in the court of public opinion.

Also, are your bookshelves littered with books by Hitler, Lenin, Moldbug, Newt Gingrich, and Ayn Rand? I'm guessing no. You chose not to support these people by buying their books. Travis rhetoric: OMIGOD YOU THREW THEM IN A FIRE. Real situation: you didn't buy their damned books. Stop escalating rhetoric to make not buying books sound like a crime.

Yes, I didn't buy J.K. Rowling's books, not because of her transphobia but because they didn't really fit my tastes (Harry Potter was popular long before her transphobia really came out of the woodwork). But remember how this thread got started - people who did enjoy works by various people, be they J.K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman, and now finding themselves wanting to be rid of them, either because they personally cannot stand the idea of liking something created by someone morally objectionable, or because they see other people thinking such. Yes, they might not be physically burning their copies of Harry Potter or The Sandman, but the same logic applies.

[xxx]

a witch hunt doesn't end with a book burning,
it ends with a witch burning...

[Ketsuban]

It's a minor point, but how is this worse than (for example) calling a working-class girl in a novel set in Victorian London Molly, or a random not-very-important male character John Smith, or giving a river a name which just means "Long RIver"?

The criticism of "Cho Chang" as I understand it is that Rowling intended a generically "ethnic" name as part of giving the background cast of her books a veneer of diversity but didn't bother to specify anything about the character's background (which might suggest an onomastic tradition to follow) or do any research into East Asian communities in the UK, and thus ended up with a name that has more in common with racist imitations of Chinese than anything else. (The Chinese translation opted to render the name as 張秋 Zhāng Qiū, if you're interested.) That said, there is more to it (going into how the character reflects Orientalist tendencies in English-language writing more broadly) which I am ill-equipped to even summarise, let alone discuss.

As for "Castelobruxo" and "Mahoutokoro", they're just the result of lazily scaling out from a story that only ultimately concerned the United Kingdom written by a British author for a British audience (and wasn't particularly good at representing other nations as well-rounded or diverse even then - French critics have not been kind to the portrayal of Beauxbatons).

• The former is supposed to be the name for a school covering both Hispanophone and Lusophone South and Central America; it's a compound of the Portuguese words castelo "castle" and bruxo "wizard".
• The latter is supposed to be the name for a school covering damn near the entirety of the continent of Asia; it's a compound of the Japanese words mahou "magic" and tokoro "place".

Both are formed by taking two words out of a dictionary and slamming them together with no regard for the languages being exploited (the latter in particular is according to ancillary material pronounced "mə-hoot-ə-koh-roh"!) or the people who speak them (or don't - we're supposed to accept that a single school with a "Japanese" name educates the children of the wizard populations of the entirety of South and East Asia).

[xxx]

and what did you expect in a novel for young people about the high school years,
if not the usual recipes, and the reflection of the rebellious sheep-like mentality of teenagers...
it's also a kind of regressive nostalgia that allows adults to read them without displeasure,
in truth it's these "flaws" that make it so good...

[zompist]

The criticism of "Cho Chang" as I understand it is that Rowling intended a generically "ethnic" name as part of giving the background cast of her books a veneer of diversity but didn't bother to specify anything about the character's background (which might suggest an onomastic tradition to follow) or do any research into East Asian communities in the UK, and thus ended up with a name that has more in common with racist imitations of Chinese than anything else. (The Chinese translation opted to render the name as 張秋 Zhāng Qiū, if you're interested.)

This one doesn't seem terrible to me... given the vagaries of Chinese transliteration, especially among immigrants, almost anything goes. I read a couple of online discussions of this, and it feels like a lot of people are way out of their depth. "Cho" seems to strike Mandarin speakers as bad; on the other hand, the character's actual ethnicity is never specified; she may not even be Chinese. I do think "Cho" is a misstep given that asking an actual Chinese person would have been easy. The ethnic bits in the books I read didn't go beyond names, but that isn't necessarily unrealistic-- they're all British kids.

