#media protest

The Hogwarts Legacy boycott failed because most of the public couldn't see the harm jkr was doing to the trans community at the time; at that point, it was only the trans community & a very small handful of allies who were begging people not to buy the game. Most people didn't believe it when she said she would use the money from it to continue doing harm to us - they thought it was hyperbole that we had taken out of context to smear her name with.

But now? Now a lot more people are seeing exactly how much damage her transphobia has done, not only to trans and intersex people but also to cis people. A much larger percentage of people are opening their eyes, so to speak. A much larger percentage of people have found out something about her which they strongly disagree with on an ethical level: they have seen her ally herself with the Elongated Muskrat, they have seen her cozy up to Depp, they have seen how deranged she sounds when she attacks cisgender women for not appearing feminine enough for her personal comfort, they have seen her get involved in politics and realised they do not feel safe with her having that much power or influence.

Now, even people who don't care about trans people are willing to stop supporting her because they have seen the version of her that we have seen for years. None of this had happened yet, at the time of the Legacy boycott.

Another reason the Legacy boycott didn't work is the technicalities of it; as a game, it had 3 main ways of making money: initial sales from the first launch, direct sales from the relaunch, and indirect sales through the streaming community. In lamens terms, it had more opportunities to earn money than a movie or series does.

The other reason was the timing of it: nobody's voices about boycotting it were getting heard until after it had already sold more than 12 million copies. By that point, it had gained enough popularity online for people to easily ignore the people saying to boycott it. Only some of the arguments against it were "Don't support jkr because she's gonna hurt trans people" - a lot of the popular debates about it online centred around the storyline of the game being pro-genocide. This then gave people more incentive to play the game for themselves, to find out if it was pro-genocide or if that was hyperbole.

Even still, the game's traction did slow down, as most games are prone to do; in the first 2 weeks (February 2023), it sold 12 million copies. But then, when the trend for it moved on, and people stopped fixating on it and moved onto other things, sale numbers fell. It took until January 2024 for it to reach 24 million sales - it took almost an entire year for it to double the amount of sales it made in the first 2 weeks. If those stats were for a box office movie or something on a streaming platform, it would be considered a flop, and the production would have lost money on it. Current Legacy sales are a little over 34 million. This means it has had over 2 years, and still has not managed to achieve the same success as in its initial first 2 weeks. This is partly due to the fact that a lot of YouTubers and Streamers are saying the game isn't worth buying, due to the gameplay time not matching up to the price tag, and it is also down to the fact that it just is not a game which invites people to go back again and again for side quests or repeats; once you've played it through one time, you've done 99% of the stuff worth doing. There's nothing addictive about it Also, most games will hit their peak sales within the first 6 months after release, then the sales will decline, but will pick back up - sometimes to an even higher peak - after every relaunch. This didn't happen for Legacy; even after its relaunch, it didn't get the same traction that it did in the first 2 weeks.)

At the time of its launch, Legacy had around 900,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch, and it was one of the top 10 games on Steam. Since its initial success, however, it has lost over 90% of its players and viewers. It still hasn't reached the next milestone, as far as I'm aware, and its stats have dropped to less than 75,000 concurrent viewers. For a single-player game, those numbers are still pretty impressive; but game revenue is very different from revenue made from TV series and films.

Roughly, Legacy was worth 1b dollars in its first 2 weeks of release, but instead of gaining traction and becoming more popular over the next few months like other high-acheiving games, it lost traction and fell to the wayside, until it was re-released for more consoles, when sales spiked again, but still did not reach the popularity of those first 2 weeks. This is kind of bad news for the manufacturers and marketing team; for games to be successful long-term, they need to increase their peak sales number with almost every relaunch, if they want to make a decent amount of profit from the franchise.

Something else worth noting about game stats is that games have an extra revenue which I'll call Passive Revenue, which TV series' and films don't have. Passive Revenue looks like this: "I won't play or buy Legacy because I support trans people... but I will watch my favourite streamer play it." A lot of people don't realise that by watching the game be played by someone else on Twitch or YouTube, they are still contributing to the game's success stats, which increases its overall worth and shows the developers that there is still money to be made from it.

