Gamers are finally getting their letter to Hogwarts this week in the form of Warner Bros.’s new Hogwarts Legacy game that is based on the Harry Potter series of books. Many people have sworn off the game in protest of author J.K. Rowlings’ opinions about transgender people.
In the past five years, Rowling, who wrote the novels affiliated with the game, has largely been criticized for beliefs that many deem transphobic, and as a content creator who likes to boast about having the largest trans audience on Twitch, HasanAbi said he won’t be playing Hogwarts Legacy.
But Rowling’s opinions on trans people aren’t the reason, at least directly. On stream yesterday, Hasan said that it isn’t Rowling that is keeping him from playing the game. Instead, he’s refraining from playing the game on stream because he doesn’t want to deal with the harassment he expects to receive from the politically motivated liberal activists that are using the game to take a moral stance.
“We know that it’s not worth it to get fucking bullied endlessly and called transphobic endlessly when we have massive queer communities and audiences,” he said. “Everybody knows how much leftist motherfuckers love to chirp on the internet. They got no power. All they do is chirp, chirp, chirp, and that’s precisely why so many fucking people that would otherwise play it, maybe even raise money for charities or whatever, they’re not doing it.”
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Hasan added that he was called transphobic on his alternate account for “even thinking about” playing Hogwarts Legacy. Hasan’s comment came after seeing a clip uploaded to the popular subreddit Livestream Fails in which viewers harassed one streamer playing Hogwarts Legacy to the point that their girlfriend began crying.
It is worth noting that the developers of Hogwarts Legacy attempted to counteract Rowling’s highly criticized opinions. In the game itself, Avalanche Software and Warner Bros. Games introduced the first transgender character to the Harry Potter universe. That doesn’t seem to have satisfied many fans, however.
