Shameless ripoffs are in. You reckon everyone's got to all the good ideas already? Who cares! Steal 'em! Used to be the worst thing you could be called (at least in rock critic land, from whose unlustrous shores I safely sailed long ago) was - gulp - "derivative". As in, deriving from something. As if you could do anything else. A person is a sluice of their context, inevitably, and as one screams from womb to tomb, clumps of cultural detritus ("inspiration") cling to one's static field like lint. Clean out your washing machine once in a while, shake off the grit, and you might find art.
Case in point: the zoomies seem keen to pin all Millennials as embarrassing Harry Potter Adults. And, yeah. Some of my not-yet-vintage-but-of-the-same-vintage kin happened to align almost perfectly with its progression, imagining themselves the secret fifth character from childhood to graduation (the fourth character is Hogwarts.) That stays with a person. It stays with a person a little shorter than it would otherwise when the progenitor of your indelible experience klaxon-calls their fuckheadedness to the universe. Take me back to train platforms named after regular integers please, I'd rather be a muggle.
As a zygote I never really cared to know about JK Rowling so her respawning into a leader of the Intellectual Dipshit Web was about the biggest declaration of her personality I'd ever heard. All the trivia I knew about her when I was still a Harry Potter Child was her middle name and that she uh, paid her taxes (???) because it was the right way to pay back a social welfare system that allowed her to write the books. Those of us destined only to pay our taxes for less magnanimous reasons (not wanting to go to jail) may have lived a beautiful rest of our lives having enshrined the Harry Potter universe in ignorant bliss. For a long time I figured, man, too bad she fucked that all up, oh well! Then there was a point I realised, man, it is too bad she fucked that all up, which was when I played Hogwarts Legacy.
Hogwarts Legacy's ha ha legacy will be for its discourse more than its gameplay. Its impending release was incendiary as all lightning rods for CuLtUrE wAr are. The shout-y discourse completely flattened nuance. But it would: there is nothing nuanced about the trans suicide rate, about hate crimes committed against trans people, and about validating the unspoken and ridiculous fears of millions of regressive cowards, which is what JK Rowling's tour de fuckwit has amounted to. Faced with an existential threat to a whole demographic of disenfranchised people and their allies, the idea that there should be patient debate is scandalous. Forget this game forever. But before you do, let's take something for our trouble.
Hogwarts Legacy is the game everyone saw when they played the Chamber of Secrets game in 2002, or almost the game purely booky types saw in their unconstrained imagination. You roam the dorms, go to class, chop it up with the cool professors, broomstick through the parapets, raise magical monsters, and ragdoll dark wizards around the Forbidden Forest like you're Tommy Vercetti in Magic Vice City. They even get the Room of Requirement in there. The game handily weaves these mechanics together with something called "a plot", a nuisance developers invented to give structure to unbridled joy. It's fine. It's set way in the past before all that Voldemort shit happened so they don't have to bristle against The Lore, but they also mercifully dodge doing that Star Wars thing of every character is this or that guy's dad. Who cares.
But the plot-adjacent stuff? It's crisp. Growing up I know you read those books thinking if I had a rocket launcher the size of a spatula that could also turn people into spiders I'd be doing way more than these noobs. Congrats, Hogwarts Legacy arms children like it's an RNC fever dream. A ton of spells slot into a spellbar of four that you can use with your buttons, but another button shifts to a whole second spellbar. What this means is once you start packing that grimoire with everything from transfiguration spells to utilitarian classics (your revelios, your leviosaaas, etc.) to the hellfire missiles every spell in the movies became, you will: need to choose your eight carefully, need to choose which bar to assign them to carefully, and learn how to switch between them carefully to combine them at the right time. The result is an unbelievably fluid magical combat system that feels more like the way Avatar: The Last Airbender looks than anything in the Harry Potter films. Chaining these spells just right - to accio some Dark Goon straight to you, throwing him into a tree, freezing him, cutting his frozen limbs into deli meat, transforming his mate into an exploding barrel, and then throwing that barrel into his mate in the span of a few seconds - is what dreams are made of.
