Eli Cugini

And then certain novels are like, what if we gave you that pleasure of, like, you know here that the enemies are going to get together.

Yes.

I think this is obviously a directly relevant question to me.

Rowling is currently bankrolling the persecution of my people in a very real sense.

But I think, you know, everyone has deep emotional investments in something made by a terrible person.

That is not something that you can get away from if you're going to be alive and engage with the world.

So in terms of litigating people's personal investments, I think that's a kind of useless line of inquiry.

My focus is more on the sort of public life of that IP.

And I think there are many different ways to engage in, say, Harry Potter fanfiction.

I think I would personally be full of far too much grief, I think, to engage with at this stage.

But also there are a lot of trans people who engage with it and who come at it from a different angle.

Yeah, that makes sense.

The difficulty I have is the reskinned Draco-Hermione novels that have been published recently.

There are three that came out last year.

There was Alchemized by Sen Lin Yu, which you've mentioned, and Rose in Chains by Julie Soto.

and The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley as well.

All of those have authors who are not in agreement with Rowling's politics, and Sen Lin Yu is non-binary.

But that doesn't really seem to have radically destabilized their relationship to the IP, even if they do try and articulate trying to resist the bigotry of the author or particular aspects of the original material.

I'm not sure that really comes through in translation with how the novels were sometimes marketed explicitly as Draco Hermione novels,

and how people discussed them in that regard.