I love Riz's mom being a public defender because it means I get to share a bit about my job/life lol. I'm an administrative assistant in my local public defender's office, so I help attorneys out with paperwork and stuff.
This actually happens, I wouldn't say a lot, but enough that in my three years working at public defender's office I've closed out a few cases where our client passed away. It's pretty sad, but since we're all overworked and underpaid, it's just one more thing that we deal with and move on to our other cases.
So You’re Getting Bullied By Leftists and Trans People for Wanting to Revisit Your Childhood: A Primer on Navigating the Complex Emotions Surrounding the New HP Game and How To Decide For Yourself if it’s Worth Buying and Playing
I’m writing this because my brother keeps getting messages from people who are getting bullied over wanting to play the new HP game and it’s making them less sympathetic to our cause. This sucks, but I don’t feel I can tell off my fellow LGBT and Jewish friends for being angry. So to you, dear reader who is feeling alienated and abused by us, I wish to offer an olive branch and a way to see through our anger to our actual point, and why we’re asking you not to engage with the game.
First, dispel the notion that you’re going to be pirating this game. It features one of the strongest versions of Denuvo yet, which can only be cracked by one person who calls herself Empress (and is herself pretty wildly transphobic), and she promised to crack it in 10 days. If you want to play it for free before February 20th, you’re SOL, and that’s if she cracks it as promised. It is a very real possibility that this will never be crackable. More than likely, if you want to experience this game, you’ll need to either watch a Twitch streamer or YouTuber play it, wait a month to purchase a used copy, or purchase it new.
One of the main talking points about this game is that buying it gives money to original HP author JK Rowling, and this is true! She receives royalties for everything WB does with the Wizarding World, which is the current official franchise name. She has been spending a lot of money on lobbying politicians in the UK to dismantle the NHS’s transgender care programs. She claims that this is because she’s trying to prevent men from getting placed in women-only jails where they rape their fellow inmates, and I see this get parroted a lot, but even if it was only about that, it’s still a massive transphobic dogwhistle.
Side bar: I’m gonna be talking about dogwhistles a lot. I’m gonna explain what those are real quick because frankly I think a lot of why we aren’t getting our message across is baked into the nature of dogwhistles. See, dogwhistles are a method of talking in code where members of an in-group (and people opposed to the in-group who study them) know what a phrase really means, but it has plausible deniability to anyone not familiar with the lingo. Common dogwhistles are things like “we’re just trying to keep men out of women’s prisons” (which is a wink to other transphobes about trans women not actually being women in their eyes), “I’m just concerned about the influence of the Hollywood elite” (”all of your media is being controlled by rich and powerful Jews with a secret agenda”) and code numbers like putting 1488 in their usernames. It feels crazy to type out or read because they’re by design meant to make you feel crazy for noticing them. It’s a bit of psychological warfare. If as we get through this you feel like some of the things I’m telling you about JK’s beliefs or the contents of the game are too crazy to be true, please come back to this paragraph and remember that they want you to doubt us when we ask you not to the play the game for X reason.
Anyways, back to the money issue: one defense I see a lot is that JK already has a ridiculous fortune and buying the game is a drop in the bucket compared to what she’s already made. Frankly, you’re not wrong. If the movies had never been made JK still would’ve been set for life and able to go on her little crusade against trans people because the books alone made her a multimillionaire. With the right investment profile she would easily be at the level of wealth she’s at now without any of the other Wizarding World properties getting published. Toss in the movies, the theme park, the merchandising empire and the game really does become a drop in the bucket. But, your money is still going to her. You know what she spends it on. Even if she managed to set up a veritable perpetual money maker, the royalties from what you spend on the game go directly to someone who is spending a lot of money on making sure trans people in the UK are barred from transitioning. Is that something you can live with?