This is no Hogwarts Legacy essay here, but it could be for how many of these little things it gets right, or glimpses at almost-incredible things it could perfect. The foundation for something totally definitive is present. I caught myself wondering what Hogwarts Legacy 2 would be like, but it's conflicted. Yeah, I do think it's something that the devs got a trans character into this world when the series' origin point is a bile-filled loser. But it's conflicted because fuck JK Rowling, but also when the credits rolled and hundreds of non-JK Rowling names whose prior years had gone into building these incredible systems which Rowling deserves no credit for at all, I thought it seemed kind of unfair that one person had the authority to diminish their effort. Not wrong, just unfair. Rowling apparently had nothing to do with this game, but sales from it naturally feed her coffers. That's not inconsequential 'cos folks, you already know we've got a bad deal where money and relevance have a painful correlation. I left Hogwarts Legacy wishing these brilliant, creative people had just made the same game without the Harry Potter dressing.
I left Hogwarts Legacy wishing these brilliant, creative people had just made the same game without the Harry Potter dressing.
That's enough Harry Potter, let's go down a different fork, Like, forking software. You ever forked a program? What the hell? Lookit: in programmer world, a bunch of people make a program. It becomes a big deal (or maybe not.) Other people get feelings about it, how it should be grown or developed or changed. Sometimes those feelings grow large enough that people take it into their own hands and they copy the program and rebrand it. Jerks Corp keeps making Xtreme Calculator for Android but progressively shoves more adware shit into it, while Cool Guys LLC copy the source code and release their own version, hopefully with less (or no!) adware shit, and probably a bunch of other features the community had been asking for which Jerks Corp didn't wanna implement. Sometimes this is pretty much illegal; sometimes, depending on the license of the original program, it's totally legal, but guaranteed to piss off Jerks Corp because if the fork takes off they won't make any money.
These aren't always done for ideological reasons, but they're notable when they are. In these cases, they're an occasion when a mass of people commit a collective action to reshape something they need under their stewardship, where the previous stewards have abandoned that community (or at least been rude to one more scene-y programmer than they should've been.) The strangulating hydra that copyright has become is clearly a nightmare, which is why Steamboat Willie entering public domain was a big thing for a week. Forking is a very powerful standard for allowing software to grow and change, especially when software development in general risks being dominated by a few massive players.
A few months after Hogwarts Legacy, Vanity Fair published a massive story about the culture in the writer's room on LOST. Well, shit. I'd been floating LOST as a flawed-but-brilliant series since Oceanic Flight 815 first got sand in its nose. Like, friends have bought me unofficial LOST merchandise. For a birthday. I was there with millions of other people, theorising week to week, reading the recaps (RIP Videogum), holding on in glorious suffering during the ascendance of watching TV on social media. The showrunner, it turns out, was a chaotic, racist asshole. The story was long but it was nauseating to read the accounts of so many people who had passed through the room, writing stories I'd watched a dozen times, accumulating grief and trauma by the experience. I thought I might never watch LOST again, and it felt unfair that one person had the authority to diminish all that effort.
Maybe we should just fork it. Not the show, that's done. Not Hogwarts Legacy, it's been and gone. But their universes, characters, relationships, the interactions and impact. If singular freaks can lock the blueprints of an unforgettable experience in a vault buried under their toxic reputation, we should learn how to crack a safe. If these people can't be trusted with these works, creative forking could remove the massive, cancerous obstacle metastasising on them: their ownership.
Let's not try talking around it: a creative fork is intellectual property theft, which is only a drag if you think "intellectual property" is the result of your heretical divine provenance and not, as previously stated, a clump of lint-art comprised of detritus just soggy enough that centrifugal force could bind it to more detritus. i.e. it puts the "common" in "the commons" and what could be more common than inspiration + execution? Just about everyone knows how to "think" and "do". Carl Sagan once said "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." (Hell he probably ganked that from someone else too.) Did you invent the universe? If not: friend, you might return the favour of the people who grew and plucked your proverbial apples by paying the harvest forward for others. (If you did invent the universe though, slide into my DMs, I have Some Questions.)
