Which is … hard to believe? For one thing, if she worked on this book in any capacity in the past three years, it should have been extremely apparent that pretty much the entire world would interpret this story as being semi-autobiographical, albeit in a funhouse mirror version of events in which the Rowling character is punished by an unruly internet mob for a harmless joke in a cartoon, and not for repeated, lengthy, fallacy-ridden attacks on the transgender community.
And also, this wouldn’t be the first time that Rowling has used her books to excise her own personal, petulant frustrations. As we’ve mentioned before, the Harry Potter books are crammed full of coded personal insults; Gilderoy Lockhart, Harry’s Aunt Marge, and the evil Professor Umbridge were all based on real people that Rowling had a beef with – hence why she tortured them using her word processor. Not to mention how she kept deliberately inserting a specific phrase in the Potter novels purely to screw with Stephen Fry, who was tasked with narrating the audiobooks – but at least those books weren’t a billion chapters long.
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Thumbnail: Wikimedia Commons/Lumita/Mulholland Books