Hogwarts Legacy - Whimsical Wizardry

Gordon_4

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I'm not sure it's so easy to say that. If someone tells you they are your friend, but then does something they know will make you unhappy, even if they think it shouldn't really affect your happiness, they have still made a choice. And the way that choice falls, rather than what it was about, can be what hurts.

Not suggesting we can let fear of hurting others control us like that, and it definitely can be abused to control people, but generally I don't think we can easily say what should and shouldn't hurt people. See 'it was just a joke'.
I think in the case of purchasing decisions it’s really not a hill worth dying on. The amount of separation between the person buying and the person hurting is vast enough to be abstract. If I go and buy a copy right now, trans people don’t suddenly feel pain like it’s a voodoo doll, assuming they know or care what a nobody like me does on a day to day basis. My guess is they have more important things to occupy their time.

And I don’t think the ‘Just a joke, bro’ situation is applicable. If for no other reason that the same person actively being the asshole is the same one who will defend it thusly. To my knowledge none of the devs have tried to play off Rowling’s bullshit as a joke. And she’s never done anything but double down on her own rhetoric.
 

Baffle

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I think in the case of purchasing decisions it’s really not a hill worth dying on. The amount of separation between the person buying and the person hurting is vast enough to be abstract. If I go and buy a copy right now, trans people don’t suddenly feel pain like it’s a voodoo doll, assuming they know or care what a nobody like me does on a day to day basis. My guess is they have more important things to occupy their time.

And I don’t think the ‘Just a joke, bro’ situation is applicable. If for no other reason that the same person actively being the asshole is the same one who will defend it thusly. To my knowledge none of the devs have tried to play off Rowling’s bullshit as a joke. And she’s never done anything but double down on her own rhetoric.
I think purchasing decisions can be important, but in your example it's a bit of a case of 'what you don't know doesn't hurt you'. My partner is non-binary, I will not be buying this game (I wouldn't anyway, but my doing so would hurt them even though it doesn't have a tangible impact, and I will not do that).

The 'just a joke' comment is really just to say that what hurts some doesn't hurt others. The person 'joking' will often expect that behaviour from others towards themselves, because they genuinely are joking. It's just that the joke has hurt someone they really didn't mean to. (I don't mean, e.g. pushing someone down the stairs, you know, as a joke.)
 

Thaluikhain

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Apparently the evil goblins bankers controlling the world's finances are also into kidnapping children, which ok.
 

Terminal Blue

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The hurt caused by buying and/or reviewing a video game is utterly negligible.
No, it isn't.

You're supporting, financially benefiting and providing promotion for someone who has devoted their lives to hurting trans people, not just by spreading harmful rhetoric but by using their influence (which is considerable, especially in the context of a small country like Scotland) to attack vital services and influence legislation.

You're also hurting people personally who might previously have respected you, who might have seen you as someone who would stand up for a marginalized community facing discrimination and now feel betrayed. Because, let's be real, internet personalities will happily build and exploit parasocial relationships. They will happily market their persona and the fact they are relatable and genuine and not like other celebrities. They will cultivate engagement and foster a climate where people feel connected to them personally and feel like they are friends, and of course it hurts when people you feel are your friends don't value you.

Not every person has reached my level of cynicism. Some trans and non-binary people still mistakenly view cishet people as human beings like them. You and I might know that's not true. You and I know that cishet people lack the basic experiences required for empathy or moral processing and consequentially that you should always assume the worst of them, but some people aren't there yet.

I'm exaggerating for effect, but there's a serious grain of truth here. I don't want people to have to view the world the way I do. I don't want people to have to go through life constantly asking the question of whether people are worth their time, or whether it's a bad idea to get emotionally invested in them. That's not a nice way to have to view the world. It would be nice if the world didn't keep vindicating that view.

Apparently the evil goblins bankers controlling the world's finances are also into kidnapping children, which ok.
Duh, without the blood of human children how are they going to make the special goblin bread that they eat in their dark rituals?
 
