Bai not Bhai

I think to when I was 15, deep in the tar pit of evangelical christianity, even deeper in the closet, feeling bone deep dread as I thought about the future expected of me, married to a man, living the good christian wife life. I honestly thought I'd kill myself before reaching 17.

Myth: This game involves crushing a slave rebellion. 

Fact: The goblins are not slaves, and the rebellion never happens. There is a minority faction of goblins with dreams of a violent revolution that will not only free them from wizards but subjugate all wizards to them, and of course put the individual goblins in the movement at the top of goblin society as well. They kill multiple goblins for not agreeing with them. They are not a social justice movement. They are a totalitarian minority group trying to overthrow one oppressive regime in order to create another. The vast majority of goblins do not support Ranrok’s rebellion or want him in charge; not because they are okay with being oppressed by wizards, but because they realize that Ranrok isn’t going to be any better and may even be worse, since he’s a lot more violent toward dissenters. The only people who would interpret Ranrok’s rebellion as a social justice movement are the braindread boycotters who think that telling Jews to kill ourselves and sending graphic rape threats to trans men are social justice acts.

Myth: You commit genocide against the goblins.

Fact: No, you do not. You kill goblins under the exact same circumstances you kill wizards: they are part of an evil group that has inserted itself into your affairs and decided of its own accord that they wanted to hurt you. You were just trying to get to school when Ranrok first attacked you. At no point does anyone in this game have the goal of wiping out goblins, and there are numerous goblins that you help throughout the game. Additionally, most protagonists are pro-goblin rights. There is only one companion who is anti-goblin, and you defend goblins to him (the game does not even give you a choice; you defend the goblins) and he is completely invalidated by the narrative. 

Myth: The goblins kidnap wizard children and steal their blood.

Fact: The only wizard “child” that Ranrok is after is the protagonist of the game. I’m pretty sure he needs that teenager alive, not for their blood but for their sight, because they can see ancient magic that most other wizards can’t, and Ranrok needs someone who can do that in order to find the ancient artifact he’s seeking. I feel like I’d remember a scene where he stole my blood, and I don’t. I can’t even imagine what his motivation for doing that would be, since at no point in the game was my blood needed to unlock or control anything; just my sight. (Even Salazar Slytherin didn’t put a blood-key lock on the door that he explicitly only wanted his own descendants to be able to get through.) 

Myth: The only Jews in this game are goblins.

Fact: This game doubled the number of Jews in the Harry Potter series with recognizable faces. That’s not saying much, but still. Abraham Ronen and Ruth Singer are both extremely Jewish-coded names, and they’re names that will actually register as Jewish-coded for a lot of gentiles. Personally, I find Officer Singer absolutely useless, but not in any way that I don’t expect from an adult cop in a narrative with a teenage protagonist. If she were good at her job, what would we do? Abraham Ronen is extremely likable and a wonderful teacher, and I am very pleased to be able to say that Hogwarts has Jewish professors. 

Myth: One of the lead devs was a Nazi.

Fact: Troy Leavitt, who left the project two years ago, was a head designer whose duties mostly included animating NPCs and designing the castle. He had a youtube account which expressed pretty mainstream Republican views and some gamergate sympathies. I disagree with him about a lot, but I’ve seen no evidence so far that he’s a Nazi or that he has any ill intentions toward Jews. If someone can show me evidence to the contrary, I will amend my views accordingly. 

Myth: The shofar is a collectable item in the game and they call it annoying.

Fact: 

This is the horn in the game: 

These are shofars: 

I don’t think there’s a strong resemblance, personally. I don’t even think the horn in the game is ram’s horn. Granted, not all shofars are or have to be ram’s horn, but I think it’s hard to make the argument that that is “clearly a shofar” when it’s not shaped like shofar and probably isn’t made out of the same material. Bone horns were used around the world, on every continent, for centuries. Not all bone horns are Jewish. 

Also, the average gentile does not know what a shofar is. I’m telling you, I have asked multiple different gentiles of various educational backgrounds, and not a single one knew what a shofar was or connected the image from the game to Jews at all. Using shofars to signify that Jews are evil and bad when the average gentile cannot identify them or connect them to Jews is some pretty inept propaganda writing. 

Myth: 1612 is a reference to a Jewish rebellion that ended with a pogrom in 1614.

Fact: First of all, it’s weird to use the date 1612 to signify a pogrom that took place in 1614. Second of all, the date 1612 is from a list of goblin rebellions that was included in the original series. I’m pretty sure JK Rowling was not slipping secret messages to kill Jews into her books and then going on twitter and denouncing antisemitism in UK politics. JK Rowling has gone out of her way to be an ally to Jews on multiple occasions. Not a perfect one; I stand by my criticisms of antisemitism in the Fantastic Beasts series. But in the absence of literally any other evidence that she secretly wants Jews dead, I think–and I know this is an extremely unpopular thing to say right now–I think JK Rowling deserves the benefit of the doubt about this. Especially since there is so much doubt. If 1612 is an obvious message to kill Jews, why was no one talking about it when it first appeared in the original Harry Potter series? 

Myth: The boycotters are just politely stating their opinion.

The "preferred" body type was broad and robust.

The parasitism of males on females is, as I see it, demonstrated by the panic, rage and hysteria generated in so many of them by the thought of being abandoned by women. But it is demonstrated in a way that is perhaps more generally persuasive by both literary and sociological evidence. Evidence cited in Jesse Bernard’s work in The Future of Marriage and in George Gilder’s Sexual Suicide and Men Alone convincingly shows that males tend in shockingly significant numbers and in alarming degree to fall into mental illness, petty crime, alcoholism, physical infirmity, chronic unemployment, drug addiction and neurosis when deprived of the care and companionship of a female mate, or keeper. (While on the other hand, women without male mates are significantly healthier and happier than women with male mates.) And masculist literature is abundant with indications of male cannibalism, of males deriving essential sustenance from females. Cannibalistic imagery, visual and verbal, is common in pornography: images likening women to food, and sex to eating. And, as documented in Millett’s Sexual Politics and many other feminist analyses of masculist literature, the theme of men getting high off beating, raping or killing women (or merely bullying them) is common. These interactions with women, or rather, these actions upon women, make men feel good, walk tall, feel refreshed, invigorated. Men are drained and depleted by their living by themselves and with and among other men, and are revived and refreshed, re-created, by going home and being served dinner, changing to clean clothes, having sex with the wife; or by dropping by the apartment of a woman friend to be served coffee or a drink and stroked in one way or another; or by picking up a prostitute for a quicky or for a dip in favorite sexual escape fantasies; or by raping refugees from their wars (foreign and domestic). The ministrations of women, be they willing or unwilling, free or paid for, are what restore in men the strength, will and confidence to go on with what they call living.

…

The fetus lives parasitically. It is a distinct animal surviving off the life (the blood) of another animal creature. It is incapable of surviving on its own resources, of independent nutrition; incapable even of symbiosis. If it is true that males live parasitically upon females, it seems reasonable to suppose that many of them and those loyal to them are in some way sensitive to the parallelism between their situation and that of the fetus. They could easily identify with the fetus. The woman who is free to see the fetus as a parasite might be free to see the man as a parasite. The woman’s willingness to cut off the life line to one parasite suggests a willingness to cut off the life line to another parasite. The woman who is capable (legally, psychologically, physically) of decisively, self-interestedly, independently rejecting the one parasite, is capable of rejecting, with the same decisiveness and independence, the like burden of the other parasite. In the eyes of the other parasite, the image of the wholly self-determined abortion, involving not even a ritual submission to male veto power, is the mirror image of death.