I know a lot of us, myself included, like to believe that piracy allows us to consume problematic media without supporting artists we do not like. But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product. HBO is absolutely keeping tabs on piracy of their show now and seeing our traffic the same way Crunchyroll used to keep tabs on pirated fan-translated anime back when they cared.
Also, there is a similar ethical zero-sum game with all other Harry Potter media and products. Normally we can buy on the secondary market if we need a hard copy to scan and rip but don’t want to support the creators. But almost every Harry Potter book in circulation is purchased by someone with intention to sell for a profit, and HBO is also likely keeping tabs on sales and resales of DVDs of the old movies. Every time money leaves your bank account for Harry Potter media, you are directly feeding the ecosystem which sustains the Queen of the TERFs.
It’s honestly pretty incredible how morally radioactive this one human is. Orson Scott Card is equally repugnant, but the Ender’s Game series doesn’t even have a small fraction of the market share of Harry Potter (IMHO this is the fault of that movie being just okayish, not good or bad, but that’s another topic.) Trump’s MAGA movement is comparable in badness, but there really isn’t much most of us can do other than voting and never shutting up about how unconstitutional the things he is doing is. Rowling really is comparable to Disney or Nestlé, and she’s just one person, not a whole company.
Right now, the only ethical way to consume Harry Potter is watching or reading movies and books on your copies that either:
- you obtained before 2020
- were given to you for free in some non-trackable way, e.g. offline or sneakernet.
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism. We will have to see if this changes once she is dead.
I’m just here to bring to your attention Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”, both the books and the assorted TV show, which is quite awesome in its own right, even if it diverges from the books by quite a bit. There’s a whole world of awesome outside of HP, and even if it wasn’t, I refuse to recast in my theater of the mind the extremely talented and deeply regretted Alan Rickman and Dame Maggie Smith.
Yep Harry Potter for adults
I read the books as they came out and loved them. i tried watching the series as it was coming out but they really were so different from the books that when I had to wait for the next season I never picked it back up.
Are they worth watching though? If I go into it knowing it’ll be basically something loosely related?
I think it’s really good. The books… were frankly hard for me to get through. Not bad, but I only read the first few.
If you are going to watch the series, understand that the main cast are written as kind of assholes and are written like real people with real emotions and it’s stupid, but stupid good. Also there is an SA scene that can honestly be skipped Season 1, Episode 13 running roughly from the 40:00 to 42:00 mark.
Once you get through the first season it’s pretty smooth sailing through to the end of season 3. Then they have cancellation hanging over them so seasons 4 and 5 aren’t quite as… grand as they should have been.
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Cause a pirate is free? :D
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Wow. What a prick. It’s difficult to imagine proudly declaring that you’re transphobic in any setting, much less a piracy thread on Lemmy.
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Nah just a turd.
Fucking gross.
The trans people asking you to not materially support someone who is harming us at scale are not your mom telling you you’re not allowed to play your video games, dude. You’re perfectly allowed to be an asshole
materially support
piracy community
Demand of any sort is still bad. This is still giving attention to a bigot and her media. This isn’t a high bar to clear at all, you can casually walk over it. But many people still seem intent on tripping over it.
I’m barely aware it exists and almost never see anything about it.
Making a post called “Reminder: do not watch HBO’s Harry Potter.” Is literally marketing it and forcing people to think about it.
Do not think about pink elephants
We all just lost The Game.
Dang it, now I’m thinking about pink elephants? Why’d ya have to bring it up? /jk
That’s a fair point. But I’m not sure how to make a clear title without the keywords. Naming things is such a frustrating, imprecise art.
I feel like by this logic you shouldn’t have even brought it up since they also track Internet engagement…
That’s a fair criticism. I’m gonna hope their scrapers aren’t looking at Lemmy, but they probably are.
All scrapers look at Lemmy. When you search on google, Lemmy pops up in the results. You can’t reasonably expect to be NOT scraped when you put things online.
