Whaddup substack nation today I am here to complain. So you may have unfortunately heard that HBO has plans to make a seven season Harry Potter tv show to reboot the old movies for some godforsaken reason. First of all, imagine being able to pitch a seven season tv show to ANY studio ever what executive would even think that would work out. It’s not like Harry Potter, or even the entire company making adaptations of JK Rowling’s work, is exactly printing money right now either, it seems more to me that executives and higher ups and whoever the hell makes decisions in streaming services have decided that Harry Potter = profit no matter what because it is a marketable and recognizable property capable of producing strange chemicals such as “nostalgia” and some undefined quantity of “magic” that apparently only one franchise in the history of ever is capable of provoking within an audience of children’s book addicts.
I’m not here to convince any Harry Potter fans to “read another book” because if you haven’t heeded that advice yet it’s too late for you and also I’m transgender so I’m “biased” or something. I’m just like really sick of this shit. I already had to watch the entire games industry fail to report on the Harry Potter game with any integrity whatsoever save a selection of random articles written by actual trans people or allies (who are real I promise) where most people jerked off trying to convince themselves that the most mediocre game ever released was going to be the game of the century even though Tears of the Kingdom is coming out in literally a month at the time of writing. And now I’ll get to watch the entire TV reporting industry do the same fucking thing regardless of the quality of what will likely be an extremely bloated, dispassionate nightmare of an adaptation of a book series that literally already has a serviceable adaptation. I don’t know maybe they’ll have more time for the slavery apologia this run guys who knows?
I’m being a lot sarcastic on that last sentence but as someone who actually read four of the books as a kid (I stopped because they were boring. Not nearly enough dragons and far too many descriptions of people that made me think JK Rowling just hates everyone who has ever breathed) the movie adaptations that I saw really cut a lot of the fluff that really turned me off from the books in the first place. I think the only justification for a new adaptation that one could argue with an entire SEVEN SEASON adaptation of a book series that already has an EIGHT MOVIE adaptation is complete and utter accuracy to the work, which frankly is impossible. Do you have any idea how much of Goblet of Fire was Harry having normal school problems like having to study and Ron being an edgelord? If you do, do you have any idea how fucking boring that would be to watch?
On the other hand, at the end of the day it would not matter if Harry Potter is good actually (it’s not) or if this adaptation somehow against all odds ends up being a banger. The quality of an artistic work is not at all affected by the values of the people making it. Amazing people can make shitty art and transphobic assholes can make good art, sometimes. The issue is that JK Rowling is literally going to take a huge cut of the money she makes from this to fund the anti-transgender bill wave in Britain and the most annoying people online will watch it to own the libs or something. And she also does this fun thing where she insists that all Harry Potter fans share her views, and even though statistics show that at this time, the majority of people in fact think trans people are cool her emphasis on saying that anyone who supports Harry Potter supports her transphobic beliefs creates a huge mental block for many trans people. Because there are a lot of Harry Potter fans, it is literally one of the biggest media franchises out there, and this position allows fear of an endless army of TERF Harry Potter fans to fester. Speaking for myself, I can attest to the fact that this whole thing has made it infinitely harder for me to come out of the closet in real life.
I was joking when putting the conservatives playing a mediocre video game to own the libs on the same gravity as anti-trans bills being funded, but I do think that the open hostility of doing that does real damage, especially on social media. Algorithms love anger, and love exposing users to anger even more. It’s hard to believe that there are trans allies out there when the majority of stuff you see when you look up Harry Potter or trans related things is written by the same group of rage-addicted losers who want to kick down on whatever minority they can get away with. Being exposed to open hostility every day is extremely tiring and certainly does no favors for things like “mental health” and “having a sense of self that isn’t really fucked up.” When any kind of bigot is openly hostile like that the purpose isn’t to be taken seriously, the purpose is to put the people of whatever group is being targeted on edge. If you read a lot of shit written by transphobes, then naturally you are going to start assuming that everyone around you could be transphobic and are waiting to strike. It creates a constant us vs. them mentality that conservatives willingly subject themselves to in order to force minorities into it for survival. Put simply, they don’t want us to feel safe. They want us dead mostly, but if we’re alive they want us scared shitless.
