> The Dahl estate owned the rights to the books until 2021, when Netflix bought them outright for a reported $686 million, building on an earlier rights deal. The American streaming service now has overall control over the book publishing, as well as various adaptation projects that are in the works.
I suspect they're hoping netflix will make movies based on his books. Netflix seems pretty sensitive to twitter opinions. They're probably trying to throw a bone to the twitter mob to make it less likely any new movies get "cancelled".
Yeah; I don’t know why it’s taken people so long to realise this. I know it seems to people on Twitter that everyone is on twitter, but that’s really not true. About 10% of people in the USA use Twitter daily - which is a huge number of eyeballs. But that still leaves the remaining 90% of people choosing instead to enjoy our short time on this planet.
If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outrage over Hogwarts Legacy increased sales of the game. I don’t know if I would have heard about it at all if not for the outrage machine.
Louis CK did a show here in Melbourne a few months ago and the show was sold out. For better or worse, being canceled doesn’t seem like a life sentence.
I have seen this a few times even as a dev, where people put way to much focus on twitter. I think its because there is a class of people that use twitter and they think twitter is really really important. But some random person on twitter tweets "@company x is bad" and its taken much more seriously than say an email, slack message, or whatever. Most people don't use twitter ever, most people on twitter rarely use twitter. We need to kill twitter and move on.
This is totally true. I've read articles in the BBC news about a 'Twitter backlash' against something where the number of tweets was an incredibly miniscule fraction of the population.
I've seen actual physical protests with people on the streets with placards that appear to get less attention from the press. It's incredibly lazy!
<I deleted a paragraph where I stated an unnuanced claim about canceling.>
The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population. Even if 100% of them loudly proclaimed anything anywhere on any social media platform, it would barely affect anything simply because they’re so small compared to the rest of the population. This is in the same sense that only a minority of the population are severely immunocompromised to the point where Covid is still a threat, and the lack of masking and other safety precautions actually makes their lives significantly worse but because they’re so small their voices literally don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
That is to say I don’t attribute the lack of irl effect to social media but due to demographic size. There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.
I don't understand the drama around that video game, and at this point, I don't think I want to understand what it's about. I did a few Internet searches and it's totally unclear what's wrong with the game, or what minorities are portrayed badly in it. The best I've come up with is: "The game is based on a fictional world written by an author who tweeted something bad, and even though the author has nothing to do with the game, we're going to boycott the game." Is that really all there is to it?
> There’s simply no possible way for a minority of such a small size to make any waves happen anywhere, not even on anything as small as a popular video game.
There's an old quote - "Never assume a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. Its the only thing that ever has."
The radical left - for all that they're championing the rights of a small group of people, has been very effective at kicking up a fuss about diversity, inclusion and trans rights. It doesn't feel like a tiny fringe movement:
- Apparently most researchers and professors at a lot of universities now need to make "diversity and inclusion statements". Stanford is banning a lot of language. So is Google and other big companies.
- Authors like Roald Dahl are having their work retroactively edited to "meet modern norms".
- The pushback against this stuff is becoming a major rallying call for America's right. Now the american conservatives accomplished most of their big policy objectives in most states (concealed carry, banned abortions, etc). What can they use to "energize the base"? Fighting this stuff is being turned into a tool to get conservatives to the polls. (Source: The economist podcast.)
I'm not sure what the lived experience has become for trans people - but the fight for trans rights (as part of the fight for diversity and inclusion) seems to have made massive waves all over the place.
> The thing with hogwarts legacy is that the minorities who are affected are like 1% of the population.
The only people affected by your decision to buy Hogwarts Legacy are the developers involved. I promise you, JK Rowling won't notice the extra 50 cents in her pocket if you buy, or don't buy the game.
If you want to support trans people, do that by supporting them. The lives of trans people are unaffected by your steam purchasing decisions.
You’re going off about a lot of stuff but all I’m saying is that if even 100% of all trans people loudly proclaimed they wanted to be against the Harry Potter game they probably wouldn’t accomplish shit just because they’re such a small population. I mean literally we have laws being passed in some states to ban all of 2 trans kids (in the entire state) from participating in sports. It’s not like they can do anything to defend themselves here.