Marketing teams only track engagement on major social media, having a discussion about it on lemmy is not going to impact their metrics or even be considered
Have you work in marketing analysis before?
yep
Agree 100%. I’ve been in some tough conversations with fellow LGBTQ+ allies over my participation, however minor, in the Harry Potter fandom. I’m seeing a lot of “it’s fine if you liked it before we learned JKR was a bigot” but I’m also seeing a lot of people with the same story as mine — discovered the franchise back then, enjoyed it, but do not like what JKR is doing to the trans community — but also criticising me for the same. Like it’s “fine” (to some extent?) if you’re trans and JKR betrayed you, but if you’re not trans, you’re held to a higher standard as an ally. I dunno. It’s confusing. I will not, however, back down from my claim that I enjoyed the first four (+HBP) books and the first four films before I learned she was crazy… and that this year I rewatched Philosopher’s Stone in 4K (and yes, it holds up).
All that being said, the fears and concerns in the trans and LGBTQ+ community are valid. They may be jerks about it online, but as an ally, I can only ever strive to be a better one. I can’t change what I liked in the past and I will not deny it, even to history revisers. But I can change what I do in the present, and I can always strive to Do Better.
I don’t like the new Harry Potter series because of why it exists. JKR was disappointed the stars of the film series did not share her transphobic views, so she immediately made a point to recast Hermione and to make her completely different from Emma Watson’s portrayal, as Watson was her most outspoken critic. She didn’t make Hermione a Black girl to be inclusive, she did it to distance Watson from the character because Watson isn’t transphobic. JKR further muddied the waters by saying that Dumbledore was gay and always had been (though no evidence of this is in the books — he’s essentially treated as ace, as in, asexual, as in, his sexuality is undetermined and probably doesn’t exist, which is fitting as the entirety of his character’s relevance is mentorship to an adolescent boy). When the rest of the cast basically stood against her, she set out to recast all of them.
The new Harry Potter series looks like it might be fun, but I cannot in good conscience watch the new series. There are so many more things out there to see. Watching it with infinite time would be one thing, but I haven’t got that, have I? I was fully grown when Philosopher’s Stone came out, and I had no intention of seeing it. A coworker slipped me a bootleg copy (while it was still in cinemas!) and I watched it… twice. Then I went and saw it in cinema. I then collected the books and read them, and watched the movies, though I didn’t like it after the fourth one. It stopped being fun. I’m currently reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, and by that I mean, of course, I’m listening to the audiobooks. I’m in the second to most current book, the seventh one, and it’s still fun. It’s gotten serious, but it’s still fun. And, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Matt Dinniman (the author) and Jeff Hays (the audiobook narrator) are not bigots. That’s the magical adventure series I’m looking forward to.
As a trans person, I have no idea why people are harping on you for liking HP before learning JKR was a bigot. As such, I never ascribe bigotry to people who simply purchase HP-related stuff. They may not know and may not be as online as I am to know the harm that they are contributing towards. However, if after they do find out, they continue to patronize said thing, I consider them as a bigot or at least that bigotry isn’t a dealbreaker for them. I believe the saying is if you sit down at a table with 10 Nazis, there are 11 Nazis at the table.
To cap this off, though, I will paraphrase the idea of perfection being the enemy of progress.
Spot on. If you’re okay with someone being racist, a bigot then that means at least you’re cool with such bigotry being in our society. Which I see as a morale failing. Attention to such is still attention, kind of like there’s no bad PR.
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Part of the difference is Rowling still holds so much cultural weight (somehow). So many people still know and watch and purchase Harry Potter stuff. Seinfeld only really holds that weight amongst older conservatives. He’s only popular amongst the people perpetuating the hate. Rowling’s stuff is popular amongst those who should know better.
I do agree we should boycott more (I personally do boycott a fair bit), but comparing the current impact of Rowling to the current impact of Seinfeld is crazy.
“I have no qualms giving money to bad people because I can also give money to worse people”
Yeah, lots of people are either terrible people, or have enough money to fund hate crimes, or are willing to act on their beliefs. Rowling is special because she is both a raving bigot, rich, and 100% willing to pour all her money into making sure no trans person feels safe again. You know, Morgoth’s Trinity: Resources, Hatred, and Will to Power.