So Harry Potter is a really, really good way to create that fear. It’s the same reason a lot of Neo Nazis use seemingly innocuous slogans and symbols and why I tense whenever I see a red hat and can’t read the text from a distance. It’s so those symbols get mixed up with people who aren’t hyper online and it becomes a metaphorical smokescreen. It allows them to say again and again, it’s just a meme, it’s just a book series, and it becomes difficult to figure out who genuinely doesn’t know they’re accidentally spreading fascist rhetoric and who is doing it on purpose. What’s unique here is that JK Rowling herself is fanning the fire, and that Harry Potter is a LOT more mainstream than, say, Pepe the Frog ever was.
But regardless of all that this seven season shitshow of a reboot/adaptation is still going to exist and make the smokescreen even bigger. The primary defense to engaging with Harry Potter content that I’ve seen is “oh no my childhood” and before I’m done with this rant/article/essay I would like to deconstruct that a bit.
I’m autistic. Fun fact! My first special interest was Pokemon, and because of that it’s a huge part of my childhood. I still have a shit ton of trading cards and I played every game that came out for years. I have several Pokemon plushies even though I’m not a huge stuffed animal person these days and have a collection of fond memories of doing Pokemon things with friends. However, though I do have some remaining interest in the series in a large part due to nostalgia, I haven’t played the most recent games, Scarlet and Violet, and to the surprise of many this isn’t eating me inside out. The reason I’m not playing them is that it’s become more and more clear over the years that Game Freak’s development team is not being given enough time to make these games in a reasonable manner. This situation is somewhat different than Harry Potter obviously, as far as I know the Pokemon Company isn’t actively funding hate campaigns, so it hasn’t become synonymous with a hate group, but I make this comparison regardless because I struggle to think of a media franchise as big as Harry Potter getting into that can of worms. Anyway, I could easily say something like “Pokemon was my childhood” but would it be true? No. Absolutely not. There’s no way I will ever define an entire period of my life by a franchise, no matter how important it was or is to me. I truly don’t understand the notion that one piece of media is the only thing your childhood can be.
Even if it is, even if Harry Potter is somehow the only thing ever to happen to you as a child, that was then. You may have experienced “the magic” then, but this is now, for better or for worse. And now Harry Potter is a string of embarrassingly poor performing spin off movies, a fanficy play that everyone hates, an extremely mediocre game made by the most antisemitic people possible, and soon what will most likely be a soulless reboot. They may all stem from a beloved children’s book series, but the last Harry Potter book came out a decade ago. Maybe I am saying “read another book” after all, but if you have decided to simply not care about JK Rowling’s transphobia so you can cling to your childhood joy, that’s not the only thing you have going for you. There are plenty of things I wish I could experience “the magic” of for the first time, but that’s not going to happen because I am now a fundamentally different person than I was when I first played Pokemon Sapphire. And frankly I’ve made peace with that, because I can just move onto other things that interest me and continue to live my life. It’s genuinely fun and easy to get into new things, especially now that the Internet’s made media so much more accessible. So why stick with a sinking ship that actively is firing cannons at the most vulnerable people on earth? Nostalgia is not the only positive emotion and maybe not feeding into the endless nostalgia-reboot-industrial-complex is a good thing.
Because this reboot is ultimately a symptom of the corporate strategy of rehashing old ideas to reduce risk of not making the largest profit possible. And currently, HBO has decided that the profit of beating the dead horse that is the Harry Potter IP will outweigh any controversy caused by producing it, despite the likely sky-high budget that will inevitably be needed to create something as bloated as this show will be. HBO has decided that putting money in JK Rowling’s pocket is fine, actually, and like all corporations it will continue to be complicit in the further oppression of whatever minority group will be on the chopping block because it will make them money. Boycotting the show and HBO as a whole is a given, but ultimately the system of capitalism will always leave the possibility for corporations to exploit minority groups for profit. This will happen again, in a different form, over and over as long as art is created for capitalistic profit over any other motivation.