Bad authors and strained attachments to the Harry Potter franchise

Abstract

In 2020, J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, began a series of actions (including publishing essays, participating in political activism, and issuing social media statements) that revealed her trans-exclusionary radical feminist politics. In response, some fans grappled with how to engage with the Harry Potter transmedia franchise as they worried that supporting the franchise also supported Rowling's political views. Seventy-eight responses to an intake survey and seventeen participant interviews from February 2025 reveal the ways that fans negotiate, reorient, or reject their fandom based on the actions of Rowling as a bad author, a term which indicates that an author has behaved in a problematic or morally reprehensible way. Overall, findings indicate that fan attachment to franchises cannot be reduced to binary terms such as fan/antifan, for/against, beloved/canceled. Rather, reflections from participants illuminate the myriad ways in which fans manage the tension between a bad author and a beloved, yet messy, cultural object.