Hogwarts Legacy Made A Controversial Villain Choice

gamerant.com:

Avalanche Software has released a lot of information on their highly anticipated game,Hogwarts Legacy, with critics and gamers alike quickly digesting all the released details. The game appears to have a lot of moving parts from learning spells, brewing potions, exploring the castle, and broomstick riding. As for the story, it has been revealed that the protagonist will be putting a stop to a Goblin Rebellion.

This villain reveal has a lot of gamers uneasy, as Harry Potter's goblins have been a controversial subject for a while now as anti-Semitic symbols. While the books had them described with hooked noses and being secretive bankers, the films pushed the controversy further by making the goblins nearly identical to Jewish characters in Nazi propaganda. This controversy is not old, though it got most people's attention when Jon Stewart mentioned it. For Hogwarts Legacy to choose these characters to take the role of villain is a strange and tone-deaf move for a game already trying to overcome much of J.K. Rowling's controversy.

Hogwarts Legacy Shouldn’t Reward Players for Using Dark Magic

J.K. Rowling did not invent goblins, but she made them something entirely different from how goblins work in folklore. In folklore, goblins are chaotic and range from tricksters to evil. They did not really become their own fantasy race until J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his books. Rowling made the goblins her own by making them highly intelligent as well as creators and overseers of wizard economy with no alignment to chaos.

They are a little alike to house-elves in that they are subservient to wizards and are forbidden from having wands of their own. In the 1400s, there were even wizards that got kicks out of killing goblins, such as the famous