I'm deeply fond of Harry Potter (putting me in company w/ ~2 billion other ppl). But JKR and HP have become the prime example of approaching representation in fantasy fiction completely ass-backwards: awkwardly shoehorning it in after the fact. (An irritated thread about writing)
As a writer, I know ALL about the mental gymnastics of introducing new plot twists and story elements by mining breadcrumbs in your own work and going, "YES, I MEANT THAT ALL ALONG. I'M A GENIUS." We all do it, trust me. And maybe our intuitive creative selves *did* mean it, BUT
we have to make sure it WORKS THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE STORYLINE. That means going back and reworking EVERYTHING that came before so you're not pulling something out of your ass on page 324. If you're on book 4 and books 1-3 are already published? TOUGH BALLS. They're canon now.
If your new "Oh, this new twist is TRUE, I meant it all along," doesn't work w/ the established canon you built for yourself, YOU SCRAP IT. Or you do some extremely clever tap dancing to make it convincing for readers. Maybe you can pull it off, but trust me, readers will notice.
JKR and the HP franchise don't just have a few prior books. They made a goddamn global mythology for an entire generation. Presumably, JKR got woke and decided she needed more diversity in her mostly white-as-white-bread fantasy world but here's the problem:
It is extremely difficult - I'd say inadvisable - to shoehorn in crucial elements of worldbuilding AFTER you've established so much of the world w/o those elements. To feel real and convincing, SFF worldbuilding has to be done from the ground up and be supported in the narrative.
Dumbledore is gay. Hermione might be black. There are magic schools with spirit animals in N.America. And now, Nagini is an Asian woman trapped in the form of a snake. ALL of these stink of post-production tweaking NOT at all well supported in the original canon and it shows.
It shows b/c it reveals prose-level inconsistency and illogical or questionable narrative choices once you try to reconcile the new info w/ the old. As all writers can attest, a story is a complex machine w/ lots of moving pieces. Pull something, and other pieces start unraveling
Look, the original 7 HP books and their characters are a predominantly straight, cis white fantasy. LET THEM BE THAT. Like LoTR. It's FINE. Minorities are used to accepting that. We can still love them. Being shoved in via revisionism is not the way to go here.
The far better option for JKR and the HP franchise is to create NEW stories, worlds, and characters in which the marginalized and minority characters are baked into the fabric of the narrative FROM THE GET GO. Now you have a robust foundation to work with.
I don't have a problem w/ Nagini being a trapped Asian woman, if SHE WERE WRITTEN THAT WAY from the start. I don't believe for a sec JKR knew she was human all along. If she had, she would've made different choices in bks 1-7 so that we're all, "Ahhh yes" instead of "WTF???"
A lot of people are offended by the way JKR handled race and representation w/ Nagini's character in #FantasticBeasts2. ME? I'm angrier that she violated rules of good writing and fantasy worldbuilding, the ones both JKR and I and all other authors are obligated to by readers.
(Add: friends, let's not get too mad at each other in the mentions, yeah? We're all HP fans here. I still bow before JKR's overall creative genius. Ppl have diff opinions about which retcons worked for them or didn't. My point: retconning diverse characters =sub-optimal at best.)
