Boycotting JK Rowling really seems like a losing game. The latest waves (on social media and beyond) against the writer accused of “transphobia” for her rather decisive positions – and it goes without saying also questionable – on the fact that it is not enough to define oneself as a woman to be considered such in all respects have miserably smashed against the wall of unstoppable success. The website acutallité.com did some math in her pocket, in a year that had begun with yet another appeal to boycott the new TV series dedicated to Harry Potter (it will be broadcast on the HBO channel) announced last April, in addition to the video game released in February. She, who is often quite sharp and uncompromising on Twitter, had commented that she was already stocking up on champagne.
Between Christmas and New Year he must have started toasting, and generously, considering that the video game sold 22 million copies all over the world, which makes it the best seller of the year (in fact, another one was immediately put in the pipeline) , and the series produced by Warner Discovery plans to last at least ten years (under the guidance of Rowling herself). It was in fact a spectacular 2023, between reprints, luxury re-editions, theatrical adaptations: the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child broke various records on Broadway, earning Rowling more than ten million dollars; the audiobooks on the Pottermore website increased profits by another 5 million pounds, not to mention normal bookshop sales (which for example in the UK recorded an increase of 15 percent compared to 2022).
The success has been unstoppable, proving that the fear of boycotts is sometimes greatly overestimated. For the most part, whether they are declared or simply “smelled” in the air, they scare the producers of objects or foodstuffs (a bit like in the case of Chiara Ferragni) and even some publishers, but essentially they galvanize above all the activists who propose them and the their social bubbles. It should also be remembered, in this regard, that already four years ago most of the film cast, however
out of conviction or out of caution, he had sided against her, hastening to distance himself: including Daniel Radcliffe, who plays the boy wizard in the series. Already at that moment the contagion effect seemed unstoppable: it was instead an optical effect. Ultimately, boycotts, if global success is involved, are paper tigers. And JK Rowling, who must be quite a character, is having a blast. Especially on X, with tweets. It seems that she is conducting her own particular social experiment. Not without a certain perfidiousness.