Can the Harry Potter fandom carry on while ignoring J.K. Rowling?

polygon.com:

Harry Potter is truly the fandom that lived. Hogwarts Legacy, the latest big-budget entry in the 26-year-old franchise, grossed over $1 billion as of May, selling 15 million copies — despite a number of outlets declining to cover it, citing Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling’s history of making transphobic statements. It’s highly rated by players and supports a thriving ecosystem of streamers and fans. Likewise, the award-winning Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play has broken records for weekly grosses around the world. The franchise is even getting a TV reboot.

Despite numerous newer additions to the franchise, including the latest underperforming installment of the Fantastic Beastsspinoff series, the core canon of the original books and movies is still the center of the lives of hundreds of thousands of fans. In various corners of the internet, sequestered from uncaring or judgmental eyes by bespoke algorithms and obscure codenames, Harry Potterfans are thriving — producing as many fan works as ever, with that same familiar fever pitch I remember from my days waiting in line for the next book release.

Dipping a toe back into HP fandom for the first time in years can, for a fan of the old school, prove a little disorienting. The depth of contemporary fans’ obsession is entirely familiar, and yet also bewildering. These fans are shipping characters I don’t remember being canon (who’s Daphne Greengrass?!) or writing fic in the form of TikTok video snippets, voiced by a realistic ElevenLabs AI of Tom Felton’s Draco Malfoy.

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