This is going to be a bit of a charged topic that I tackle this morning. It is not going to be for everyone, but it is still something I feel like I need to talk about. Normally I break up my posts with a bunch of colorful screenshots and images, but due to the gravity of this topic, I am going to forgo that. Apologies for the “walls of unbroken text” that is to follow.
I am an aging geek and grew up during the 80s and 90s as a result many of the things that I still love to this day are deeply tainted by issues with either the subject matter itself or the person who created it. For example, I grew up loving the Cosby Show and Fat Albert was deeply foundational media for me. I remember listening to Bill Cosby comedy tapes and even to this day I still have to stop myself from quoting random shit from all of those. Bill Cosby is a fucking monster, and aging in many ways is learning just how wrong you were about the people you thought were cool growing up. I have friends who can lop off the limb that was the love of whatever the thing was, and move on with their lives. I’ve never been able to do this, however, I also don’t want to support the thing anymore and end up holding all of these thoughts in a complex mental tapestry.
One of my favorite novels of all time is Santiago by Mike Resnick. It is this great wild west in outer space read that predates Firefly popularizing that sort of setting. Resnick has some serious problems and maybe is not something that I really want to support any more. However, it does not stop me from loving Santiago and the shared universe that he created of outer space nonsense and fables. Similarly, Orson Scott Card is pretty fucking awful, and not the sort of person that I want to be supporting either. That does not stop the fact that Enders Game and the sequence of novels that followed it were deeply foundational to my young science fiction reader brain. Then there is my love of the Cthulhu mythos and having to contend with the fact that H.P. Lovecraft and his extremely disturbing views are embedded directly in that setting.
My entire childhood when taken out of context is littered with moments that just no longer work or synchronize with my core beliefs. So many movies that I still hold close to my heart have deeply sexist, homophobic, or straight-up racist undertones that exist in the background. God forbid we go outside of my generation and start exploring the black-and-white era of film and the many issues with the themes and assumptions those films contain. I miss being able to feel pure joy about the things that I love, but that is also part of growing up and realizing that almost everything that you once cared about is tarnished in some way.
I think there are essentially three ways to handle this conundrum. The first is to say you don’t give a shit and keep on consuming and ultimately funding the problem. The second is to completely wall yourself off from anything that has issues and exorcise those things from your life. The third path tends to be the one that I travel down. It is to appreciate the good of the thing, while also understanding the harm that it has caused and do your best to not actively support it. The third path is a bit hard to walk at times and often means you are going to stumble along the way but that you are still striving to “do no harm”. It is important that we understand and accept the problems with the things that we love, but I feel like it isn’t necessary to stop loving them.
Now we zoom forward to the situation we find ourselves in, where J.K. Rowling is an awful human being that does real and tangible harm to my friends. However I still very much love Harry Potter and that setting and the novels are wrapped up in so many personal memories. I joined the series a bit late and the very first-midnight release that I remember attending was for Goblet of Fire. After that, it became a thing that both my wife and her sister that is no longer with us shared together. With Goblet of Fire we tried to share one novel between the three of us, and by the time Order of the Phoenix came out we were buying three copies so we could all start reading at midnight. I’ve got quite a bit of Harry Potter kitsch laying around the house that was accumulated over the years.
However, once the great unmasking of J.K. Rowling as the “serious villain that she is” happened, I stopped buying anything Harry Potter related. I shifted into the same mode that I have been with other problematic creators. I might purchase a book at a Thrift store where a charity is profiting from that sale, but would never purchase a new copy of anything from retail because I did not want to actively be supporting them. There are also times when piracy is the only ethical form of consumption, so that is also absolutely not off the table either. Whatever the case I did not want to be funding the creation of products and therefore lining the pockets of the creator who has shown themselves to not be worthy of our adoration. I am by no means perfect in walking this line, but I am going to do my best because, at the end of the day, it is more about my own belief structure than some performative action.
I will admit, in another time and another sequence of events I would absolutely be playing Hogwarts Legacy. Everything I have seen about it in passing looks like it is a really fun game. However, I am not going to be playing it because I do not want to be supporting the monster that is ultimately getting large licensing payments as a result of it. I get that there are good people who created that game, and spent loving care placing those assets and writing those quests, but it is all too murky for me to be able to sift that from the fact that a bad person is directly benefiting from the licensing agreements. Moreso it is that those royalty payments will likely directly support causes that seek to do harm to my friends that are transitioning. This is a very real concern for me specifically as I live in a state that is actively attempting to outlaw the existence of transfolk, so it is not exactly a hyperbolic dog whistle where I stand.