Some people have decided they can live with that. Others are donating the same cost of the game to orgs like Trevor Project to offset the impact of the royalties Rowling will get. If that’s the route you choose to go, realize that your trans friends will probably still be pretty upset with you. It calls to mind the Catholic concept of indulgences, where one could commit all manor of crimes but with a simple donation to the right priest still get into heaven. That’s harsh, I know, but we make the comparison because it genuinely feels like our charities are being used just to offset the guilt of buying the game instead of being donated to because people actually want to help us. That hurts. It’s hard to articulate exactly why that hurts so bad, but it does. Your friends are lashing out and bullying you because of real pain. And what you experience as a result of that bullying is real pain too. But consider the source. Walk it back to its origin point. When someone has been fighting for their very life, and they ask you not to spend money on the game or watch streams of it, and you try to find a way to do it anyways after they’ve illustrated the very real harm your dollar causes, and you feel hurt when they lash out at you or unfriend you, do you stop to think of the pain they were in first? This is your chance to do so.
This part is hard, I know that intimately. Again, I’m writing this post because my brother is hurting, because people who want to play the game are reaching out to him and expressing their pain. We are all hurting over this in various ways for various reasons. I know how hard it is to cut something off that was a tremendous part of your life because I had to cut this out too. It wasn’t easy. You can read my other post on this topic to see how big of a fan I was.
Which leads me to streaming. I have very bad news for you. We’ve hit a point in media where the amount of money people collectively make off of a game is not just from sales. You see, there’s a barely hidden mechanic in the stock market that rewards people for gambling on the success of a franchise, and success is not just raw sales numbers. Piracy, streams on twitch, number of concurrent players and viewers, and social media engagement all play a part. I’m benefiting those guys right now because I’m posting about the game on social media! It doesn’t matter that my post is negative, because the attention I’m giving it is part of the commodity being sold. It’s not just about the game anymore, it’s about the brand. The more popular a series is, the more the value of the stock owned by shareholders increases. The more that value increases, the more the shareholder’s portfolio is worth, which is more leverage to use against high dollar loans, which the shareholders then use to buy yachts and houses or even use to purchase stocks and futures for another company or commodity, and then pay the loan off by selling off lower value stocks. It becomes an oroboros of money, a juggernaut fueled by speculation and gambling and hashtags. I’m gonna say this right now: it’s already too late. If you want to watch someone play the game, you can do that and have a clean conscious. We’re on day 2 of the proper release and day 5 of it being streamed by various people on Twitch. The game is already second only to Elden Ring in stream numbers. If I’d written this a week ago I would’ve expounded upon how giving this game any attention just signals to WB that making more Wizarding World content is good even if you didn’t personally give WB and JK money, but the cat is out of the damn bag. This is also how a lot of us leftists are getting info about the game so we can talk about it more intelligently, so it would be a little hypocritical to tell you not to. Go nuts.
Except, maybe don’t. Here’s the final part of my essay begging you not to play or watch this game even as the bullying makes you want to play it more. We have spent a lot of time talking about trans people for a very good reason, but frankly they aren’t the elephant in the room. We need to talk about antisemetism, cognitohazards, and how choosing to consume content with an obvious bias can slant you unconsciously to that bias. Now, I am not saying that playing the game makes you an antisemite! Again, I’m not here to bully you and that would be bullying. I’m just here to help you see through the bullying. But, when we engage with such content, it does form a little bit of bias in our heads if we aren’t careful to examine and undermine that. If you continue to consume content with that bias, it cements itself further. Eventually, if you never consume content with the opposite bias, you will find yourself believing what wormed into your subconsciousness way back at the start. This is how the so-called Alt Right Pipeline works. For more information about that I would ask that you go watch Innuendo Studios’ “The Alt Right Playbook”. He’s much nicer than me and the videos clearly demonstrate the effect.
