Reshaping a "Legacy"

I want to begin by saying that this isn’t a protest. I’m not here to lay out the many reasons that I am not personally playing Hogwarts Legacy. Chief among those reasons is that I am not a gamer. My Playstation died decades ago and sits disheveled in a box under my bed. If I were ever to adopt such an expensive habit, there would be dozens upon dozens of games that I’d turn to instead. At the same time, I don’t wish to advertise a game that has knowingly promoted Anti-Semitism through its banker-centric goblin characters or mired itself in endless controversy. I don’t wish to give fire to the fuel of people who are playing this game solely out of some unfound vengeance against the transgender community. This post isn’t going to break down the endless reasons I find the discourse around this game disheartening (let alone because there’s better-spoken rhetoric out there). No, this is about self-reflection.

I think it would be difficult to have been alive in the 21st century especially without having some relationship with The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. If it wasn’t the books, then there were the films that were churned out almost annually at a time, expanding the brand to a near level of omnipresence. The books quickly became record-breaking best-sellers that were said to have inspired a generation to become voracious readers. There’s been endless extensions of the brand from theme park attractions to video games and even a score that the legendary John Williams will still pull out at his concerts to enthusiastic applause each time. There’s even fan videos that have become cherished heirlooms. 

In any other situation, this would be one of the greatest achievements in history. Given that I was 9 when J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was released, there was something perfect about the narrative. The media sold her as a struggling mother who wrote this novel that was rejected by many publishers until landing in a bidding war. It sold the working class perspective perfectly and made a possibly more naïve child believe in the potential that by working hard you too can helm a multi-billion dollar franchise that inspires acclaim from such established authors as Stephen King (while he’s since retracted his support, he does reference her in “The Dark Tower” series). To see it happen in my lifetime and not be another William Shakespeare-esque “this is great because generations prior said it was great” means a lot. To be cognizant of every book launch resonates so much more than being told that I should read “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager. Yes, Rowling’s success probably could’ve helped her coast for the rest of her career, but it does feel like her personal opinions got in the way.

As someone who has been writing since they were 5, a story like Rowling’s sounds a bit too perfect. Much like King, there is something admirable about putting in those hours behind a desk and having that effort validated in sales. It’s taking those low-wage jobs and believing that your career is going nowhere until your wife pulls “Carrie” out of the trashcan. I’m sure the chances of achieving their level of success boil down to luck. I probably could go the rest of my career without ever crossing 100,000 books sold, but there’s something about self-expression that remains addictive and essential to me. It’s the hope that I could be like King: successful, entertaining, and shamelessly transparent. He’s great because he’s flawed, able to release masterpieces one time and grandiose failures the next while accepting them as a reality. Rowling similarly found a way to use children’s fiction as a chance to evolve with the reader in a way that made people of my generation endlessly indebted to her. The issue with that is when her post-Harry Potter career included TERF rhetoric, it consumed many with a hypnotic pull.

This is why I’m finding my relationship with Harry Potter difficult. It isn’t so much that I am one of those obsessives who has a thorough dictionary of every supporting character and how to cast the spells. It’s more that on one level I sympathized with Rowling’s Post-Harry Potter career in the immediate sense while having grown relieved that I never picked up “The Casual Vacancy.” I couldn’t imagine recreating literature in your image and then having to coast for the rest of your life. How do you possibly create something that’s a quarter as successful? As dumb as it probably was, it’s why I’m not as bothered by pointless “rewrites of history” like Albus Dumbledore being gay or Hermione Granger being allegedly Black. If anything, I saw it as an effort to keep the franchise relevant, and I think anyone would struggle with the post-mortem. The addiction to success is inevitable, to have people constantly wanting to return to your most beloved work probably eats at you, as if invalidating your creative gifts as a writer.

That’s the thing. As much as I could get hung up on the minutia of Harry Potter, I think there are ways she could’ve navigated everything after that would’ve had history see her a little more positively. I’ll fully confess that I never thought critically about those books. I didn’t consider many of its problematic themes until decades later when fans began to poke holes in Rowling’s worldview. It’s all worth exploring because I think the eventual answers are there. However, I think achieving a billionaire status for having your ideas seen as society-shifting brilliance must weigh on you. I think on some level the transphobia is as much a response to some deep-seated bias but also doubling down on foolish comments she made on Twitter because she was getting a level of attention not afforded to her since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011) hit theaters. When you’re that powerful, nobody can tell you what to say.

