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?
Even as a kid, the way that people were sorted into houses seemed weird and off to me. Like it is at least heavily implied that it's genetics that determine what house you get into. (Maybe this is explained further at some point, idk.) But also it's tied to character traits, but the books seem to say that these character traits are pre-determined and your house doesn't change.
So people are born with these sets of traits that don't change that determine what house they get into. The house system reinforces these differences, forces any small difference that might only matter a little to matter a lot by soft segregating people. Even if some characters in the book try to claim no house is better than others, it's pretty clear that some are. And the points system and competition between them having consistent winners and losers seem to reinforce this.
The way the house system works sounds bad when first presented, it's feels eugenicy. Instead of leaning into it and saying "see how bad this is" or making it good and work out anyway, J. K. Rowling makes it bad and says "this is how it's supposed to work, actually this is good" when it's clearly awful.
Reading it as a kid I kept expecting the house system to be a huge central conflict and for its problems to build into some huge crisis that is solved by the main characters, but instead it just stayed simmering in the background, clearly causing all these problems, but no character ever saying "this is a problem". I was very disappointed that it was never addressed.
There's a good comic just for this.
They try to handwave the unfairness of the sorting hat with the fact that Harry Potter gets to pick his house, but surely it can't go both ways, right? Harry was pure-blooded and had the opportunity to join the supremacists who undoubtedly have a majority of political and economic power, but turns down the privilege. Even if Hermione really cared about strength and loyalty or whatever, she would never be allowed in Slytherin due to the conditions of her birth. The epilogue talks about the same thing, basically praising that the system has downward social mobility
Harry wasn't even pure blooded. Neither were half the people in the wizard supremacist house. Makes no goddam sense
I mean, there has been a non-negligible number of mixed race and white-passing people who became aggressive white supremacists. It’s ultimately about creating a hierarchy with you on top.