My mind is going off again on that one personal ethical struggle I have.

Which wouldn’t really be much of a struggle anyplace else but Tumblr.

And it isn’t even really a struggle here. It’s just me overthinking, extrapolating Tumblr Discourse to what seems like a logical conclusion– but a conclusion that I’ve never seen actual Tumblr discourse take it to.

And I’ve talked about all this before. But I’ve been hesitant to lay it all out before in this much detail.

Cuz when I’ve discussed it before, in less depth, I’ve gotten replies arguing points that I already addressed in the post.

If people weren’t even gonna fully read a whole shorter post before trying to argue with me, I can only imagine how much trouble I’m getting myself into writing a longer one.

But … well, I have no sense.

So here it is.

I’m not a fan of JK Rowling or any of her work.

But I am a fan of a specific property owned by Disney.

…

And Disney is not better than JK Rowling.

…

Disney is different from JK Rowling… because Disney is a corporation and not an individual. 

This causes several differences, of varying amounts of significance. Including the following:

1.

A corporation can do much more damage than an individual, because it has more money and more power, and can exist for a longer time.

This is how Disney has done so much more harm than JKR on so many levels. This includes contributing money to support harmful legislation. It includes actively taking legal action to bring about harmful legislation. It includes shaping the culture, people’s views on the rights of marginalized groups, and social expectations of every kind, through vast control over entertainment and other media we have access to, starting from childhood. 

…Not that Disney ever had some grand evil plan for raising a generation of Americans to be bigoted in a particular way, out of sheer malice. No. Disney’s decisions, like most business decisions, are made one at a time, each based on what’s currently profitable, or believed to be.

It’s just that… this rarely overlaps very much with what’s good for people.

It usually overlaps with what’ll just reinforce the biases that the audience is already comfortable with– for as much of the audience as possible.

And Disney has always been very good at this. Which is part of how they’ve become so successful. But it’s also part of how they have significantly worsened pretty much every societal and political problem in the United States.

I doubt this country would be in nearly as bad a mess right now without them.

But it’s hard to even know. Because their influence is so huge, at this point, that the specifics of a world without them are beyond any attempt at theorizing.

2.

A corporation can escape blame for any harm it does, by having whole departments dedicated to public image.

Disney has unbelievably successful PR teams. Disney can spend all day making choices that increase racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, inequality, and societal harm of all kinds all over the world…. and their PR teams will still make sure their most nominal, performative little gestures of goodwill take the whole center stage, forcing everything else they do into invisibility. 

They can build a whole franchise on stolen work and exploited employees and draconian updates they’ve forced into federal law… and all the controversy they’ll get will be over some little two-second scene of an ambiguously-queer background character.

And the only two publicized sides of the debate will be, “So brave! So revolutionary!” and “Abomination against Traditional Values!” Disney will always come out of it looking good, with the critics looking unhinged and unreasonable.

JKR doesn’t even try to do this. Her bigoted opinions are out in the open, not glossed over with the most universally palatable public statements a spin doctor can write.

Her actions aren’t worse, they’re just more obvious. That’s the difference between her and Disney.

3.

A corporation can also escape blame for harm just by consisting of many people and many systems, thus spreading the harm out.

The public likes to get angry at individuals. When a vast amount of harm is done by a system instead of by an individual, there is less anger– even when the harm is greater– because each individual is responsible for fairly little harm.

This is where we see the defense “You should support this Disney movie, because there are good people working on it!” Which is insidious in several ways.

Every one of those good people is doing work that ultimately brings money to the Disney corporation. And that money will be used to worsen laws and government and society even more.

But at the same time, those same people may also be creating something that truly is good in many ways. And none of them, individually, are doing anything nearly as harmful as what a powerful bigot like JKR can do.

And we’re also conscious of the fact that these artists don’t have many other options in their field besides working for Disney– and that Disney does not treat its employees well.

So, in the end, we mostly just feel sympathy for them. And this manifests in a desire to support them.

Ideally, “supporting” them should mean weakening Disney’s monopoly so that they’ll have a chance to work someplace else.

