I know a lot of us, myself included, like to believe that piracy allows us to consume problematic media without supporting artists we do not like. But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product. HBO is absolutely keeping tabs on piracy of their show now and seeing our traffic the same way Crunchyroll used to keep tabs on pirated fan-translated anime back when they cared.
Also, there is a similar ethical zero-sum game with all other Harry Potter media and products. Normally we can buy on the secondary market if we need a hard copy to scan and rip but don’t want to support the creators. But almost every Harry Potter book in circulation is purchased by someone with intention to sell for a profit, and HBO is also likely keeping tabs on sales and resales of DVDs of the old movies. Every time money leaves your bank account for Harry Potter media, you are directly feeding the ecosystem which sustains the Queen of the TERFs.
It’s honestly pretty incredible how morally radioactive this one human is. Orson Scott Card is equally repugnant, but the Ender’s Game series doesn’t even have a small fraction of the market share of Harry Potter (IMHO this is the fault of that movie being just okayish, not good or bad, but that’s another topic.) Trump’s MAGA movement is comparable in badness, but there really isn’t much most of us can do other than voting and never shutting up about how unconstitutional the things he is doing is. Rowling really is comparable to Disney or Nestlé, and she’s just one person, not a whole company.
Right now, the only ethical way to consume Harry Potter is watching or reading movies and books on your copies that either:
- you obtained before 2020
- were given to you for free in some non-trackable way, e.g. offline or sneakernet.
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism. We will have to see if this changes once she is dead.
Never thought I’d see the day when hexbear users would make a ton more sense than anyone else on a given topic. But here we are.
But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product
I agree with your conclusion of not watching it, but the reason that companies might observe and take a non-purchase as some kind of hypothetical market signal doesn’t seem like the strongest argument for that, especially if people are avoiding the purchase specifically to deny them money for ethical reasons, that’s not something they can resolve by making ‘the right product’.
If pirating a Harry Potter show provides support to its author, I think that support is going to be more in the form of cultural relevance and mindshare than anything directly financial. Being a fan of an IP gives other people a reason to engage with it because your interest signals things to other people, like it means that by not watching it they might be left out of the loop etc, and since the law enforces property rights over what can be done with it and who can profit, that adds to the power of its owner by influencing the choices and interests of other people in their favor.
That is another reason to avoid it, at least for now. If you don’t watch it, you don’t talk about it, you don’t give them free advertising. Piracy evokes demand in many ways. It will still be around in 20 years when no one is looking, anymore.
i agree OP
fuck the haters and lowkey transphobes
It’s shocking to me someone would want to watch this.
Harry Potter was never good. Why would someone even want to read a Harry Potter book obtained before 2020???
The TERF stuff didn’t make Harry Potter bad. It always sucked, and people only realized after the TERF stuff.
I’ll die on the hill that Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban adaptation is the only good HP media.
And not just for the sneaky sex scene in the credits. ;)
I liked Harry Potter but I’m no longer a child.
In any case, aside from JKR being a piece of shit who deserves zero support:
These remakes seem completely and utterly unnecessary and of questionable production quality anyway. Why rehash the classic movies that were actually decent adaptations of the source material? Is this one arc really the only story worth telling in that universe?
Boycott it because JKR is a Nazi. Don’t watch it because it’s yet more Hollywood remake slop.
Is this one arc really the only story worth telling in that universe?
JKR tried with the fantastic beasts films, it failed so hard it only get three out of the five planned films.
they did not fail:
collectively grossed over US$1.8 billion across three films, three times more than the budgeted costs
they just weren’t as successful as the Harry Potter movies, and the second and third films had bad reviews (because they weren’t very good movies. but still, they had audience polls of B+)
I’m barely aware it exists and almost never see anything about it.
Making a post called “Reminder: do not watch HBO’s Harry Potter.” Is literally marketing it and forcing people to think about it.
Do not think about pink elephants
We all just lost The Game.
Damnit
Dang it, now I’m thinking about pink elephants? Why’d ya have to bring it up? /jk
That’s a fair point. But I’m not sure how to make a clear title without the keywords. Naming things is such a frustrating, imprecise art.