This game is meant to be part of the alt right pipeline. The original director, Troy Leavitt, runs a youtube channel that promotes alt right content meant to funnel viewers deeper into the pipeline. He stepped down from the game but not after the president of WB Games stated that he was fine with employees like Leavitt posting whatever they want to their personal social media, a milquetoast endorsement of Leavitt’s influence on the game’s antisemetism. Lest you think that Leavitt leaving the game was the end of the problems, voice actor Greg Ellis, who voices 12 of the characters in the game, is an antifeminist who’s created revenge porn of an ex, something JK is actually strongly opposed to, yet she thanked him for his work on the game. Other employees who worked on the game to the bitter end have confirmed that the plot of the game didn’t change after Leavitt left.
One final sidebar: this game is way more antisemetic than what JK wrote originally. I know a lot of people talk about JK’s antisemetism in the original books, and it is bad, but the goblins are little more than set dressing for most of the books, only becoming plot relevant a couple of times across tens of thousands of pages. Mostly she pulls from the original goblin stereotypes of the early 1900s that every other property from DnD to WoW was pulling from, being hooked noses, a penchant for banking, a very insular community, abrasive behavior to outsiders and being very protective of things they made. There’s a lot of plausible deniability in what JK wrote, which has made it very hard for Jews to speak up about the problems.
This game launches plausible deniability out the window. I’m going to copy and paste some things from my last post on the topic, and this will spoil parts of the game, but if you’ve humored me this far I think you’ll understand why I need to.
“This game presents to you a fantasy race based on antisemetic caricatures and gives the fantasy race a number of real-world antisemetic stereotypes like blood libel, greedy banking, and collaborating with their own persecutors to cause a Holocaust. We currently live in a world where a large number of people are convinced that a secret Jewish elite is conspiring to use COVID vaccines to sterilize white people so they will cease to exist in a generation. The game has its fantasy Jews collaborating with a dark wizard to wipe out the wizarding population. You can choose to join them, or you can choose to put down the rebellion. The game allows you to collect a shofar as a trophy. Joanne didn't have anything to do with this and the game is actually on a special noncanon license where WB Games can ignore or add whatever they want to Joanne's worldbuilding, and they added that goblins use shofars. And you can collect it. As a trophy.“ Further, the final boss no matter which route you go down is the goblin leader of the rebellion. Whether you’re a good wizard putting down the rebellion or a bad one helping it, you have to kill the guy who organized the whole thing. Shofars are an important Jewish instrument used in many ceremonies from synagogue services on Rosh Hashanah and at the end of Yom Kippur to every weekday morning in the month of Elul running up to Rosh Hashanah. and they look like this:
And here’s the in-game screenshot, with a little bit of extra commentary:
This is probably the single BIGGEST dogwhistle in the game. You could even call it a dogshofar it’s so loud. You wouldn’t recognize this unless you were either Jewish/very steeped in Jewish culture or if you were an antisemite. Remember what I said about psychological warfare? This is that.
Also, here’s a good article on blood libel: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/blood-libel I actually think blood libel was present in the original books, but it gets way amped up in this game, with the goblins genuinely kidnapping and killing wizard children, just like the antisemetic stereotype. A lot of people don’t know what blood libel even is so please read about it.
Again, playing this game by itself does not make you antisemetic. But if you play it and then go on to consume other media with these antisemetic stereotypes, you are getting primed to become more antisemetic, and to slide down the pipeline. You have to ask yourself, is playing the game really worth that? Do you have the fortitude to play it or watch someone else play it and stay an ally to Jewish people against the current onslaught of antisemetism? And if you do have that fortitude, then why do you want to play this game? Is it just so you can see Hogwarts again, is it to soothe the part of your soul that needs nostalgia in troubling times, and is there other ways you can do that? Is this a cultural moment that you really need to participate in, or can you sit this one out and support the people asking you to not engage for all the reasons I’ve listed above?
I can’t answer that question for you. I can’t stop the people bullying you. I can’t stop myself from feeling disappointed when friends I have engage with the game even after I’ve explained myself a dozen times. I just know that I have a responsibility to keep explaining this, and hope you can see why I’ve written this massive essay. Please, if I can sway you in any way, don’t buy the game. If you absolutely must see it with your own eyes, watch someone play it. But don’t give money to WB and JK for this.