(If you don't want to contribute to this, you can:

A: Leave a message in Chat saying you're disappointed your favourite Streamer is playing this game & now you're questioning their ethics, and you're not a fan anymore, and then leave that stream

B: Unfollow

C: Unsubscribe

D: All of the above

Most of the time, streamers will play whichever games get us more views and interactions, because that's how we earn money. If a game gets us a lot of hate or disappointment or our community doesn't vibe with it & our stats go down, we will play a different game.)

As for the other boycotts you mentioned: Eurovision is next to impossible to boycott because of how important it is on a cultural and political level. It has survived Cold Wars, decades of genocide, the Afghan War throughout the 00s and 2010s, war in Syria, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and every other conflict which has happened since the mid 1950s. People finding out about the Gaza genocide and getting angry at Eurovision for allowing Israel to compete was never going to be enough to boycott the event. To be clear: I am pro-Palestine, and anti-genocide, pro-ceasefire, all of those things. But Israeli forces have been attacking Palestine almost consistently since the 90s without really taking a break, and Eurovision never so much as blinked. Schools getting targeted in the middle East? Eurovision never stuttered. People finding out about conflicts, wars, executions and genocides which have been endured for decades is not enough to get the event canceled. A lot of people involved would argue that it is even more reason to continue celebrating it, because of the political alliances which can be bought or traded via votes for each act, and how it brings people together regardless of their background. (I do not agree with these views, but I do recognise the logic behind them.)

The FIFA World Cup won't be boycotted over Trump, it'll just not have any matches within the USA. It has survived worse than a Korporal-wannabe, and it has far more options for host-countries in the Americas than the USA.

Now onto the other part of your question: I genuinely think boycotting the HBO adaption of HP will work because people are tired of hearing about HP and Rowling. We have just endured 5 years of cultural wars over her, her work, her hypocrisy, her lies, and her political bribes. Those of us in Scotland have been enduring this since 2014.

She has allied herself with the Elongated Muskrat, she has been sympathised with by Putin, she has humiliated herself via the Olympics, she has been critiqued by the very people she gave the opportunity to have a platform in the first place, and she is still being critiqued by the actors who have signed up for the HBO series.

I really don't think there are enough fans of hers left who will be able to continue supporting her for this adaption to have any genuine success. It will only take 1 episode flopping for tens of thousands of people to stop watching. It will only take one offence, one scandal, one controversy, for the show to drop like a dead bird out of the sky.

Think of how the Percy Jackson adaption on Disney+ has been critiqued, and has flopped: the set is good, the story is good, the scripts are good, the casting is far more accurate than the films were, the franchise is popular online... but it's considered a flop because of how few people are genuinely interested in it beyond the first 2, maybe 3 episodes. It just doesn't hold up. And that's not the fault of the child actors; it's the fault of the people who decided to make it in the first place when they knew there was a very high chance of failure following the movies flopping and the fact it is over a decade since it had its peak in pop culture. Its fanbase has grown up and moved on, and now it's aimed at a new generation who just Do Not Vibe With It like its initial audience did, and they didn't compensate enough to truly grab the attention of the generation who it is aimed at. Same goes for the Artemus Fowl adaption - it was insanely popular 10-15 years ago. But now? No luck. (As for films: Beautiful Creatures was massively popular as a book back into he late 00s or early 2010s, but the movie was a disaster.)

Over the last 15 years, the only long-form franchises that have survived a multi-episode series on a large streaming platform and have run for multiple seasons have been sitcoms, dramas and horrors. Mortal Instruments survived being adapted from book to show because they leant into the comedy of it all, and there were plenty of physical fights, lots of controversial pairings, and actors who were willing to take the poorly written script and roll with it because they were aware of how cheesy the melodrama was. The most beloved parts of the show were when they moved away from the books. American Horror Story survived being resurrected for a new generation because the writers were able to appeal to a modern audience and knew who their target market was, and the fact they found a cast who were drop-dead gorgeous, and they went to town on the makeup and special-effects and the sets. They fleshed the characters out and made them absolutely beautiful and easy to empathise with, even when they were horrifically ugly roles. It didn't shy away or censor the ugliness or the brutality of some of the topics it covered; it leant right into them. The Good Place was a comedy that didn't shy away from tough conversations, and which used humour to get audiences talking about really painful topics which would be next to impossible to broach quite so painlessly in another genre.

