Stop Going to the Wizarding World
When I first started writing this blog in 2021, I wanted to write about theme parks, but then when I tried anything other than a simple listicle I’d run into a block. Sometimes it would be the result of imposter syndrome; knowing that my own take on the history/meaning of a place would be a small voice in an already thriving chorus of essayists, authors, and filmmakers. And then, of course, there’s the discourse; the spats that would rise out of theme park Twitter once or twice a week, raise the ire of a few hundred people, and then die down. I would have my own thoughts, often emotional ones, but by the time my fingers had tapped a few paragraphs worth of takes the passion had gone, the Twitter tab was closed, and I was ready for something else. I hardly ever engage directly on Twitter, I’m a wallflower, not even enough followers to warrant a reply if I tried. So I was going to share my thoughts here instead, if I ever managed to get them out coherently.
Discourse around theme parks, at least in the US, tends to focus around the two biggest properties: Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando, both located in central Florida. In the last several years, the general drumbeat has gone something like this: Disney World has become lazy in its execution, nickel and dime-ing its customers for an increasingly less satisfying experience, scaling back their plans and operations so that it takes years of work to open so much as a planter. Meanwhile, Universal Studios has been providing nonstop jaw-dropping new experiences with swiftness and ease, their brand has not suffered like Disney’s, and — in case you haven’t heard — they’re building an entirely new theme park to open next year. Disney is the past, Universal is the future, one company constantly fumbles the bag, the other lands on its feet time and again. Anyone who disagrees is a sad shill for the corporate Mouse.
I know what you’re thinking, and I agree with you: this is wildly ridiculous and petty. Universal Studios is not a bold underdog taking on Goliath, it’s a theme park owned by Comcast, the second largest broadcasting company in the world that is just as faceless and uninterested in the goodwill of humanity as the Bobs Chapek and Iger. They, like Disney, pay their park employees just above minimum wage, they also laid off people during the pandemic. Neither of these corporations is worth the anthropomorphism; it is our human nature to do so, to give them moral value so that our choices of where to spend money on vacation can have virtue. We have evolved into absolute weirdos, and when I realized that I would stop typing, save to draft, and go make dinner.
Tonight, though, I am ordering takeout, because I do think that there is a choice we can make, in one of these parks, with a moral weight to it. It almost never comes up in the discourse. Even when the Disney company was being (rightfully) chided for not speaking up against Ron DeSantis’s barbaric plans for LGBTQIA Floridians, it didn’t come up. Not this past month, as both parks rolled out their now ubiquitous Pride merchandise lines.
Strangest thing, too, because none of this so-called competition would be happening without it.
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter exists at Universal Orlando because it does not exist at the Magic Kingdom. Disney, being the juggernaut of themed entertainment, was the first to tempt JK Rowling with a presence in their parks, but allegedly offered two attractions and a food location; whereas Rowling was anticipating something on a much grander scale. Whether or not she “stormed” out of the corporate offices is legend, but Universal creative was willing to acquiesce to whatever demands Rowling made (these will be important later), and in 2009, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter opened at Universal Studios’s Islands of Adventure.
Before this opening, Universal Studios had not held a serious candle to Walt Disney World as a destination. Its offerings were more geared toward teens and adults, the relatively young (opened in 2009) Islands of Adventure boasting three roller coasters and only two “family” rides; the flagship park had gone through some upheaval but maintained an air of dustiness to it (it still does, there are restaurants there serving the same Sbarro quality pizza they had in 1995). As a Floridian, we would go for the weekend because resident passes were inexpensive and the lines for roller coasters were hardly ever long — though the food was hardly worth the prices, the rides that were fun wouldn’t keep a person entertained for more than a day, and even with the addition of CityWalk there just wasn’t a lot to do. It was a nice addition to an Orlando trip if you were taking a break from Disney World, or if you were a local and didn’t want to spend too much money, but that was about it.
When the Wizarding World opened, that changed overnight. The land looked and felt remarkable in its scale and craftsmanship; having been designed in collaboration with the team that worked on the film sets, the experience was above and beyond anything that Universal had ever made. Suddenly, “Harry Potter Land” became the reason people went to Orlando — you have to remember, at that time, the movies were about to end, the book series was barely over, and the world of Harry Potter was a cultural juggernaut, unstoppable.
