The r/Crafts subreddit has been debating banning Harry Potter crafts for months, and came to a decision last week: Explicitly Harry Potter-themed projects are no longer allowed. The subreddit's moderation team held a poll two months ago to determine how they should handle Harry Potter-themed projects, which were causing a lot of "off-topic conversations and uncivil conversations," according to a post announcing the results.
"As a quick recap, the mod team noticed a pattern of off-topic conversations and uncivil conversations whenever someone posted crafts related to Harry Potter, and members of the community raised concerns about allowing such content in the subreddit," the moderators wrote. "It was compared to hate speech, due to JK Rowling’s increasingly vocal bigotry and use of her political, economic, and social platforms to further that agenda, as documented here and here."
Across 1,232 votes, 53% of people said Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling-related posts should be banned. Forty-one percent of voters were against banning these crafts. Four percent of people had no opinion.
Aftermath reached out to the moderators of r/crafts subreddit for comment.
Rowling, in the years since the original books were released, has become increasingly transphobic, spreading rhetoric and funding anti-transgender legislation in the United Kingdom. Her yearslong crusade of cruelty and transphobia is well-documented online.
The ban has some flexibility. Items can sort of reference Harry Potter. The example is a red-and-gold scarf; as long as it's not labeled as a Gryffindor scarf, it's OK. Wands are, too, as long as they're not exact replicas of a specific character's wand.
"But generally speaking, any identifiable reference to Harry Potter is going to be a no-go, and moderator discretion will be the ultimate decider on what is and isn’t considered ‘Harry Potter-related,’" the moderators wrote. Discussion of Harry Potter isn't allowed either.
"This also doesn’t mean we’re planning to start banning all kinds of IP and inspirations—as stated earlier, we found that Harry Potter posts generated far more issues and conflict than any other IP, and no other IP has been raised as a concern to the same degree," the moderators continued. "We talked about it, and while we all have companies or creators that we as individuals don’t love to see discussed in the subreddit, no other topic has been so universally controversial and caused so many problems from a purely logistical moderation standpoint. If, in the future, another similar issue does arise, we will handle that as it happens."
Comments on the announcement and original two-month-old post are locked, but the original post did allow comments for some time. Responses are mixed, which lines up the poll results. Some of the community views it as censorship, despite agreeing that Rowling is transphobic. Others argue that Rowling actively uses her success as a weapon, and crafting Harry Potter stuff keeps that alive. One Redditor said that Rowling uses her Harry Potter revenue "to fund her "hate campaign and sees any engagement with her IP as agreement with her and her views."
