Continuing to engage with HP content, even fanfic, encourages others to continue engaging with official HP content. I respect your stance as an improvement, but you are still choosing to actively perpetuate the larger problem.
It’s harm reduction for people (many of them trans and/or autistic) who literally cannot let go of the world despite Knowing That, but experience extreme psychological stress at the idea of causing harm to others/their community.
I would also go so far as to say it can siphon off people/fans who would instead engage with the source material or new material from the author and bring them to a place where they can actively combat the issues in the source work that perpetuated that ideology and teach others to do the same in a completely free gift economy until they’re ready to leave the world entirely.
Autism doesn't mean you can't ever let go of anything. I let go of D&D and jumped ship to something better within the same genera.
I refuse to believe it's impossible to jump to a different book. I'm certain there's a fantasy novel series set in a magic school that's got much much better worldbuilding than shit like, "Actually the slaves like being slaves and the main character owns one. Also, the one character who has a problem with slavery is ridiculed for it because it's ridiculous to want to free slaves."
Which is why fanfiction criticizing that has artistic value (especially when written by trans people); for a lot of people it’s not about the magical school and world so much as it is about childhood trauma/imprinting on a book in childhood. We know it’s Not Good.
I’m not implying that being autistic means one can’t let go of things, but it does mean that there are potentially comfort objects (in your case potentially TTRPG) of which it is more difficult to switch to a different book (often without a fandom, because there aren’t many) than it is to revisit the literal mountain of historic fanfiction. Fandom is GENUINELY the last bastion of free content, and the last bastion of self published independent work.
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u/AmazingScoops 11h ago
Continuing to engage with HP content, even fanfic, encourages others to continue engaging with official HP content. I respect your stance as an improvement, but you are still choosing to actively perpetuate the larger problem.