Harry Potter and the Oversaturated Offensive Franchise

Things have been pretty stressful in the news lately. I’d say my anxiety is dialed up to an 11 at roughly all times. Donald Trump wants to end mail-in voting. D.C. is a police state. The internet is being walled off and censored in front of our very eyes. And if the horrors weren’t enough, it feels like everywhere I look I see Harry Potter.

On social media, I am subjected daily to content related to HBO’s Harry Potter T.V. show, which is filming right now. Yesterday, I scrolled past a viral set photo of the actors playing Hagrid and Harry. The series is expected to air in late 2026 or early 2027 and run for a whole decade. Just this year, there have been new Harry Potter audiobooks, a new Harry Potter theme park, and two new Harry Potter stores in Tokyo and Chicago. As I began to write this newsletter, I got an email from Krispy Kreme: “Dipped in chocolate, filled with mystery, bite into the NEW Sorting Hat™ doughnut for a Hogwarts™ house-colored surprise!”

In an entertainment, travel, retail, and fast casual dining economy dominated by fandom nostalgia, the endless parade of ads for products based on a nearly 30-year-old franchise is par for the course. But when our dystopian political present is so reliant on bigotry against trans people and the person behind that franchise has become uniquely obsessed with funding and supporting discrimination, seeing Harry Potter all the time isn’t just an affront to the senses. It’s directly fueling J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans agenda in the U.K.—and Trump’s in the U.S.

A lot of the mainstream discourse around Harry Potter is whether it’s too soon to reboot the series and if it’s being used as a cash grab. Most people agree on both counts. But Rowling profiting from it and riding its relevancy to become the most famous and arguably powerful anti-trans activist is a bigger issue. And as I’ve been blanketed with more boy wizard propaganda, I’ve also seen more acts of anti-Harry Potter resistance on those grounds.

Theme park food reviews, romance novel conventions, and party board games may seem like unlikely territory for political coalition-building, but pop culture niches have been both political identity markers and momentum drivers for some time now. Back in the 2010s, platforms like Tumblr were home to a progressive political culture alongside fandom participation (including, at the time, Harry Potter), while conservatives have since weaponized franchises like Star Wars and Marvel superheroes in Gamergate-style campaigns that support regressive politics and Trump. But with recent social media-driven protests against Harry Potter and the creatives who adapt Rowling’s work and align with her anti-trans activism, there seems to be a bit of a tide shift back. It’s clear who the underdogs are in this moment.

When Universal opened its third Orlando theme park, Epic Universe, in May this year, one of the park’s five themed lands was a monument to Harry Potter. Designed to look like 1920s Paris, the setting of the second Fantastic Beasts movie (a spinoff that almost no one cares about), the land further expands the multibillion dollar portfolio of Harry Potter attractions Universal has operated in its theme parks since 2010. Both Universal and Disney have increasingly relied on theme park influencers to advertise their resorts, and I’ve tracked growing backlash from these typically loyal creators when the corporations act out of accordance with their previous support of the LGBTQ community (and their eagerness to profit from pride).

During a nearly hour-long taste test of food at Epic Universe posted weeks before the park officially opened to the public, the YouTubers known as the Try Guys made a PSA that they wouldn’t be showing or reviewing anything from the Harry Potter land (not even the $20 “butterbeer crepe”).

“We have decided that J.K. Rowling does not deserve to benefit from our advertising,” Try Guys member Keith Habersberger said in the video, which has over a million views. Subscribers praised them in the comments. The Try Guys have had queer and trans cast members and have accrued a large LGBTQ following. But their decision to abstain was still rare in a sea of hundreds of influencers who snacked and vlogged their way through the new Harry Potter land.

Last month, a much bigger swell of anti-Harry Potter sentiment kicked off in the romance fiction community on Threads about the release of multiple adaptations of “Dramione” fanfiction (fan works that romantically paired Draco Malfoy with Hermione Granger). One of the authors, Julie Soto, was also a planned featured guest at a convention called Romance Con, run by a company that ironically used to host some of the biggest Harry Potter fan conventions until it distanced itself from Rowling’s transphobia. Soto and Romance Con parted ways and dozens of authors have dropped out of the convention, which is happening in a few weeks.

“While J.K. Rowling may not be getting a cut of the profits directly, we are in this period where she’s having a new boom of interest in the Harry Potter franchise because of the HBO show,” said Ella Dawson, a romance author and the host of the Rebel Ever After podcast. She also cancelled a planned appearance at Romance Con. “The publishers and Barnes and Nobles had signage directly calling them Draco and Hermione coded. You cannot separate these books from the source material.”

Dawson is a queer author of queer fiction, and in her corner of the romance community, she said people were “pretty disgusted” by the Harry Potter marketing. But outside her corner, the books have become bestsellers. That’s the power of being the most popular children’s book series of all time, even if the author works to bar trans people from public life and makes a lot of questionable editorial choices about the characters belonging to different minorities in her books.

“I think a lot of folks do not want to reckon with how J.K. Rowling has spent their money,” Dawson said. “Fans of romance and romance authors believe so much in the power of their books, but the moment that we say you should not monetarily support these books that hold up the worldview of a transphobic person, then people want to say ‘Oh, but it’s just entertainment.‘“

Within smaller and more diverse fandom spaces, there can be just enough momentum to completely reverse shameless Harry Potter promotion. Less than two weeks ago, the company behind the popular game Codenames did a full 180 after releasing a Harry Potter-themed spinoff. First they released an apologetic statement. Then they announced they would donate all the proceeds to charity.

“If you make a board game, a huge portion of your audience is going to be queer people,” said Aly Gibbs, an independent journalist who wrote a piece about the Codenames debacle for Assigned Media. “But this is still a really lucrative media franchise. If you are shameless and soulless, there’s plenty of money to be made by attaching J.K. Rowling’s work to whatever you’re already doing.”

Just yesterday, the U.K. LGBTQ+ book award the Polari Prize announced it would pause this year after longlisting a novel by John Boyne, who is a self-proclaimed TERF (a trans exclusionary radical feminist, which is a magically contradictory identity rivaling anything in the Potter universe) and “friendly” with Rowling. If there’s one entertainment sector that certainly can’t get away with Rowling associations in this day and age, it’s an LGBTQ book award.

These smaller-scale boycotts of Harry Potter haven’t stopped entertainment giants like HBO from promising decades to come of stale, recycled IP. But they continue to make an impact. Actors associated with Harry Potter reboots like Michelle Gomez have felt compelled to issue statements of support for trans people after feeling the heat. It’s a start. Brands with large queer and trans followings are likely already growing wary of the backlash and may stay away from licensing Harry Potter, even if the mainstream stays hooked on the overpriced plastic and the content slop. And fan communities can still strengthen their vital support for trans and queer members.

“It’s just not that hard to not spend money on something Harry Potter related,” Dawson said. “If you’re paying for it, you’re sending a message.”

That’s all for now, and thanks so much for reading. I also have a new piece out this week in Them about the history of queer fandom communities and NSFW art on DeviantArt and how the past 25 years have seen the platform crater its relevancy and turn to AI as a last resort. The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, and we can even see that in the way Harry Potter’s reanimated corpse strains for our attention.

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