Less loftily, what're we talking about here? A creative fork is not taking source code or tangible materials from some series. It's responding to the crisis of an influential and terrible creator by taking as much as possible away from them, and doing better -- hopefully in a way that supplants them entirely. It wasn't, I figure, probably, for most people, the idea of going to witch school and and finding out you're a future flying/teleporting snake chatter-upperer that former Harry Potter fans now hate about the series. It was its unapologetic and now irredeemable vomit-hose of a creator. The success of their original work has spawned a ton of spin-offs, some which they've had varying input into but largely the efforts of tens of thousands of creative, rigorous people.
JK Rowling didn't direct or write the films, star in the scenes, supervise shot continuity, design and build the special effects or the CGI. She didn't do the colour grade or the compositing. She didn't build the set or the props. She didn't program the game, model the assets, spend months retopologising 3D geometry and running physics sims. She didn't sew or patch the costumes, pull wires or run lights or mop sweat off the stage at theatre performances. She didn't write any of the trillions of words of fanfiction, plenty of which use the Harry Potter world to explore trans stories of established or newly imaginative characters.
Creatively speaking she is the least important element of Harry Potter's gigantic imprint on the culture. But her deleterious impact on this universe built by thousands is, at least in terms of cultural memory, larger than all of them put together. Her biggest achievement in life is being such a horrible blight on public discourse that it permanently stains everyone even tangentially associated with her work. Dare to dream of a future in which her second biggest achievement was inspiring a flourishing of art almost identical to the Harry Potter universe which becomes, like the rest of her existence, a bit of snobby trivia, like "Did you know Hugo Boss designed suits for the Nazis?" I didn't even know Hugo Boss was the name of some guy; can one give the future a vast wizarding world in which they've forgotten JK Rowling as well?
This isn't a plea to welcome selective parts of Harry Potter back into your heart. This thing is tainted and there can't be a Harry Potter universe any more. It should be condemned to the past. Instead, a creative fork is an option for how to proceed when the creator of a thing reveals their gruesome interior. If the alternative is waiting around, any time you fall in love with something new, to lose it forever when its author is horribly amplified, how can you love with the fullness art warrants?
The software dev world has already shown that taking everything about a property but its name off the gremlins who spawned it is a great benefit to everyone. Unfortunately a standard like open source software doesn't yet exist in the creative space yet. I've always been a proponent of Creative Commons and I'd like to see a resurgence. In the mean time, those money farmers hoarding creative franchises like battery farm hens hide, the sobbing cowards, behind copyright. Replacing copyright is a long battle. In the mean time, we oughta just steal.
Replacing copyright is a long battle. In the mean time, we oughta just steal.
Mashup fans, shout out: you can already see this is an extension of remix culture. But where remix culture is so heavy on addressing copyright predominantly for its restrictive legislative nature by addition/subtraction/commentary/transmutation, a creative fork is about preservation and progression. If you want actually the Harry Potter world without the attachment of its toxifying influence, a fork is necessary. Forking implies a total separation, a denial of its source, where a remix always exists in relation to the source. A remix might recontextualise, but a creative fork tries to preserve the context, at least at first. A creative fork doesn't exist alongside its source, it supplants it by offering a freedom from the original. A remix says "look what we made with this." A creative fork says "You made this? No, we made this. Get lost."
Lotta folks still play the Pokemon games. You got your Pikachus, sure, but now a whole bunch of other freaks. Every time a new batch of little freaks. A badger with a punk haircut. A platypus with a guitar, or something. You know the (bee)drill. But a lot of those folks agree: these games have basically sucked for a straight decade. Like the Chamber of Secrets thing, everyone who's played a Pokemon game has had some daydream about what it could be with the massive scope and technology of a modern video game. Every year we get some Assassin's Creed or Elder Scrolls-type game that, regardless of its flaws, shows just how far developers can push a huge 3D world now. That fidelity and scale, filled with the mechanics of an RPG genre which has grown exponentially in the past 15 years, should make a Pokemon flavour of the same a slam dunk.