All of these became adored franchises and highly successful series', because they had crews and casts who knew exactly who their audiences were, and they knew the controversy they wanted to cause among fans, and they knew where to hit in order to cause the biggest explosion. And every single one was created with adults as the primary target audience, not children or teens. The HBO adaption of HP doesn't have this luxury. Unfortunately for HBO, most shows aimed at teens - apart from Disney+ specials - drop dead within the first 4 seasons. In order for this adaption to have the success they want / need it to have, they need to target an adult audience... but if they are staying true to jkr and the books, that's impossible, because it all takes place within a child's world and us told through a child's view of that world.

Let's break down some of the topics they'll run into during the script writing process, and you can tell me if you think they'll shy away from it, censor it / replace it with something new, lean into it, or write it out entirely:

Harry's parents getting murdered in front of him as a baby, but Volde not having the power to kill a defenseless baby because Lily sacrificed herself and gave him the protection of love

To be clear: Lily Potter committed suicide and sacrificed herself in order to save her son. She did not have an argument with Volde. There were no screaming matches. No arguments. No stand-offs. Volde did not accidentally hit her in the crossfire and then flee. Volde went there with the sole intention of executing 2 young parents and their baby. This was an execution. Lily knew this. She did not know if her action would save Harry, but she had to believe it would. So she sacrificed herself in her son's place. This love, this devotion, this selflessness, was what protected Harry.

Volde was a Nazi. Volde was the wizard equivalent of Hitler. Very, very blatantly. The Potter family were executed as part of a raid, because Volde's followers were executing all who defied him, all who tried to fight against him, and all who were a threat to him. People were tortured. Imprisoned. Executed. Adults and children alike. Rich and poor. If they were not pro-Volde, they had to go into hiding and leave their lives behind, because he and his followers would execute them. The people who survived this era still have PTSD. This war changed the entire Wizarding culture.

Dumbledor grooms Harry, and this is portrayed as a good thing throughout the series. Harry goes on to kill himself via self-sacrifice, in an echo of Lily, but only because Dumbledor prepared him to do so. For the entire series, Dumbledor is grooming Harry like a pig for slaughter. He is fully aware of what he is doing. Harry trains Dumbledor's Army because he sympathises with his abuser. Harry names his own son after the man who groomed and abused him for the entirety of his teen years. Snape's disgust at Dumbledor at the end is not "you never tried to save Lily's son"; Snape's disgust is because he can see these actions through an adult's perspective and knows exactly what Dumbledor did.

Lupin is a werewolf who is treated like a gay sex offender. This treatment is seen by Wizarding society as justified and for everyone's protection, especially children's.

The entire narrative of the werewolves is an anti-gay metaphor born from the AIDS epidemic in the 80s & 90s. The narrative of the werewolves enjoying scratching unsuspecting victims and turning them against their will? That's from people scratching passersby with concealed dirty needles and infecting them with HIV. The people getting scratched didn't know anything had happened until they started showing symptoms, and by the time they got diagnosed, they had already slept with someone and passed it on. The narrative of that Grey werewolf liking 'getting them while they're young'? Anti-gay propaganda from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, where all gay men were seen as pedophiles, and that if people allowed their young, impressionable children to be in the presence of a gay man, he would abuse them and turn them gay. The entire idea that lycanoprothy is passed via blood, and that it is a toxin in their saliva or on their nails which then infects the new victim via penetrating their skin? Anti-gay propaganda from the 80s & 90s, when people thought the only way to catch AIDS / HIV was to have unprotected gay sex.

Harry has a crush on Cedric. This isn't fanon; in the books, Harry describes Cedric as 'beautiful', is awkward and nervous when talking with him, and stares at him a lot then gets flustered.

Cho Cheng. Her name is wrong; that's not how Chinese names work. At all.

Mudbloods. It's a slur which Volde's followers loved; anyone who was muggle-born had dirty blood, and deserved to be treated like shit and were better off dead. Creatures who were not pureblood wizards? Off with their heads, they were filthy things and ought to be culled. All for the good of wizarding kind, of course. Very, very racist ideology.

