#can't believe i'm inadvertently praising skyrim

[ashthehermit]

Harry Potter & shallow worldbuilding

I probably shouldn't wade into these waters, but once again, I am demonstrating that my self-preservation instincts are poor, and that my family refuse to listen to my rants anymore. [TW: Harry Potter and all that entails].

I was a little confused when I saw the trailer for Hogwarts Legacy (source of ire for me, and many many other people).  I had thought that it was supposed to be set in Victorian England, but honestly, it looked a lot like it was still set in the 1990s (or the early 2000s, the films never came down on exact dates).  Perhaps this is because the movies - upon which all subsequent media has based its design - relied heavily on Victorian and early 20th century design elements.  Think Hogwarts' gothic architecture; the ministry's early London Underground tiles; and the entire interior of Grimmauld Place.  This wasn't in any way a bad thing.  Harry Potter, as a story, made good on a sense of whimsy and old British aesthetics.  The wizarding world, having no need of technology, would not modernise its aesthetics at the same rate as the non-magical world.  It was a design choice that was of great consternation to my mother.  We went to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, she whispered to me 'why do they have wheelie suitcases?  I thought this was set in the 1930s?'

It makes me wonder now, why doesn't the world in Hogwarts Legacy look much different to its predecessor?  I suppose that they are wearing vaguely Victorian clothes, but shouldn't we be looking at some 1700s aesthetics, or is the wizarding world caught in a perpetual loop of Victoriana?

Truth is, the Harry Potter universe has fallen foul of the problem that irks most fantasy universes once they are analysed for too long.  It isn't logically coherent.  Like the history of Westeros, the history of the wizarding world repeats itself perpetually, never looking or behaving especially differently.  In a series of children's books that were focused on the life of one teen, the cracks didn't show.  Sure, Voldemort was in power twice, and before him there was Grindelwald (for all intents and purposes, Voldemort but European).

J.K. Rowling's world building is fine for what it was in the beginning (again, the life of one teen in Britain), or as fine as it could be.  The world was not greatly expansive, but it didn't need to be.  The best parts of it were whimsical and extensions of the cheerier side of Britain.  There was the Knight bus, a purple routemaster.  The entrance to the Ministry of Magic was inside a red phone box, one of the great symbols of British tourism.  The primary setting was a boarding school.  One of the most popular elements is the house system, which is just a more complicated extension of your average school house system.  It is touted as a categorisation of identity, but it obeys all the rules of school houses.  Siblings going into different houses is rare (to the point that it's only mentioned once) because family groups always go into the same house (unless your school just doesn't care about houses).  The bigotry in the series is also British by design.  It ends up being a simplified version of classism, that features more in subtext than text.  This being said, there isn't a great deal of specificity in the world building.  I still don't know where Hermione's home town is.  I only know that her parents are dentists and they like to ski.  Where does Malfoy live, apart from in a manor that has peacocks in the garden?  These are the kind of flaws you notice when you have analysed the story for as long as I have.

The worldbuilding gets thinner the more expansive it gets.  The students from Beauxbatons are more or less French stereotypes, Fleur especially.  Durmstrang is the same, but Bulgarian.  Much has already been said on Rowling's shallow naming conventions (Cho Chang, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and now Sirona Ryan).  Without the crutch of something being British and vaguely quaint, the world loses all of its charm, and all of its logic.

Fantastic Beasts, for some reason, begins in 1920s New York.  Most of the richness of the setting is achieved by production design rather than the script (incidentally, flashbacks set in Hogwarts still manage to look like it's the early 2000s).  Conflict in the story is wrought from an American government that is more anti-muggle than the British equivalent.  If it is allegorical in any way, I do not understand it.  But let's not pretend Rowling's allegory has ever been any good.  Claims that Lupin's lycanthropy was a metaphor for HIV and AIDs only serve to lessen the character.  At best, it's an allegory for general prejudice.  The assertion that Lupin, at the age of six, was attacked by Greyback with the express intention of passing on AIDs, is well, it's dicey.  Rowling might have intended to create an allegory for stigma around 'blood-borne conditions', but failed to consider the extra baggage that that allegory might entail.  

The same is true for Fantastic Beasts, where the nonsense is turned up to twenty.  There's a group of muggles who somehow know about the existence of magic.  They name themselves after Salem, despite the Salem witch trials being appropriate for neither this setting nor this geographic region.  Any commentary on the nature of the Salem witch trials is hardly a commentary on the nature of America at large, but rather a commentary on a single Puritan colony.  Rowling takes pieces of Native American culture for her lore, with no understanding of the cultural legacy at play.

It gets even weirder in the sequels, which zip through countries so fast there's barely any time for worldbuilding.  There's a circus!  Why!  I don't know.

For no reason at all, there's a deer that chooses the outcome of an election.  In a baffling moment, Grindelwald (as played by font of virtue, Johnny Depp) tells a group of wizards that they have to kill muggles because they are going to start a world war.  He is wizarding Hitler, and that isn't a subtle analogy.  In that same scene, Queenie Goldstein, a character heavily coded as Jewish, joins wizard Hitler because he promises her that she will be able to marry her muggle beau.  The man that just gave a speech about killing muggles, is apparently all for marriage equality!  By all means, it doesn't make any sense.  It’s far from being respectful either.

There are of course attempts to make the wizarding world more diverse in Fantastic Beasts, but without any attempt to make these characters more genuine.  There's an Asian woman, but she's Voldemort's snake and she's going to be beheaded by Neville in a few decades.  The second film has Zoe Kravitz!  Yay!  But she's part of a needlessly convoluted tale in which a powerful white man hypnotises a black woman to be his wife, and then she dies?  I don't know what to make of that.  It's not good representation, and by gum it isn't good storytelling!  The Fantastic Beasts trilogy has all the perspective of Emily in Paris.

Hogwarts Legacy can hardly improve upon this worldbuilding, because it comes from an unstable foundation.  I might have been more understanding had the game been set in say, not Hogwarts, or even a Hogwarts that was fundamentally different from the Hogwarts that we already know.  The worldbuilding remains as shallow as it ever was, and with all the bigotry retained.  Of course, the main story is based on a piece of anti-semitic folklore, expanded upon in the books, and even more so in the game.  The problem being that Hogwarts Legacy can only make sales based on nostalgia.  It can't be that different from the world of the novels, because no one is bold enough to alter the world and alienate people who want nothing more than to experience their childhoods all over again.  As such, the shallow worldbuilding is laid bare over and over again, to the point that it is no longer a setting in service of a series of novels.  It now has to be a real, coherent world, which it fails at.  We have to examine the nature of Hogwarts houses, and the mechanics of time turners (thank you Cursed Child), and the reasons why house elves don't want their freedom.  

They'll never get freedom anyhow, because Hermione's attempts at activism are used for comedy.  The world at the end of Deathly Hallows is not greatly different to the world at the beginning.  Voldemort is dead, but we are not assured of any big changes.  The world returns to what it was.  For all that The Legend of Korra may not have lived up to its predecessor, it made an effective attempt at showing that the world had been altered by the actions of our heroes.  In the Cursed Child, nothing is different.  The story spends all of its time looking to the past and imagining increasingly unlikely alternate timelines (Cedric turns evil?  Ron marries Padma Patil?).  Hogwarts Legacy does not set up the world of Harry Potter, nor does it fundamentally alter it.  The status quo is preserved.  Like Westeros, it cannot change. The new game does nothing with the world, and acts in its detriment.  Anyhow, it’s not a good work of fantasy.  J.K. Rowling loves the status quo.   That much is evident.  Don’t buy this game!  Support trans people instead.