PlayStation released the official reveal trailer of the upcoming Harry Potter game ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ for the PlayStation 5 earlier today; and MY GOODNESS, DOES IT LOOK AWESOME!!! My Potterhead heart was screaming internally when I saw the stunning graphics of everything I had grown to love about the Wizarding World through the years as I heard the voiceover talk about the bond we share over the beautiful and powerful magic of the Harry Potter Universe.
This game is literally everything I had dreamed of being able to play as a child – slash – young teenager: entering the halls of Hogwarts, putting on the Sorting Hat (Ravenclaw represent!), riding a broom, meeting fellow magic-loving people, taking classes like Potions and Herbology, taming Fantastic Beasts, mastering spells… plus more! Apparently, ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ will even take us into a world beyond the walls of Hogwarts – and open world games are the kinds of games that I love the most.
Watch the trailer here if you haven’t yet:
However… as beautiful as the trailer is and as much as it has awakened my dormant love for the franchise, I couldn’t help but feel sad at the same time. After all, I am no longer a child whose sole interest is making my Potterhead heart happy. I am now an adult who makes her own money and also makes her own decisions on what to spend that money on and who knows who that money will go to.
J.K. Rowling, the once loved author of the Harry Potter series, has been very vocal about her transphobia on Twitter. After liking a tweet that called transgender women “men in dresses”, she has spoken up about the transgender community several times – and never in a good way. During the pandemic, she posted several transphobic tweets that the stars of the Harry Potter movies commented on. Read more about that here. Around the same time, she also wrote an essay filled with trans exclusionary radical feminist points.
Mere days ago, Rowling also proved how committed she is to her transphobia in her new book ‘Troubled Blood’ (written under the pen name Robert Galbraith), where a woman disappears in 1974 and is believed to have been a victim of “a transvestite serial killer” named Dennis Creed. In a recent interview with The Independent, ‘Sex and the City’ star Cynthia Nixon called Rowling out, stating that her transphobic comments were very painful for her transgender son to hear, especially since much of his childhood involved Harry Potter. Having a transgender sibling myself, this hits very close to home.
This brings us back to how sad I feel about the awesomeness of the ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ trailer. Yes, the game looks amazing. Yes, it is everything I have dreamed of playing ever since I started reading the Harry Potter books. However, we must not forget that J.K. Rowling will also directly profit from this game.
After her anti-trans comments were posted, I already felt a ton of pain for having had supported this woman throughout her career… do I really want to support this game and put more money into her pockets? Yes, it can be hard to separate the art from the artist, especially when it comes to something with as big of a scale as Harry Potter; but I feel that standing by the transgender community is much more important. ‘Hogwarts Legacy’… it’s a no for me.
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