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Satinavian

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No, it isn't.

You're supporting, financially benefiting and providing promotion for someone who has devoted their lives to hurting trans people, not just by spreading harmful rhetoric but by using their influence (which is considerable, especially in the context of a small country like Scotland) to attack vital services and influence legislation.
How much money is she getting per sold copy ? Distribution channels, publishers, developers, advertising etc come first. What is left will be reduced by tax. The rest become part of Rowlings wealth. How high of a percentage of her wealth is she spending on anti-trans politics ? That percentage of her income from a sold copy is the amount of harm done :

Political influence worth a couple of cent as far as donations go.

Yes. I would say that is pretty negligible. It's on the level of having a salad instead of beef exactly once and calling it climate activism.
You're also hurting people personally who might previously have respected you, who might have seen you as someone who would stand up for a marginalized community facing discrimination and now feel betrayed.
If someone were to lose respect for me for buying a video game, i would consider them pretty shallow and not really worth my time.
 
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Thaluikhain

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How much money is she getting per sold copy ? Distribution channels, publishers, developers, advertising etc come first. What is left will be reduced by tax. The rest become part of Rowlings wealth. How high of a percentage of her wealth is she spending on anti-trans politics ? That percentage of her income from a sold copy is the amount of harm done :

Political influence worth a couple of cent as far as donations go.
Rowling herself disagrees, saying in a tweet (which I can't find again, gah), that people supporting her franchise proves they support her anti-trans views.

If someone were to lose respect for me for buying a video game, i would consider them pretty shallow and not really worth my time.
That sounds a lot like saying that you don't really care about those trans people anyway, which might not be the greatest defence.
 

Baffle

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If someone were to lose respect for me for buying a video game, i would consider them pretty shallow and not really worth my time.
Do you feel this way about all purchase boycotts? (I want to be clear that this isn't a gotcha or an attempt to single you out or anything, it's a genuine question about boycotts.)
 

BrawlMan

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BrawlMan

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Political influence worth a couple of cent as far as donations go.

Yes. I would say that is pretty negligible. It's on the level of having a salad instead of beef exactly once and calling it climate activism.
I wouldn't go that far. Now you're just downplaying. Unintentional or not. A reminder. She takes a lot of her money and it goes straight to anti-trans, anti-gay, and anti-women/anti-abortion organizations. Yet she claims to be all about equal women and female rights. Did you see this video? You don't say anything and just watch. It gets real deep and scary. This is something you should not take lightly

 
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Satinavian

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Do you feel this way about all purchase boycotts? (I want to be clear that this isn't a gotcha or an attempt to single you out or anything, it's a genuine question about boycotts.)
Honestly, yes.

Boycotts are fine. It is a form of protest. But requiring that all of your friends join your boycotts or you are cutting the friendship ? No, not fine.

And i feel the same about my own purchase decisions. E.g. I have never owned a car in my whole life for climate reasons. I turned down job offers that would require me to get a car. I skipped living arrangements that would need me to get a car. I struggled to move bulky things more often than i like to remember. But that is important for me and worth it.

But am i shunning people who have a car ? No, i don't.

A lot. She gets between 50 million to 100 million dollars in royalties alone. So I assume it's going to be the same for the Hogwarts game.
That is here total royalties including Lego and whatever. I talked about the royalties per game sold and how much of that goes into politics. Which is the only reasonable basis for estimating the damage a single sale does.
 
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BrawlMan

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I talked about the royalties per game sold and how much of that goes into politics. Which is the only reasonable basis for estimating the damage a single sale does.
That's why I showed you that video. While it is currently unknown how much Rowling made from Hogwarts (which is a highly financial success), a lot of royalties probably not to different from other HP related projects. It doesn't matter how little or how high she gets from them. Rowling is still making a huge sum and whatever she gets either goes to her pockets and is donated to said anti-abortion/trans/gay organizations. Watch the video. If you can't get that around your head, want to be oblivious about it, or too scared to realize that truth, then we have nothing left to discuss. Either you get it, or you don't. There is no in-between.
 
