On Authorial Intent
So, Hogwarts Legacy is nearing its street date, which means The Discourse is back in full swing, and various pieces from all potential angles are popping up.
This is a long boy. More below the cut.
What comes up frequently up here is the idea that the main antagonist, a goblin named Ranrok, effectively calls back to blood libel in attempting to kidnap the player character. This starts out of the assertion that on the wider spectrum, Rowling's goblins are supposedly wholeheartedly Antisemitic in design.
In that case, call me a troll, because I've got one heck of an unpopular read on the situation.
There is such a thing, in literary circles, called reading sensitivity. That should refer to a writer's ability to gauge his or her strength accordingly, in order to create instances of pathos or resolution that are impactful, without being insulting or disturbing. That's Fact A, to which I'll return shortly.
Fact B is that the Goblin, as a concept, is thousands of years old. The deepest roots of tales like Das Ring der Nibelungen relate to proto-germanic legends, and that virtually every culture in existence has its small, scurrying pseudo-humanoid of various levels of greed or material attachment. The Russians have the domovoi, some Irish folktales focus on Brownies, and the French have their own lutins that carry slight loaners from animal anatomy. Physical deformities can also feature, seeing as it took the emergence of most modern forms of medicine for the disabled or the infirm to not be seen as otherwordly or freakish. Let's not forget Victorian spiritualism, which saw faeries make a comeback as entirely anatomically-correct "little people" of a sort.
Considering, you'll have to excuse me if the Potter movies' use of money-lending and hook-nosed humans beset with a glandular or skeletal issue doesn't exactly strike me as being antisemitic. Culture warps and shifts over time, points of contention are identified and workshopped, and now you've got ethically mature postures found in Dungeons and Dragons' 5th edition, which rebrands liches' Phylacteries as more à-propos "vessels" or "soul jars". Looking at goblins and at virtually any other Fantasy staple, it's not hard to see that recent advances in criticism have enabled worldbuilders to think critically about their object of focus without disavowing them entirely.
Therein lies a tiny bit of an issue. It isn't impossible for a set of creatives to connect two dots without realizing the implications of the inferences they've made. As is the case with Hogwarts Legacy, this gives you Ranrok's rather awkward reasoning behind his siding with Dark Wizards. It isn't blood libel so much as a clumsy attempt at reclamation, our antagonist not realizing how his actions are painting his entire diaspora in a corner.
Fact C concerns Avalanche Studio themselves. I first thought their name referred to the Stockholm-based creators of open-world titles like Just Cause 3 or Mad Max, but it's a case of mistaken identity. They're actually American, with Hogwarts Legacy being their first tentpole title under WB Games' auspices. They're in more than a tertiary position in relation to Rowling's remaining rights - say that three times fast - and had more contact with WB Games than with anyone related to the wider Potterverse. Considering, I highly doubt they would've chosen to pile onto Rowling's already-massive pile of worldbuilding and character-creating flaws. This, for better or worse, is entirely theirs to shoulder. Going over demos and earlier cover stories, the entire Ranrok angle feels... sophomoric, rather than insulting. It's as though they thought that the game would primarily be played by fifteen year-olds, when the books and movies' core audiences are either well into their thirties or edging ever closer to the mid three-ohs. Some elements of complexity are missing that featured in the movies and games, with the entire premise giving me the impression that our poor Goblin fellow would be hoist by his own petard in some mind-numbingly spectacular fashion, following a boilerplate boss fight.
In clearer terms, I won't be kicking the ass of a clumsy and mean-spirited allegory for Jewish people getting even after the Holocaust; I'll be spending the game trying to set up the most aggressive take on an intervention you could think of. None of this reflects poorly on goblins - it reflects poorly on Ranrok, instead, as well as the game's scriptwriters.
What's interesting is how the current discourse underlines an important point about Rowling's oeuvre, which is that her attempts at making her characters mature through exposure to deeper sociopolitical undercurrents are consistently and amazingly clumsy. Most of her created organizations are pale facsimiles of their real-world counterparts, with her moral compass suggesting that she blew through Ethics without paying much attention in class. She's palpably had good intentions, but her looking for digestible shortcuts is exactly what landed her in her currently murky waters. Characters who'd start out ready and willing to clean their society of its systemic ills after a few books spent in-training would be shelved as now-useless adults by the series' end. The Big Bad is vanquished. Everyone, if not everything in Hogwarts depended on Voldemort's existence as some form of motivating impulse.
What do you do, once you've killed your campaign's BBEG and want to extend it? You totemize societal ills and tell another group of plucky mercenaries to have at it for the sake of a paycheck. Legacy likely wants to say something about the mistreatment of minority groups, but it's contractually obligated to focus on the mirth and whimsy. Considering, reading too much into the antagonist is a fool's errand.
My more personal take on the game is as follows: Rowling's been burned at the stake of Progressivism and now exists as a specter the reactionary Right flaps about. She goes quiet for a few months and then shambles for a few steps like a zombie, Tweeting inane nonsense that depersonalizes minority groups out of some rampant paranoia of hers. In clearer terms, she isn't worth anyone's time.
Everything Potter is now squarely in the House that Batman and Bugs Bunny built. The golden goose has laid all its eggs and the goose itself is now fallow and barren. Ultimately, you can interpret any product in any way you'd choose and ignore anything that displeases you, but my thinking is that you'd be punching down on a megacorporation that knows enough not to purposefully incense a particular group. If any game was focus-tested to Hell and back, it's certainly Hogwarts Legacy.
Don't buy it if you don't want to, sure, but try and maybe catch a few Let's Play segments. We'll all see for ourselves just how adroitly - or clumsily - one particular goblin's racial hatred and spite could call back to an anti-Jewish trope I've never seen bandied-about outside of tailor-made Fash mouthpieces like The Daily Stormer.