The Dementors are anti-LGBT propaganda. This isn't a fan-theory; jkr stated it. Publicly. The Dementors are anti-LGBT propaganda. They are supposed to represent queers who endanger children just by being in their vicinity. Schools should be protected from them.

Harry gets gang-raped. On page. On screen. He sees Sirius getting assaulted, tries to stop it, and then gets gang-raped and dissociates. (I could make an entire goddamn post about this one if I'm being honest.)

Dumbledor actively recruits Harry to destroy the fragments of Volde's soul, knowing that Harry is one of them. He knows this will lead to Harry deciding to kill himself when he figures it out. He doesn't know if Harry will survive the death of Volde's soul inside of him. He is willing to have a child kill himself in order to kill Volde, and this is what he has been grooming Harry for for the entire series.

Hermoine is tortured. In front of a crowd. In front of her classmate. She is left with permanent scars on her forearm and PTSD.

Ron is permanently disfigured when the trio try to escape. He doesn't return to looking like his normal self; he is left with visible scars on his face and the left side of his body.

Children die. On page.

Children are abused. On page.

Children are tortured. On page.

Malfoy and Potter are both groomed. On page.

Children are murdered. On page. In front of the protagonist. He sees his friends get killed. He sees the corpses of his friends.

Harry watches as his Godfather is executed in front of him, then tries to kill the woman who did it. The hero child wants to murder someone. The hero child tries to murder someone, but is then told not to lose himself; if he does this, he will be just as bad as the nazi who executed his parents in cold blood. That is what his abuser tells him.

11 year old Harry murders a grown man with his bare hands. Then he stops, realises what he is doing, and then continues it with renewed determination. Or did everyone else forget how the first book ended?

On that note, 11 year old Ron says he and Hermoine must sacrifice themselves in order for Harry to succeed. 11 year old Hermoine agrees with him. They almost kill themselves on that chessboard. Ron is fully aware of this risk. He almost kills Hermoine in the process before deciding to sacrifice himself. He barely avoids getting killed. Both children are on board with this, because they recognise that they are not the ones who need to get to the next stage of this battle; Harry is. They already believe they are not as important as Harry.

Hufflepuff orgies. Confirmed as canon. By jkr. Underage teenagers having orgies. In a boarding school. Stated to be canon by the author.

There is canonically not a single LGBTQIA+ student in Hogwarts. But there is a single canonically gay member of staff: Dumbledor. The old guy grooming Harry is the only gay guy, who has been single for decades after never being able to get over Grindlewald, who used him.

On page ableism.

On page racism.

On page classism.

Neville talks about how he is proud to be fighting for the same cause which got his parents tortured and executed.

Harry is assaulted in the subway tunnel. So is Dudley, and then Dudley watches as Harry is assaulted. Dudley goes catatonic afterwards due to not being able to process it all.

Draco is told to execute a man who has protected him, by the people who groomed him for exactly this purpose. When he fails to do so, Snape steps in and does it for him. This failure is then held over his head as something to be ashamed of. Refusing to kill someone is seen as a weakness.

LeStrange is very sexual towards Draco, who is underage at the time, and her nephew. Draco's reactions imply this is standard behaviour from her and that he is used to it.

Myrtle is forever 13ish and horny for Harry. On page. On screen.

The house elves enjoy being enslaved and refuse Hermoine's white-saviour attempt to free them from servitude. They turn their back on Dobby when he accepts the freedom given to him.

Hermoine breaks multiple laws, turns Skeeter into a bug and tortures her in a jar because she knows Skeeter won't be able to press charges or punish her without incriminating herself, because having her body and species changed against her will is still seen as a crime, because she must have cooperated somehow.

There are probably more things that I'm forgetting about, honestly. But look at that list very closely, and then think about today's audiences. Today's parents, children and families. Today's audiences who found season 1 of Wednesday somewhat difficult to digest and who get offended by Bluey and The Simpsons and who think Futurama is inappropriate for children. And tell me, honestly, if you think the creators have the balls to lean into any of it, or if you think they'll chicken out and sanitize it.

