#wizardcourse

[arabelle-wzrd]

So I’ve been seeing a lot of posts floating around about the Wizard Council and spell regulations. Most of these posts are hate for the Wizard Council. I just want to say that lot of the posts are pretty ignorant of the reality of unregulated magic use so I’m going to clear up some of the broader misconceptions.

[misanthropiccatboy]

like, relative to the claims of antisemitism i think it is actually pretty important to point at that there are wizard characters who are good guys who look more jewish and are more jewish-coded than the goblins in hogwarts legacy

[misanthropiccatboy]

Not to be annoying on main, but i really feel like the harry potter game discourse is just detroit become human discourse 2.0.

i have no excuse for how stupid it is, it's rotting my brain. sorry to all followers who have stuck around block #wizardcourse

[misanthropiccatboy]

people are just unironically going the "consuming media brainwashes you" route now huh

[misanthropiccatboy]

okay i was gonna let it go but i can’t help but notice you have nothing to say on the subject of actual jewish history being written into the history of goblins. but you DO have a sick own for me about how i must not have a life outside of the internet. i’m too drunk to parse exactly what you’re saying in your second screenshot but it looks to me like a bunch of buzzwords to make yourself sound smarter, while avoiding the actual issues i’ve brought up. which, in my experience, is something people do when they know the other person has a point and they’re not quite sure how to refute it, so instead they’re just gonna mock the way the other person made or phrased their point. your mistake is in thinking any of your tactics are original or that i’ve never encountered subtle bigots like you before

i am "misunderstanding" you because you are either poor at expressing your ideas or poor at having ideas. those aren't "buzzwords," they are regular words arranged in a way that you don't understand. you either chose not to address or misunderstood the pivotal two points i made in my reply so badly as to make you look unequipped to be having this discussion. nonetheless you have about the level of intellectual rigor i have expected from people having this discourse. if you want my response to just about every point people have made, you can read our blog back for a day or two. i'm not going to be responding to you, though.

go sober up and stop arguing with people online (<- hypocrisy)

[misanthropiccatboy]

except that buying the wizard game IS meaningfully harmful to me, bc jkr has gone on record saying that she plans to use the proceeds to donate to anti-trans organizations. and do you really think the normalization and excusing of such a deeply, intentionally antisemitic game ISN’T doing harm to jewish communities worldwide? hogwarts legacy is not “problematic media”, it’s literal anti-semitic propaganda. buying the game is actively causing harm to both the trans and jewish communities, and it’s not fucking “virtue signaling” to get angry at the people buying this and actively contributing to the problem. how many times do we need to disprove the “fiction doesn’t affect reality” argument before it starts to sink in?

how many times do we need to disprove the “fiction doesn’t affect reality” argument before it starts to sink in?

either you are just making up people to get mad at or you are not in the right person's askbox. i knwo we did not say this anywhere.

for the other stuff, you're actually making two arguments, which are,

a) some fraction of the money earned from HL will be given to Bad Organizations that do harm. this is factually correct! however this is also something that is factually correct about (checks notes) every other video game by an AAA studio. so either you have to argue all mass market video games are just as immoral, or make your argument more convincing.

b) this game will somehow cause real life antisemitism. this is extremely doubtful! there is nobody in the game that someone either extremely prone to social justice tumblr discourse or already extremely antisemitic would perceive as jewish. in fact your average normie is pretty baffled by accusations of antisemitism, if they've even heard them. (sometimes your average jewish person isn't all that convinced either). even if your presuppositions (this game was made by people intending to make antisemitic propaganda, this game is antisemitic propaganda) are true, this is just not something that is going to translate to actual real-life bigotry from people who were not already real-life bigots. unless you have a different definition of "harm" i can't grok.

both of these are arguments i've made before so before you send your next ask do more ragescrolling on my blog and educate yourself on my arguments!

[misanthropiccatboy]

people are able to admit just about all the justifications for harassing people over video games are stupid but will defend that they think engaging with media is a moral action that can tell you a lot about a person and is something you can and should judge the people around you on.

[misanthropiccatboy]

This is tangential to the whole Hogwarts Legacy thing, but I think Jacob Geller made a fairly good point about the relation between fiction and media and real-world violence in his video on the history of the headshot. Essentially, his argument isn’t that people will see a violent thing on TV or in a game and decide, “Yeah, that’s a cool thing to do.” Rather, it is the types and modes of violence that fosters misconceptions and differing attitudes about violence. The keystone example here is the headshot. People who played games that put high values on headshots tended to believe that police officers aiming for the head was a part of normal procedure, even though in reality aiming for the body is standard across police forces and the military barring the extremely specific case of a hostage scenario gone wrong. Even snipers - the people in media we most associate with shooting people in the head - are trained to aim for the center of mass.

(This isn’t actually for any, like, lifesaving reason. Rather, aiming for the head makes you miss a lot, and even with modern body armor a gunshot to the chest can take people out of the fight. At least as I understand it.)

Just an aside that I thought you might find interesting. As for Legacy itself I have… a bit of a different view than you. I understand your central complaint of the fact that Legacy won’t actually change anyone’s mind on much of anything. I think that’s… probably true? But what is more pertinent to me is the shitstorm around it; I’ve noted several notable trans people online getting death threats and harassment for speaking up about what they find objectionable in the game. I think that sort of speaks to the cultural momentum that the game has acquired, where even if it was entirely benign in content, it has by association acquired a fanbase with a sizable transphobic audience. That strikes me as far more concerning, because while I wouldn’t describe my trans friends online as notable nor would I describe myself as notable, I also just don’t want high concentrations of people who would send death threats to me, my friends or people like me or really just to people in general.

it's true, when people have no real-life knowledge or examples they often turn to media. i don't think that media is really more or less important than regular communication between people. (the most reliable means of taking someone down is shooting them more than once!)

I think even without jkr's bullshit the mass, mass audience of a harry potter game would create opportunities for the worst kind of harassment - criticism regardless of content would be met with abuse. with her terf stuff, and the right-wing coverage, people have made the game into a culture war target and drawn in people who might otherwise not be interested to argue about it and harass people criticizing it. this has the potential to gestate a lot of very angry hate mobs and i do not blame you for being upset and/or worried or what have you. it's become a very nasty internet phenomenon for some of the worst parts of the modern culture war.

however i would say that i think the vast majority of harry potter game enjoyers are mostly offline harry potter fans who just like wizard stuff. this is an online phenomenon for very political people, and regardless of whether the shitstorm happened or not it would still be selling like hotcakes.