What has he done horrible? Maybe we shouldn’t support him either.
He claims Palestine doesn’t exist and that calls to free Palestine are akin to the KKK.
I doubt I’ll watch it, still gonna download it and put on my media server regardless. Other people will want to watch it so it’s better they watch it pirated on plex than on an official stream.
Harm reduction ftw
i agree OP
fuck the haters and lowkey transphobes
There’s a bunch of flaws in your logic here, not the least of which is:
There is no ethical Harry Potter consumption within capitalism.
Piracy isn’t capitalism
Edit: let me be more clear–
You’re trying to resolve one ethical dilemma with another unresolved ethical dilemma: You’re trying to resolve: “Can one appreciate an artist’s work while acknowledging that the artist is detestable?” with the same logic as “Is digital piracy an ethical workaround to media capitalism?” and combine the two arguments into one solution: “Is it ethical to pirate Harry Potter media from HBO, even though I find both Rowling, HBO, and capitalism detestable?”
It’s like asking, “As a strict environmentalist, is it ethical to drive my EV to the market if I know I had to charge it from an energy grid powered by coal plant (that I had no choice but to use)?” Because no matter how much personal opinion and moral relativism enters the ethical calculus, there’s a logical breakdown at the crosspoint of systemics, when individual participation merges into participation at scale, how much your choice is actually a choice at all, how much your choice would make any difference, and on and on…
but before all of that, it doesn’t make any logical sense to even go down that path since trying to resolve one ethical dilemma with another - especially expecting a black-and-white answer - is just a bit silly.
My man, the reason I said that is I’m giving you an out. Direct downloads can’t be tracked in the way that streams and torrents can. Get a Google Drive link from somebody or get a Usenet subscription. I thought I was clear that I meant “within capitalism” as “everything the suits can measure and react to”.
Not only is what you said definitely not true for a lot of different reasons, but if you’re gonna be this condescending, I don’t see why I should continue having a conversation with you.
I don’t think the cached file other people cached on premiumize.me or other debrid services can be tracked but I’d love to know how I’m wrong. Out of curiosity to be clear, I’m not watching Harry Potter.
I didn’t say it could. In fact, I really hope it can’t, lol.
Direct downloads can’t be tracked in the way torrents can, as far as I know.
It’s shocking to me someone would want to watch this.
Harry Potter was never good. Why would someone even want to read a Harry Potter book obtained before 2020???
The TERF stuff didn’t make Harry Potter bad. It always sucked, and people only realized after the TERF stuff.
I liked Harry Potter but I’m no longer a child.
I’ll die on the hill that Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban adaptation is the only good HP media.
And not just for the sneaky sex scene in the credits. ;)
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You fully cant exist in modern society without ethical problems. You draw your own line.
If you’re not giving money, and you’re ensuring your plex-shared friends arent giving money, thats a valid enough degree of separation for many, potentially most.
The plex server is enough for me, too. HBO isn’t going to be watching your Plex server, unless Plex is secretly selling all their users’ data somehow. Can’t imagine my high horse being that high lmfao
But piracy demand also indicates to companies an untapped market that they could tap if they create the right product
I agree with your conclusion of not watching it, but the reason that companies might observe and take a non-purchase as some kind of hypothetical market signal doesn’t seem like the strongest argument for that, especially if people are avoiding the purchase specifically to deny them money for ethical reasons, that’s not something they can resolve by making ‘the right product’.
If pirating a Harry Potter show provides support to its author, I think that support is going to be more in the form of cultural relevance and mindshare than anything directly financial. Being a fan of an IP gives other people a reason to engage with it because your interest signals things to other people, like it means that by not watching it they might be left out of the loop etc, and since the law enforces property rights over what can be done with it and who can profit, that adds to the power of its owner by influencing the choices and interests of other people in their favor.
Fuckin A, Misfits!
I wouldn’t watch it anyways, I got tired of Harry Potter in the early 2000s.