If they sanitize it... do you honestly think adult fans will continue supporting it, if it only disappoints them and ruins their beloved nostalgia for this franchise?

I don't think the show will survive more than 2 seasons, 3 at a desperate push. I really don't think it'll survive the full 10 years that the creators want it to.

But I do know for a fact that the harm jkr will be able to do with the money she earns from those 2 seasons will cause Hell on earth for people in the UK and USA. Or did you not know that the group which got the UK supreme court to redefine 'woman' as 'biological female' was supported by jkr? Did you not know that jkr was the cash cow behind that group getting the UK to legally redefine a woman as a biological female? Did you not know that jkr is the money behind why bigots in the UK now feel entitled enough to seriously discuss whether they need to ask little girls and women to prove they are female in order to use public restrooms or changing rooms, or to take part in girls-only sports? Did you not know that jkr feels safer in a world where children could be forced to strip naked in front of a group of adults to prove their assigned sex in order to play a sport, than a world where some girls and women have penises and some boys and men have vulvas? Or did you forget that this is the same person who got upset about a professional boxer beating her opponent, who was shorter, curvier and conventionally prettier than her, and not wearing a full face of makeup in the ring, and whose career and life were endangered by the allegations of her being transgender, which is illegal in her home country? Did you forget this is the same person who got mad about a professional footballer on the women's team not looking feminine enough while in uniform, not wearing makeup, and celebrating a win with her teammates?

Personally, I don't want this woman getting richer from relaunching this franchise via the HBO series, which she has openly stated she wants as a do-over after most of the original cast (most notably: the actors who played Harry, Hermoine, Ron, Ginny, Luna, Seamus, Dean and Lucious) went public with their pro-trans & pro-LGBT views (including when the actors who played Seamus & Dean proposed to each other after Ireland legalised gay marriage, despite jkr saying repeatedly those characters were not gay). She claims to have no issue with the fact multiple members of the HBO show's cast have signed petitions in favour of trans women having equal legal rights and recognition as cis women in direct response to the supreme court ruling, and she claims she has no issue with someone on the show expressing views which are protected under the law of free speech just because they differ from her own. If any of that were true, she wouldn't need to redo the franchise; she wouldn't have so publicly mocked Dan, Emma and Rupert after they expressed their own views which were also protected under the law of free speech. It was her inability to deal with that fallout which has brought us here in the first place.

Is this really a woman people want to endorse? Is this really a woman people want to admire? Is this really a franchise people want their children watching? A franchise which glorifies an abuser who is gay & grooms a young boy to kill himself, all while being seen as a hero and martyr and is never held accountable for his abuse? Is this a franchise people want to watch or to allow their children to watch?

Or is this a franchise which has aged poorly and deserves to be left in the past along with all the other ones we dropped when we grew up and realised how disgusting they were, or how horrible a person their creator is?

Sources:

https://levvvel.com/hogwarts-legacy-statistics/

https://levvvel.com/statistics/

https://forwomen.scot/media/ (TW for major transphobia)

https://news.stv.tv/politics/scottish-government-threatened-with-legal-action-over-single-sex-spaces

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t

https://www.gendergp.com/uk-supreme-court-ruling-what-it-means-for-transgender-rights-in-britain/

During the Depp v Heard trial, Tumblr split pretty cleanly into halves: one half said Depp was guilty, and the other half said Heard was guilty. There was a slim grey area in between for people who said they were both as toxic as each other.

The evidence most accessible and spread around on here was:

She hit him

She chased him out of his own house

She broke his finger

She taunted him that nobody would believe his story, because who would believe a man saying he was beaten by a woman

She shat in his bed

Vanessa Paridy & Winona Rider (2 of his most notable exes) both said he was one of the most gentle, kind men they had known

He had a history of drug & alcohol abusr

He had a history as a womaniser

He had a history of abusive behaviour &/or language

Half of Tumblr bought his side of the story, and canceled Heard. Despite the statistics of Heard being the victim, despite the overall culture online at the time being that men were violent and women were docile, despite the amount of hate they got sent for it, despite the amount of people saying they were defending an abuser, despite the amount of people saying they were victim-blaming Heard and that Depp was using hus name, status, fame and the patriarchy to harm Heard by turning women against her, they stuck to their belief that Heard was guilty, and canceled her. They made sure Aquaman flopped, despite how much they loved Jason Mamoa. They circulated videos from old interviews which showed Heard as narcissistic and impossible to work with, and Depp as polite, sweet and charming. They didn't question whether they were in the wrong, and they believed that a beautiful, famous woman could be abusive, and they canceled her because of it. They piled onto the 'Cancel Disney' train because Disney had abandoned its projects involving Depp, while it continued to support Heard.