I think it hurts because this controversy is happening in the present tense for me. When others like Dave Chappelle win Grammys for offering his support, it’s clear how difficult the situation ultimately becomes. This isn’t like separating the art from the artist in the past tense. This isn’t trying to plead with Salvador Dali to denounce fascism. This is recognizing the power imbalance where those with enough billions to hire a country-sized army to protect their harmful opinions against a marginalized group simply wanting human rights. Giving Chappelle a Grammy, by supporting Hogwarts Legacy while knowing these truths says a lot about who you are. It’s the choice that entertainment is more important than humanity.

I say this as someone who has continually found more comfort in the LGBTQIA+ community than in modern American politics. Some of the most insightful and compassionate voices on current events are queer individuals of any age. There’s a level of empathy among them that I feel is absent in the vengeance-centric view of some. I think of Florida’s infamous Don’t Say Gay legislature. I think of The Club Q Shooting that was met not with “thoughts and prayers” but the suggestion that these “groomers” deserved it. On a more localized level, there have been some unfortunate realities this past month. In the neighboring Orange County, Huntington Beach, CA has declared that they’re not going to be flying the rainbow flag on city property claiming: 

“By definition, inclusion represents everyone, equally,” Casey McKeon said, arguing that flags other than those representative of the country, state, city or military, such as the pride flag, do “not represent every resident equally.”

It’s not unexpected, but the idea of supporting the military and not people’s right to identify how they want is a real show of hand. It’s an invalidation that many around the country have faced. It’s fine if you sacrifice your life and mental health to protect some patriotic ideology but God forbid you love someone differently. It’s a theme that has terrible outcomes and encourages the worst from society. As I write this, I am saddened to hear about the death of Brianna Ghey: a 15-year-old girl who was stabbed to death. Right now there are talks to change the outcome of California’s Prop 8 ruling that was pivotal to the state’s passing of gay marriage. It’s ostensibly throwing everyone back into the closet, and having a billionaire like Rowling using her platform to embrace insensitivity is scary. All that we want is to have a rational discourse, not someone sticking their fingers in their ear while screaming “La la la la.” It hurts that in a country founded on compromise that there’s none for those who need help the most. Given that the architect behind the Don’t Say Gay legislature may be running for president next year, it’s not looking any better in the near future.

I say all this because while Rowling is British and theoretically shouldn’t have any impact on American discourse, the world is too interconnected. Someone could write a negative comment in Ukraine and if it goes viral, there’s a chance that it alters the way we see things. Where Rowling could be charitable and support causes that make trans communities, instead she encourages people to buy video games and shove fingers in their ears. If you grow up believing that Harry Potter is a profound piece of art, there’s a good chance you’ll buy it because how could the person who impacted your core values be wrong? 

I’ll admit there’s some dissonance that we should apply to humanity. Again, I admire King not because he is perfect but because he’s willing to admit some of his ideas were bad. He’s someone who may be financially better off than I could ever dream, but I still could imagine getting a beer with him and talking about horror movies. Rowling has never struck me as flawed, and I think that impacts how some would see her. Some articles have suggested that the only one who has outsold her is God, which I think doesn’t help matters. I recognize that a lot of this is being image conscious decisions that have benefited her greatly. Who doesn’t want to see their escapist works as holding that comforting ability?

With all of this said, I don’t say this as someone who hated Harry Potter and believed it was ever an awful work of fiction. It would be dishonest to own that opinion. However, when the person who would write future books under the pseudonym of a known abuser, it’s hard to give her a pass. The thing that hurts is she has spent so much time making me dread the future that it’s hard to remember there was a time when Harry Potter as a franchise made me optimistic for it.

