Too toxic for the fandom hype cycle

JK Rowling Isn’t The Harry Potter Show’s Only Problem

—by Adam Bumas

The ongoing collapse of both journalism as an industry and social media as an institution means we’re in a very weird time for the hundreds of things about culture that couldn’t exist without them. Surprise music releases, relatable brand posting — all of these are still going on, but they’re having to deal with worse contradictions and bigger problems as the circumstances around them change.

You can see a great example of this if you still keep track of the press cycles for movies and TV shows based on popular nerd culture IPs. I use that term knowing how old and awkward it sounds, because it’s been a long time since the ThinkGeek and Funko eras, when seeing a real famous actor playing a cartoon character from a weird, niche fandom was exciting and rare. Now studios are having to get experimental to retain interest, with ideas like the Avengers: Doomsday chair video — if you made a meme with those chairs, BTW, congrats on your unpaid Disney marketing gig.

I don’t like getting this cynical, but it’s hard to avoid considering the current IP adaptation hype cycle for the upcoming HBO Harry Potter show. Casting announcements are coming more or less weekly now, which is standard operating procedure so the topic stays trending. And it’s absolutely working, considering how many other interviews and stories we’re getting about the show and the franchise in general. Here’s what two actors say about playing the same wizard! Here’s a guy from the movies in the Broadway show! Here’s JK Rowling using her piles of money to create a fund to oppress trans people! Wait, hang on a second…

It would already be hard to keep the marketing going for something like this under the best of circumstances. Box office for big IP movies are in a slump, and the success of A Minecraft Movie shows the nostalgia clock is ticking past the 2000s. The Harry Potter show is clearly a move to keep interest and revenue up, for both HBO and whatever they’re calling their streaming service this month. But streaming TV in general is currently losing badly to YouTube, giving us weird spectacles like HBO stablemate John Oliver taking an on-air fight with Rowling online.

Which is the real problem here: You can’t really promote anything with such an enormous, transphobic elephant in the room. Especially after this April, when the UK Supreme Court ruled against almost all legal recognition for trans people. When the ruling was announced, Rowling posted a photo of herself on her yacht with a cigar and a glass of wine, saying “I love it when a plan comes together”.

Not all her X posts are so triumphant, though. A few weeks earlier, she acknowledged the top-ten-anime-betrayal of the original Harry Potter cast members who have publicly distanced themselves from her and the franchise over her anti-trans activism.

The structure of a hype cycle isn’t built to handle someone so gleefully toxic at the very top. That’s not to say there hasn’t been structural intolerance baked into all these big productions — just last year, Inside Out 2 reportedly had an anti-gay mandate from Disney executives. And there have been unsavory subjects to avoid before, like trying to promote The Flash without acknowledging the person who plays The Flash. HBO seems to think they can use the same playbook — when asked about Rowling, HBO’s CEO Casey Bloys said, “It’s pretty clear that those are her personal, political views. She’s entitled to them. Harry Potter is not secretly being infused with anything. And if you want to debate her, you can go on Twitter.”

But JK Rowling was in a unique position culturally, long before Twitter turned her into a clapback activist, which I believe is the main driver for her ongoing descent into TERFdom. Most of these fandom IPs are either corporate productions from the start, or take decades to reach the apex of culture. Within about five years, Harry Potter went from being a manuscript by a single mother on welfare to an eight-movie series with nine-figure budgets. Rowling, that single mother, was rocketed into the spotlight with an unprecedented level of control and attention by entertainment industry standards. And unlike, say, pop stars who get big overnight, whatever she wrote would directly and immediately affect the lives and careers of hundreds of people, including dozens of child actors who would spend over a decade in the world she was creating.

Which is another consideration, one that’s getting lost in the shuffle. It was hard enough for those kids in 2000. If you’re a parent, how would you feel about your child having to deal with the fandom and media ecosystem of 2025? The new actress playing Hermione has darker skin than Emma Watson, which has led to exactly what you’d expect, from her name and “ethnicity” trending on Google, to comment sections across the internet getting locked down.

This is why all the executives, actors and so on arguing you can compartmentalize this don’t have an argument: When someone as hateful as Rowling is setting the tone, it can only get worse going on down. The woman who once compared Trump to Voldemort now says she’s “comfortable with my choice” of siding with him — how can that not impact the show, or the children who make up its main cast and theoretical target audience?

Who am I kidding, the Harry Potter show won’t be for kids. Otherwise, it might inspire the same kind of explosion of fandom that led to so many people figuring out their queer identity in the first place. Happy Pride Month!

