Harry Potter shows where to draw the line with Universes Beyond

On February 10th, Hasbro announced, through its shareholder report, partnerships with four brands: Harry Potter, K-Pop Demon Hunters, Street Fighter, and Voltron. Except for K-Pop Demon Hunters, none of these partnerships directly involve Wizards of the Coast, the company behind Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons.

These are products for Hasbro's toy sector, created to promote the new HBO Harry Potter series and the new live-action Street Fighter movie. It makes sense — it's been the company's core business for decades.

But the announcement carried a layer of subtext and ambiguity. Harry Potter, specifically, mentions "role play and collectibles". Dungeons & Dragons is role-play. Magic: The Gathering is collectibles. The door was left open. Whether intentional or not, it was.

The Magic community noticed, discussed, and reacted poorly. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has a long history of transphobia and recurrent activism against trans rights, with public, reiterated, and at times aggressive positioning.

On the other side, there's a Magic audience on social media that is very vocal about LGBTQIA+ inclusion being one of the card game's fundamental pillars. In early February, Tolarian Community College ran a campaign that raised $ 600.000 for Trans Lifeline.

The fight within Magic is nothing new either. In 2019, Autumn Burchett played a Mythic Championship with basic lands inscribed with "No Terf on Gruul Turf" and other messages against transphobia. Those lands were illustrated by Terese Nielsen, an artist who worked for 25 years illustrating Magic cards and gradually presented more radical views on transgender people. Wizards cut ties with Nielsen in 2020, after the illustrator supported— through donations—causes linked to far-right conspiracy theory movements.

Wizards responded quickly to Hasbro's announcement. Within hours, they issued a statement saying Magic already has its own school of magic — Strixhaven — and has no plans to visit other schools. The statement may not have been as emphatic as some activists wanted, but the message was clear: Magic will not partner with Harry Potter, at least not now. Good thing it won't.

But let's look at what the announcement revealed, not just what was said: does the possibility actually exist? Yes. It's naive to think otherwise.

Wizards of the Coast is a subsidiary of Hasbro. It's a corporation. Harry Potter, despite all the controversies surrounding Rowling, is a powerful literary and audiovisual brand that spans generations and has mobilized fans for over two decades. It has all the elements that have motivated Universes Beyond partnerships so far.

For practical purposes, Wizards will never say "never" about Harry Potter. Companies don't do that with other companies when there's convergence in their spheres of interest. After all, society changes, and so do its values — a Harry Potter partnership fifteen years ago would have been met with celebration. Today it isn't. Tomorrow? Nobody knows.

The context of the announcement also matters. The partnerships were presented in a public document to shareholders — the perfect place to test the waters. The message was deliberately ambiguous when mentioning "role play and collectibles" for Harry Potter, opening the possibility that, at some point, this could include Wizards.

They needed to gauge how much the public would accept this decision. From a commercial standpoint — and businesses tend to have no moral bias — it made sense to test: Harry Potter still mobilizes legions of fans.

There's a new HBO series coming. Collectible products, film rereleases, and events related to Rowling's works are still well-received by many fans. Often out of nostalgia, passion, or fond memories of simpler times. Sometimes there's even the opportunity to connect with children through a literary work that spans generations.

The more active part of this discussion on social media tends to frame debates with moral biases about fans' attachment to the Harry Potter universe, claiming it's impossible to separate support for the work from J.K. Rowling's initiatives against trans people. But the overall judgment serves as scrutiny for a discussion that involves more than that and demands some amount of introspective reflection.

How much would each person be willing to give up long-term passions for certain universes, stories, characters, and important childhood memories — how much would they be willing to renounce what all that meant — in favor of a cause or for the right of other people to exist without suffering verbal or institutional attacks from the authors of that work?

The answer may seem simple, but it isn't. Humans aren't coherent. We can defend certain causes and propagate hatred against others. We can be inclusive with some minority groups and act with contempt toward others. We have individual or collective values we can't always uphold using the same moral yardstick we'd apply to other matters—we're masses of contradictions. Our beliefs tend not to be as universal when they touch things intimately close to us or so distant we can't see them.

As for the Magic community, however, the response was emphatic: we don't want this.

As every company, Wizards/Hasbro likes money. According to Mark Rosewater, the biggest consumer of Universes Beyond isn't the outside fan — it's the Magic audience. In theory, Harry Potter could have high sales volume for Magic: The Gathering. It might even surpass one of the three best-selling sets in history.

But it would come at a very steep cost: reputation with groups that have grown within the community in recent years. People for whom Wizards has promoted and promised that "Magic is for everyone." Groups that would feel personally attacked by a partnership with a brand whose author promotes hate and transphobia.

Magic's catalog doesn't need, in its range of partnerships, a brand that not only became exclusionary to a specific audience but was also transformed into a financial tool for policies and movements that drive the exclusion of those people's right to exist and live with dignity.

If there were doubts about how far Magic could go with Universes Beyond partnerships and how willingly the community would accept the collaborations, the answer has been given — they draw the line in Harry Potter.