But, since they work for Disney right now, we don’t think of that. All we see is that a boycott could hurt them in the near term.

Thousands of acts of “working for Disney because there’s no other option” add up collectively to more harm than any individual could ever possibly do. But the public isn’t going to feel proportionate anger over that harm. Because no individual is making the villainous choice to do all that harm at once.

And without an individual villain to blame, it’s just… very hard to stir anger.

(Which is a societal tendency that’s probably always existed. But I can’t help feeling it’s been strengthened, over the years, by the formula of Disney movies.)

4.

A corporation can distance its works from the harm it does, by presenting itself as separate from the part of itself that’s working on any particular project.

Disney does this in at least two ways. 

One: when people see a Disney movie they think is bad and harmful, their anger toward it can be directed onto the team that made that particular movie. This leaves other Disney properties in an area of perception where the same viewers might still love them and be willing to pay for them.

Two: when people see a Disney movie they think is good, their admiration for the team that made that particular movie will outweigh the fact that their support of it is still going to the same company that made the bad movies they hate.

5.

And finally– tying into the previous points– a corporation can get people to tolerate it by making sure there just isn’t another option. 

Disney has done this by owning practically everything. It’s now pretty much impossible to live one’s life without in some way contributing money to Disney. They, along with several other corporations, are a big part of the de facto government of this country– a part that is vastly powerful, and dangerously independent from democracy.

Magic, but still very much a kingdom.

This has gotten so bad that even when Disney is making some of the worst and most harmful films ever, any public outrage only focuses on telling people not to see those specific films. To vote with their wallets, with the hope of encouraging Disney to do better things instead. Even though the money goes toward a lot of the same horrors.

No matter how bad Disney’s representation is, we keep acting like it’s unthinkable to turn to anyone other than Disney for the better representation we want.

And on some level that’s true. Because practically everything is under Disney’s control to some degree.

We can, of course, reduce the amount we support Disney. Watch fewer movies; choose independent films when possible. Watch old movies on physical media bought secondhand. Read fanfiction. Read original works by small-time authors. 

But the fact that so much of it still, somehow, connects to Disney, causes people to feel as if none of that is worth doing.

If you’ve got the usual all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil binary view of the situation– “either you support them or you’re against them!”-- then it’s easy to conclude that you might as well give up on fighting against them. Because supporting them is just so unavoidable.

The same black-and-white thinking also gets applied a lot to JKR. 

But at least, in her case, it’s still possible to avoid buying from her, pretty much entirely. And there’s hope that if enough people make that decision, the properties that make her money will eventually fade into obscurity.

But I support fighting against both those enemies, to whatever degree we can.

Meaning, do whatever you can to minimize any profit you bring them. If you can’t eliminate it, then, for the love of humanity, don’t give up– at least cut that profit down, somewhat, somehow.

…

Now…. onto the topic of enjoying a property in ways that don’t immediately profit the owner.

We of course see lots of reasonable arguments that you shouldn’t buy anything that JKR profits from, and I can’t imagine any reasonable person arguing against that.

But, at the same time, we also see a lot of arguments saying that you shouldn’t even engage with the property in totally non-monetary ways– and that’s harder to make sense of.

For example, re-reading and re-watching older parts of the canon… buying physical media secondhand… watching pirated versions of newer stuff… engaging socially with fandom; reading fanfiction and looking at fanart.

I don’t do any of this in regard to HP. I was never that much into it in the first place, back when JKR still probably had the potential to be a pretty good person if she’d been willing to work on her biases. And her subsequent slide into bigotry has pretty much ruined any ability I had to enjoy her work anyway.

And I do have some trouble understanding how anyone else doesn’t feel that way. How anyone can hate her current behavior as much as I do, and still be able to enjoy anything she ever produced.

But, I also don’t feel I can judge.

Because that is basically where I am with the Tron franchise, which is owned by Disney.  I do some of those things with Tron– writing and reading fanfiction, participating in fandom discussion, re-watching the 1982 movie on my old secondhand DVD.

