I don’t trust this game to do it, but honestly? What I feel like would go a long way is a note from the devs in the character creator that just straight up acknowledges it.

“We wanted all options in the character creator to be independent to help include more people and let people make more unique characters, but we…

The Percy Jackson series comes to mind. 

I’m begging any game studio to make Legally Distinct Wizard School Game, a Saints Row to Hogwarts Legacy’s GTA.

I think you may have given this more thought than Rowling.

In a sense, this article isn’t really about Harry Potter, no one expects any progress from the franchise, and no one will trust any attempt they make. HP/Rowling is just the catalyst.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re not trying to be confrontational.

I mean, what can I say? It’s punching down.

I’ve accepted that there probably won’t be any sort of good answer any time soon. For any game that requires a binary gender (either for lore or mechanics), the best you can seem to hope for is letting body type, voice, pronoun, and genitalia (when relevant) be independent choices.

Yeah, it’s weird. Orson Scott Card wrote a wonderful book about learning to accept others who are so different from you that it’s genuinely difficult to put yourself in their shoes (Speaker for the Dead), and then has spent the rest of his life hating LGBT+ people. It’s baffling.

Her anti-trans stance just seems so crazy given the world she created. People can turn into animals whenever they want and they all, at least partly, identify as those animals. She dedicated quite a bit of time to a potion that can not only change someone’s gender, if they choose, but turn them into an actual other…

You’re right, people believing differently than you doesn’t make them hateful. Too bad that’s not the argument I was making.

Hmm, yes and no, it’s not a zero sum proposition. ie, it doesn’t necessarily become incumbent on me to tell you how to fix an issue I may not know how to fix just because I’m pointing out the aforementioned issue with your project. A project can be criticized by the customer and the onus of changing it falls to the…

The sad fact of the matter is

I love Chick-fil-A sandwiches to death, being from the South.

It’s an attempt at a step forward (or rather revealing something implemented for a while) but it doesn’t change the fact it’s still a set dressing for a fictional project that will give money to someone in the real world actively pushing to strip transpeople of their civil rights.

and the lead developer is a gamer-gater/woman hating libertarian.

Yeah it’s a nice step forward but I’m still not buying this game because I refuse to give Joann my money.

Pokémon: Breath of the Wild, huh? Using a region other than Kanto? Feudal Japan-like designs of traditional items (like these awesome pokéballs?) Fighting and dethroning God?

But here’s the thing about that, it implies there’s a single moment of the game where I don’t have a penguin. Piplip being a non-starter is a non-starter for me.

Off to a good start...