If you ban someone from reddit or twitter - their opinions only disappear from your echo chamber not from the real world. Maybe echo chambers aren't such a good idea after all.
Those people banned every single dissenting opinion and after a while started to think that their opinions are way more popular than they actually are.
"Everybody around here thinks that JKR is bad - so surely our boycott is going to be successful - I don't see anyone who disagrees."
If anything - this ridiculous hate campaign against JKR could decrease the support for trans people.
i think people have gotten a lot more aware and accepting of trans people in the last couple decades. i think the real reason why people don't seem to be bothered by the harry potter game is because most people get that whatever j.k. rowling thinks or says or does doesn't really harm trans people, that she didn't make the game, and that playing a game is just playing a game.
actually, i take that back: most people don't know about j.k. rowling's opinions. and even so over the last couple decades they've become much more aware and accepting of trans people.
> If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outrage over Hogwarts Legacy increased sales of the game. I don’t know if I would have heard about it at all if not for the outrage machine.
It wasn't in the file I have of upcoming games until that happened, so you can definitely also include me. It'll be on Switch later in the year, I'll be waiting for then.
Because being cancelled isn't a real thing. It's usually just scoundrels angry they received the slightest bit of pushback. Dave Chapelle constantly whines that queer people are trying to cancel him while he cashes $20m Netflix checks on a regular basis.
Being cancelled is very much a real thing, since a lot of people have, e.g., spineless bosses who will immediately capitulate to the Twitter mob's demands.
We studied To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible when I was in highschool. I remember thinking how barbaric and despicable "mob justice" was. I didn't understand it, and I assumed I never would - I thought it was something we reference from history. But twitter really has brought the mob justice style witch hunts back.
I don't understand how anyone can claim its not a real phenomenon. Being cancelled is obviously quite a real experience for the people it happens to.
Not only can you make money while ignoring Twitter — but you can make money by ignoring Twitter screeching. Eg, by hiring Johnny Depp rather than engaging in misandry by supporting false accusations against him.
Hopefully, WarnerMedia eventually gets the memo — and stops discriminating against men while supporting abusers like Amber Heard (female) or Ezra Miller (non-binary).
I think a lot of companies have forgotten they need to treat people based on the content of their character rather than race/sex/gender/etc.
> Nothing happens, except the game is completely mired in controversy to a degree that it keeps the transphobe-in-chief JK Rowling up at night, to such a degree she called her TERF friend at the NYT to publish a defense of her.
wouldn't her TERF friend publish a defense of her because her TERF friend is a TERF, not because j.k. rowling is bothered?
not that i doubt she is bothered, she's as hopelessly addicted to twitter as the people who hate her. it's how she became a TERF.
twitter is a game. it's played by posting. you score 1 point by getting praise from good people, 2 points by getting scorn from bad people. points can be exchanged for a sense of identity. and so people get sharper and sharper, and their concerns get more and more indesipherable to people who aren't playing the game.
I sympathize with the view of Netflix bowdlerizing to broaden the audience but they're also the platform with Dave Chappelle - which makes it hard to align them with "pretty sensitive to Twitter opinions" since a bunch of people have declared that fellow persona non grata.
True; but I don't think they paid to have Dave Chappelle produced. They stopped making House of Cards after the sexual harassment thing with Kevin Spacey.
I'm sure they'd rather have less controversy around Dahl's work. And its pretty easy to imagine Dahl's estate making the 'conservative' choice and allowing these edits if there's even a risk of their netflix deal falling apart.
> The Dahl estate owned the rights to the books until 2021, when Netflix bought them outright for a reported $686 million, building on an earlier rights deal. The American streaming service now has overall control over the book publishing, as well as various adaptation projects that are in the works.
I suspect they're hoping netflix will make movies based on his books. Netflix seems pretty sensitive to twitter opinions. They're probably trying to throw a bone to the twitter mob to make it less likely any new movies get "cancelled".