Hogwarts Legatees
You've got to be carefully taught yer a wizard.*
*with apologies to Rogers & Hammerstein, who knew what they were doing when they wrote that song, and to Rubeus Hagrid, who deserved better.
cw: anti-trans hate, antisemitism, J.K. Rowling. Those of us who loved this world together, those of us who came to grieve it, we each have had to do that alone.
The algorithm keeps insisting that I want to play Hogwarts Legacy.
You don’t need me to tell you that the Wizarding World imagined by J.K. Rowling is rotten to its core. You know it. I know it. You don’t need me to prove my bona fides as someone who loved Harry Potter dearly, read and reread the books, imagined myself with a wand, saving the day. I had friends who loved it more deeply, but I was so invested. I loved. And yet. I still remember when the cracks appeared for me, widened. I still remember where I was when I just couldn’t keep loving it despite its flaws. I remember where I was when I knew I wouldn’t be returning.
I wonder if it’s how Susan Pevensie felt when she knew she wouldn’t ever step foot in Narnia again. I like to think it is.
I was eleven years old the first time I went to Hogwarts. Susan was twelve when she first went to Narnia. We did not have a critical lens, me or this fictional girl from eighty years ago. It was just another book on the shelf. There were no movies yet. There was barely a third book when I started reading the series, and the books were still short, still about children rather than teenagers. What complexity there was sailed right over my head.
If Harry Potter hadn’t become such a big deal, it’s completely possible no one would ever have known or cared what its creator thought beyond “I guess she turned out to be awful, damn, that’s disappointing, I really liked those books.” And we all would have gone on with our days. Roald Dahl was viciously antisemitic and racist, and transphobic when it occurred to him that that was also a thing he could be, and his own legacy in the public imagination is not nearly as tarnished as it could—or should—be.
But Harry Potter was buoyed by the forces of capitalism and the uncomplicated, passionate love of so many young people—so many of us queer, creative, longing for nothing more than a letter to come and give us a place that we could go away to, that would recognize the difference in us and show us what to do with it. We bought, we talked, we analyzed, we wrote. We wrote so much. Millions and millions of words spilled out with our love, our hope, our desires, our needs. We became a constellation shining down on that monolith, and the cracks began to glow more brightly because of our light. We were better at the Wizarding World than its creator. Not perfect. No. Never that. And the cracks only widened, eventually shining brightly enough for even those of us who loved it so much to see.
What do we do with the grief that comes from the world being so different, so much more rotted and unkind and incoherent than we thought? What do we do with the grief that comes from realizing that the world we escaped into was also rotted, unkind, incoherent?
I’m not surprised there are people who really want to play the new HP game and are willing, even wanting, to overlook the radioactivity pervading it. The game is literally called Hogwarts Legacy. A legacy is something you’re left. A legacy is something that stretches behind and beyond you. A legacy is a promise and a burden, depending on your point of view.
We have been living through a mass death event for almost three years, no room or quarter given for our grief, and here comes a game that slams on the keys. Remember when you had a place to imagine where you were strong and did magic and fought evil and fell in love? it whispers, like the fucking Mirror of Erised. And just like the Mirror, with its absolutely basic level of encryption to name a piece of glass that shows you what you most want, it’s a backwards illusion.
To go back there is to go where race-based slavery is the norm. Where goblins with vaults full of gold have six-pointed stars inlaid in the floors of the banks they run, according to the movies. Where race among humans is declared to be a non-issue because there is a certain diversity among the student body. Never explored, just stated. (Hogwarts even has an Irish student!)
But there was just enough room for you. If you could imagine it. Harry Potter is that weird religion we all raised ourselves in, we of a particular generation, and like a lot of religions, when you grow up, you have to realize the gap between what you were taught and the rest of the living, breathing world that needs you to come into it fully.
Once the books were over, once the last line had been drawn under the story, the author was freed from the confines of mere narration. Then the cost of love began to climb. From her position atop the radioactive monolith built for her out of money and, yes, all our love as measured in money and analysis and time, she began. Slowly at first, in whispers, and now in full-throated, constant financial and social support to policies, academics, and organizations that want nothing less than the eradication of trans people. This is what she puts her energies toward. This is her quest. What matters to her continues to appear in the art she continues to make, and in the art made with her licensing and her imprimatur.
The plot of Hogwarts Legacy is about putting down a rebellion. A goblin rebellion. You are going to assist in defeating another race’s rebellion against its oppressors (of whom you are one) because you are told they are “bad” by authority figures you do not ever question because the rebellion is threatening your safe place. Your haven for the things that make you different, and your difference is all that matters. And speaking of your difference, in case you have any doubts, the goblin rebels want your blood to do special magic with. This is blood libel, one of the oldest antisemitic tropes of them all.
That is the price. You know that this place was created by a woman who despises trans people, who barely tolerates queer people (who does not, in fact, write them in—or am I to count the vile metaphor of werewolves as inclusion?), and views anyone who isn’t white and Christian with dismissive disdain at best. And let us not forget what she thinks about Jews. She hates. She hates so much and so many. How do you continue to cling so tightly to the radioactive monolith built on hate? How can you?
If you want to return, that is your right. I certainly cannot stop you. But you have to pay with hating the people the author of this world tells you to hate, or else there is no room for you. The cost is to your soul.