As for "Castelobruxo" and "Mahoutokoro", they're just the result of lazily scaling out from a story that only ultimately concerned the United Kingdom written by a British author for a British audience (and wasn't particularly good at representing other nations as well-rounded or diverse even then - French critics have not been kind to the portrayal of Beauxbatons).

• The former is supposed to be the name for a school covering both Hispanophone and Lusophone South and Central America; it's a compound of the Portuguese words castelo "castle" and bruxo "wizard".
• The latter is supposed to be the name for a school covering damn near the entirety of the continent of Asia; it's a compound of the Japanese words mahou "magic" and tokoro "place".

Both are formed by taking two words out of a dictionary and slamming them together with no regard for the languages being exploited

These sound pretty awkward to me. "Magic place" is a dumb name, but even as is, shouldn't it be more like maho no basho? The Portuguese is even worse... there are just not that many castles in Latin America, and "bruxo" is a noun... should be "castelo dos bruxos" or something.

I recall the other wizarding schools being pretty cringey.

[xxx]

The criticism of "Cho Chang" as I understand it is that Rowling intended a generically "ethnic" name as part of giving the background cast of her books a veneer of diversity but didn't bother to specify anything about the character's background (which might suggest an onomastic tradition to follow) or do any research into East Asian communities in the UK, and thus ended up with a name that has more in common with racist imitations of Chinese than anything else. (The Chinese translation opted to render the name as 張秋 Zhāng Qiū, if you're interested.)

This one doesn't seem terrible to me... given the vagaries of Chinese transliteration, especially among immigrants, almost anything goes. I read a couple of online discussions of this, and it feels like a lot of people are way out of their depth. "Cho" seems to strike Mandarin speakers as bad; on the other hand, the character's actual ethnicity is never specified; she may not even be Chinese. I do think "Cho" is a misstep given that asking an actual Chinese person would have been easy. The ethnic bits in the books I read didn't go beyond names, but that isn't necessarily unrealistic-- they're all British kids

Cho Chang is not unrealistic in Korea...
and if you test the onomastics of any novel,
including adult ones, there's not much to complain about...
all these polemics are borderline gags,
if they didn't have non-academic consequences...

[dɮ the phoneme]

These sound pretty awkward to me. "Magic place" is a dumb name, but even as is, shouldn't it be more like maho no basho?

It actually sort of seems fine; I would expect either mahoudokoro (with rendaku; cf. daidokoro "kitchen"), or mahousho/mahoujo (same kanji, just with onyomi instead of kunyomi).

[Ares Land]

Reports of witch hunts are much exaggerated. As far as I can see, J.K Rowling is doing just fine.
I haven't gotten rid of her books or of the movies, and so far nobody has demanded I do so. I feel sad about her descent into crankery though.

I really don't see anything wrong with the original HP series, and I still think they're pretty great. "Cho Chang" does feel a little lazy; Beauxbatons was I think satire of the English-French rivalry, and I took it as such. There's kind of a subplot about the British being a little bigoted about the French, who actually turn out okay and I think that wasn't badly done.

The other names are from later works, and frankly these turned out very disappointing. Coincidentally, so did Rowling's politics. (Is it politics though? More like a deep dive into conspiracy theories.) Maybe this is consistent -- it all looks like nobody's really dared contradict the lady in the past twenty years or so.

I don't get rid of works by people I dislike; in fact I don't really see the point, but people feeling bad about them is perfectly understandable. I won't get rid of my Sandman comic books or Amanda Palmer records, but I sure feel a bit weird about them.

[zompist]

all these polemics are borderline gags,
if they didn't have non-academic consequences...

Have you found the stupidest thing yet to troll about?

Oh noes, JK Rowling might face non-academic consequences, with only her $1.1 billion fortune to console her.

[Raphael]

ok moral purity is a joke
like Harry Potter's transphobia,
or Tintin's racism,
it's just agitprop by manipulated activists....

