Part 1: Overview

Last week, the video game company Avalanche, as well as Warner Bros. released their long anticipated game Hogwarts Legacy, which is a part of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter fictional universe. 

While the game is doing quite well on its opening week, amassing great ratings and player counts, the game has also received a lot of backlash following a few issues. 

Some controversies concern the game itself, with accusations of antisemitism and the plot of the game being about repressing a slave rebellion, but most pertain to J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter and her history of transphobia.

Due to this, there had been a growing debate about a boycott of the game leading up to its release, but when the game finally came out last Friday, the boycott seemingly had not done enough damage as viewer counts of the game skyrocketed, with over a million people watching it on Twitch (1). 

Part 2: Background 

Hogwarts Legacy is the first Harry Potter game released since the a series of J.K. Rowling tweets in the summer of 2020. 

The tweets go as follows, with Rowling first tweeting, “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” By “people who menstruate”, she is referring to biological women. This tweet seemingly means that women no longer exist, since not all women are biologically female. 

A follow up tweet further stated her opinion, entailing, “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.” By this, she seems to mean that trans women should be excluded from being seen as a woman because it will destroy what it means to be a woman, and that trans women are not women as they don’t have “the lived reality of women.”

Many people, including people who worked in the Harry Potter series called her out on her opinion, which she time and time again fought back with more tweets. To add on to this, she also released a new book titled Troubled Blood, that faced controversy for its lesson being that you can’t trust a man in a dress. This controversy is better explained in this article by Glamour.

Additionally, Rowling has been criticized for supporting anti-trans organizations who advocate for the removal of LGBTQ protections, as well as other anti-trans “influencers”, some of which have worked with white nationalists. 

Rowling, as well as the people she supports have been described as “terfs”, a derogatory term that’s an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”, meaning a person who doesn’t believe that trans women are women. Many of these people that Rowling has supported have attended anti-trans protests, with a friend of one of the “terfs” supported by Rowling, quoting Hilter in a good light at one of the protests. 

In December of 2022, Rowling opened a “sex abuse support service” for women who have experienced sexual abuse. However, she noted that this service will exclude trans people. Jessie Earl, a youtuber who creates LGBTQ based content, called this exclusion “cruel” since Rowling has herself experienced sexual abuse, and so she knows what it is like to go through that, and since trans women are more likely to experience sexual abuse, it isn’t right to deny them of that service. Jessie Earl does a deeper dive into this topic on her youtube channel. 

Part 3: “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

One argument against the boycott of Hogwarts Legacy is that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” 

Twitch Streamer xQc pointed this out while playing the game this past week, stating that people “fund all sorts and types of evil in their daily purchases across the board, even in way worse ways than you could even imagine.” A user on Twitter noted this further in stating that the metal in their phone of which they used to record a video was produced by child slave labor. 

The defense seems to be that buying Hogwarts Legacy isn’t ethically wrong as there are no ethics anyways under capitalism, so boycotting it is useless, since there are many more terrible things that you indirectly fund on a daily basis. This argument was, however, challenged on The Guardian with one saying “for anyone who argues that we still buy phones that were probably made unethically and drive cars using petrol (2), we need to do those things to survive and partake in society. We can survive without buying Hogwarts Legacy.” 

Furthermore, some have argued that the boycott is instead, important not for the financial reasons, but for the “cultural significance” that buying the game has. 

Part 4: “Cultural Significance” 

One argument for the boycott is that by buying the game (and by engaging in Harry Potter content in general), you are supporting the Wizarding World universe, which in turn, gives it cultural significance.

This means that by engaging and supporting Harry Potter, you are giving the universe meaning in society, and the means to which the universe can be further used to create more content, which in turn further expands the universe and in the process, the influence of Rowling as well. 

On the Hogwarts Legacy website Q&A, the game calls her “one of the world’s greatest storytellers, her extraordinary body of writing is the foundation of all projects in the Wizarding World.” Hogwarts Legacy gives praise and support to Rowling, the owner of the IP (3) that is the Wizarding World. All future projects within it must also give this same type of rhetoric, as for if they don’t, aren’t they just using the IP for profit. 

It seems only right that when someone wants to use the IP of another, that they give the dignity to acknowledge the author. It only makes sense that this acknowledgement is positive, for if it wasn’t, what are you exactly doing sharing, distributing, and profiting from the IP of someone you don’t agree with? What are you to further the influence of another when it is against your own self interest? 

The more content that is created, the more the influence and praise of Rowling grows. 

Part 5: “You cannot separate the art from the artist.” 

Another argument against the boycott has been supported by the fact that the developers of the game have already been paid, and so boycotting the game for financial reasons would be useless. It goes on to also state that J.K. Rowling is already a billionaire, and a boycott does near nothing to her financially. 

However, as seen in a recent tweet by Rowling in response to someone asking her how she feels about losing “a whole audience from buying [her] books”, she replied saying, “I read my most recent royalty cheques and find the pain goes away pretty quickly.” This means that she feels politically supported through the money she receives from the sales of her IP.

Youtuber, Council of Geeks explained this further in stating, “You cannot separate the artist from the art when the artist is actively wielding the influence granted to them by that art, in order to harm people. And if you fail to note that you do not support what she is doing and saying, you are cosigning her actions and words.”

This means that by buying the game, you are giving her the gratification of support, and although you may not agree with her in her views, she still thinks you do when you purchase from her IP.