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- cross-posted to:
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Author J.K. Rowling has fallen silent on her usually busy X (formerly Twitter) feed, after Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif filed a legal complaint in France for alleged cyber harassment over statements regarding her gender.
On August 9, lawyers for Khelif filed a lawsuit with a special unit of the public prosecutor’s office in Paris, stemming from false statements that spread online about her gender after the Algerian boxer defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in her first fight of the 2024 Olympic Games. Carini pulled out 46 seconds into the bout and told reporters afterwards that she had “never felt a punch like this.”
I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that a fantasy author has a lot of silly fantasies about herself.
Did anything come of the rumors that she plagiarized at least the first book, and premise of the entire series?
Are you referring to The Legend of Rah and the Muggles? That was found to be bullshit the second people read the book. It’s an extremely weird story about nuclear fallout, talking animals, and a shit ton of meandering filler. The only similarity was use of the word “muggle”, which doesn’t even mean the same thing in both stories. JK may be a TERF now, but she is not a plagiarist.
She’s not a plagiarist per se, but the idea of an elite school for wizards is not exactly original to her. There’s The Worst Witch series of books. The first one was published in 1974. They were a huge hit, especially in the UK, leading eventually to a TV movie with a very impressive cast list in the 1980s, which, you will note, was decades before Rowling wrote any Harry Potter book.
There’s absolutely no way she was not aware of those books. In fact, considering she was nine years old when the first one came out- the exact age for those books- she almost certainly read it and treasured it and it almost certainly inspired her to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
On top of that, there was Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea novels, the first of which takes place in large part at a boarding school for wizards where a poor boy who is from a non-magical family is sent after showing that he has magical powers and ends up being the most powerful wizard in the world, fighting the ultimate magical evil.
That was published in 1968 and I would be very surprised if Rowling hadn’t read it before she wrote her books, because that is just too similar.
Maybe? I just remembered some thread from ages ago where people were saying that some guy had written a book that wasn’t popular, and she reworked it. This may have been pre-reddit, it was that long ago.
Hence why I said rumors. I didn’t remember anything that was a smoking gun, or a conclusion to that rumor.
Almost none of the ideas in any of those books are original, they’re all cribbed from somewhere else, but that’s always the way art is created whether the creator knows it or not. The premise of a kid discovering he’s special and entering a secret world of other special people is not something new to childrens’ literature