[...]

ok non-productive sexuality may be a solution,
but a solution to what,
to a better turpitudinal sex life of the upper class,

Always fun to see someone complain about "agitprop by manipulated activists", and then, in the very same posts, express ridiculous hangups about people having sex. You know what's really "just agitprop by manipulated activists"? Complaining about "non-productive sexuality".

[xxx]

Have you found the stupidest thing yet to troll about?

this thread is a whole trolling thing...

with this thing of debunking idols,
in order to regain a shred of credibility, for misappropriated moral causes,
could just as easily enable us, to detach ourselves from :
- Tintin, (racism)
- Harry Potter, (transphobia)
- Foundation and Robots, (women harassment)
- Alice in Wonderland, (pedophilia)
- Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, (women harassment)
- the US Constitution, (slavery)
- the Theory of Relativity, (women harassment)
- the Bible (all these motives at the same time)
- ...

[Raholeun]

I find myself in agreement with xxx, either y'all be trolling, or 'tis in earnest and we should have the intellectual honesty to take the argument to its logical conclusion.

Starting with historical assholes; Socrates was such a jerk that one might think the true reason for his conviction was not his presumed impiety. As evidenced in the Dialogues, he constantly went about town belittling people, mocking them and he often puts the blame on others for faults of his own. The dialogues are full of Socrates flaunting his superiority complex. He annoyed the shit out of his contemporaries. And in addition to behaving in an offensive manner there are numerous modern sensitivities he offends; he is a pederast, using his authority to molest and sodomize star-struck, vulnerable young lads. He is an outspoken enemy of democracy. Slaves? Oh boy... I can go on.

Now, surely this is enough fodder for us to discard Socrates' legacy? By association we cancel Plato and western philosophy subsequently?

[Raphael]

Given that Socrates has been dead for a while, it's not really possible to financially support him or enable him to abuse anyone anymore.

[xxx]

as zompist said, for HP,
I don't think JKR has any prejudice
from the loss of earnings from this boycott,
so...

all we have to gain from it is self Newspeakisation,
to of the past let us wipe the slate clean
and create an idiocracy for the future...

[Raholeun]

Given that Socrates has been dead for a while, it's not really possible to financially support him or enable him to abuse anyone anymore.

Evidently, his legacy lives on and is propagated when you buy the new edition of the translated works. Let us say I pirate the collected cinematography of Woody Allen and seed on some torrent platform, thereby outdoing mister Konigsberg of his royalty payments, would that undo his films of their deontological stains?

[Ares Land]

I find myself in agreement with xxx, either y'all be trolling, or 'tis in earnest and we should have the intellectual honesty to take the argument to its logical conclusion.

In all cases? I mean, yeah, every ten years or so, someone rediscovers Tintin in the Congo and buys their fifteen minutes of fame and that's extremely annoying. But read up, for instance, on the Polanski case. How is a famous filmmaker getting away with rape?
Or, if like me, you've read a few comic books or novels by Gaiman and found him a thoughtful and talented man, isn't it a little shocking to learn about the sexual assaults?

[xxx]

I agree talent should not be an excuse for not answering for one's actions,
but even a convict can produce valuable work that deserves to be appreciated...
and, I find it inappropriate to play the vigilante following hearsay,
about which I have no direct information, at least not in a lynch-mob style...

[WeepingElf]

Knowing that an artist holds (or held) controversial opinions makes it somewhat harder to me to appreciate their work, but as long as those controversial opinions are not expressed in the work in question, I still can appreciate that work. For instance, Richard Wagner is well known to have been a German nationalist and an antisemite (which probably was the main reason why he was Hitler's favourite composer), but that doesn't mean that his operas ought to be banned. Wagner is not my favourite composer, though, but not as much due to his antisemitic statements or to Hitler liking him, but because I feel that most of his operas are too pompous to my taste (which, however, may have something to do with his nationalist mindset, but then, such pompousness was just typical of his time), and my music taste lies elsewhere. Yet, I do consider Wagner's operas works of great artistic value and importance to the history of music, even if I there are things about them I do not like.