I'm not just talking about her being a TERF specifically (I know she was liking various transphobic tweets long before she was officially outed), but also her just being super shitty and neolib in general even by normal lib standards.
I've heard it goes back as far as the Harry Potter books themselves which, full disclosure, I haven't read for myself (Seen all the movies tho). I've heard from people who have tho that there's apparently shit in them like a subplot mocking Hermione for trying to stand up for House-elf rights (Who don't want to be free anyway of course) and Harry basically becoming a cop at the end (As part of the organization that pretty much just allowed Voldemort and the Death Eaters to take control again).
But to me personally, in hindsight, the moment when alarms really should've been going off is when she lazily retconned Dumbledore as being gay and Hermione as being black while acting like she totally intended those characters to be that way from the beginning.
Obviously the problem isn't them actually being gay or black, it's that it's very transparent in this case that she just wanted brownie points and pats on the back for having diverse characters without actually having to do any of the work.
I'm not saying every time Dumbledore/Hermione were in a scene that they needed to go "Say Harry, have I mentioned that I'm homosexual/of African descent today?", but you'd think those aspects of themselves would at the very least be alluded to at least once in the span of 7 fuckin' books.
The fact readers could go through the whole series and never notice those supposed aspects of the characters says it all imo.
(Also, in Hermione's case specifically, you think she would have said something about Emma Watson being cast as her and not a black actress if she really did have that planned all the way back then.)
Anything else I missed? Perhaps from actual Harry Potter readers that know something I don't?
Hermione’s activism thing had potential in that it was a way for Hermione to overcome a character flaw (being arrogant). She “protested” in the way that you would expect a 13-year-old British girl who’d grown up seeing her parents be mildly politically active might. She did not ask the house elves what they wanted or include them in her plans. Her demands were a vague “bad things are bad”. Her demonstrations were literally a single person shouting slogans. TLDR: Hermione’s a lib and it would have been nice to see her grow out of it.
But in the end iirc it’s more just played up for laughs and dismissed. It theoretically culminates in the death of Dobby, who is much more present in the books, but her work does little in the end. A big tell: Dumbledore handsomely pays the only house elf who’d thought to ask for a wage upon first request. All the slaves just forgot to ask because they love working so much 😬
Rowling’s world was frankly begging for a more political plot, but it ended up with a shallow Fascism Bad aesthetic. Its explorations of power are basically that wielding power isn’t a good idea (but also some people are naturally talented and the people who are popular in high school should run society)