Disrupting Fandom, Collective Action, and Social Justice: Organizing Identity and Boycotting Hogwarts Legacy

Between November 2022 and February 2023, JK Rowling’s persistent anti-trans political advocacy incited a boycott of the Hogwarts Legacy video game release, sparking debate and controversy among fans of the Wizarding World. In this study, we examine Redditors’ engagement with this controversy by analyzing their narrative sensemaking processes and communicative enactment of resilience in response to it through a combination of computational and qualitative methods. Specifically, we describe how users navigated tensions among three interrelated pairings of individual identifications and collective praxes: fan/fandom, activist/collective action, and ally/social justice. We explore how these tensions manifested as organizational paradoxes in the Redditors’ talk about the boycott: (1) identifying as a fan while organizing for social justice; (2) identifying as an ally while organizing collective action; and (3) identifying as an activist while organizing as a fandom. From this analysis, we articulate implications (1) for understanding fan community organizing amidst disruption and (2) for analyzing narrative aesthetics and social justice with theoretical and practical opportunities for advocacy and organizing.