Instead, the developers of the Pokemon games - Game Freak - have been dive bombing the bottom of the barrel. A few years ago the games finally made the shift to a third dimension, but just about nothing had changed. Promising and imaginative features of previous games (like being able to build and decorate a home base out in the wild) didn't make it. They'd gone 3D but regressed in so many other ways. The games have never been especially difficult, not that they need to be, but over the past generations of games Game Freak had been phasing out some of the subtle complexity to the simple-seeming systems. By Pokemon Sword and Shield, the game was so easy that even baseline systems like type advantage didn't matter. You could put down everything in sight with the first Pokemon you got.
This month, the indie studio Pocketpair released a game called Palworld. Since its announcement in 2021, it has been called "Pokemon with guns." Your character can use guns (and bows, spears, pick axes, woodcutting axes, grappling guns, etc.) This needs no description once you've seen an image of the game.
In the first five days after release, Palworld sold seven million copies. It was the second fastest selling game on Steam ever. Why? Besides savvy marketing (giving pre-release copies to a bunch of streamers to stream the game in the week before), the game finally, finally delivers on promises the Pokemon games have made since inception, but bizarrely left to rot. The home-y base you could build and decorate in Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire is now a fully automatable base-building sim in Palworld. Just about the whole world is open, meaning if you see a cool mountain in the far distance, you can run across the world and climb it if you want. Or jump on the back of one of the Pals (Palworld's name for Pokemon) and fly there. You can raise and hatch Pals, a deceptively simple system I've already spent whole days experimenting with. There's also a lot more to fighting other Pals too. Wild Pals will come for your ass with everything they've got, meaning you better sprint, dodge, and hide while your own Pal does the work or you're gonna be bones bleaching in the sun, buddy. Yeah, like the headlines say, there are guns, and you can shoot Pals. While this could just be a meme in another developer's hands, weapons are pretty useless against them and mostly effective against other people in the world, who will try to rush you in the wild or straight up siege your base, blowing up everything they can see.
This is no Palworld essay here, but it could be for how many of these little things it gets right, or glimpses at almost-incredible things it could perfect. Unlike Hogwarts Legacy, Palworld is only in Early Access, which is what we used to call "public beta". In other words, very unfinished. Even in this state, there isn't one aspect on which it isn't a vast improvement over any Pokemon game released in the last decade. Yet! Since announcement, it's been "Pokemon with guns". Just about everyone, from fans to detractors, is on board with this being a Pokemon ripoff in some regard. And they're all gunning to play it anyway. Where some people diverge is that it also incorporates elements from other base-building, RPG, and survival games, and there's a segment of the discourse that can't decide whether it's a ripoff of Pokemon, or xyz other game. The one thing in agreement is that conceptually, Palworld is shamelessly derivative. It swaddles itself in the unrealised potential of its inspiration's forebears who've become languid about their product. Debates rage about how many days Palworld has left before Pokemon's parents sue. That's how strong the consensus is: that there's very little doubt Game Freak or Nintendo could at least take a run at locking up Palworld in litigation. Pocketpair are indie devs, they made this game on a shoestring budget. Nintendo is an unstoppable force. Nintendo have at least threatened to "investigate and take appropriate measures" about it.
The worst that can be said about Game Freak and Nintendo is that they're lazy, letting a world with enormous promise wilt as long as the money printer goes brrrr. Clearly not the same as the existential concerns of funding transphobia. What the situations share is a decades-long frustration that their sources of inspiration were in the stranglehold of their condemnable creators, whether malicious or indifferent. And which have now been far more completely realised than their creators' were capable of doing. While progress on copyright law stagnates, a creative fork creates a new starting point. Where it goes next may wildly diverge - that's the thing about a fork in the road - but if it veers too wildly or slumps to a stop, the community can just fork it again. You have to embrace the ripoff first though. Barthes' assertion that "the author is dead" is taken for granted now; most audiences understand that their experiences with art aren't defined by its creator. But for the author to really die, the audience has to starve them of oxygen first. If they don't deserve their creation, take it away from them and share it. It was never really theirs to begin with.