It seems to have been a rushed job to try to ward off criticism. In the end, it may have failed spectacularly to silence a vocal opposition which is itself tiny, but at the same time annoyed normal people seeing a clear virtue signal.
At That Park Place, we like to cover all the news that should be fun. Sometimes we get to dig deep into fantastical narrative worlds that are all around us but are hidden from plain sight. Magical and impossible stories that strain belief and ignite the imagination.
Today, we’re talking about an interesting subculture that normal people are unaware of. Inside of Warner Bros, the studio behind the Harry Potter films, there is a division called WB Games, inside of that division is another division called Portkey Games, and Portkey Games worked behind closed doors with The Walt Disney Company’s former partner Avalanche Software to create a game that can tell you…
…whether or not you are a bad person.
In all seriousness, the discourse around the title Hogwarts Legacy has been charged to say the least. While the game itself seems fairly innocuous (with more on that in a moment), the social media discussion has been unbelievable. As we’ve covered on That Park Place, there have been successful social media campaigns to end people’s careers that were inspired solely by that person stating publicly that they were looking forward to playing to playing the game.
Let me say that again. People lost their jobs because they said they were looking forward to playing a video game.
For months, a community of people have been constantly vocalizing that they could not condone anyone purchasing, playing, or (gasp) streaming Hogwarts Legacy because doing so would show support for billionaire Harry Potter author and philanthropist J.K. Rowling, who has come under fire in the last few years for her stances in support of biological women over transgender women in sports, domestic abuse, and media coverage, earning her the title of “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist” or TERF.
It is worth pointing out that before this narrative came into play, J.K. Rowling was considered problematic to those with more traditional but now radical views (see above). After Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published, J.K. Rowling raised the ire of conservatives by stating that she had always seen Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore as gay.
Subsequent entries into the Wizarding World franchise have made it canon that Dumbledore is in fact gay and at one point had a passionate relationship with the Fantastic Beasts villain Gellert Grindelwald. This is acknowledged in the latest (and likely final) film of that spin-off series Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore in a short, less than 12 seconds of dialogue which were cut out for the Chinese release.
Despite the campaign against the game, Hogwarts Legacy is widely anticipated to be one of the best-selling video game titles of the year and is planned for release on all major platforms. The sentiment against it might have actually worked in favor of the game, raising its profile among hardcore gamers and by extension casuals who just see a shiny new game that’s doing well enough in sales to garner attention.
But what about the charge that J.K. Rowling, and therefore the game based on her narrative world, are transphobic? Well, it seems that the game does include a transgender character in the form of the bartender at the Three Broomsticks tavern, Sirona Ryan.
Whether or not this will please the games detractors is unknown. The earliest interactions with the character of Sirona Ryan are part of the main questline and don’t make it seem like there was a lot of additional effort put into presenting the character as trans other than having the dialogue spoken by what sounds like a male voice actor:
So they added the bartender's dialogue to an "Additional Voices" guy's script, attached it to a female NPC and called it "transgender representation."
I wonder how many Hogwart's Legacy players will just read this as a production error.
Thanks to @FatStevenJFG for the clip. pic.twitter.com/VHYeaf5Tnb
— Jonas J. Campbell (@JonasJCampbell) February 7, 2023
Either way, WB Games seems to have a hit on their hands. I fully expect that the developers will start working on a sequel as soon as they’ve run out of DLC to market.
For more coverage on Warner Bros and Harry Potter, stay tuned to That Park Place, the first place to drop the news that WB is restarting the Harry Potter franchise as soon as possible.
