Due to the release of the video game Hogwarts Legacy, there’s currently quite a bit of controversy about Harry Potter and its creator, who now spends her days spewing hate speech against transwomen instead of writing magical children’s stories. I would like to add my two cents to this discussion.

As a millennial, I grew up with Harry Potter. I started reading these books when I was around 14 years old, and they played a significant role in me acquiring the English language, as they were some of the first books I read in English. I read every new book of the series as it was released, and for the release of the final book, I even went to the midnight event at Düsseldorf’s largest book store(RIP Stern Verlag). There, I stood in line with around 30-50 other fans eager to get their hands on the final book, waiting for 1am and the beginning of the sales. I proceeded to spend half the night and all of the next day reading the book, not putting it down for about 18 hours until I finished it. That was 16 years ago.

A long time has passed since then and the world has changed significantly, as have I. Since the release of the final book, I believe I have re-read the entire book series once or twice, the last time being around two or three years into my bachelor’s degree. That must have been around 2013ish, and after a couple of semesters of studying English literature, back then it already became pretty apparent to me that these books are actually not that good. I gave them some slack because they’re obviously aimed at children (at least the first 3-4 books), but even for children’s books, they are actually not that good. There are many reasons for that, I will touch on some of these.

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is a binary world. There is only good and evil, and you are either a good, virtuous person, or an evil, despicable person. There are no shades of moral ambiguity in this world, no opportunity for redemption. Even Draco Malfoy, who at some point shows the tiniest bit of decency, doesn’t truly redeem himself, he remains the evil bully even after the events of the final book. And how could he? In this world, everyone’s personality is set in stone already due to their names. How could someone like Draco Malfoy (roughly translating to “bad/evil dragon”) ever be good?

Ironically, Harry himself is also not actually a good person. Still, he is always portrayed as such, because he is the hero of the series. His largely questionable actions are framed as necessary to defeat the enemy, but they are often far from good or empathetic. In essence he is a jerk who only got to where he is with the help from his friends, and that only because he is ‘special’. What this story tells us, is that if you’re privileged in some way or another, you can achieve anything. However, if you’re just a normal person, you can never be as great as the Chosen One™.

The world of Harry Potter is quite obviously a patriarchal world, which is ironic coming from a female author. The value of men far exceeds the value of women, as all the most important characters are male (Harry, Dumbledore, Sirius, Lupin, ministers for magic, etc.). Can you think of a great female character in this series that both passes the Bechdel test, and is not portrayed as either a mother figure or an insecure, annoying nerd or weirdo? I cannot.

It’s also full of idiots. Harry himself is probably the biggest idiot, yet again and again he gets away with his idiocy – and is even encouraged by adults due to their lack of interference. The adults in this series are possibly the most irresponsible adults I have every encountered in a fictional realm, with Dumbledore being way at the top of the list. Dumbledore is portrayed as this wise, all-knowing, all-seeing wizard. He absolutely knew all the shit that Harry and his friends were up to, shit that put them in mortal danger – and what did Dumbledore do? Absolutely nothing. Instead, he let them fight monsters all by themselves. Any responsible adult would have interfered and helped here, but I guess then the books would have been over too quickly.

So why do people like Harry Potter so much? First of all, it’s a remnant of a bygone era. The first book was published in 1997, which was 26 years ago. The real world was a vastly different place back in the nineties, and movements of equality and social justice were nowhere near where they are today. But what I think made this series so immensely popular is its world-building1 — taking aside the binary aspects of the culture in this world, it is actually quite a fantastic world. The author has put a lot of effort and attention to detail into the world-building aspects of Harry Potter, and reading about this sprawling, ancient, magical castle sucks you as the reader right into this world and makes you feel at home.

