I wonder what our world would currently be like if J.K. Rowling had just let the man who spent seven years making the HP Lexicon publish his encyclopedia instead of bringing him to court and blocking his publication so that she could be considered the only official source of all things Harry Potter as she tweets out updates on Dumbledore’s sex life and wizards shitting in the streets…
Oooh, okay, all right, gather around, folks, let’s learn some history!
So before this hellsite existed, there were really cool websites to go to exclusively for Harry Potter content. Some of the top ones I can remember are MuggleNet, The Leaky Cauldron, SugarQuill, and, of course, HP Lexicon.
The Harry Potter Lexicon wasn’t just a website, it was a massive Wiki before Wikis even existed. And I still go to it over the Harry Potter Wiki. And I have gone to it ever since I was a kid. Here’s what it looked like in 2005:
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It was incredible!
One could (and I did) spend hours just searching through every single topic about the books, the plotpoints, the locations, the characters, all written out in journal-format, like an actual old-fashioned lexicon, each page featuring cool fanart that was used with permission and always linked back to the artist:
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But the main reason to go onto the website was the essays. You think the SuperCarlinBrothers are impressive? They are. But so were the people who submitted to the HP Lexicon. I was just reading an essay this morning on the Weasley brothers’ ages. Every essay was brilliant. This is the website that made us all realize R.A.B. was really Regulus, that Snape was a double-agent, that Harry was a horcrux. This is a website that that J.K. Rowling used/praised:
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She then promptly turned around and brought the creator to court. (She technically didn’t sue him, she sued the publication company, but he was still brought to court and put on the stand.) Here’s an article from The NY Times:
Steven Vander Ark was allowed to publish a condensed version of the encyclopedia (which is currently sitting in my dusty attic). Link: x
He publicly claimed that he has no animosity towards Jo for taking him to court and he continues to update the Lexicon with essays/content to this day, so if you somehow have never gone onto the website, take a look: hp-lexicon.org
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I tried to be as neutral as possible when presenting the facts of the court but if you want to know my actual opinion, here are my tags from the original post:
id never seen the hp lexicon before and i just clicked on it for the first time
first thing i saw? scrolling weather report for beauxbatons, followed by ilvermorny, followed by the romanian dragon reserve. second thing was galleon exchange rates. this website is incredible
HAM Helsinki Art Museum participates in recent debates about gender and its discontents with the exhibition Genderfuck 1900.
The exhibition opens astonishing perspectives on the issue by turning
attention to forgotten history. Showcased are roughly 300 postcards,
studio photos and snapshots that date back more than a hundred years. The people represented in the photos and postcards cross-dress and
play with gender and sexual roles, challenging assumptions about
masculinity and femininity.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the gender binary was a solid
axiom and the sexual norms were rigid. They were upheld with criminal
laws as well as taboos not written into law. Non-binary genders were a
conceptual impossibility, while homosexuality was a crime or a disease.The brand new media of the turn of the 20th century – postcards and
photographs – examined the boundaries of decency. Joyful curiosities
bloomed within the confines of a bellowing photographic industry.The images should be examined with piety. Sometimes the messages
travel so slowly that they first take shape in the mind of today’s
viewer. The age-old images are enhanced by modern concepts reflected
back into history. We inevitably look at these photos differently from
how their contemporaries did.
