Friendly fire
We are hardly a few weeks away from the much anticipated launch of the single most ambitious Harry Potter game ever conceived; the brain child of life long fans of the Harry Potter franchise that grew up crossing their fingers hoping for a owl in the mail. This open world RPG dive into the magical wizarding world where somehow the English School is the greatest in the world (knowing our education system, that seems debatable. Then again, I guess it is a private school, isn't it? How did Hermione afford to go there? How much is tuition? It can't be Government subsidized. Am I getting too much into it again?) should be the absolute belle of the ball for people my age, and indeed the vast majority of pot-heads are extremely excited to experience a game that simulates some of their deepest held fantasies. Others, however, have chosen this game to be a battlefield in their online war against the forces of prejudice and transphobia, which brings up something of a curious dilemma: is this even the appropriate place to raise such a confrontation?
The reason for the derision rolls on back to J.K Rowling, because of course it does. As the author and head of the Harry Potter universe, the ideals and whims of Rowling used to have something of a weight amongst the Harry Potter community. But somewhere between the explosion of social media and the decent of the public ideals which compelled people to share every errant toilet thought with the world; it became more and more obvious the J.K Rowling was a bit of a airhead when it came to spearheading her creation outside of the pages of the book. Slapping any old idea in her head about the wider Wizarding universe on the Internet and declaring it immediate cannon; including, but in no way limited to, the idea that Wizards and Witches of the past used to actually defecate themselves and then vanish it away with magic. (Which goes against one of the core principle laws of magic that she wrote! Things can't just disappear, they have to go somewhere!) It was long after all of this when she decided to make her thoughts know about how she doesn't quite agree with the trans-movement and people who identify that way- again, long after her words and opinion stopped holding any sway or weight over the Potter community.
Still, she is the head of the Harry Potter train. People who took umbrage (get it?) with her statements found themselves locked in Twitter spats with an author so sad that she wrote herself into one of her newer books as a beleaguered victim of an LGBT hate mob. (I'm not joking, she literally fell for the lowest common denominator in fan fiction writing; it's just embarrassing at this point.) But the hate crowd aren't just happy shouting at her. They want to expand their vision to everything she touches and cut off the 'hateful woman' to the many sources she has supplying her with the unimaginable wealth that J.K boasts. They campaign against the books she publishes, the studios she works with and, pertinently, the video games based off of the Harry Potter franchise she birthed. So at it's heart this is a conflict between people who are fighting on behalf of the trans community and a grumpy old woman on the Internet who is prejudiced. Hogwarts Legacy is just caught in the middle of it all.
Where the mob starts to draw legitimate blood is in the meta details. The franchise that Hogwarts Legacy belongs to the woman of the hour and she was obviously paid for the royalties to use it. Therefore the purchase of this product would be telling companies that it's okay to pay her to use her franchise licence again, but then that is how intellectual property works, isn't it? What would be the solution in the minds of these people- to sink the Harry Potter franchise because they don't agree with the creator's opinions? Are they so incapable of separating the artist from their work that they believe the taint of J.K Rowling needs to be burnt out from the ends, instead of targeting the woman herself? Aside from the fact I don't personally particularly care what J.K. Rowling's opinion on literally anything is, I fail to see how destroying Harry Potter by making it totally unprofitable to work with is the 'good ending' to affairs.
And then there's the further disconnect in the fact that Rowling has literally nothing to do with the game. Warner Bros. worked with her team to make the game fit the rules of the universe; (and not very well, apparently, given how Accio seems to work on humans in the game) but J.K. had no actual involvement in the creative process of making this game at any level. In fact, her presence is so off this project, that the team even went so far as to include the option to play as a Trans character in the game. An option, I should point out, which thematically makes no sense given that this game is set in the 1800's; the only way this would make it into the game, would be as the developer's way of saying that J.K. has no power over what makes it into the game and what doesn't. Attempting to boycott Hogwarts Legacy does not, therefore, effect any of Rowling's work in the slightest.
You know something she did work on? Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. A movie franchise which didn't appear to drum up nearly as much furore despite the fact that Rowling literally wrote for each movie and was integral to deciding the direction of the story. A direction so twisted that it ended up spiralling out of control and sinking that franchise on it's own. She didn't need any boycott to trip her up for those movies, her own incompetence at creating a new story within her universe managed to drum that up all on it's own. And then there's her play sequel to Harry Potter which I heard ragged on for many years until I started reading into it and found out why. (Good lord, fame really did scorch that poor woman's creativity dry, didn't it?) My point is, it's a good thing that new Harry Potter projects are being made without her involvement, and the fact that blind activism is seeking to destroy the only good product of this franchise in the current year is about as sad as the mobs are misguided.
Pre-purchasing Harry Potter Hogwarts legacy is not a subscription to discrimination of the trans community, if anything it's a solidification in the slow extraction of the Harry Potter franchise out of the purview of a woman who's talents have wobbled as she, herself, has displayed symptoms of transphobia. Twitter activists and Resetera warriors are so preoccupied trying to torch a woman antithetical to their values that they are turning pitchforks against a game that has no part whatsoever to their target beyond paying for her licence. It's not like Rowling is actively funding anti-trans movements with the money, else we'd be having a totally different conversation altogether. She's just hording her gains like a dragon on it's hoard as she slowly loses touch with the talents that won her all that money. The situation is so misanthropic it's makes me wonder if Hidetaka Miyazaki wrote the poor woman's lore.
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