These days there is an elephant in the room when Harry Potter comes up, because the author of Harry Potter, JK Rowling, has turned her idealism away from a sort of middle class moderate liberalism toward bigotry and transphobia. This is not, I need to be clear, my interpretation of “controversial” statements that she has made. Her words are not being twisted. JK Rowling does not believe that transgender people of any age deserve to be recognized, respected, cared for, or given equal rights and protections. Here is a record of some tweets she wrote about it. Here’s an exhaustive timeline of her transphobia. Here’s why defending her is bullshit. I could go on, but you know this. You should know this. This is the internet. You should know, or you can easily find out, that JK Rowling is spending a lot of time with some fucked up hateful people and that she said that trans people were not victims of the Nazis.
When this started, back in 2019, it became a sort of edge test for people who still enjoyed or engaged with Harry Potter — will you still watch the movies? Will you read the books? Would you see the play? Will you go to the theme park?
And so what, some death of the author nerds might be asking, why would Rowling becoming an absolute bigot prevent you from reading Harry Potter, or watching it, or visiting the theme park land? She’s a transphobe, so you can’t have a butterbeer? Really?
It seems ridiculous, but it’s less ridiculous than her clinging to a cruel ideology. And many of us agreed: we love trans people more than we love Harry Potter. The choice was made.
In 2017, Forbes reported that JK Rowling made $95 million in a 12 month period. The largest chunk of that was from royalty sales of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which had been released in print in 2016 and was newly staged on the West End. The second largest chunk was from the three Wizarding World locations in Florida, California, and Japan. Now that Rowling doesn’t have any new Potter books out — and I assume the Robert Galbraith books aren’t as monumentally gangbusters — it stands to reason that a majority of her income comes from licensing merchandise. This is where Rowling’s demands come in.
The SEC has the original contract between Rowling, Warner Bros, and Universal available to peruse online, which I have, but thankfully Alecia Stella did a write up for Park Stop here that breaks down the important parts. Rowling and WB, who share the rights to Harry Potter (Essentially, Rowling owns the rights via books and WB via films), essentially get a cut of anything that has a Harry Potter trademarked name and can be purchased by a guest. Butterbeer, candies, robes, wands, any souvenirs, even on-ride photos — all of them add dollars and cents into Rowling’s purse, which she can, of course, spend on whatever she likes, including a £70,000 donation for a transphobic activist group in Scotland, or she’ll buy another TERF shirt, who’s to say. She certainly doesn’t mind the money, as she herself has admitted:
I generally believe that disavowal is a “your mileage may vary” situation, which is more or less the theory at the center of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, last year’s very good and somewhat frustratingly incomplete read on how we reconcile the monstrous behavior of people who create art we enjoy. Dederer’s thesis that I relate to the most is, more or less, that no matter what choice you make — maybe you never engage with that art again, maybe you do in secret, maybe you do with caveats, etc — you’re not so much dealing with the monstrosity of the artist so much as how you take on those contradictions. But even that is not the answer; your choice to disavow, or to consume with caveats, or whatever, is still complicated, as we exist in a world where morality itself cannot be achieved by checking a box:
“You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end. The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.”
And yet, sometimes, the choices still do matter: take, for example, the BDS Movement that has existed for decades in opposition to Israeli occupation in Palestine, which clearly directs supporters to withhold funds or to focus protest against certain individuals or companies that will directly impact the presence and power of Israel. Choosing to support BDS might make someone feel like a good person, but the action of doing so can be considered a positive one, even if the impact is small.
We make the impact where we can, and the rest we wrestle with in whatever way we can, however we can accomplish peace with ourselves.
For the average consumer, though, JK Rowling is a much easier entity to boycott and divest from. It’s right there in the title: stop going to the Wizarding World. Don’t go to the movies, if they ever happen again, and don’t watch the cynical cash-grab remake show on HBO. Don’t go to the multiple “experiences” and “pop ups” or stores, and definitely don’t see the play. If you must, rent the films or watch them on old physical media, read the books you already own, support artists who aren’t affiliated with the Wizarding World company. Learn how to make your own Butterbeer. Because you love trans people more than you love Harry Potter.
Perhaps, for some, the situation is more complicated. For some, they might be tied down for good.