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Satinavian

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Rowling herself disagrees, saying in a tweet (which I can't find again, gah), that people supporting her franchise proves they support her anti-trans views.
She is an idiot. Of course she chooses to believe that the whole HP fandom shares her bigoted political view. Otherwise she would need to entertain the idea that she might actually be wrong.

@BrawlMan Will watch the video when i am on another device. Usually when visiting the forum, i can't properly watch videos.
 
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Baffle

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And i feel the same about my own purchase decisions. E.g. I have never owned a car in my whole life for climate reasons. I turned down job offers that would require me to get a car. I skipped living arrangements that would need me to get a car. I struggled to move bulky things more often than i like to remember. But that is important for me and worth it.

But am i shunning people who have a car ? No, i don't.
I don't think I'd criticise you if you did though, that would be a fair choice that you made based on how strongly you feel about the climate (it's not only you taking away the friendship, as one half of the friendship you're giving something up too). Certainly I wouldn't appreciate my friends making me feel bad about driving a car - I would feel defensive about it because I know I drive when I don't really need to.
 
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Hawki

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Yes, this is more or less my point.

And you miss it if you shift to a technical usage of "fairy tale". This would be like discussing animal rights with a biologist who goes "but scientifically humans are animals". Or discussing racism with an anthropologist who'd go "but this isn't racism because it's not about a race" - which anthropologists usually don't answer (outside a zealously pedantic first year) because they know in which context which broad/narrow/popular/technical usage of the word is the most relevant to communication.
Well, I don't agree with the analogies.



We can debate definitions all day, but if everything is a fairy tale, then the term becomes meaningless. Also, you realize that you're the first year student in this analogy, right?

The point here isn't academic textual classification, discussing whether the Hobbit belongs to some oral tradition, or whatever. The relevant thing is that such fantasy tales are processed by the public like they process fairy tales :
I completely disagree. I've never seen anyone approach a fairy tale the same way they do a work of fantasy. I've already explained the differences earlier in the thread.

it's a series of magical premises that aren't debated, a "this creature was evil" is self-sufficient, just like any fairy tale defines a "good king" archetype, a noble "prince charming", an "evil witch". These do not operate on rational real world logic, this logic is suspended like in front of a myth, which importance resides in structures, articulating abstractions (good, evil, stepmotherness, etc).
That's highly debatable.

Fantasy (and sci-fi, to a lesser extent) can get away with the premise of "this creature is evil," but the difference between fairy tales and fantasy is that the latter usually has rationale to justify it, while the former usually presents things "as is." In Little Red Riding Hood (a fairy tale), no-one is going to waste their time asking how wolves can talk, whereas in something like Lord of the Rings, the lore of wolves/wargs is fleshed out. Or since this started about orcs, I can give you an in-universe reason as to why the orcs are the way they are, or elves are the way they are. In contrast, something like 'The Elves and the Shoemaker' doesn't really examine why elves like fixing shoes, or how they came into being, or anything like that, because that's not the crux of the story.

There is a pointless geekery in seeking mechanisms or content beyond the puppets that have been set up by an author :
Except the "mechanisms," as you put them, are already in the text.

In a fairy tale, mechanisms are usually redundent, because they're never brought up, and are generally not relevant - I don't need to know where the Three Little Pigs got their skills in architecture, that isn't the point of the story. In a fantasy setting, on the other hand, an author is generally expected to justify why things are the way they are.

smurfs have no sexuality and no reproduction, they simply "are", and biological coherence is irrelevant to their imaginary universe.

What hasn't been thought up by an author in their universe isn't to be "discovered", it's simply a hollow place that stays hollow because what matters to the story is on the envelope's level.
Okay, and? Fictional lore exists as the author(s) dictate. Difference between the fantasy genre and fairy tales is that one usually has a lot more lore than the other, and is structured differently.

