Discuss the state of the forums and find solutions

[Shadow1980]

Chrkeller said:

Shadow1980 said:

We never banned discussion of the game. This was official forum policy, written by yours truly. There were people out there, including on this board, using Hogwarts Legacy's success as an excuse to mock or otherwise be dismissive towards people who were boycotting the game, said boycott existed purely because of J.K. Rowling's transphobia, and we weren't going to have that garbage here. Bigotry of any kind, including transphobia, has been against board rules since, like, forever ago. If users here don't like trans people, they need to keep it to themselves.

Except JK sold the rights to WB, thus didn't get direct money as it relates to the sales, thus the boycott only was hurting a studio and people's employment....  but anybody who wanted to point that out, couldn't, because the mods decided to label us.  

Regarding what royalties Rowling gets, it may be more complicated than that. Without any actual documentation, we don't know what kind of money she makes off of any given licensed work based off of her books. Most people aren't privy to the specific details of any given licensing agreement. So, maybe she got money off of each copy sold of Hogwarts Legacy. Maybe she didn't.

But that's not the point.

The point was that people are opposed to J.K. Rowling because she is a transphobe. Not "allegedly." Is. People are well within their rights to refuse to continue to spend money on anything related to HP, to advocate for general boycotts of anything related to the Wizarding World because of Rowling's transphobia. People who boycott Rowling and works based on her IPs were being mocked for doing so. They thought it was amusing that people opposed Rowling's transphobia. They took it as an opportunity to mock people they hated for political/cultural reasons.

For example, a user on this site wrote in one discussion "I guess the boycott made by certain 'community' backfired." Not sure else how to interpret that "certain community" jab as anything other than trans people (and probably also trans allies who were also boycotting the game). Another user (who's since been permabanned for multiple instances of flagrant bigotry & sexism) wrote in a separate discussion that "It seems the woke boycott didn't work :)" That's even more explicit in its direct mockery of people boycotting the game because of Rowling's transphobia.

So yeah, we were more than justified in having that policy regarding Hogwarts Legacy. We weren't going to go full ResetEra and outright ban discussion of the game. People can separate the art from the artist, and many people still enjoy HP-related media despite Rowling being a bigoted POS. But we decided we needed to make it clear that we weren't going to put up with people making snide comments about those who were opposed to Rowling and her history of blatant transphobia.