Being a Harry Potter fan should be troublesome nowadays. J.K. Rowling, the creator of the Blood Libel Hogwarts Legacy franchise, has been repeatedly chastised for her transphobic views. The contentions encompassing establishment entertainers Ezra Mill operator and Johnny Depp consistently hurt the Incredible Monsters side project film series. With the arrival of the Hogwarts Legacy game, the most recent Wizarding World passage proceeds with the series’ disturbing history of discrimination against Jews.
Following the distribution of the first ongoing interaction trailer in Walk 2022, the game got analysis for its racist portrayals of trolls. It’s a worrying tendency, to be sure, given that this is far from the first time Harry Potter has been accused of overt antisemitism. What’s happening in Hogwarts Legacy, and how can it influence the game’s prominence and deals potential?
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Blood Libel Hogwarts Legacy 2023 Controversy
Players assume command over a fifth-year understudy at the nominal school of wizardry during the 1800s in Hogwarts Legacy. The learner has gained mastery of an old kind of magic that has the potential to transform the face of the Wizarding World as a whole. While learning how to use this skill, players may engage with various Hogwarts characters and even carry on with their regular school routines. Players can also form relationships with NPCs, just like they would at a real school.
Members of the “Goblin Rebellion” are among the various opponents that players will fight throughout the game. Throughout the game, players will learn about an ongoing conflict between wizards and goblins, with the latter serving as the villains. Goblins are said to be revolting against wizards since they cannot own wands on their own.
The issue of prejudiced portrayals of trolls in the Wizarding Scene existed well before Hogwarts Legacy. Goblins are depicted in Harry Potter as cold and unscrupulous financiers who control the magical society’s underground banks. Furthermore, popular films exaggerate this stereotype. According to Forbes, the movie’s goblins looked to be drawn straight from Nazi propaganda and Judaic religious symbolism.
Alleged antisemitism in ‘Hogwarts Legacy’Â
Hogwarts Legacy solidifies the franchise’s troubling habit of antisemitism. Goblins are portrayed as an oppressed minority that are viewed as foes for rebelling against their oppressors. Once is by some coincidence, two times is unintentionally, and multiple times is by design. But when a decades-old franchise has been built on these depictions throughout its history, it’s tough to ignore the warning signs.
Conversations about Harry Potter, and hence the impending open world adventure Hogwarts Legacy, seem to be dominated by transphobia, which is strange given that transphobia is one of the only forms of prejudice not addressed in the original novels. I realize the obvious background of JK Rowling – and have already written about it – but it’s easy to overlook everything else in the novels that’s suspicious.
Hogwarts Legacy 2023 Controversy: Conclusion
There are relatively few persons of color in the books, and those who do appear are frequently pushed to the background and given horribly stereotyped names, such as Cho Chang, whose main characteristics include being brilliant at school and, yeah, that’s it. Even white people aren’t immune to this; just ask secondary characters Anthony Goldstein and Seamus Finnigan, the latter of whom is extremely foolish and enjoys blowing stuff up. Don’t worry, they like being slaves.
The skin tone of a Black female wizard changes dramatically across the films as she is recast with little regard for authenticity, and the strange views on gender are clear with the fact that the magic stairs prevent boys from entering the girls’ dorm but do not prevent girls from entering the boys’. The ugliness of bad characters is usually overemphasized, countless women (and zero males) are continuously adversely characterized by their emotions, and then there are the physical slaves in the shape of house elves.