Of course, any cultural production comes from the author's culture and individual beliefs, so there is always a worldview to find and deduce from a text. But again, this worldview is expressed in dreamlike logic, in little touches that don't have to make an exhaustive and coherent system (few fictions would function if they had to be exhaustively logical), and even less be an actual reflexion of the real world : in many fictions, even pseudo-realistic ones, human races exist and determine mentalities, or homosexuality is a sign of weakness and perversion, or women are less capable than men, etc...
In one sense, I agree, any fictional world will usually break down eventually if enough holes are poked in it. However:

1: The difference between good and bad worldbuilding is, among other things, that the setting with bad worldbuilding will collapse with far fewer holes than the one with better worldbuilding.

2: Again, I disagree with this "dreamlike" assertion. "Dreamlike" usually refers to a style of writing, though at times, this can be extended to the context. Alice in Wonderland can be described as dreamlike because among other things, it doesn't really function like a normal book. Lord of the Rings isn't dreamlike, because its writing style is formal, it's operating under a series of rules, it takes itself seriously, everything in LotR definitively happens (to the point where it's stated to be Earth in the distant past), etc. Of all the adjectives you could use to describe LotR or many high fantasy works, "dreamlike' isn't a word I've ever seen.

3: Actually, a fictional world DOES require logical consistency (heck, most writing requires logical consistency, period). You can certainly write a setting without logical consistency, but if people pick up on the inconsistencies, it's not a defence to say "it's fiction," it's just a case of bad writing

These premises make stories (and character ehaviours) that fall apart if analysed in terms of real world analogies, or even in terms of inner logic (because these concepts -like the concepts of ghosts, vampires, zombies, etc- simply don't work if you overanalyse them). The fictional universe is structured differently than the real world, and doesn't require full logical consistency, it exists "as described", plot holes and contradictions included.
Again with the zombies and vampires, and again, you're missing the point.

Zombies and vampires don't exist in the real world, that's true. No-one bar a few loonies would claim otherwise. But if you're writing a work that involves zombies and vampires, then unless these are part of the background, it's generally expected that they have a set of rules that they follow.

For instance, a classic rule of zombies is that they need to be killed through a bullet to the head (or something similar). If your zombie story starts with this rule, then later, zombies are killed through chestshots, that's an error. Semantics as to the believability of zombies are just a distraction.

There's a geeky habit of trying to bring fiction to reality-level of cohesion (one hilarious archetypal example was aliens nerds debating for years to rationalize biologically the difference of design between the first two movies - while the real answer is how cool it looked to different directors). It can be a fun creative mind game, but it makes no sense to treat it as a revelation of an original work's hidden reality instead of a fan-created addendum.
Well, I've never seen anyone debate that - the drone(s) in Alien and Aliens are clearly the same species. But even then, it's a non sequitur, because we know that xenomorphs take on the traits of their implantee, so you've got a potential "out" there already.

You're right, in a real-world sense, any error between works is down to writers in the real world either making mistakes or retconning. No-one denies this. But if we're talking about Aliens, part of the reason why there is debate is that Aliens canon is a mess. Not even the films are entirely consistent with themselves (contrast AvP vs. Prometheus for example). Simply saying "it's fiction" as to why these errors exist is just a cop-out.

Now some people might not even mind, and more power to them, but it's not over-analyzing to see that the IP has major consistency issues.

Just like inventing stories where dracula is some ("humanized", "realisticalized") tormented lovestruck soul, adding pyschological complexity to orcs is an example of this : it expands an universe into another, fan-created around the first. Even if it's to include "more logical", "less fairy-tale-ish" things to it. Less, I say it, "childish" things.
Dracula isn't a good example of this.

Dracula actually comes closer to being a fairy tale because the original text (Dracula, by Bram Stoker) isn't definitive in the same way that LotR is. In part due to public domain, in part because of differences in setting, but that Dracula acts in one way in the original novel has no bearing on how he acts in another product, because they're effectively different continuities.

