So. There is an open world Potter game. As you can imagine, this has caused a lot of strong emotions because for many people, JKR is the absolute worst. I will hasten to add that I’m in that category. To others, people who are against JKR are the worst. They can go jump in a lake. I only read the books because I had a massive crush on Alan Rickman, but there were serious problems with them even outside JKR’s transphobia.
First of all, the casual racism. The way she named the love interest ‘Cho Chang’. That’s just like she dropped a fork on a tiled floor and named the character after the sound the fork made. In addition, why is she Asian? There is nothing Asian about her except her made-up name. There was the casual transphobia–how she described Rita Skeeter–and the fatphobia. The ‘oh Dumbledore was gay all along’ bullshit, just to name a few.
The worse thing, though, is her simplistic morality system. If someone is deemed good, then anything they do is good. If someone is bad, then everything they do is bad. Harry Potter bullies other kids, but that’s fine because he’s good. No, the absolute worst thing is that they are poorly-written books. Plus, like most famous writers, she needed a good editor starting around book four.
She went off the rails in her transphobic views and many of us in the LBGTQ+ family wrote her off for good. It’s especially repugnant because she likes to wrap it up as her just looking out for (cis) women. She claims that she has many friends who are trans. Hahahahhahahah. That’s always the lie people go to when they want to trash a group–but I have friends who are in that group! It might even be true. There are always people in a group who are too eager to be the cool one in that group. My brother, sadly, is like that when it comes to being Asian.
One person is a game developer and said that the protests hurt the devs, not JKR. Although Ian pointed out to me that devs got paid ahead of time and most don’t get a percentage of the game sales (the minions, I mean). I said, “Well, yes. People are going to not get the money. That’s the point.” And, yes, it’s easy for me to say that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. It was her arguing with a trans woman for a while, and the dev was saying that it was too personal for the trans woman. Which, well, duh. Of course it’s personal. I don’t understand why this needs to be said. I also don’t understand why you (generic you) would think it was a negative to not want to give money to people who were actively harming you.
Ian sent me the clip above, and I agree. Yes, almost everything is exploitative in some way or the other in a capitalistic society. But it’s bizarre to then conclude that we should just throw up our hands and say, “Nothing we can do about it!” It’s even more bizarre because this same person (the developer) is passionate about climate change. That’s not the bizarre part. The bizarre part is that she can’t make the connection about her hardcore stance on being a vegan (no one should eat animals ever) and boycotting the Potter game.
It’s not really that bizarre. People are notorious for thinking they were different from everyone else. If they did something, there was a rational reason for it. If someone else did it, then they were idiots or assholes or whatever. But her claim that not buying the Potter game hurt the devs of the game could easily translate in saying that her not eating meat hurt the farmers who raised the animals to be sold as food.
And, in some ways, you could say that not buying a game is more defensible because no one NEEDs to play a game. People do need to eat. But, yes. People will usually be kinder to themselves than others because they know their own situation whereas they can only make guesses about other people’s circumstances.
For me, the bottom line is that I get to spend my money as I want. This is what gets me. If I don’t want to buy the Potter game because I don’t like JKR, I am allowed to do that! That’s not why I’m not buying the game, but it’s an added reason that I make no apologies for. In the same vein, I will not buy Diablo IV because of how reprehensible Activision is, despite my love for Diablo III. It was the first ‘hardcore’ game I played, and I poured hundreds of hours into it.
In this case, I actually see more of the ‘support the devs’ argument because the ones who were being victimized actually worked on the game. But in the case of the Potter game, well, I’m not giving money to a franchise that is so transphobic as well as fatphobic, casually racist, and a bunch of other troubling issues.
We all get to draw the line for ourselves. What is and isn’t acceptable. In a prior post, I wrote about how so many women think not wearing a bra at work isn’t a hill to die on. Which, that’s fine if that’s their calculation. But to categorically state that it’s not a hill to die on is rubbish. It absolutely is a line I would draw as there is no scientifically-supported reason to wear a bra. As long as my so-called naughty bits are covered up, that should be enough. If I worked in an office that demanded this of me, I absolutely would find another job over it.
That’s why they are called hills to die on. Because they are not mountains–but they are worth walking away over, anyway. And we can argue whether it’s wise or not to die on those particular hills, but in the end, people get to decide for themselves when they want to make that stand.