Now that Nintendo has shared total sales of Zelda for 2023, it can be officially declared that Hogwarts Legacy was the best selling game of 2023 worldwide.
Zelda: TotK: 20.28 Million Hogwarts legacy: 22 Million
Congrats to Avalanche Software!
Now that Nintendo has shared total sales of Zelda for 2023, it can be officially declared that Hogwarts Legacy was the best selling game of 2023 worldwide.
Zelda: TotK: 20.28 Million Hogwarts legacy: 22 Million
Congrats to Avalanche Software!
Yes, despite that.
Most people are fine separating the art from the artist, at least to a point.
There’s music I listen to from artists that I’d hate to hang around with (e.g. Morrissey from the Smiths)
There’s books I’ve read and enjoyed despite being from authors that I dislike on a personal level (e.g. JKR, Rudyard Kipling)
Stanley Kubrick is a total bellend but I still think he makes good films.
Tom Cruise is part of a cult that takes advantage of people and destroys families, but when I watch a film with him in it I can put that aside and just enjoy his work.
It’s very subjective where the line is when you say “nah actually I can’t consume this media”. Some people boycott JKR, and that’s fine. Some people don’t, despite not liking her, and that’s also fine.
And it should be noted that JKR doesn’t get any more money based on the game’s sales, she got a lump sum upfront and has been trashing the game due to it including a trans character. It’s a grey area whether buying this game is supporting her or not.
A podcast I listen to calls this “the Card Line” after Orson Scott Card.
If supporting the game indicates interest in the franchise does it support her in that she would get money for the next game again?
She thinks so. She looks at the continued success of her IP as a specific barometer for how okay fans are with her views. She’s said as much in interviews.
What’s sad is her anti-trans position bewildering considering the morals in her books. Hermoine is called a mudblood and outcast and she works hard to be accepted as a witch in the magical society. The trio befriend Hagrid. I don’t see anybody else visiting him for a cup of tea as frequently as these 3. Dobby the house elf is surprised and shocked to find that Harry frees him just to be a friend. Neville is mocked for all of 7 books and we learn that his circumstances aren’t that far off from that of Harry’s.
The whole fricking book is about showing kindness and accepting people as they are. Given all of this, I don’t quite get why JK Rowling is filled with hatred.
The whole Voldemort/Death Eater/pureblood movement is clearly an allegory for white nationalism.
They believe themselves to be superior and more pure. They look down on people not like them, and they view wizards who intermingle with muggles to be race traitors.
The tone of the books is pretty “woke”, so it’s crazy to me that JKR is now liking and retweeting statements from nationalists and the far right.
They really found common ground on the whole trans people being subhuman thing.
Is she though? Do you have a link? I really want to get clarity in this whole JKR situation. The only thing I remember is her tweeting something of the like “we used to have a word for ‘people who menstruate’ in the English language, what was it?” which I can see how it can sound transphobic, but all it’s really saying is that since the word “woman” now includes trans women, the English language now lacks a word for people being born female. She later said she is not tranphobic, and has (had?) many trans friends, but do think trans women are not the same as cis women, which doesn’t really seem all that transphobic to me, so maybe I missed something else she said.
Based on the above, and the fact that all her books are pretty woke, as you say, I always assumed it was a bad misunderstanding, but I’d really want to see if she doubled down on some objectionable view.
You’ll be able to easily find a number of anti-Trans stuff from her.
Things like her moaning about a university not granting the screening of a pseudoscientific anti-Trans film
Or her coming out in support of someone who was removed from a think tank for being publicly transphobic
She has peddled a conspiracy theory that doctors are trying to push kids into taking hormone replacement therapy.
She’s close friends with anti-Trans activists like Helen Joyce, someone who actively called for a “reduction” of the amount of trans people. To me, calling for a “reduction” in the numbers of some minority group immediately raises alarm bells in my mind.
She has retweeted anti-gay, anti-Trans activists like Caroline Farrow.
She wrote a book involving a trans character where she detailed that the character was unable to pass. The main character ‘hero’ of her book gleefully threatens prison rape for this trans woman.
She pedalled the debunked “fact” that trans women are a danger in women’s toilets.
She liked a tweet that said trans women are just men in dresses, and that calling them women is misogynistic.
She liked a tweet saying trans women are inherently sexual predators, saying they’re like “foxes in a henhouse, identifying as hens” - in the interest of being transparent, I will say she unliked the tweet after receiving backlash, alleging she liked it by accident. I’ll let you be the judge on that.
She wrote another book, Troubled Blood in which the villain preys upon women by dressing up in women’s clothes. Pretty clear what she’s alluding to there.
In an interview, she states that “90% of HP fans agree with her stances on trans people” and that they’re just afraid to say so because of the violent trans mob.
She purposely doxxed a trans woman, who then received a bunch of death threats.
She compared the acceptance from the state that trans people are real to 1984 - "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”
She wrote another book, The Ink Black Heart, where there is a stand-in character that is clearly meant to be Rowling herself. In the book, the anti-Trans activist main character is “cancelled” online, and is then killed based on trumped-up charges of transphobia.
Rowling opens a domestic violence help centre that explicitly bans trans women, despite trans women being disproportionately likely to experience domestic and sexual violence.
She said she finds it amusing people have lost respect for her because she “doesn’t support violent, duplicitous rapists” - i.e. trans women.
This woman is a fucking billionaire. If I had that kind of money I’d be sipping drinks on beaches, going rock climbing, banging expensive prostitutes, and putting money into good causes.
What does Rowling do? She takes the one thing she can’t buy - time - and spends it on stirring up hatred for a minority group. She is awful.
And it’s a real shame. I still have my first edition collection of HP books, and I like them, but she certainly takes some of the shine away from them.
Thanks for the detailed response, I’ll have to double-check some of these. It seemed strange to me that everybody called her a transphobe based just on that tweet I remembered, and on a statement she put on her website that didn’t seem that transphobic to me, but if all you say is true, then yeah, she definitely is.
ContraPoints has a video that explains a lot of it: https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us?si=_RQR_ZJE2ZHsh8E2
Yeah that’s my thinking, and why I say it’s a grey area.
It brings more attention to her franchise, which benefits her if it means more installments or book sales, even if she did want the game to crash and burn once she got the cash, and clearly hurts her precious fee fees.
It’s also symbolic of the HP mythos moving beyond her direct control, which no doubt bothers her.
Yeah. I own lots of films by Roman Polanski. I think he should have served time in prison for rape rather than absconding to Europe. But he also has made some outstanding films. So my compromise was buying them all second hand from eBay years after release so he doesn’t receive a dime from me.
With this game, I bought it new to support the studio producing a good product with lots of care and attention. But if a new series of Wizarding books came out by Rowling, I’d likely skip them entirely. If I did buy them it would be the same way as Polanski, years later and second hand.