So, the new Harry Potter trailer dropped. I watched it so you don’t have to.
It looks exactly like the original. High fantasy magical school gloss, just with a higher budget and HBO gloss. It’s a reboot nobody asked for, serving stale bread to an audience that’s moved on to better nutrition. Further motivated to apathy by what we do not want to pass to our kids, nieces, or even younger cousins.
Like most millennials, I grew up on those books. I was a kid, then a tween, enjoying the books with a flashlight on a camping trip, eager to laugh at the strange antics, hate on the wrong people being hated, etc. I remember Dumbledore publicly praises Neville with, “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.” That hit me hard. It shaped my moral compass before I even knew what a compass was. It taught me that loyalty isn’t absolute; sometimes the bravest thing you can do is call out the people you love.
That world, specifically that cozy, kid world, with some sinister things to discover, is what eventually tipped me into my “dark academia” era. Give me gothic towers, forbidden magic in dusty libraries, and robes any day over the real world.
But then… Joanne happened. And I don’t just mean the books she wrote. I mean the relentless, vitriolic anti-trans crusade. It wasn’t just disgust I felt; it was a betrayal of my inner kid. She had even been lauded as the ultimate feminist success story—a single mom on government money who built an empire. Perhaps all that was PR, but did we all feel like idiots for believing it? I couldn’t look at the shelf without thinking of the harm she was actively funding. There is another moral lesson here. Never meet your heroes. I didn’t learn it for the first time then, but social media made sure gave us all a reminder. So what do we do? We boycott the TERF.
Now, I know it’s a Sisyphean cause. You can’t really hurt someone that rich with a boycott. Joanne has ‘fuck you’ money. She’s going to keep being the ‘fuck you’ queen for the rest of her -honestly kinda sad- transphobic (and let’s add also racist, and antisemitic) life. So it makes you wonder, what ought the message of this boycott truly be? I hope I have HBOs attention now.
The the laziness of the studios is the problem here. Why are we letting HBO give us Potter again? There are so many other fandoms that deserve that level of attention and budget. Why are we recycling this maligned IP when we could be elevating other creators? Other worlds? Other fandoms? It’s a risk adverse entertainment industry. Instead of finding something new, interesting, and deserving of attention… we’re going to give the next generation a nostalgic re-run, that most of us are no longer nostalgic for.
We are done with the “tried and true,” especially when the creator is a villain. It worked on Wizards of the Coast, didn’t it? It was long speculated, but never proven, that Harry Potter would join the MtG and 5e systems. The fact that they had deny it shows how toxic the Potter brand had become…. and how strong the threats of a boycott might be.
My hope is that big studios will learn. I want them to realize that the next generation of young nerds deserves different role models and heroes to look up to—ones who don’t spend their free time attacking the existence of trans people. Push the boulder up the hill, even if it rolls back down. Eventually, maybe we’ll build something new on the summit.