Precisely, orcs are vague (imagine how many details a Stephen King would have described), they are catch-all boogeymen, like ogres in fairy tales, about which all you need to know (be told and take as granted) is that they are terrible. They are the bad.
Orcs aren't really that vague. Maybe in visual descriptions, but that's it. They aren't creatures of a fairy tale, they're definitive, real, operate on rules, etc.

Now you're free to make of them what you want in your own headcanon or in your own fanfictions, or independent works. Just like vampires can be romantic conflicted souls or one-dimension predatory revenants. In fact their vagueness (and relative abstraction) is also what allows projections, and efficiently universalizes them. But inserting components of your own (in their "hollowness") and declaring this to be some underyling objective truth is wrong. And useless. Complexifying them is interesting, but this complexification doesn't have to be presented as something inherent to that work. It's an extension in its own. Like, say, Tournier's own personal take on Defoe's Robinson.
Who's inserting what?

First, I've never claimed that any piece of fanfiction I've ever written is canon to a setting. It's canon to my own writing (this is better explained on my homepage), but I've never deployed the argument of "I wrote X, therefore X is canon," because of course it isn't canon. I've never seen any fanfic author claim that what they've written is canon, and if they did, they'd be wrong, unless the fanfic was canonized.

Second, again, who's inserting what? That orcs are evil? That's not me inserting anything, that's the nature of the text itself. Heck, if I DID write LotR as an original work, there'd probably be more moral ambiguity, but I didn't. So it's why when I write for LotR, I've never had a 'good' orc because that's breaking canon,* whereas there's a handful of stuff I've written from an Easterling/Haradrim POV, where they most definitively aren't, because the setting allows for that. It's part of why 'A Shadow in the East' is my favorite GW LotR campaign because we see things from the Haradrim's perspective, and it syncs in perfectly with canon, even if it isn't canon itself.

*Not including crackfics or anything similar

But not every fictional character (or creature) has a revealing psych-analysable childhood. Most of them are just structural functions. Single ideas on legs. Heck, sometimes even stories that mean to say truths work better with abstractions and reductionisms. After all, myths and fairy takes do convey messages about the human condition that are often valid. And they convey them through minimalist, technically false, impossible, reductive components. Like a proverb would. "Fleshing out" a tale isn't necessarily a path to increased accuracy. It depends on what its grammar demands.
Not really. Look at any fictional character widely known and/or beloved, and they'll usually be a fleshed out character. Added complexity adds to character reciprocation most of the time.

(Also, I and most of my friends have read Tolkien during childhood. I don't think it's a work that belongs to an age bracket, but it does have something childish to them and I really mean it in the most wholesome, noble sense of the term. I think it describes a world with a sense of marvel that gets lost with age. And capturing it, indirectly capturing/transposing childhood awe and anxieties, makes a large part of its power.)
Obviously I can't comment on your own experiences, but for me, it's the opposite. LotR is something that gets better with age, because as you get older, you're able to better appreciate its complexities. That's generally true of fiction in general though - the exception is stuff explicitly designed for children that, when viewed as an adult, loses a lot of its lustre.
 

Silvanus

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While I'm never going to shit on someone for doing what is an objectively good thing, I don't think it works that way. You don't get to buy indulgences and get automatic forgiveness.

To a certain type of person, myself included, this kind of behaviour actually comes off as very cynical. If you know something is going to hurt people and you do it anyway, you've made your choice. You've decided what's important to you and what isn't. Making a donation afterwards is just an apology without any contrition.
I think interpreting it as "apology" and "buying indulgence" is attributing a thought process to them that they never expressed.

They did something which ensured their stream did more good than bad. That's all, and they didn't do it afterwards, the stream was setup from the get-go as a stream in support of the Trevor Project.
 

Satinavian

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Did you see this video?
Ok, that was just half an hour about how Rowlings associates are horrible. I can totally believe that, but it is not changing my mind about anything. I already knew that Rowling was a bigot and her keeping even worse company it not exactly an eye opener.