J.K. Rowling scored two big wins this month, helping to topple Scotland’s SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon over shoving male rapists into female prisons and advancing transgender ‘self-ID’, and watching as Hogwarts Legacy, a video game launch, survived a dedicated boycott effort that saw streamers being bullied and reviewers downgrading the game because of Rowling’s views.
A few headlines neatly encapsulate the downfall
Hogwarts Legacy’ Is Already The #1 Selling Game On Steam And PS5, #2 On Xbox – Forbes
How the Harry Potter video game became an ethical minefield – Vox
The Hogwarts Legacy launch was an acid test for cancel culture. And it lost. Badly.
The game is expected to be one of the four bestsellers of the year and the failed boycott has dented the credibility of those reviewers and streamers who took part. Threats have to be effective on and a failure to launch discredits the entire woke infrastructure that was deployed to stop the product launch.
All that’s left are the bitter recriminations like those at Vox and elsewhere.
The interesting thing about the Hogwarts Legacy experiment is that it was arguably the first time that cancel culture was deployed on a massive scale against the launch of a corporate product with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake by targeting individuals collectively. Streamers were put on lists and warned not to stream the game. Social media bullying was unleashed on a granular level against people playing the game. Those who did were urged to hide their ‘achievements’.
Reviews became unintentionally hilarious tantrums like this one at Wired.
When I was a kid, every word that flowed from J. K. Rowling’s pen wrote magic into my world, but now every word she puts out just hurts my heart. Every homophobic or transphobic thing queer kids hear growing up becomes a voice that follows them for a long time…
There’s a direct correlation between how open Rowling becomes about her bigotry, and how flat and heartless Wizarding World media becomes. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think it’s because LGBTQIA+ people and genuine allies are some of the best creative minds in the world, and these films and this game were made largely without them.
The “every time you play Hogwarts Legacy a trans kid dies” approach didn’t work out.
And there are lessons to be learned from that.
The biggest one, I think, is that canceling individuals isn’t hard. J.K. Rowling for the most part has been canceled. Harry Potter media carefully avoids mentioning her and vice versa. But canceling something that people love is much harder. Any individual can be canceled and destroyed. Few people are really that beloved that the public can’t be turned against them with enough work. But, the things people love are much harder to cancel. That’s why wokes tend to get inside them and twist them around as has happened to most intellectual properties.
A confrontation like this, between wokeness and a beloved intellectual property, has rarely happened. And it is less likely to happen again because everyone has now seen the weakness of cancel culture. It’s a weapon of terror that is extremely effective at destroying individuals, but impotent against the things they love.
There’s a lesson here.
Conservatives might consider investing less in influencers and more in works that influence.
I never got into all that Harry Potter (or whatever it was) stuff, but I saw that it was super popular with the kids. Maybe it is similar genre to Hobbits and such that was super popular with earlier generations, a kind of fantasy world that draws people in. Maybe all the way back to L. Frank Baum.
Never got into it either, goes without saying, and I think it’s pernicious. Baum in some ways began by trying to build fairy tales for children without a moral core.
No moral core? Really? I was nine years old when I heard that story so I din’t notice.
The movie version is great but surprisingly gay, which I didn’t notice when I was a kid.
JK Rowling is not destroyed by cancel culture. Yes, the left does not like her, but free thinking individuals know that she is entitled to her opinion and cannot be forced to agree with the radical trans activists.
I normally don’t respect most leftists, like Rowling, but I respect her more for standing up to the woke crowd. So, no, she has not been destroyed from my perspective. She has actually grown in stature.
She’s been marginalized from her bigger achievement and from her place in the culture. That’s a courageous decision that she consciously made and she’s performing well in the battle.
But cancel culture clearly has had a major impact on her image.
Frank L. Baum was awesome. His fiction wasn’t just imaginary, it was allegorical about the times of his day. Stuff that doesn’t make sense now but if you research it, it’s cool.
My Ninth grade teacher read “The Wizard Of OZ” to us and I loved hearing it.
I was very lucky, my neighbor had a large collection of Baum’s books from when she was a child in Bakersfield. I was trying to remember how many of them I read, maybe all of them. Wonderful stuff, some of the best work I ever read. I read them at her house too, I must have spent a lot of time there.
Yeah! It’s not just me. His stories were good! 🙂
I’ve read most of Baum’s books and they need to be understood as having a strong populist agrarian emphasis concerning themselves with the abuse of midwestern farmers by banks, the government, and the gold standard of currency. They are primarily political books, not written for children.
There’s that. Also most of the books after the first were really materials for plays and movies.
The Wizard of Oz was a hit musical long before it was a play and Baum tried to recapture its success moved to California to make movies.
Rowling doesn’t need to be the good girl here for her opposition to be bad.
Bread and circuses also have serious limitations.