![]() For Dave Chappelle’s The Closer, which reflects on the comedian’s own experience of being ostracized for his jokes about trans issues, the reverse was true. Hannah Gadsby’s progressive demolition of stand-up comedy, Nanette, scored 100 percent with critics but just 26 percent with fans. In recent years, I have become a student of what I think of as the “Rotten Tomatoes split”-that is, the gulf between critical and audience reactions to various pieces of art. This dynamic isn’t unique to video games. What’s going on? The most obvious explanation is the emergence of a class of internet critics who are completely out of touch with their audiences. Every day, a long line forms outside the Harry Potter shop at King’s Cross, as people of all ages wait to be photographed with the luggage cart embedded in the wall at “ Platform 9 ¾.” (The only Rowling property that is struggling is the Fantastic Beasts movie franchise, which received mixed reviews for its third installment last year.) ![]() Rowling’s crime novels, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, have all been best sellers in Britain, and the latest television adaptation ran on the BBC over Christmas. The London run of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child just extended to March next year, and the play is also running in New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, Toronto, and Hamburg. Rowling projects, which are still hits, despite her alleged outcast status. The success of Hogwarts Legacy follows the pattern of other recent J. At the same time, it became the game with the most concurrent streams on Twitch-even though some Twitch streamers were harassed for playing it. The financial success of Hogwarts Legacy is many times greater. Let me put that number in perspective: John Wick: Chapter 4, the latest in the Keanu Reeves action-movie franchise, just had what is generally considered to be an excellent opening weekend at the box office by taking in $73.5 million. As the website Den of Geek conceded-in an article preceded by an italicized warning about “Rowling’s history of transphobic remarks”-those sales generated more than $850 million in revenue. Hogwarts Legacy sold more than 12 million copies in its first two weeks, even though it’s not yet available for older consoles. The views she has expressed on Twitter and elsewhere-for instance, that women’s spaces, such as prisons and domestic-violence shelters, should be protected on the basis of biological sex rather than self-declared gender, and that some young people are rushed toward medical transition with insufficient gatekeeping-are clearly not fatally repulsive to normie consumers. ![]() The headline of an Axios article by the former Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo even declared that the Hogwarts Legacy launch had become a “referendum” on the author. Neither outlet joined a boycott of the game-walk-throughs are a reliable source of web traffic for months or even years-but both wanted you to know that they deplored it nonetheless. “The game has been embroiled in controversy due to transphobic remarks from Harry Potter author JK Rowling,” GameSpot warns its readers, in an apologetic tone. Rowling has taken public stances against inclusive transgender laws and trans rights,” reads a note at the bottom of a Polygon guide to finding the magic keys scattered around Hogwarts. “On numerous occasions in recent years, billionaire and Harry Potter creator J. The Mary Sue reported on an alleged fan boycott, in an article that began with the Potteresque incantation “Accio controversy!”Įven the walk-throughs-those helpful guides telling players how to solve the game’s puzzles and defeat its bosses-carried panicked disclaimers. The tech magazine Wired gave the game 1/10, and said its “real-world harms are impossible to ignore.” (These were left unspecified, but let’s presume the reviewer wasn’t talking about repetitive-strain injury from too many spell battles.) TheGamer declined to review the title at all, and suggested that readers should not play Hogwarts Legacy “if you care about your trans friends.” The British outlet Rock Paper Shotgun pointedly reviewed games by trans developers instead. When Hogwarts Legacy was released in February, the verdict from video-game sites was close to unanimous: The latest spin-off from the Harry Potter series was a heartless mess, the product of a bigoted worldview, and playing it involved an uncomfortable act of moral compromise-or at least holding your nose and reassuring yourself that J.
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