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‘The unmitigated gall of these [redacted]s not to bow and scrape before OBE holder and world’s greatest author Joanne Rowling’ - that’s you, that’s how you sound
I’m doing my part
I’m just here to bring to your attention Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”, both the books and the assorted TV show, which is quite awesome in its own right, even if it diverges from the books by quite a bit. There’s a whole world of awesome outside of HP, and even if it wasn’t, I refuse to recast in my theater of the mind the extremely talented and deeply regretted Alan Rickman and Dame Maggie Smith.
I’ll add, the manga Witch Hat Atelier is a much better execution than Potter of the premise “a young orphan is abruptly brought over into a secretive world of mages overlapping with the mundane, but for mysterious reasons repeatedly draws the attention of dark forces.”
The Magicians show lost me with the sudden graphic rape, that was then portrayed a good thing. Sucks you got raped but you get a consolation prize of extra powerful magic! Also the rapist has magic semen, and they need to get more.
Look. You’re not wrong that there is a really scary (I would perhaps say very intense and absolutely triggering, but not explicitly graphic. There’s definitely graphic violence, but yeah.) scene with SA. But the god semen thing was a different deity and they gank the original trickster deity that did the SA.
When watching I do have the timestamps for that scene written down and do skip it. I skipped it when I introduced my wife to the show.
Not telling you what to do, but there is good content there. That’s probably the single scene in the series I seriously tell people to avoid.
I’m sorry it upset you the way it did. And now I’m seriously feeling like typing this is not the right thing, but my tism brain wants to explain more and better.
It’s all good, i enjoy a good explanation! I did mix those 2 up, I got farther in the series than I remembered. I had to go look it up and it’s still bad. The way all of her remaining friends(because her friends were murdered before the rape) just brushed her off afterwards was unpleasant. She wanted justice and they didn’t help her, so she went for it on her own. That messed up their plans and they were pissed in addition to being “concerned” she was turning dark. When they had originally abandoned her and looked down on her because of her lack of magic, now all of a sudden they “care”. Quinten was such a shit friend. After all that, she chose to save them, by takeing a part her rapists to make her a goddess. Yeah, her whole arc was rage inducing. I tried to only watch what was necessary.
Yeah, I tried to get past it but there were a couple other plot lines that were fairly disturbing. The living ship, that also was SA somehow or something. Creepy Russian teacher watching them fuck as foxes. The magic system had a lot of tie ins with sex and it was ick. The guy who got stuck in the the past or something and lived a life that was erased. Idk it was just a lot.
Yep Harry Potter for adults
I read the books as they came out and loved them. i tried watching the series as it was coming out but they really were so different from the books that when I had to wait for the next season I never picked it back up.
Are they worth watching though? If I go into it knowing it’ll be basically something loosely related?
I think it’s really good. The books… were frankly hard for me to get through. Not bad, but I only read the first few.
If you are going to watch the series, understand that the main cast are written as kind of assholes and are written like real people with real emotions and it’s stupid, but stupid good. Also there is an SA scene that can honestly be skipped Season 1, Episode 13 running roughly from the 40:00 to 42:00 mark.
Once you get through the first season it’s pretty smooth sailing through to the end of season 3. Then they have cancellation hanging over them so seasons 4 and 5 aren’t quite as… grand as they should have been.
Damn straight!
Even if I wanted to watch a worse version of the movies I already watched, no fucking support for transphobes!
I feel like by this logic you shouldn’t have even brought it up since they also track Internet engagement…
That’s a fair criticism. I’m gonna hope their scrapers aren’t looking at Lemmy, but they probably are.
Lemmy is well known by every major AI. It can even talk about the histories between various instances with some accuracy. Unless there’s some reason that commercial scraping companies would include Lemmy for an AI corpus but not include it for a marketing department’s research file, I’d say it’s safe to assume we’re included in that.
All scrapers look at Lemmy. When you search on google, Lemmy pops up in the results. You can’t reasonably expect to be NOT scraped when you put things online.
Marketing teams only track engagement on major social media, having a discussion about it on lemmy is not going to impact their metrics or even be considered
Have you work in marketing analysis before?
yep
Omg… About to go find out why I should stop reading Orson Scott Card… Thanks a ton OP.
