The gameplay is a mixture of cutscenes and action basically. The tutorial lasts for the first part of the game before you get to school. You will be watching the cutscene then it will just let you take control without warning basically. It’s immersive with this type of tutorial playing. It does take a good amount of speed to keep up with the fighting on the PC. The characters are very realistic looking which I wasn’t expecting.
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The name was extremely unfortunate. From what I hear, she’s a cool character, but Harry Potter has never been known for its inclusive or culturally appropriate naming conventions.
I mean, calling the black guy Kingsley SHACKLEbolt says it all. “What do I think of when I think of a black person? Martin Luther King, slave in shackles… DONE!”
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Naming the Chinese character after two surnames from two different countries that sounds suspiciously like the thing racist people say when they’re making fun of the Chinese language…
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It’s like being called Stevenson Selensky, but with extra racial insensitivity
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This is why my view of Harry Potter is soiled now. Very VERY problematic when you look back on it. The house elves issue is very messy too.
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Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been a huge HUGE Harry Potter fan since I was 3 years old. That’s over 20 years of love and good faith to the franchise. This is a game I have been desperate for since the release of the Prisoner of Azkaban film. However, I cannot, in good conscience, play this game while Rowling uses her continued support and relevance as a stamp of approval for her transphobia.
She’s basically saying “well people still buy my stuff so they must agree with me.”
In reality, people like me find it hard to stop buying her stuff because it helped us through some dark times. For some, they are able to just keep their ignorance or cognitive dissonance. For me, it feels like she’s just beaten my childhood to death with a club, given how I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community with loads of trans friends.
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The worst part is that I should have seen it coming. I always found the issues with Harry Potter hilarious and “of its time”. Now that she’s doubling, tripling and quadrupling down, it’s soured the whole thing for me
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YES, I was going to mention her!
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I try not to pay any heed to what she says. I know this comes off as ignorance but in truth. I don’t associate her with her creation. I have always been this way. I understand how much her comments have hurt the community. It’s up to the person to choose to play or not which is something I don’t pressure anyone on. I don’t like the uproar from both sides to be completely honest. The names were strange in Harry Potter anyway. I mean they went with such a generic name as Cho Chang even. There was no uniqueness to the name at all.
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The thing is, there are so many other writers who had some lousy representation in the early 2000s. The thing is, they learnt, listened to people and made better stuff in the future. Rick Riordan, Neil Gaiman, Derek Landy…
Derek Landy realised YEARS ago that having one magic sanctuary in the whole CONTINENT of Africa when there’s on in England and one in Ireland was pretty obtuse. He’s gone on to make some amazing black characters since. His main character is bi and there are non binary and other trans characters in the later books.
Rowling? Regressed. Her old stance was that there was a transition spell that would physically transition a person. Now? She hates trans people. She has ONE wizard school in the whole of Africa where they don’t use wands (the sign of being civilised and human in the English wizarding world) and called it UAGADOU!!! Of all the names! She literally did the thing that Derek Landy learnt from ages ago.
Let’s not forget the Brazilian wizard school which was made before colonisation, but still managed to have a Portuguese name. A lousy name that was just Google Translate working for her
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I was in two minds about playing the game when it first came on preorder because there are a LOT of people who worked on it and it saved the company from bankruptcy. She wasn’t directly involved and I knew it would support some trans workers’ incomes.
Then she started talking about her royalty cheques and using the success of the franchise as an excuse to keep being transphobic. That’s why I decided I can’t support this anymore
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I know that the Goblin Rebellions were a point made in passing in the books, but with the way that the goblins are ridiculously close to Nazi anti-semitic propaganda images AND the bankers…
Plus, the wizarding world unambiguously treats the goblins terribly. They don’t allow them to have wands. They act like they’re completely untrustworthy. The goblins have to follow wizard laws but don’t get a vote. They don’t get to go to school. They’re are treated like second-class citizens. It’s basically an aparteid state. Like, it’s fair enough that they want to rebel. I would.