What about the journalists and influencers whose jobs depend on their going to the parks, sampling the foods, engaging with the merchandise and the entertainment? Since just before the pandemic, influencers — especially YouTube vloggers — have made a significant space for themselves in theme park coverage, becoming mainstays at press events and receiving special access to the parks and creative teams. This access provides them with legitimacy, which helps boost subscribers, and with that AdSense revenue, merchandise, Patreon subscriptions, and so on. Most vloggers are millennials or younger and appear to be politically moderate or to the left; many cover Pride events in park and encourage diversity and inclusion amongst their viewers, or praise representation when they see it. And yet — there they are, buying a new wand, or a Spirit Jersey, or encouraging their viewers to do the same. Rowling herself is never mentioned, or cheekily referred to as “she who must not be named,” disavowel in a weak statement and no action at all.
Their options aren’t great: there’s the choice to make the brave statement, refuse to cover Harry Potter content, which may make them out of favor with Universal. Then there’s a financial option, to offset the cost of visiting the land by donating to charity or something of the like; this may just rub some fans the wrong way either for seeming insubstantial or by being too political for a theme park video. Or, there’s the road already traveled, to visit the land, enjoy it, report on it, reap whatever rewards, and in private lament that it has to be at the expense of Rowling’s benefit. Some may say this is complicated, others cowardice. Like I said before, mileage may vary.
And then, of course, there’s Universal itself — surely Warner Brothers has a lot to handle with JK Rowling being both a huge asset and an increasing liability — but if you remember before the Wizarding World opened in 2008, Universal Orlando wasn’t considered to be much of a competitor with Disney World. In the 15 years since, that’s changed substantially.
Within the first quarter after Wizarding World opened, Universal’s revenue rose 62%, continuing to nearly double year over year. Attendance alone at Islands of Adventure in the following year was up 31%. The additional revenue — which again rose a few years later when Universal opened a second half of the land in Universal Studios — encouraged additional investment in Universal’s parks, the crown jewel of which will be next year’s entirely new park, Epic Universe.
Epic Universe (full name Universal Epic Universe), according to theme park Twitter, is going to make Walt Disney World shit itself. The park, which is (more or less) another Islands of Adventure but with a much higher budget, is the first theme park to open in Central Florida since 1999, and will feature lands based on Super Nintendo, How to Train your Dragon, Universal Monsters, a central dining and shopping area and, of course, the Wizarding World. This is not by chance: in the contract that WB and Rowling signed with Universal, there is a requirement that Harry Potter be included in any new parks that Universal builds, and that the content therein be of the highest possible caliber.
It’s hard for me to imagine Universal being able to get to Epic Universe without having had the success of the first Wizarding World. The land was revolutionary, ushering in a new style of immersive theming that is, for better or worse, becoming more and more in fashion across multiple parks and companies. Universal creative was a place where people wanted to work, and the company was willing to invest in what they had to make — all because of an incredible proof of concept that, 15 years later, has transfigured itself into a tiger that they’re holding by the tail; on one hand the most money-making property that they’ve ever put into a theme park, on the other a more and more outdated story that is impossible to untangle from its creator, a woman becoming more notorious and disliked by younger generations with each passing day.
Many people will read this, or hear someone share this argument, and say that it doesn’t matter, or that you should let people enjoy things, or that telling someone not to go to the Harry Potter theme park is exactly what George Orwell was talking about in 1984 (that one is true, go read the first comment on this ITM post). If you think that your freedom is so important that you need to ally yourself with JK Rowling, I cannot stop you. If you do think that you can love trans people and love Harry Potter and that there is no potential for hypocricy there, only so much can be said and the rest must be understood over time. I do believe that every person, if given the chance, can reach the right side of history on their own, and I welcome everyone who does. But if you already understand everything that is at play — if you know where the money is going, if you know what Rowling is saying and doing, if you know who is being impacted by it, and you go anyway — yes, even those YouTubers and influencers who do it for work — you know the right choice, and you turned back. Maybe your mileage varies between cowardice and complexity, but I know where I stand, and I wish that they were brave.
This was a fairly straightforward argument; we didn’t even broach any of the other issues with Rowling/Harry Potter (the fatphobia, the antisemitism, the slavery), how the lands might not actually be that good, which, I wrote about in my former blog space a few years ago, but if I were to write it again I would point out that three of the big rides take place in a school, a bank, and a government building (the Universal Epic Universe land will take place in the Ministry of Magic, which is like if you made a theme park inside Parliament) and the other ride is themed after a large half-giant man and is notoriously restrictive to plus-sized riders.