The fact that the man who wrote Speaker For The Dead is a bigot is mind boggling
He’s as rabidly against the existence of gay people as She Who Will Not Be Named is against trans people, he just isn’t able to actually do anything about it, partly because a large part of the income from his books is tithed to the LDS church.
Sci fi and lds man. Yeah, I looked it up and was very disappointed. I had never looked up anything about him personally before that
Agree 100%. I’ve been in some tough conversations with fellow LGBTQ+ allies over my participation, however minor, in the Harry Potter fandom. I’m seeing a lot of “it’s fine if you liked it before we learned JKR was a bigot” but I’m also seeing a lot of people with the same story as mine — discovered the franchise back then, enjoyed it, but do not like what JKR is doing to the trans community — but also criticising me for the same. Like it’s “fine” (to some extent?) if you’re trans and JKR betrayed you, but if you’re not trans, you’re held to a higher standard as an ally. I dunno. It’s confusing. I will not, however, back down from my claim that I enjoyed the first four (+HBP) books and the first four films before I learned she was crazy… and that this year I rewatched Philosopher’s Stone in 4K (and yes, it holds up).
All that being said, the fears and concerns in the trans and LGBTQ+ community are valid. They may be jerks about it online, but as an ally, I can only ever strive to be a better one. I can’t change what I liked in the past and I will not deny it, even to history revisers. But I can change what I do in the present, and I can always strive to Do Better.
I don’t like the new Harry Potter series because of why it exists. JKR was disappointed the stars of the film series did not share her transphobic views, so she immediately made a point to recast Hermione and to make her completely different from Emma Watson’s portrayal, as Watson was her most outspoken critic. She didn’t make Hermione a Black girl to be inclusive, she did it to distance Watson from the character because Watson isn’t transphobic. JKR further muddied the waters by saying that Dumbledore was gay and always had been (though no evidence of this is in the books — he’s essentially treated as ace, as in, asexual, as in, his sexuality is undetermined and probably doesn’t exist, which is fitting as the entirety of his character’s relevance is mentorship to an adolescent boy). When the rest of the cast basically stood against her, she set out to recast all of them.
The new Harry Potter series looks like it might be fun, but I cannot in good conscience watch the new series. There are so many more things out there to see. Watching it with infinite time would be one thing, but I haven’t got that, have I? I was fully grown when Philosopher’s Stone came out, and I had no intention of seeing it. A coworker slipped me a bootleg copy (while it was still in cinemas!) and I watched it… twice. Then I went and saw it in cinema. I then collected the books and read them, and watched the movies, though I didn’t like it after the fourth one. It stopped being fun. I’m currently reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, and by that I mean, of course, I’m listening to the audiobooks. I’m in the second to most current book, the seventh one, and it’s still fun. It’s gotten serious, but it’s still fun. And, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Matt Dinniman (the author) and Jeff Hays (the audiobook narrator) are not bigots. That’s the magical adventure series I’m looking forward to.
As a trans person, I have no idea why people are harping on you for liking HP before learning JKR was a bigot. As such, I never ascribe bigotry to people who simply purchase HP-related stuff. They may not know and may not be as online as I am to know the harm that they are contributing towards. However, if after they do find out, they continue to patronize said thing, I consider them as a bigot or at least that bigotry isn’t a dealbreaker for them. I believe the saying is if you sit down at a table with 10 Nazis, there are 11 Nazis at the table.
To cap this off, though, I will paraphrase the idea of perfection being the enemy of progress.
Spot on. If you’re okay with someone being racist, a bigot then that means at least you’re cool with such bigotry being in our society. Which I see as a morale failing. Attention to such is still attention, kind of like there’s no bad PR.
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ok and I’m going to say you’re indulging a cultural movement of transphobia
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Part of the difference is Rowling still holds so much cultural weight (somehow). So many people still know and watch and purchase Harry Potter stuff. Seinfeld only really holds that weight amongst older conservatives. He’s only popular amongst the people perpetuating the hate. Rowling’s stuff is popular amongst those who should know better.