So why are they the bad guys? Because it’s a prequel and we have to keep the status quo so the Harry Potter story makes sense.
So what do they do? The thing that Fantastic Beasts did: make the villain with a very good point comically evil so we can dismiss him without listening to his message.
And like Fantastic Beasts, they don’t do it properly, either. If they wanted to do it properly, they’d have someone agree with the message… you know “let’s stop hitler” and “maybe we should treat goblins fairly”. This person would fight AGAINST the villain because of HOW they are trying to achieve that. Or, they’d notice that the villain is just using these talking points for their own gain. Then, they’d fight for their cause in a “better” way. Like the first Black Panther film where T’Challa realises that Killmonger was right, but that his methods are inhumane.
Of course, they don’t do that, either.
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NO.
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Yeah, she has never done POCs right. NEVER.
It’s not even generic, it’s two surnames from two different countries and sounds like a racist thing
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I understand that. She should have left the royalties part out of it. Just because people are buying content related to you doesn’t actually mean you support them and their views. She should have stopped when the latest blowback happened. I feel like people forget about the saying “never meet your idol” since they thought of her in a certain way. So, when she started making these comments it destroyed their “view” of who she is and what she created. I don’t care for the cancel culture in any situation. To be honest, they throw me off of anything they protest about when they force themselves on others. I’m just meaning the bad side of the protesting in recent months.
Sadly that would make it too easy in other people’s minds. This would have been very interesting had they added some of this narrative into the story. There are a lot of plot holes in the Harry Potter fandom that never get explained at times. Near the end, it kind of felt like she was basically saying “F*** it! Everyone dies!” when she made the last three books.
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The thing that happened even with Wizards Unite is that nothing changes
I mean, it makes sense. She’s a Blairite Neoliberal. She’s basically the kinda person who’d say they’re a liberal but Joe Biden is too leftist. LOL. People like her want to maintain the status quo.
But the promotional material demonises goblins who side with Ranrok. It would be interesting to know if there are any sympathetic goblins who believed in him because he’s right about the way the wizards treat the goblins but fell out of love with his ideals when they saw his methods.
You know… like the thing that she did for Sirius Black’s brother in the books. I wonder if she gave the same care to the anti-semitic propaganda race
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Yeah, Cho is Japanese for butterfly, Chang is Chinese.
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I wonder if she’s ever met a British or American Chinese person, personally. I mean, I had a friend from China who only came to the UK to study for 3 years and she had an English name as well as a Chinese name. Someone like Cho Chang who has such a clear Scottish accent definitely would have an English name. Something more like Lucy Chang or something would have been clumsy but more realistic
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I have a Chinese character in my story. Her English name is Lily because her Chinese name is Baihe, which means Lily. Guess how I found out about that? I looked at Chinese baby names and chose one where the translation is also a name in English. It didn’t take long and I consulted Mandarin speakers when I chose it. It wouldn’t have taken her long, either. By the time Cho was in the HP franchise, she was rich enough to take some time out to research the name
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Yeah, that is the way of marketing basically. I feel like the more she tried to justify it what made everything worse. Like you said she quadrupled down on the subject when she should have just backed off. She can say what she wants but there is a difference between voicing your opinion and her trying to prove what she said was right. I mean had she left it after the first comments before the essay then none of this would have gotten blown out of portion. Of course, she decided to forgo that thought process. I mean it makes sense that she is a Blairite Neoliberal. Oof Biden is a whole other headache to talk about. I don’t even know where to start on that subject. Yeah, the status quo issue is my biggest peeve with liberals. They focus on that one thing and then neglect the other points which is what leads to trouble. Uh is Ranrok part of the game?..or is that another part of the fandom I just haven’t read about? Yeah, they could have used the same method that she did with Sirius Black’s brother but failed to do so.
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