ileolai
Remember when Ursula K. Le Guin called JK Rowling a nasty basic bitch back in like, 2004? We should have listened
legok9
“This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter. I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H.White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn’t plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.“
i found the specific quote i was thinking of x
Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style
UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
damn gurl :’]
airyairyaucontraire
Yeah, but the fact that JK Rowling was massively overrated as a fantasy writer and the fact JK Rowling has terrible opinions about transgender people are completely unrelated. People who didn’t like her books never liked her books (I never liked her books) and we certainly didn’t have any inside line on her prejudices. We just had the benefit of not being primed to feel personally disappointed and hurt when she made them public.
People are feeling personally disappointed and hurt, and feeling like they were dumb not to have realised this was someone who would disappoint and hurt them, and casting about for the warning signs that they must have missed, what they should have spotted so that they would not have wasted their feelings of love, trust and respect. If only they hadn’t bothered. But “her books just weren’t that shit-hot and it was all rather annoying” was never a red flag for her personal views.