As a child, I was gifted “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by my Nana. She was a librarian from Spokane, WA that I only ever met six or seven times in my life. However, we were constant pen pals, where I used to write her short stories and she would provide feedback. In her final year, we discussed PBS’ Great American Read with maybe too much obsessiveness. Still, when I held that book as a child, I’d see her note at the front and not know what was to come. At the time it was just a book. No franchise in sight. I was able to pour through those pages and feel immersed, finding myself in awe by the end of the first chapter. I still remember the twist at the end that Professor Quirrell was the villain as being downright shocking. While I can’t call myself someone who likes rereading works, those first three books were ones I’d make an exception for. There was a couch in the back of the warehouse my dad worked at where I would sit for hours just taking it all in.

Nothing in that series resonated with me as much as those first three books. By “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” I was falling out of love with the franchise. Even then, that was a decade’s worth of connection, where I had the Playstation game and had the many films’ release dates marked on my calendar. My friends in high school were more endeared to everything and discussing the final book on Myspace remains a memorable experience. I don’t think I grew disinterested in the final run out of any disagreement but more that I struggle to appreciate sci-fi and fantasy. I don’t know if that helped me escape the betwixt powers that followed, but there’s no denying that even at its worst, Harry Potter was so ingrained in the era that it would be like denying living through the 70s without some awareness of disco music.

All in all, I think it hurts a little because of how those books correlated with my own childhood. In 2000, I was 10 and went through the worst year of school. It could be that I was autistic and suffering major social cue issues, but over the span of that year, I lost an entire friend group (given the size of the school, that was everyone). I was accused of all sorts of things I didn’t do and it quickly became clear that the school’s staff wasn’t going to make it better. At the end of the school year I transferred, but the damage was done. There was an effort to make the kids like me by writing encouraging messages, but it backfired and instead created deep-seated trust issues around sentimentalism when everyone reverted to being annoyed by my existence. In one of the more confusing turns of events, I heard someone once say that the father of my former best friend (whom I saw The Phantom Menace (1999) with) wanted to beat me up. Kids can be cruel indeed.

But one of the clear memories I have is the few months that I was taken to therapy that year. I can’t remember much of what was discussed, save for this woman asking me questions about my life. The final session included a discussion of potentially doing group therapy of some kind. I remember it sounding appealing but for reasons I never learned, I never went back. I choose to think it was a financial reason since I didn’t come from the most affluent of families. More than these sessions, I remember sitting in the waiting room reading “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It was a comforting piece of escapism to reach those words: the boy who lived. In a time where everything around me was distressing, this book was able to give me some optimism. I can’t say I consider it the greatest book I read at the time, but as someone who eventually was punished during recess and lunch and had to sit on the bench reading books, it was symbolic of the one saving grace.

I was reminded of this recently in Jessie Gender’s video deconstructing her relationship with J.K. Rowling. The tragedy isn’t so much an author being hateful but that it happened during your lifetime, where you believed a certain level of trust that was ultimately shattered. I can’t imagine how the news feels to those who feel more validated by those books and saw something about themselves in it. With that said, the section dedicated to collaborator Aranock touched me the most and inspired me to write this. She has suffered a much worse fate than I have. Most of my anguish is past tense and not exactly at the hands of the art. She continues to struggle with harassment for being trans and it’s easy to see why Hogwarts Legacy is something she hates with a passion. 

Sure, there is something amusing about seeing Hogwarts Legacy promote itself during new episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it’s still bittersweet to see something that should be full of optimism just makes me feel empty. How can something so integral to over 2/3 of my life now feel so unnecessary? At this point, I hold onto that first book less because I want to read it but because of that note my Nana wrote in it, reminding me of a moment when we formed this deep bond over literature. I can’t shake it. It’ll always be there.

I don’t have any great answer for any of this. I’ll just say that I’m relieved that I haven’t had to deal with an undying love of Rowling going into the controversy. Maybe I admired her for how she symbolized success as a writer. Even then, it comes down to what she did with that fame that makes me now use her story more as cautionary. I’m an imperfect person. I’m sure I’ve written dozens possibly hundreds of dumb things on the internet, but I’m hoping that what’s also been reflective is self-awareness and willingness to grow. I want to be a good person who empathizes with others. I want to be able to feel like someone you’d feel comfortable just talking to about anything. I don’t feel that way about Rowling. I’m sure she’d just bully me like those kids 23 years ago. That’s not how I want to spend my time. I have better things to do with my time.