And that is honestly also what I think most people find attractive about Hogwarts Legacy – its a video game, far removed from the events of the book series2, that lets you freely explore this world and become a witch or wizard yourself. I am quite tempted to play this game myself, but I feel morally ambiguous about this, due to the fact that the creator of the Harry Potter has outed herself as a massive transphobe, using her popularity and platform to promote anti-trans propaganda. This is, quite honestly, not surprising at all, because we already knew that she thinks in black and white, good and evil, male and female. In her world, there are just no shades of grey at all, and thus there cannot be genders other than male or female. If she wants to be an idiot that’s her choice, but actively using her follower base to utter anti-trans hatespeech up to a point where trans lives in the UK are hurt is just despicable. I do not feel good about spending money on anything that would support this woman even in the slightest.

However, I am also aware that the developers of Hogwarts Legacy worked independently from her and she was not involved in any aspects of the creation of the game or its story. They even went so far as to give her a virtual slap in the face by introducing a trans character into the world of Harry Potter. And even though you can only be a ‘witch’ or ‘wizard’, you can create your character in this game however queer you like. For that, I think the developers deserve some recognition.

While that would put the developers into a positive light, to make things worse, there only is not only controversy around the transphobe author of Harry Potter, there is also additional controversy about the former lead developer of Hogwarts Legacy, who appears to be an alt-right anti-feminist activist and proud Slytherin (see e.g. this article on Kotaku). I can see why such a person would be attracted to the Wizarding World – it’s not only a fairly patriarchal world, but also incredibly racist world, where pure-blood wizards are the master race, and everything else is seen as lower forms of being regardless of intelligence (e.g. goblins, house-elves, non-pureblood wizards). Warner Brothers apparently knew about this guy’s alt-right activism, but did not care. I’m not surprised that a mega corporation doesn’t care, as those tend to be interested primarily in money, not in what’s right. They did, however, eventually fire the alt-right guy late in the development of the game, late enough to raise concerns about his negative influence on the game. There are arguments that the game is trying to be actively anti-semitic, in so far as including a goblin artifact that resembles a Jewish shofar, a musical instrument that was traditionally made from a ram’s horn. This quite obviously shifts the discussion around the game into an even less favorable direction.

However, I do not believe that social justice warriors will succeed in canceling the game. The power of consumerism (ironically something that Harry Potter is great at brainwashing us into) will be too strong, and the average consumer just doesn’t care. What I find a bit puzzling is that if you want to forbid people from playing Hogwarts Legacy, do you also forbid people from consuming anything related to, for example, the Cthulhu myth, the author of which was blatantly racist? Similar arguments could be made for Tolkien, who definitely favored white people. But since these authors are dead, boycotting their works would have very little impact. Those two, however, are great examples for fictional universes that developed a life of their own. Tolkien has defined a whole century’s worth of fantasy. His orcs, elves and dwarves are now omnipresent in fantasy, such as for example in Dungeons & Dragons.

Personally, I think it’s time to take the Wizarding World away from its author and make it our own. The Harry Potter generation has grown up and evolved, whereas the author got stuck in the mud. We can take this universe, which is so familiar to us, and create something much better out of it, something where not everything is set in stone, where there is equality for all intelligent life-forms, where there’s shades of morality rather than good and evil, and where people are empathetic and thoughtful rather than rash jerks. Those were my hopes for Hogwarts Legacy, but the argument that the game is actively trying to be anti-semitic sullies these.

Ironically, the current controversy around Hogwarts Legacy is rather black and white. You’re good if you’re not buying it, because then you don’t support the transphobe. You’re evil if you buy it, because then you do support her. But it’s not really her game, and the developers actively distanced themselves from her. She’s filthy rich anyway, so does it really matter? Obviously matters are more complicated due to the involvement of the alt-right guy in this game, and many reports emerging that the game is actively anti-semitic. But by buying this game you pretty much only support WB, as even the developers have already been paid, and the opinions of one lead developer does not automatically mean that the thousands of other developers who worked hard to make this game share his views. I think there are many shades of grey here, and I would advice against condemning people who play the game in the same black and white terms that make the universe of Harry Potter so problematic.