Edie Ledwell Deserves a Better-Led Creator

In her new “Robert Galbraith” Cormoran Strike novel, J.K. Rowling reportedly savages her critics as a “woke Twitter mob” motivated by “cancel culture” and the sheer jealousy of a successful woman.

According to Wikipedia:

Edie Ledwell, who has become successful and wealthy by creating a YouTube cartoon called The Ink Black Heart, centered around a disembodied heart named Hart, is being persecuted online for a scene which is allegedly racist, ableist, and transphobic.

This online persecution eventually leads to Edie’s murder.

Not having read The Ink Black Heart (which, it must be said, should be punctuated as The Ink-Black Heart—adjectives hyphenated, please), and with no plans to (since I will not support Rowling’s various revenue streams in any way, shape or form), I have a number of questions, some of which may already be answered in the novel. Although I doubt it.

First, how on earth could a “YouTube cartoonist” become “successful and wealthy”? Has this ever happened? I can’t think of any examples. Without licensing deals, adaptations into other media, books, toys, movies, television, and other revenues streams, it seems highly unlikely.

The hypothetical Edie Ledwell, successful and wealthy YouTube cartoonist, is utterly implausible.

Second, are we to believe that a single scene in such a hypothetical cartoon—albeit one perceived as “racist, ableist, and transphobic”—is alone responsible for setting off an unrelenting firestorm of backlash that can only culminate in assassination? Yow! That’s zero-tolerance toxic fandom!

Now, there have been examples of cartoons (in print publications) setting off religious fanatics—Charlie Hebdo comes to mind; in such cases, the unapologetic depiction of sacred cows in an unfavorable light (or in this case any depiction of a sacred cow at all) is followed by a long tradition of doubling down and further antagonism. That is the nature of polemical editorial cartoons.

But it strains credulity to imagine a narrative cartoon, or a conventional humor strip, or even an online animation (or whatever Rowling has in mind when she refers to a cartoon)—ostensibly offered for entertainment, but that may have inadvertently caused offense in a single instance—as inspiring such a backlash. Was Edie as unapologetic to her offended following as the staff of Charlie Hebdo? Was her intent to be as provocative and rile up a specific group in the first place?

One can think of instances of quite tame newspaper strips by the likes of Charles Schultz, Mort Walker, Milton Caniff and others occasionally raising the ire of readers and newspaper features editors—or crossing the lines of good taste—resulting in canceled subscriptions and suspended appearances in various localities, but certainly not death threats or assassination.

One can think of even more instances of creatives in the entertainment world inadvertently causing offense—comedians, show runners, actors, you name it—who were “trying to be funny” or otherwise being insensitive and offering, if not an overt apology, a mollifying explanation.

Most creators with any sense would simply back off and let emotions die down.

Presumably, in The Ink-Black Heart, Edie causes offense, and this single incident is turned by cancel culture into an unrelenting cause célèbre, resulting in her death.

Or perhaps the fictional Edie created the fictional Ink-Black Heart online cartoon purely to antagonize an already persecuted minority or minorities. Still, hard to imagine.

Perhaps Edie, stumbling upon this hot-button issue by accident, decides that it is her life’s work to persecute transgender and disabled people in perpetuity—to double down, hammer away at the same theme, and continue to antagonize her audience repeatedly—as J.K. Rowling has done in real life.

Again, I wonder if something like this occurs in the novel?

Third, no mention is made of criticism of Edie and her cartoon beyond Twitter. Surely, in the novel, Edie’s critics must include voice talent for her YouTube cartoon seeking to distance themselves from Edie’s horridly regressive views; fellow cartoonists who try to reason with her as she attacks her own fan-base and devalues her own IP; admiring fans who write lengthy rebuttals to her uninformed opinions in fora outside Twitter, even lengthier deconstructions of her arguments in respectable publications, and in exhaustve (and exhausting) long-from videos.

In the novel, Edie engages with all this criticism and handily refutes every sound argument. Right?

