Tuesday, February 14, 2023

The Wizarding Game (and World)

 I have 100% been a hypocrite about HP.

Even when Jo began Tweeting her insane TERF logic, I kept wearing HP jewelry that I own. I kept watching the movies when they came on TV. I kept thinking about buying a video game (thankfully I'm lazy and bad at buying video games so that never happened). I pretended Cursed Child and the Fantastic Beasts series never happened to put my head in the sand.

We are so far beyond that now.

Jo has begun suing / threatening to sue people who Tweet about how her beliefs align with Nazis. She is using her money (money that I contributed to) to bring lawsuits against people who call her out on her beyond unbelievable and offensive thoughts. To the point where people have to delete the Tweets and formally apologize to her saying that nothing they said was true.

I had been ignoring it pretty successfully until the Wizarding game came out. Watching the near constant online discourse about the politics of buying the game has been watching people twist themselves in mental knots worthy of the Olympics. People are saying they buy the game but also donate to charities!

Jo has directly said that people continuing to buy and support HP are proof that people agree with her. They agree with her destructive TERF logic. They buoy her into thinking that she is somehow right.

I was literally in my high school yearbook as a HP fanatic. I didn't start reading until after GoF came out, but once I did, I went to every midnight release. I would stay up all night to read them because I couldn't stand the idea of having anything spoiled. I went to all the midnight releases of the movies. My friends and I were literally first in line for some of them (this was a million years ago before you could reserve specific seats online. I had so much merch. I had notebooks and board games and stickers and Funko pops and bags and mugs and bracelets and necklaces and snow globes and shirts and posters and DVDs and books and books on tape.

I can't ignore it anymore. It doesn't matter how much the books mattered to me and how it made me feel that good actually can win against evil even in the face of incredible odds. 

The time of HP is over for me, and I hope for a lot of other people.