How The Wizarding World Fails Hogwarts Legacy [DRAFT]

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I don’t know anything about Harry Potter.

Growing up, my millennial sister was obsessed with the books, so much so that a story that commonly gets brought up at family gatherings is about how my mom had to walk out of a showing of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to get infant-me to stop crying while my sister sat and watched the movie by herself, mom occasionally peeking in to see how she fared. As time went on, echoes of Hogwarts and quidditch would ring through the house every now and again, worn copies of the books sitting haphazardly around my sister’s room after she moved out.

Growing up even more meant that this distance to the Wizarding World would grow even shorter — family trips to Universal Studios were neat, but the following years would see a battle of comparison begin that would unravel the magic that J. K. Rowling had cast. Embedded in the DNA of Hogwarts were poor depictions of minority races, xenophobia illustrated through a divide of man and monster, and a magic system built on poorly illustrating cultural identities across the world, amongst other things. Combining this with Rowling’s TERF rhetoric, worn like a badge of honor, I found myself more and more confused as to how this series continues to stand as a pillar of fantasy this far into the 21st century. Perhaps I’ve surrounded myself with a chamber of people who dislike her work. Perhaps it’s a generational thing. Maybe the rest of the world just doesn’t care about this kind of stuff, and I need to get off the internet for a few days.

When Hogwarts Legacy was announced, I’ll admit that I was painfully curious. Conversation online stirred back and forth between people announcing their excitement, people claiming that anyone who played the game was transphobic for giving Rowling more money, and other opinions of the ilk that made it a fairly controversial release. It’s been two years since then, and needless to say, the conversation around Harry Potter has done little to die down, finding small ways to stay culturally relevant while development on a new show retelling the events of the books has been going on for some time now.

Since then, I’ve done my own bit of research into the world building of the Wizarding World, and it’s not the best. Rowling has notably used poor representations of minority cultures to fill in gaps and check off whatever racial group is needed for the Hogwarts diversity quota. Skin-walkers, a real thing that the Navajo people believe in and hold close to their culture as a representation of evil, were turned into simple victims that wanted to evade persecution in Rowling’s canon. Along with these insensitivities are various inconsistencies riddled throughout the books and movies, but no matter what this series persists. 

When I looked at review sites online, I noticed that most of the conversation came from people who had already enjoyed the series, and professional critics summarizing gameplay mechanics and addressing how the game appreciates its source material. IGN gave it a 9/10 with the reviewer saying that it’s “the Harry Potter RPG [he]’s always wanted to play,” and most of his review goes on to read about how much he had wanted a good Harry Potter game ever since he was a kid. This sentiment would be shared in other professional reviews on sites like Metacritic and GameInformer, propping up similarly high scores as well. In reading these reviews it’s clear that the angles that these writers were going for were “how fun is the game?” and “how does it fit within the context of what we already know about Harry Potter based on vibes alone?”

Backloggd, an independently developed website that’s essentially Letterboxd for video games, has its most popular reviews addressing the offenses that the game’s narrative commits. In various critiques, the main story is riddled with the same problems I mentioned earlier: analogies to slavey, antisemitism, and xenophobia between humans and magical, sentient creatures.

This essay was initially going to be a simple review of the game to see how it feels and pass judgement onto it without having any pre-determined biases, but now I’m here to ask one question: Just how much does Hogwarts Legacy go down in quality because of the world it has to exist in?

Now, I don’t plan to just talk about cultural representations; I want to look at the practicality and functionality of it all. I want to understand the structure of the Wizarding World and how it makes sense given that this is one of a few large, popular series that try to bridge modernity and fantasy. I also have to remember that since this is a video game, there’s a decent chance that some things are altered to make it more…well, video gamey.

The opening hours of Hogwarts Legacy guide the player into the world with a letter of introduction, inviting the player to the U. K’s premier (and only) wizarding school, and this is where the first set of questions prop themselves up. In a vacuum, the idea of a school for magic that encompasses a handful of countries sort of makes sense. Hogwarts is a boarding school, and since wizards and witches are supposed to be living in their own secret society it makes sense why there isn’t an established public school system that guides the teaching of magic. According to Pottermore, the official website for all of the Wizarding World info, the reason for this is that the magic population of the world is small, as well as most parents opting to homeschool their children instead of having them learn magic in the classroom. Some small schools do exist, but they’re “difficult to keep track of, and are rarely registered with the appropriate Ministry.” The distribution of these schools is weird, but admittedly it creates a question of why the world here is so disjointed. There are only eight major wizarding schools in total, with half of them being in various parts of Europe, while the rest are in North America, Japan, Brazil, and Uganda. The map shows them in some fairly precise locations, but the diction around anything specific like that is left intentionally vague to fit the air of mystery that magic in Harry Potter is supposed to give off. I mention this because within the first hour or so of the game, the player is introduced to Natsai Onai, a student from the school in Uganda whose mother is now a professor at Hogwarts. It’s also worth mentioning that the game takes place in 1890, four years before Uganda would go under British Imperialism for almost a century.

Throughout this short geography lesson, I wanted to know why the wizards are so culturally split up, and the best answer I could surmise is that this is an antiquated world rooted in tradition, as well as being a “minority race” that’s trying to hide from persecution. Earlier I mentioned how Rowling used the skin-walkers as a means of misusing real world cultures, and while that’s true I believe it also speaks to a different crisis that makes up the backbone of this series: discrimination. 

From the very beginning, this world is built on an ‘us-vs-them’ structure. The sorting hat splits students into one of four houses, and while that would ideally promote teamwork and camaraderie, it instead creates cliques, in-groups and out-groups. Slytherin historically continues to promote the idea of pureblood wizards being the only way to go, its whole origin story is that the guy that founded Slytherin got mad and left when nobody else wanted to discriminate against wizards that were born from human families. 