Surely, if J.K. Rowling uses The Ink-Black Heart to skewer her Twitter mob, she’s also taken the time and effort to construct witty, satirical, caricatural avatars for Daniel Radcliffe, Stephen King, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, Forbes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vox, In Style, CNBC, Contrapoints, Buzzfeed—to say nothing of Pete Davidson on Saturday Night Live Weekend Update—and her own fan website, The Leaky Cauldron. And then beaten them into the ground.

Funny; there doesn’t seem to be any mention of her doing so in any of the coverage I’ve seen.

In the real world, J.K. Rowling has simply ignored her more substantial critics, many of whom were erstwhile, ardent admirers and early champions of Harry Potter—booksellers, fans, reader, early podcasters—who have all turned against her or been turned off by her, and have given up on her.

Rowling has routinely reduced her critics to a “Twitter mob,” and reduced that Twitter mob to a handful of alleged death threats, thus making it easy to dismiss any all criticism of her and her harmful views on transgender issues (including and especially criticism that excedes the 240-character limit) as merely “woke cancel culture” motivated by the patriarchic jealousy of a successful woman.

Such intellectual dishonesty, needless to say, is unworthy of the most successful author in recent times, who is simply capable of better.

Rowling was certainly capable of presenting a well-researched, thoughtful nonfiction book on the topic of transgender issues for debate and discussion; one assumes in the course of actual research she might have come to very different conclusions than the bigotry she has subscribed to all along, a priori.

Instead, she took to Twitter, setting off a Twitter storm; finally, it seems to have consumed her prose fiction.

Rowling entrée into the “debate” on gender issues was not made in a loving or generous way. “Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you” is not something you tell to someone you have concern for, which she claims to have for her many (but nameless) transgender friends. It’s a cruel rebuke and a warning one makes to a travesty one regards as loathsome and unworthy of the love (and identity) of their choice—and suspects capable of pedophilia. It is a discourse initiated and sustained by transphobia.

Rowling’s most astute former fans, who understand her transphobia as diametrically opposed to the underlying ethos of Harry Potter, have long since given up on her. If there is only a Twitter mob of hate left for her, it is of her own making. And she richly deserves it.

As something of a “YouTube cartoonist” myself, broadly speaking—I’m a cartoonist, and I’ve made YouTube videos (mostly of me drawing), although they haven’t made me wealthy—I’m deeply offended that anyone should think anyone in my line of work would handle inadvertent offense as callously and antagonistically as poor ignorant, obtuse, tone-deaf, stubborn Edie Ledwell, escalating unto assassination.

As a creative person in general, I also shudder to think that anyone can be as ungrateful for having a paying audience as the autocratic, imperious author of the Harry Potter series.

I’d like to think such an inadvertently offending scene in a hypothetical cartoon—especially amid a discourse already threatening the lives of a community already vulnerable to bigotry, prejudice, and violence—would and could be easily amended, elided, or quietly taken down, and the incident converted into a teachable moment (if for nobody else than the creator).

I’d certainly flatter myself to believe I’d be open-minded enough to engage my critics fairly and openly, without restraint, without retreating behind a screen of spin-doctors and sycophants, and without resorting to mean-spirited caricatures or sham straw men, trite tropes of jealousy, or bad faith.

Poor Edie Ledwell. She certainly deserves better than to have been created by J.K. Rowling.

Inky, black-hearted cartoonist Don Simpson has a PhD and therefore thinks he knows how to hyphenate (at least some of the time). He is currently writing a fanfic in which an online cartoonist, moved by her persuasive critics, decides to research gender issues for herself, using authoritative sources. The misnamed Edie Ledwell decides she has been anything but well-led by online TERFs and transphobes, concludes that Maya Forestater is a truly loathsome bigot who deserves to be unemployed, and writes an exhaustively-footnoted. 600-page graphic novel that sells half a billion copies and wins the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. Now a Social Justice Warrior, Edie forfeits the love and affection of Robert Galbraith, an online troll sometimes known as “J.K. Rowling,” who unfriends and blocks poor Edie on Twitter.