And I feel bad about it, sometimes. Because every time I see arguments against doing those things with HP, it reminds me that I can’t see any significant difference between that and what I do.

I mean, I guess one difference is that Tron (1982) was written by Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird, who, as far as I can tell, have always been more decent people than JKR, even though they did sell out to Disney.

But that isn’t a meaningful difference. Not in terms of the various arguments I’ve seen on here.

There are several arguments. One is, “JKR has said that she interprets all fan engagement with her property as support of her views, so if you engage with her work in any way, you’re supporting her!” Personally I consider that one a flawed argument not worthy of consideration– it assigns authority to her that she doesn’t deserve.

She can say that, all she wants. She could also say that all support of women’s rights is inherently in support of her views. Wouldn’t make it true. JKR is not the final authority on anyone else’s beliefs. Not about her work, not about anything else.  You could write a fanfic in which all the HP characters undergo magical gender transitions and then kidnap and guillotine a RPF depiction of Rowling herself in the middle of the dining hall, in front of a cheering crowd– and yeah, maybe she could talk herself into thinking that’s in support of her, but it doesn’t mean it is.

A somewhat stronger argument is the one that says, “All engagement gives some attention to the property, and that keeps it relevant in the public eye, which increases the chance that people will pay for new official material, and thus the evil property owner gets more money.”

And that’s… equally true for the HP fandom I don’t participate in, and the Tron fandom that I do.

It’s a valid point. I see the cause-and-effect argument here, and I’m not gonna claim the connection isn’t real. It’s not always a very strong connection, though.

For instance, I don’t think very many people are gonna read the fanfic that I write about the 1982 movie, and go from there to becoming a fan who wants to go see “Tron: Ares” in theaters and pay into Disney’s evil coffers, when they otherwise wouldn’t have.

(Especially since my whole fandom presence makes it very clear that I am not interested in “Ares,” and not even all that interested in any of the canon after the 1982 movie, and I don’t want Disney to make any more Tron stuff, ever, and I’m a lot more excited about fans posting fanfic than about Disney releasing anything new, because the fanfic is pretty much always better.)

And I imagine that’d be the same for fans of HP.

If a fan is out there engaging with fandom and creating fanworks for JKR’s old books– from back when JKR was just a middle-of-the-road milquetoast liberal with decent intentions and lots of unexamined biases– and making it very clear they see the flaws in all of it, and still enjoy the good parts, from back when the writer had any good parts to give, and they loathe everything she’s done since she got all brainwashed and radicalized by hate groups–

–well, if someone is a fan and expresses it like that, then I doubt that’s gonna cause many people to start paying money to watch whatever sad, rehashed new garbage she’s making now.

But the other somewhat strong argument– which again, I only ever see about JKR and HP– is “the creator is now so unbreakably tied to bigotry that any expression of interest in the work is going to come across as bigoted, and it’s going to make vulnerable people around you feel unsafe, no matter what you actually think of the creator’s views.”

Which is probably true. I mean, not always – for instance, there are some transgender people who still like HP and try to reclaim it for themselves, and those people wouldn’t necessarily feel threatened by someone else being a fan too, as long as that person made their feelings clear. But yes, in a whole lot of cases, being a fan is automatically suspect, and does lead trans people and other marginalized groups to feel unsafe.

And yet– again– I don’t see why being a fan of a Disney property would be any different.

Well, I mean, okay, I do.

It’s the stuff I said earlier… about how successful Disney has been at convincing people that it’s not actually that bad.

I just don’t feel like that should make the difference.

Because of, yknow, how it’s all a lie.

So…. where do I stand on this all? I don’t even know.

I’m not going to give up my participation in Tron fandom, because it’s one of the biggest things making life enjoyable for me at the moment, and I…. just can’t see any way that giving it up would help anyone.

And… I’m also not going to try and argue that it makes me ethically better than people who are into HP.

All I’ll concede is that it’s currently more socially acceptable– and therefore less likely to make people feel uncomfortable and unsafe– in the areas of the internet where I hang out.

Even though the reasons for that don’t feel rational to me.

But that’s still worth something.

I guess.