This article is focused solely on the world of Harry Potter and The Wizarding World. It is important to note that this discussion is not an endorsement of J.K. Rowling’s personal views or statements. I stand in support of trans rights and believe in creating an inclusive and welcoming world for all people, regardless of gender identity.
Like most millennials, I was absolutely entranced by the Harry Potter series in the 2000’s. I was introduced to the series not through the books but through the movies, my cousin babysitting us suggesting it and after my modest protest my only complaint was that it had ended. When the 6th book was to be released, I had preordered it through Borders and had my mom go with me to pick it up at midnight.
This backstory is to illustrate that I was, indeed, a fan of Harry Potter. Fans of the franchise are dedicated and I was no different. I collected the books, had a poster or two hanging in my room, and secretly wished it was real. All I wanted to do was escape to the world over and over again. I wanted to live in a world where magic existed, and it was just beyond our sight. But like with most successful franchises, I wasn’t given the opportunity to explore more of the world, instead, I was given the same story in different mediums.
When I think about the Wizarding World, it makes me want to pull my hair out. I know it’s easy for me to “armchair QB” this whole thing, but the four Sins I list here are so egregious to a transmedia producer like myself I can’t help it. The Wizarding World has broken 7 of 10 of the Transmedia Commandments. That’s like getting a 30% on a project that you had nearly 30 years to work on and that 30% was for spelling your name correctly.
Without further adieu, let’s start the rage machine.
Sin 1- Same Story on different mediums
I don’t know what could be more boring than constantly being told the same story over and over. At every junction the franchise decided to play it safe rather than innovate. Throughout the release of the books, there were movies telling the same story, leaving out details in order to match the medium. Video games were really bad versions of the story, some skipped over critical points with a narrator reading a storybook, others changing the story to match common game play of the medium (Harry learned spells by parkoring through secret rooms and collected jelly beans that were scattered on the ground in ps1 and ps2 versions of the Sorcerer’s Stone and beyond).
In transmedia, we believe that fans want new ways to interact with their favorite stories. Telling new stories that take place within a world in different mediums and on different platforms allows for endless exploration. Simultaneously, transmedia provides a place for audience members to interact with each other and with the creators themselves. This is what brings the world to life, transmedia is where entertainment and community intersect.
Early on, the Harry Potter franchise had no plans for creating new stories within the story world nor did they plan on having a place where their fans could actually connect. During an episode of Story World Explorers, my brother Jack and I got to talk to the great Transmedia Producer Jeff Gomez about his advising (or pitching to advise) the franchise back when the PotterMore site was about to be launched. During the meeting, Jeff asked for clarification on what the plan was for the Potter More website:
“The universe that you've created is vast and sprawling and you're between books, and it's going to be a couple of years before the next book. So, what are we going to do? And what is Potter More really for? ‘Well, it's a place for fans to get together because we want to sell them Harry Potter books in new and different formats.’… And I go, well, okay, so are we going to get short stories set in the universe? ‘No.’ You know, there'll be little tidbits every now and then. And every tidbit that we drop that's going to be a headline, a global headline, you know? And that's no good. Guys, that's, and I said, that's not going to work. And she said, "Well, then you may leave.” – Jeff Gomez on Story World Explorers Ep. #11
The PotterMore website, now harrypotter.com, was never intended to be anything more than a mausoleum of old content repackaged as new. You could take a quiz to find out your Hogwarts house, buy the books, buy the audio books, etc. And guess what folks, that’s still all it is. If you were to create an account on the site today you’d get these tantalizing perks:
- Discover your true Hogwarts house
- Find out which wand will choose you
- Reveal your Patronus Cast - your very own animal guardian in the Patronus experience.
- Create your unique wizarding portrait and show the world your most magical look.
- Get the latest news and offers weekly.
- Enjoy a round-up of the latest news, tailored offers and fun – including quizzes, puzzles and more - from all around the wizarding world.
- Explore your Wizarding World profile
- Learn more about your Hogwarts house, wand, Patronus and more in your dedicated Harry Potter Fan Club profile.
- Get a magical treat Dudley would be jealous of every birthday. Exclusive to newsletter subscribers, you'll receive a special surprise in your inbox for your birthday each year.
In my best Christopher Walken impersonation: WOW! What perks!
Are you kidding me? Do you notice how perk 6 is looking at your decisions for perks 1-4? What a joke. Perks 1-3 are taking simple quizzes, answering questions by selecting one of two choices. Perk 4 is dressing an avatar that can be viewed while experiencing perk 6.
