RememberHogwarts Legacy? Remember how trans people and their allies called for a boycott of the game, got massive amounts of pushback from the ‘anti-woke’ crowd, and there was an absurd amount of discourse online aboutwhether it’s okay to buy a video game if you really, really want to, despite knowing your purchase supports the work of a transphobe? You know how we’ve already been through this, and now nobody’s talking aboutHarry Potterregularly because nobody cares about the game anymore? Well, I hate telling good people bad news, but it’s happening again – Harry Potter is in the headlines, and I’m once again asking you to boycott Rowling’s work.
According to a report fromBloomberg, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. is close to making a deal for a seven-season reboot of the Harry Potter books, with each season dedicated to one book in the series. The deal hasn’t come through yet, but this is just one more addition to the huge number of ways JK Rowling continues to profit off her IP – she’s already got the movies (including the spin-offs that barely broke even), the stage play adaptation Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the theme-park attractions, and of course, Hogwarts Legacy.
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Rowling is likely to be involved in the series ‘to ensure it remains loyal to her original material’, according to Bloomberg, but she won’t be its showrunner or primary creator. I was hoping that an HBO adaptation could at least begin to grapple with its terrible legacy oftransphobiaandanti-semitism. We’ve seen video game remakes wipe away things that are now considered problematic, like Resident Evil 4 Remake, which gave Ashley shorts so she couldn’t be upskirted, desexualised its female characters (to some extent), and removed some inappropriate dialogue. The game waslater swarmed with negative reviews over its wokeness.
Unfortunately,with Rowling at the helm, that’s unlikely to happen. She’s been known to double down on her statements and beliefs instead of critically examining them, as we can see from her tweets and the fact that she’s basically a TERF figurehead now. She is committed, it seems, to persecuting transgender people, and the HBO adaptation won’t critically examine the flaws of the Harry Potter series if she’s overseeing the project. This show could have been a chance for us to have a true reboot of the series, to keep the things that we held dear while condemning the books’ racism and anti-semitism. The themes of the books and their world were what readers loved – I doubt anybody is particularly attached to Cho Chang’s or Kingsley Shacklebolt’s terrible names, or the hook-nosed caricatures that are the banker goblins.
So what is there to do? Hogwarts Legacy was the latest in a whole host of examples that video game boycotts don’t work, and neither do television shows. The pull of nostalgia seems to be too strong for audiences to resist, and I understand that personally. I was a full-blown Potterhead. I have a Slytherin journal in my drawer, never used and now, never to be used. I used to play Harry Potter Scene It every weekend as a teenager, and have an embarrassingly deep knowledge of the series.
I still did not play Hogwarts Legacy, because much like our own Eric Switzer, I understand thatboycotts don’t work, but you have a moral imperative to oppose harm when you see it. It is the same with this TV show – I don’t want to watch it because I’d be supporting a creator who harms marginalised people, but I know that there are enough people who do want to watch it that my individual action will do nothing. Without collective action, there is no hope of a successful boycott, and despite the number of people who care about trans rights and will boycott the show, there are more who want to watch it and either don’t know about Rowling’s statements or don’t care.
A bright spot is that shows are far easier to cancel than video games – their survival is highly impacted by ratings and viewership. If the show is bad and views fall off, it might not be worth the investment of the studio to keep making it. After all,bigger and better shows have been cancelled over less. However, we’ve seen Rings of Power get low-to-middling audience ratings and it’s still been renewed. The strength of the IP may be enough to keep these shows afloat, regardless of audience reception.
Strangely, there has been some mainstream opposition to the show being created. Not because of Rowling’s beliefs, mind you, but because people are sick of reboots and remakes – they want new stories, even prequels. This could be a factor in the show’s survival, but it appears HBO is soon to announce a new strategy of prioritising content with settings and characters that viewers are already familiar with. It looks like if the show is confirmed, it could be boosted heavily by HBO, and they’re relying on the strength of existing IP to continue making money off their shows. I think it’s a weak strategy and people are far more interested in original content because of the wealth of franchises and remakes already in the media, but that won’t stop HBO.
We’ll have to wait and see which poor young actors start their careers on the back of this terrible legacy – most of the actors in the original movies have disavowed Rowling’s statements and will likely not want to be further associated with the franchise. Whether the series comes through or not is yet to be seen, but if it does, all we can do is continue talking about the harm supporting this franchise does and hope that others will have enough empathy to take action. We are in a time of stark queerphobia and discrimination, and we must speak up.
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