I do agree we should boycott more (I personally do boycott a fair bit), but comparing the current impact of Rowling to the current impact of Seinfeld is crazy.
Seinfeld (thankfully) doesn’t have a theme park
I dunno, the rise and fall and extreme mismanagement of a Seinfeld theme park would make for some great background documentaries for while I work…
Fuck it would be like 3 hours it would be so good
If only AI was real
“I have no qualms giving money to bad people because I can also give money to worse people”
Yeah, lots of people are either terrible people, or have enough money to fund hate crimes, or are willing to act on their beliefs. Rowling is special because she is both a raving bigot, rich, and 100% willing to pour all her money into making sure no trans person feels safe again. You know, Morgoth’s Trinity: Resources, Hatred, and Will to Power.
What has he done horrible? Maybe we shouldn’t support him either.
He claims Palestine doesn’t exist and that calls to free Palestine are akin to the KKK.
Boycotts for media work about as well as those for Hogwarts Legacy, not buying a Tesla post 2024, or staying off PSN after Sony announced game discs will no longer be made. Sadly most people don’t care about the political views of those who make these things unless it personally affects them. The only successful boycott I’ve seen recently is Canadians avoiding American goods in supermarkets and even that took an existential threat of annexation for them to act on it.
You’d have an easier time herding cats.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott led to desegregation of the transit system there and helped ignite further civil rights causes, marches, protests etc(although it’s still not a complete process the US still discriminating against its Black population)
The Sugar boycott led to the fall of several sugar firms and eventually led to Britain abolishing slavery
The Boycott against Apartheid South Africa led to several south-african companies going bankrupt and eventually to the fall of apartheid
And most pertinent to this discussion as it was against a single person and their revenue streams the origin of the term ‘boycott’: the shunning of Charles Boycott by Irish people, leading to massive social and political reputational loss, forcing him to flee Ireland
Not to say that boycotting a single show(or all media based on her IP) to harm the profits of a single bigot is quite comparable to ending the triangle trade or South African Apartheid, as said it more like the (successful)Boycott of Charles Boycott. Anyway to say their haven’t been successfully boycotts is ahistorical
I didn’t say all boycotts are ineffective, merely that most recent ones have been directed at things meant for entertainment and personal use. It takes a big enough threat for enough people to want to do it: slavery, apartheid, segregation, and annexation are. An angry billionaire tweeting their evil bullshit can be, but isn’t perceived as such by the general populace enough to avoid purchasing a game licensed from them.
merely that most recent ones have been directed at things meant for entertainment and personal use.
Most are, the Sugar Boycott surprisingly boycotted sugar(a good for personal use) produced by slavery, the Boycott against South Africa boycotted buying goods(for personal use) from South African companies, and included artists refusing to play gigs there and criticism of artists that did, sometime leading to them losing gigs elsewhere like Laura Branigan who lost bookings in the US after playing in SA(entertainment)
An angry billionaire tweeting their evil bullshit can be, but isn’t perceived as such by the general populace enough to avoid purchasing a game licensed from them.
After Kanye West’s anti-semitic tweets, a boycott of his brands like Yeezy began e.g. His branded Adidas shoes(personal use), his music(entertainment)
Eventually leading to many companies cutting their ties(endorsements, appearances at festivals, selling of ‘Yeezy’ licensed goods etc) with him, this led to him losing his Billionaire status(he’s now worth ‘just’ $400 million according to forbes, so perhaps not a ‘total victory’, but seeing Joanne have a similar reduction in wealth and mainstream reputation would lead me to seeing it as a successful boycott),
this shows people can and will get inspired to boycott the licensed products of a billionaire if they tweet some bigoted shit
the hogwarts legacy boycott was effective because it showed trans people which cis people in our life didn’t actually give a fuck about us or our rights
At least one of those things was very effective (Tesla’s sales took a huge dive)
There is so much far better content out there to absorb other than Harry Potter. I can go without and be perfectly fine. I think we already have some of the books and DVDs from ages ago. So if my wife or I suddenly have the desire to revisit, we’re not consuming anything HBO or anyone else can even remotely trace.
