The new Harry Potter video game is a big hit. Forbes reported earlier this week that the four different SKUs for the game held the top four places on the Steam global sales chart. The author of that piece predicts it will sell 20 million copies by the end of this year.

That success is a sign that efforts to boycott the game aren’t working. As the LA Times points out today in a story about the controversy, the boycott efforts are part of a moral conundrum for progressive Harry Potter fans.

For weeks, a battle has brewed among gamers as parts of the community have called for a boycott of “Hogwarts Legacy,” a game set roughly 100 years before the events of the “Harry Potter” books. The debate, first sparked when the game was announced in 2020 and renewed amid its release this month, centers on a moral question: Can fans support “Hogwarts Legacy” and the “Harry Potter” franchise while also condemning Rowling‘s comments on transgender people and gender identity?

Unfortunately for the critics, they may be experiencing a bit of the Streisand effect, i.e. by drawing so much attention to the game they are acting as free marketing.

Andrew Uerkwitz, senior analyst at Jefferies, said that the debate around “Hogwarts Legacy” has driven awareness for the game, ultimately acting as free marketing.

“Yes, there’s been controversy … but it doesn’t take away from how beloved ‘Harry Potter’ and the ‘Harry Potter’ universe is,” he said. “Based on sales and Metacritic scores and user scores, the game has met or exceeded the quality expectations.”

And that brings us to Vox which published a story today titled “Can more Harry Potter ever be okay?” The answer, according to author Aja Romano is no.

On some level, I can’t help but feel a wistful curiosity about the new game because I still love the Harry Potter characters and universe…

Now, regarding Hogwarts Legacy, I have chosen to opt completely out of the discussion over the game. The stakes are too painful; one must simply put aside one’s humanity to even begin to talk about the game purely as “art,” even though far too many people are eager to do just that…

Anything that we respond to and love about a new Harry Potter series will still be something that ultimately came from J.K. Rowling — from the den mother who betrayed us…

New Harry Potter can only be a source of ultimate harm unless Rowling lets go of her creative control and cedes her universe to other minds — something I sense she’s very unlikely to ever do…

Yes, I think it’s pretty unlikely one of the world’s richest living authors would decide to abandon everything she has created. So the conclusion of the piece sort of migrates from stoicism to a critique of capitalism and finally collapses in a jumble of despair.

Given that no amount of social protest is going to dent Rowling’s bank account, perhaps it’s understandable, then, to consider a pragmatic response to Hogwarts Legacy or any new Harry Potter series. Perhaps the only way to approach the possibility of more Harry Potter is to accept that nothing we do will change the status quo — that J.K. Rowling will always be one of the wealthiest people on earth, no matter how much we wish otherwise, and no matter how much we are aware that she’s actively using her power and influence to promote transphobic messaging. To accept that the consumerist machine that is the Harry Potter franchise is simply bigger than all of our feelings, and bigger than the harm Rowling’s views have brought and will continue to bring to real trans people. In other words, as the meme goes, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”…

If Harry Potter himself could become flesh and blood, it seems clear that he’d argue that more Harry Potter stories should never take precedence over real trans lives.

But Harry Potter is fiction. And as new Harry Potter works come out and the increasingly obfuscating debate around Rowling intensifies, their mere existence conveys that the books’ core tenets of promoting tolerance, love, equality, and resistance are ultimately just a fantasy.

It’s worth noting that the author of this piece wrote about boxing up all of her JK Rowling books back in 2020. That previous story ended with a retreat into private fantasy.

As for me, I won’t be reading or rereading Harry Potter anytime soon. I have endless Harry Potter fanfiction and novels written by Harry Potter fans who grew up to explore instead. Above all, I have the Wizarding World that lives on in my heart — queer, genderqueer, deviant, diverse, and currently defunding the Aurors.

That’s the Harry Potter we all created together, without J.K. Rowling. And we all know that’s the version that matters, in the end.

Trans activists are already free to do whatever they want in their own private lives. Like all adults, they can write the personal fan fiction of their lives however they see fit, including their own gender identity. But they’re determined to do more than that. They need to enforce their views—about trans women in sports, trans women in women’s prisons, gender identity instruction in kindergarten, men dating trans women, lesbians dating trans women, etc. —on everyone else. The fact that they can’t get everyone else to go along with them (people won’t even sacrifice the latest Harry Potter game to spite the world’s creator!) is really bringing them down. The rest of us should just go about our business. There’s no need to be cruel to anyone who sees things differently, but you also don’t have to adopt their entire worldview simply because they demand it.