I also didn’t get into more of the discourse around Disney vs Universal because, for one, they’re corporations and we shouldn’t care who “wins” unless winning involves benefits for their employees, and for two, the entire argument is deeply cynical and staged: Disney is seen as the larger of the two and thus more fun to shit on, whereas Universal is praised despite still being behind in several aspects, which are not worth discussing here, nor do I really care to discuss the cost of tickets and skip-the-line passes (in short: everything at both of these locations costs way more than it should and is not designed to be any more user friendly than it can get away with, but that doesn’t mean that it’s inaccessible, impossible to understand, or absolute garbage. Voilá, my take).
The only moment that I will bring up is that, in 2022 when Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans were pushing to enact the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Disney was lambasted for being silent on the measure despite having thousands of employees in the state (several groups, including the HRC, refused donations from the company), and for having given campaign contributions to politicians in favor of the measure. Disney did eventually come out against the bill, which led to an infamous spat with DeSantis, all of which was fodder for social media. Disney were cowards, then they were inauthentic with an about face, then they were tough for standing up to DeSantis, then the whole thing petered out. Universal Orlando, who also employs thousands and also donated to the same politicians, was silent the entire time. They weren’t held to a shred of the accountability — perfomative or otherwise — that the online community asked of Disney.
I personally don’t believe that Disney was ever acting out of altruism here, or that Universal would have been either — what interests me is the narrative being employed online. Even now, if you look back through Twitter, you’ll find scores of posts about Disney’s stance on the situation, and nothing about Universal, only the occasional question as to why they’re silent. There was no targeted rage for this silence, no cynical takedown, no criticism. Discourse, to me, is not interesting because of its subjects but because of what is being said; in this case one party’s feet were readily held to the fire and another’s never were, despite having arguably a similar amount of responsibility to speak out (if you believe that to be important). And, then, there’s that elephant in the room again: how could they speak out against a law that targets the LGBTQIA community when their fortune was owed to a transphobe?
There has been much wishful thinking in the former-Harry Potter fan community. The dream is that Warner Bros, finally fed up with JK Rowling’s antics, will buy out her shares and take over control of the property and start making newer, better Wizarding World stories, ones that are inclusive and multicultural and not those awful Fantastic Beasts films. When I talk to people who used to be fans, we discuss how Rowling “should have been like George Lucas”, in the way that the creator of Star Wars let others in to expand his universe in films, books, video games, and television, first in the literal Expanded Universe and now with Disney’s ventures with Lucasfilm. Even if she weren’t a horrible person, JK Rowling’s single focus has been bad for Harry Potter and the Wizarding World as a franchise, as her own politics and lack of understanding the world around her became more and more apparent as the stories grew (and yes, here’s the Shaun video about some of those things, its very good). What if we’d gotten the story of Indigenous wizards as told by actual Indigenous writers? What if we actually had queer representation instead of the after-the-fact of Dumbledore being gay? What if anyone, literally anyone else wrote those movies? Could we go to the park, then? Can we finally try out that Hagrid ride?
I won’t hold my breath, and neither should you. I don’t think that a media conglomerate buying a franchise is going to save the day. Even now, in this moment, I am trying to recollect how Harry Potter felt for me before all of this happened, and the truth is that it wasn’t so much a story as it was a vibe — old castles, magic, sweaters and robes and crackling fireplaces. Perhaps thats why Harry Potter is, after Star Wars, the most merchandisable brand in the world. I understand the temptation to consume it. But that feeling exists in other stories, other places, other people, in love that is real and kind.
Not everyone will stop going to the Wizarding World. It is a tragedy that they still go, especially those who know better, especially those who say they are still allies, that they have no choice. I wholly reject this idea; if nothing else, all great stories are about making a choice. Mine has been made, and wherever I go, I hope to see you there.
If you want to and are able to support the trans community that is being targeted by figures such as JK Rowling and Ron DeSantis, I more than encourage you to do so. As a native Floridian, I support PRISM (which operates near my hometown), Orlando’s The Center, and the statewide Equality Florida, as well as the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project. I also am a great admirer of Mermaids, a group that supports trans youth and their families in the UK, where Rowling’s rhetoric has the most harmful impact. Please give where you can, give locally (or to small charities in impacted areas) instead of to larger nonprofits, and spread the word with allies. Happy Pride.