I will not be playing Hogwarts Legacy, and I firmly believe that you should not either. Will I cut you out of my life if you do? No, because it is not for me to decide your actions. I will however be disappointed in you. Ultimately your actions have to come down to your own personal beliefs and your own conscience. If you can keep actively supporting folks who do harm in the world, then that is on you and not on me. I’m never going to personally attack you over your actions, but I will remember them. Essentially every friendship you have is a weighing of the good attributes with the bad ones. There are times when you have a realization that a person is doing more harm than they are good, and ultimately cut them out of your life. I have lots of family members that I still love dearly, but that have unfortunate traits. My Grandmother was pretty fucking racist, but I still loved her with all of my heart.
When someone says that they don’t want to have to care about “politics”, what they are really saying is that they don’t want to be judged for their actions and I am sorry… but we are all judged for our actions. No one gets a free pass, and just because something has no personal impact on you… does not mean that the action has no impact at all. If you are going to play Hogwarts Legacy, I would ask that you at least wait to purchase your copy until you can get one secondhand so you are at least diminishing the harm you are causing. I still do truly love Harry Potter and the story that I fell in love with all those years ago, but I’ve made the conscious decision to stop supporting it. I still own the novels and the movies from the “before I knew she was awful” times and even some Lego sets that I might one day get around to putting together, but I won’t be consuming anything new that gets released.
I feel like I want to do as little harm as I can while I am on this planet. There are absolutely ways in which I am failing miserably at that. I know that and I own that… but I can give up playing this one game. I care about the safety of my trans friends more than I care about this one thing.
Thank you for putting this in a very clear and succinct way. Like yourself I’m old enough to have the same issues with many things that I used to like. The biggest one for me was Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an abuse survivor, but there is also a prolific celebrity child abuser here in the UK who’s animal programs I used to love. It was a huge shock to many people when his crimes were revealed.
Many people don’t seem to realise that this isn’t just about the trans community; her latest book attacks and vilifies the chronic illness community, and the HP books have huge LGBT and racism issues. I think if people stopped hiding it behind “just a trans issue” then they would have to face the reality of what they have been supporting and how ignorant they have been. It’s not an issue to mirror to look in, many of us have done it, and it was easier for us to do earlier because the world of publishing and readers were more ignorant. I mean, even as a disabled reader I didn’t blink at the lack of disabled representation in the HP series (or many others) for a very long time, it’s not just people outside the community. Now marginalised voices are being heard, and books like HP would have been pulled up for their problematic representations immediately but back in the 90s and early 00s the voices that were talking were in the minority.
But since JKR openly made her stance known it’s very hard to claim to be ignorant of those things, and this whole thing now about being bullied for playing the game is just making me feel even more ill. These people live in a world where they don’t care about anyone but themselves.
I’d love to watch you and Tobold in a head-to-head debate on this one, Bel!
Leaving aside the moral issues, on which I broadly agree with you, and the specific game in question, which I wouldn’t play on a bet, the thing that really gets me is that Harry Potter just isn’t all that good to begin with. I read all the books as they came out (And you’ll be pleased to know I paid for none of them – they were all freebies from work, mostly damaged copies.) and my immediate thoughts on reading the first two were “How did these even get published?” They do improve as they go on but at no point do they actually become good by any standard I’d recognise. I’ve never seen the movies so maybe they’re better. I guess they’d have to be. I like to think of Harry Potter as one of those hysterical phenomena, like the reaction that followed the death of Princess Diana; it’s just not explicable by rational means.
The thing about the extra money JKR will get from the game is, she’s already insanely rich. Any action she might want to take is well within her reach, so you could say giving her more money would be like giving a beach more sand – it isn’t going to make it sandier. Still, she won’t be getting any of mine. That’ll show her!
Unfortunately I think “isn’t all that good to begin with” is a bit too simplistic in this case, because (and of course I can’t speak for everyone but it very much matches the experience in my group of rl friends) – it’s not about the books and the story per se, it’s just as much about the world building and especially also about the movies. I’ve never been a huge fan of the books myself, they read like any children’s/YA novel to me as not-an-explicit fan of that genre (can’t even tell you how old I was when I read them, maybe 20-22ish?). But I loved the movies and how they made this ok-ish story into something really cool (including the music). So I don’t even think “are they really good or do you just remember them fondly” works here, I’m pretty sure I only read the books once but watched the movies several times and preferred them a lot.
But overall I agree with Bel, maybe even leaning a tad more to one side and re-evaluating “is it even worth not downright discarding this?” and so far I’ve not had many exceptions. I’m not throwing out the stuff I have but I’m trying to avoid everything new as good as it gets, but I absolutely don’t want to be the hypocrite and I admit that I just like WoW (and my guild) too much to stop playing – but I’m very well prepared to skip Diablo IV, we’ll see.