Then even when the case ended and Depp left Hollywood, they didn't resurrect Heard. They didn't start defending her now that the heat was off. They didn't jump ship.

They moved on with their lives, letting Heard and Depp fall into the past, and that was that.

They had no way of knowing whether they were truly right or wrong. They had no tangible proof that they had supported the right person. Without doing a ton of online digging, they had no way to see how their opinions and actions influenced real people. Months and years later, they still have no proof beyond interviews and clips online to say whether they made the right call 2 years ago, since both Depp and Heard faded from public scrutiny.

Do they know whether Heard celebrated having support? No.

Do they know whether Heard genuinely begged for support? No.

Do they know whether Heard or Depp regretted the trial? No.

Do they know whether their actions to cancel Heard led to male victims of domestic violence feeling empowered? No.

Do they know whether their actions to cancel Heard led to female perpetrators of domestic violence feeling cowed? No.

Do they know whether their actions had any impact on real peoples daily lives, legal rights or medical autonomy? No.

Would they have had any way of knowing these things at the time of the trial? No.

Yet, they still done it. Despite everything which said they were wrong, and despite the fact they would never be able to know 100% for sure if they were making the right call, and despite not knowing if their online actions would have any influence on real people's lives beyond the celebrity sphere, they still canceled her.

So, why bring this up on a post about JKR's transphobia? Because it is hypocritical as fuck.

Can we see JKR celebrating having support for her views? Yes.

Can we see trans people begging to be heard and listened to? Yes.

Can we see JKR's pattern of behaviour laid out clearly on very accessible platforms? Yes.

Can we see the impact that supporting her is having on real people's daily lives, legal rights and medical autonomy? Yes.

Can we see the consequences of supporting her financially, in real time? Yes.

And yet... people continue to justify supporting her financially. Even after she has stated that she will continue to use her Potter earnings to fund anti-trans bills and laws in the UK, ehich we know have a ripple effect on laws and legal discussions across other Western countries. Even after she has stated that she believes anyone who continues to enjoy / partake in the franchise is actively agreeing with her. Even after she has made it clear as crystal glass that she is the perpetrator, even after they have seen laws change and decades worth of work and progress go down the drain in a matter of hours, even after they have seen her actively harm one of the most marginalised groups of people in the country... they continue to justify their financial support of her.

People were willing to cancel Heard when there was only snippets of evidence pointing to her being guilty of hitting her partner; yet they're not willing to cancel JKR despite literal years of very accessible evidence of her actively harming and endangering every transgender person and every cisgender woman in the United Kingdom.

"Cancel Heard because Depp says she hit him, let Aquaman flop even though we love Jason Mamoa, fuck Disney for supporting her just because she's a woman, fuck Disney for dropping Depp" was a totally logical, easy choice for them to make and stick to. They were willing to turn their back on what was essentially The Brand of their childhood, because the mouse took Heard's side. They were willing to drop a film with Mamoa in it, even though they loved him.

And yet, "Cancel JKR because she actively endangers the lives, human rights and medical autonomy of every transgender person and cisgender woman in the UK, fuck Warner Bros for continuing to take her side just because she's a cash pig for them, fuck them for saying trans people's human rights are an 'online conversation', and fuck her for shitting on actors who stand against her" seems to be a totally irrational train of thought to them. They're not willing to turn their back on a singular franchise from their childhood because they're still nostalgic about it. They're not willing to turn their back on a set of movies even the lead actors don't promote anymore. They're not willing to drop this one, single author from their bookshelves or streaming lists, despite the fact they can see the real-life consequences of their support of her in real time.