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A Good Post

What’s Real And What’s Not: LA Edition

As the LA protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stretch into their sixth day, the coverage online is beginning to get a little fuzzy. It’s not just that right-wing influencers and trolls are spreading disinformation, it’s also that we live in such an idiotic information environment that things that feel fake actually aren’t. It’s all pretty confusing!

First, an easy one. This is an AI-generated video. It’s not real. You can tell because it looks like shit.

Next up, it may seem fake, but this X post from Homeland Security featuring a Spy Kids GIF is actually real. Making it feel even more unreal is that Homeland Security was using the Spy Kids GIF to threaten to arrest Derek Guy, the Menswear Guy, for being an illegal immigrant. I’ve seen users making the argument that the Denny’s Tumblr is patient zero for the new fascist brand accounts being run by the Trump regime, which I think is half right. I think everything changed — like everything maybe across all of media and adverting — with the Oreos Super Bowl blackout tweet in 2013.

Anyway, this TikTok of a Marine eating a bowl of unidentified mush in his car while threatening protesters doesn’t appear to actually be about LA at all. It’s from April and it seems like it was just a weird guy filming a video in his car.

Lastly, Jack Quillin, the man behind the LA Scanner X account that was tracking ICE movement, has taken the account down. But there is not an arrest warrant out for him as some users have claimed. But he is now being doxxed.

Elon Musk Apologized For His Massive Crashout, Does Not Explain If He Still Thinks President Trump Is A Pedophile

Well, it’s not exactly a massive apology, but it’s definitely a big step back. “I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far,” Musk wrote on X last night.

A lot of his biggest reply guys are more than a little confused about this. Especially since Musk has not clarified if he still believes that Trump is on the Epstein list. Even more perplexing, @IfindRetards, an account long-believed to belong to Musk — though it’s still unconfirmed — replied to his Trump apology post, writing, “Well done, we all have our moments of retardation. Good on you for posting this.” Which, if that is a Musk alt, is even more confusing than all the Epstein stuff.

Building A Brain For The World

OpenAI’s Sam Altman published a blog post yesterday that has sent the internet’s various AI dorks into a tizzy. It’s titled “The Gentle Singularity,” and it, honestly, is very long and doesn’t say all that much. Should have asked ChatGPT to give it a once over, I guess.

But the bulk of the essay is arguing that once companies like OpenAI build “a brain for the world,” the only people who will come out on top are “ideas guys,” because everything else will be automated. This is pretty typical for Altman. A few years ago he shrewdly zeroed in on a very unique marketing strategy, one that’s, honestly, perfectly illustrated by the concept of a “gentle singularity.” He likes to take fairly dystopian, cataclysmic science fiction concepts, claim his company will cause them and that they will be as destabilizing as you think they’ll be, and then kindly offer people a guide for navigating them. “Look, if you listen to me and just change your entire life, you’ll be able to survive the revolution that I’ve decided is inevitable.”

The other thing worth highlighting here, behind propaganda, is that the concept of a “brain for the world,” is extremely similar to the mistake that the previous internet era’s tech moguls made. Companies like Meta and Google also believed that they could connect the whole world under one technology and everything would be fine. It wasn’t then and it won’t be now with AI. But I guess we have to do this whole dance a few more times before everyone realizes it won’t work.

MatPat Goes To Washington

Matthew Robert Patrick, or MatPat, as hundreds of thousands of zillennials know him as, is a former YouTuber who just helped launch the Creator Economy Caucus. It’s a bipartisan project inside the House of Representatives meant, as Patrick wrote, “to make ensure creators are respected and seen as the legitimate businesses that they are to ensure that this ecosystem thrives for decades to come.”

This is long overdue if you ask me, and not just because I am technically a “creator.” There are about 1.5 million Americans making a living as full-time creators as of 2025. And that number is growing every year.

We need regulation for the platforms these businesses operate on. We need better protections for the business owners trying to make a living. And, my god, we desperately need an easier way to do our taxes.

Will You Be Hitting The Cough Dance At A Party This Summer?

@h00pify

Will You Be Hitting The Cough Dance At A Party This Summer? #coughdance #merrickhanna #coughdancechallenge #merrickhannaedit #merrickcough... See more

Some Stray Links

• “Why Do Dads Watch TV Standing Up?”

• “The Democrats Are Giving Up On Going High”

P.S. here’s an incredible scene from Bushwick.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***