I didn’t open the cover and get transported to a world of magic and mystery. It wasn’t a Neverending Story situation for me. At the time, it was just another chapter book on the shelves beside the likes of Bunnicula and Goosebumps. The gangly boy on the cover illustration. When one of those voices comes from the author who taught you about accepting yourself, a person you thought truly saw you and kids like you, it hurts in a way I honestly hope she never understands. For a lot of us, we fight those voices every day. We hear relatives, friends, and parents say awful things about us and to us. Every homophobic or transphobic thing queer kids hear growing up becomes a voice that follows them for a long time. Rowling’s pen wrote magic into my world, but now every word she puts out just hurts my heart. When I was a kid, every word that flowed from J. She’s even gone as far as to suggest that we’re inherently dangerous, a threat to real (ouch) women everywhere.

Since 2019 though, the once-beloved children’s author has-well, she’s had some opinions.

She created a place where weird lonely kids would be told they were special, where kids who had survived abuse were more than just fundamentally broken. Within the pages of her books, she made the ordinary seem extraordinary. Nothing with a Wizarding World stamp on it can be viewed outside the context of it being a product of Dame J. This is important because she’s always been inseparable from her work and from work that she’s inspired (and licensed), for better and now mostly for worse. In case you need a refresher, those books, the Wizarding World setting, and the Harry Potter film franchise are all the intellectual property and brainchildren of author J. Hogwarts Legacy is a third-person action-RPG set in the same universe as the classic Harry Potter series of children's books. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, scream into a pillow (or the abyss), because this one’s gonna take a lot out of both of us. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. I don’t even smoke and I feel like I need a cigarette before I get this thing started.

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