Perk 5 is an infuriating repurposing of the Harry Potter story that thinking about it literally makes me have to stop writing every other word to recollect myself. There is no news. What they do is send you an email with quizzes. ‘Quizzes about what, Frank?’ Well, they take the HP movies and make quizzes out of them. One such quiz was, “How well do you know the Weasleys?” which asked questions like: What was the first thing Ron said to Harry when they first met? At the end of the quiz I presume they give you a score, I wouldn’t know because I put my fist through my monitor.
Perk 7 is a chocolate frog. More accurately, it’s an image of a chocolate frog. It’s the same thing every year. What a perk to end on!
The website itself is full of stale repurposed content. The franchise is full of stale repurposed content. It was all stale until they introduced Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them & Hogwarts Legacy. Huzzah! A new story!? Transmediation! Did they finally figure it out? (they didn’t) On to Sin 2.
Sin 2 – Good Intent / Bad Transmedia Storytelling
I remember when I heard about Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (FanBea) I was thrilled. I wasn’t even in tune with the transmedia concept yet, but I knew I liked the way it sounded. New story in the wizarding world that doesn’t have Harry Potter? Sign me up!
The reception was lackluster. People compared it to the Harry Potter movies and claimed they weren’t as good. FanBea getting compared to HP is the franchises’ fault, it’s bad transmedia storytelling. There’s no one reason why the FanBea movies as a whole weren't as revered as the Harry Potter movies. In my mind it came down to:
1. Same medium sets expectations - The idea in transmedia is to use multiple mediums and platforms to tell stories within a story world. While HP was originally a book, when most people think of HP they visualize the movies (whether because they liked it or subscribed to the newsletter). By using the same medium (movie) for FanBea, fans immediately judged it against their medium reference, the HP movies. When the story, characters, acting, direction wasn’t up to their HP expectations, they couldn’t see past it.
2. Bad storytelling - Jumping right off from using the same medium, nothing can save a piece of content from being poorly done. While the story of Dumbledore v. Grindelwald was peppered through both mediums of the HP story, the story itself was lackluster. Whether fans didn’t connect with the new protagonist or the characters were underdeveloped, the story didn’t hold up.
It's a pity because there were great transmedia elements. Originally I didn’t think Grindelwald was mentioned in the HP books or movies, but I had apparently missed them! The stories that exist in the future or past of a story world are always the most ready for transmedia exploration. It seems that they failed to execute from a storytelling standpoint.
This wasn’t their only attempt at expanding the story world. Hogwarts Legacy came out in 2023 to much anticipation. Unlike FanBea, Legacy was a new story in a new medium that took us back to where it all started, Hogwarts. I remember first seeing the visuals for the game, they were brilliant. In-game footage looked like everything a fan could want in a video game taking place in the franchise story world.
Fans pre-ordered 10 million copies before its release in Feb 2023. There were stories of older, non-video-game-playing fans purchasing a gaming system just to play it. It was evident that there was a lot of demand to return to the wizarding world. I was one of them.
Having pre-purchased the game via Steam gave me access to the DLC – Dark Arts Pack. I was unbelievably excited which quickly became unbelievably disappointed. The game was, well, repetitive. Once the initial shock of the beautiful aesthetics wore off, you found the world was really basic. No one was ever in bed at night or doing anything but loitering during the day; NPCs simply disappeared at night and wandered around the grounds during the day (RDRII really set the bar high). Throughout the game you do a lot of the same things over and for the same rewards. I must have killed 1500 Direwolves and 1000 spiders during my playthrough. The lack of collectables and thus repeatable collectibles (clothing) was astounding.
As for the main story arch, it's pretty basic as well. Bad guys want to wield ancient power to do bad things and we are the only ones who can stop them. Bad guys were spread across the map, had little camps and were looking for a fight. The human / dwarf enemies weren’t particularly interesting. And I’m still not sure if I was, as a 5th year student mind you, killing them or incapacitating them. For a world with 3 curses you’re not supposed to use, it sure was easy to learn them and really silly not to use them. If there was ever a game that needed a morality meter and repercussions for your actions, it was this one. (If I can use a killing curse with no repercussions, defeating an otherwise difficult enemy in one hit, why would I use anything else?)
Overall, not a great game, but it’s not this that has my hair on fire. It has been three years since the game was released and they haven’t released any new content for it. Nothing. Not a paid DLC nor a suggestion as such. With the amazing pre-purchase and then subsequent purchase numbers, you’d figure they’d have started to plan on something. Instead of capitalizing on unbelievable momentum, they let it die. As we’ll see in Sin 3, there was a great opportunity to use Hogwarts Legacy as a space for diehards to actually attend school as an online RPG similar to GTA 5. (such a missed opportunity).
Oh, and the “no Quiditch because someone got hurt” in game excuse is laziness. Not an easy thing to develop, for sure, but that continues to be a big draw to the Hogwarts experience. Figure it out.