Now, I will say that this doesn’t feel like a horribly out of place detail to have. The world is full of institutions that continue to try and promote bigotry and discrimination (looking at you PragerU), and erasing people’s biases is a hard job. These methodologies are taught through institutions with roots running deep into most people’s lives. There seems to just be a general lack of nuance in these house divisions that boil down to characteristics that can just…change with age and experience. Loyalty can fade, kindness can be broken down, ambition can be bogged down with complacence, and curiosity can falter to disappointment. Hogwarts’ desire to maintain its traditions creates an environment where students only know division, further bolstered by the fact that this reality seems to have little unity or standardization overseas. 

On the topic of magical genetics, magic just is a thing in this world. There’s no special organ or bone, some people just have the magic gene, and some don’t. Sometimes people can be born in Wizard families and just not have the magic gene. Some people can be born in human families and have the magic gene. It all seems strangely up to chance as to whether or not someone will be able to cast magic. J.K. Rowling would hate to see a Punnett Square.

Let’s look at some other established fantasy media: Percy Jackson rationalizes everything pretty simply. Is your parent a God? Yes? Then you’re a demigod and have powers and some personality traits corresponding to that particular god. In Dungeons and Dragons, magic has a handful of origin points. Clerics learn their magic through prayer. Sorcerers have some sort of draconic or magical ancestry. Wizards learn magic in school. These classes have access to different spells of varying strengths and utilities, and all magic is cast through The Weave, an intangible element of the universe that spellcasters can manipulate in order to use magic. Not everybody has the same magical affinity, or even any magical affinity at all, but all of it comes with explanation. The mystical force is there; it just requires study. Looking back into the world of Hogwarts, some people can, and some people can’t. The various boons of arcane knowledge are clearly illustrated, wands as an arcane focus and the ability to fly on a broomstick are a couple obvious ones, but the tangibility of magic in this world isn’t there.

Bringing this all back into the lens of Hogwarts Legacy, the game does little to talk about the player character’s background. The reason you can cast spells at the very beginning is because the professor who picks you up taught you some basic spells off-screen. From a roleplaying standpoint, I actually think this kind of beginning is pretty neat! Players have the freedom and flexibility to craft whatever narrative they want for their character, and while this isn’t a game with many branching paths, it’s still fun to think about. After a considerably short combat tutorial, the player puts on the Sorting Hat and answers two measly questions while it evaluates their character. From here, the choice is prompted to either stick with the house the Hat gave the player, or to just pick one of the other three. With the blank slate for roleplaying that’s here, I think that it’s possible to take a big stretch with this and say that the Hat had a hard time making a decision in order to rationalize this, just like how Hermoine could’ve been a Ravenclaw, or Harry a Slytherin, but in reality this just exists because two questions isn’t enough to judge a blank slate with a British accent. 

Fantasy races have always had a bit of trouble finding a way to break away from their discriminatory real-world counterparts. For a while, Orcs in Dungeons and Dragons were under fire for poorly depicting black physical stereotypes. Beyond this, fantasy races that get relegated to the role of serving the big bad evil guy tend to just fit into the role of “the other,” a culture that’s viewed negatively because they’re different without as much nuance or study into their cultural norms. Goblins are still a fantasy race that get put into this role very often, but their treatment in the Wizarding World is a bit different. 

Now, the goblins in harry potter have always been a sore spot. They fit the bill for being the stock, evil fantasy creature that’s deemed as lesser when the viewer/reader sticks to the point of view of the protagonist who doesn’t know any better. What makes goblins different in this reality is assimilation. Goblins aren’t just savages anymore, rejoice! They have jobs like banking and terrorism, just like any other human! 

The role and depiction of goblins in Harry Potter has always been too good to be true when compared to antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish people. And no, I’m not going to say that this particular depiction was a subconscious choice by J. K. Rowling, I wholeheartedly believe this was deliberate. Four of these books were written and on store shelves before the first movie came out, that gave her four whole years to redesign goblins in a way that was less overtly offensive, and that just didn’t happen. 

These are the first two goblins you meet in the game. The first one has much rounder features; he speaks in a much quieter tone while still being crabby, and he’s a banker. The second leans deep into the whole ‘show-the-player-that-this-is-a-bad-guy’ thing with how much sharper he is. His ears are more triangular, his nose is pointed, his clothes resemble those of Civil Wars confederate denim, and he's got a magical red armband to boot. It isn't a stretch to say that the symbol on his badge resembles a Star of David either.

It’s with these things that the rhetoric around goblins in this game proceeds to take an interesting route. The main conflict of the game revolves around a goblin rebellion. The way that characters talk about goblins in this game, one would think that they’re a lesser being, something akin to a wild animal with how bestial they’re described to be. That changes pretty quickly though as it’s made clear that the goblins only issue is that they just aren’t being treated equally at all. They can cast magic just like you and I (we can't but let's just pretend that we can), but the greater wizard society doesn't want to offer them the same luxury of an arcane focus.

There is a load-bearing insecurity to the world J. K. Rowling popularized herself with. If Harry Potter or any of the adventures in this world stray from tradition, that change could very well destroy the established rules of the world that things are built around, for better or for worse, but we'll never know. And it's because of this that Hogwarts Legacy is held back in its freedom and player expression.

There's no chance to abandon the world and society the game offers, because if it betrays that antiquity and leaves the traditions and beliefs of the past behind, it doesn’t know what’s next. It’s why the sorting hat still exists to tell students that they should participate in Slytherin, and a part of that decision can include if they have biases for whether or not someone is purebred or not. There’s a fear of change here, and it’s excruciatingly clear when a game that takes place a century before the best-selling books take place has those same fundamental issues.