So while I’ll give the Wizarding World a ‘close, but no butterbeer’ in this respect, the urge to rub my eyes in disappointment is too strong to resist. Come on, man. It’s right there, all you have to do is take it! But like with most IPs, it’s not that they wouldn’t have seen these opportunities but that they weren’t looking for them in the first place. In order to realize and capitalize on what the audience wants, you have to pay attention to them in the first place. On to Sin 3.
Sin 3 – Refraining from including the audience
In the same conversation we had, Jeff said he asked the franchise about how the fans were going to be a part of the Potter More website, “And the answer, bluntly was the fans are not a part of it. They cannot be a part of it. They cannot submit their drawings or their poems or their stories or anything. Not to this side. No way. Not going to happen.”
Disappointing to say the least but certainly not surprising. This is how most franchises operate and have done so forever. Art and entertainment used to be a one-way street of communication, where entities would create and then distribute for the masses to consume where the masses didn’t have direct access to those entities. The top-down flow of information at the time and especially right now is not a functional method of audience interaction because the lines of communication between fan and creator is free, easy, and open. Social media has made it possible for the audience to respond back to the entertainment creators in real time.
If you ignore your audience, they are going to clap back or clap elsewhere.
If they weren’t going to be let in officially, they were going to find a way to meet and tell new stories in spite of the franchise. One such place is on the website Hogwarts is Here. Fans of Harry Potter loved the story, yes, but many of them wanted to attend school, as we saw in the questions posed in Hogwarts Legacy. Hogwarts is Here scratches that itch, allowing individuals to take tailored curriculums as if they were studying at Hogwarts. You can take classes, earn degrees, and get a certificate of completion! Hogwarts is Here is not an official site, but it should be. All the Franchise would have to do is purchase the site and support the fans who run the page to do more with it. If you were to create an online RP portion to Hogwarts Legacy where you could go to class, you’d use Hogwarts is Here’s curriculum!
The point? A missed opportunity that they continue to miss. Your fans tell you what they want. If you don’t listen, as a franchise you lose control of your IP because the fans will go and create it themselves. If you go to Reddit you will find hundreds of fanfiction taking place in the Wizarding World. If you are lucky enough to have a passionate fan base dying to participate, the least you can do is provide the platform where they can share it with other fans.
Sin 4 – Misunderstanding Success
Ah, yes, the greatest sin of all. The one that makes Frank the most furious. On April 12, 2023 HBO and the HP Franchise announced the 7 season Harry Potter series.
(Frank pauses, looking at the ceiling and pensively taps his fingers together. He needs to yell at someone but alas he is alone in his apartment. *Deep Breath*)
With the overwhelming interest and financial success of Hogwarts Legacy along side the relatively unpopular Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them coupled with the ever-popular Harry Potter Movies (as people still watch them as “marathons”), the franchise made a huge assumption and in my estimation a huge mistake. All of the success and failures since the Harry Potter Movies led them to the conclusion that people wanted more Harry Potter, not more stories in the Wizarding World. Choosing the medium of a series was simply the trendy option.
I’ve heard arguments as to why this was a good idea flying out of every ass from here to London. This is going to be detrimental for the fandom. It already has been detrimental to the fandom. Here’s what to expect:
- Actor v. Actor – Who played the character better / who is the true character / best representation of the character via the book
- Movie v. Series – Which was better
- Book v. Series – Which was better
These schisms divide a fandom into entrenched sides. Arguments about which medium told the story better or who is the true Hagrid are pointless, exhausting, and counterproductive. Rather than exploring the world with new, good transmedia stories we get to join a pissing match between which twin actors best represented Fred & George from the books. We’ve already seen this playing out, most recently with people complaining that Paapa Essiedu might be playing Snape. What is the point!? Why are they doing this to the fandom!?
I’ll tell you why they and most IPs default to this: money and security. At the end of the day, a remake has a better chance of making its money back than a new story. It’s a safety strategy. Frankly, the fans deserve better and they’re not going to get it.
Conclusion
This went on a lot longer than I expected and then I realized I needed to conclude it. These Sins are common across major IPs; HP is not unique. Luckily, there are things we can do.
Find better story worlds. Find story worlds that listen and engage with you, that create content and tell new stories with you in mind.
Stop supporting this trash. The IPs that pit you against each other. That creates content and expects you to like it. That doesn't give you opportunities to engage with them.
Luckily you are in the right place. Storytects is a place for these stories and a place for you to create them. Check out the Storytects podcast and blogs to learn more about transmedia and storytelling to use creating your own worlds.
Read me for more rants. You know you want to.
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