Hey people. Grow up. You can be pissed off all you want. But the internet's a miracle of free speech. No one is breaking a law by naming their community 'kristallnacht' and besides, if it wasn't for the Nazi's making it what it means today it'd just be a bunch of words. Everyone's going to complain about SOMETHING. Grow up. Seriously. It's a bloody GAME. There are no Nazis running around gasing people in the game so I don't see why these extremists are blowing things out of proportion.

Are you honestly sitting at your computer seething and throwing things because of the name of a Harry Potter game? If you are...get help. FAST. You clearly have several mental issues you need to have looked into.

Oh and in case any of you know fuck all about HP, JK herself BASED her plot around...*gasp* WWII and Nazis!

Voldemort? Alot like Hitler.
Death Eaters? SS anyone?

So until you lot go and 'bring the internet' down on JK Rowling, quit picking on a group of people on the internet. Cyber-bullying makes you look lame.

And most of you likely have NO TIES WHATSOEVER with goings on during the Holocaust.

My great grandmother died in Dachau and I'm not even remotely offended by these girls. So grow up.

It's a bloody GAME.

See, this is the part I don't get. If it's just a bloody GAME, why all the heel digging about refusing to change the name? Why is it so damn important when it's obvious how much hurt this has caused? Why aren't people's feelings more important than some bloody GAME?

Because it's their game and they don't give a fuck about extremists whinging about how offensive it is. Neither do I. It's childish. If people just ignored them and left them alone they wouldn't notice to be offended.

Seriously. If you lot want a cause, join something REAL like P.E.T.A.

I'm not an extremist. I'm someone who disagrees with you.

And ignoring or leaving something you find offensive alone is exactly why injustice continues.

That's a great solution, I can't believe no one ever thought of that! I mean, if you ignore things, they don't exist, right? I can't believe it never occurred to anyone here that if they merely shut their eyes and pretended this didn't exist, it wouldn't offend them! Perhaps we can all use this as a mantra - IGNORE IT AND IT WILL GO AWAY. It's worked so well throughout history, after all.
And a hint: just because something doesn't offend you, personally, doesn't mean it's not offensive to other people. Or that other people don't have a perfect right to be offended.

As for your apparent belief that Holocaust rememberence isn't REAL like PETA, I can't comment. My vocabulary doesn't include words to describe my reaction.

I have seen very few cases of extremism here. People are getting heated, yes, but because it's a subject that is close to their hearts. It's not childish to be offended by something that opens up deep wounds, but it is childish to dismiss those wounds and trivialize the very valid points that have been brought up.

Ahhhh, you must be the Alan Dershowitz to navery's Johnny Cochrane.

WOWEEE.

Do you realize that you basically said that because the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews and 5 million Roms and physically and mentally handicapped and homosexual people, that we should be GLAD, because that gave this word that everyone is clinging to MEANING. (And you clearly don't understand that words HAVE meaning.)

Do you realize that? Wow, do I think you are one complete moron and very, very young. (Mentally.)

And so your g-grandma died in a concentration camp and WHATEV. Pffft. You just won the "I'm The Biggest Asshole!" award. *slow clap*

Wow. Are people here acting like 12 years old who have no idea about the impact of a tragedy like that on people's lives and cultures on purpose?

Because that's all I'm seeing here. Please, please. They are trivializing the Holocaust in a Harry Potter RPG. Yeah, in a game.

It's so easy to call 'extremist' to everyone who have suffered it and have to live with its sequels when you have the privilege to never have experienced something like that.

I haven't read Harry Potter, I can't tell you what JKR did, but I hope she had had more class than to bring the Holocaust in her fiction just for her own entertainment.

In Deathly Hallows, the way that the muggleborns were treated, tried and convicted without argument, forced to hide, gathered and tortured, yes, she has made plenty of references to it. Writing isn't all about entertainment. Writing is also about understanding and expression. We don't simply rp "because it's fun", we do it because we want a better understanding of what the world goes through, human reaction, and to better our writing abilities. Its fun and hard work at the same time, it doesn't mean that it's trivialized any more than anything else based off real life has been. If you want to pull fiction into it, Lord of the Rings could be considered just as bad. The Hobbit was written in the trenches of the first world war and heavily influenced the story and world as a whole. And so if the only right we have, in wanting to relate and understand is to have experienced it ourselves, well then most modern day authors are in the wrong.

Okay, I understand. You are right, writing isn't all about entertainment. That's why you can write about the Holocaust, WWII and make it respectful. But you have to know what you are writing. You have to know you can hurt people if you do it wrong.

I don't know how clear those references were. But there is a difference between making a 'like war' situation, and placing your story in a real life period where a tragedy occurred and completely ignore and dismiss that tragedy besides the place. Or the name. You just do it because your story will be 'more dark' like that. Do you see the difference?

Sometimes apologizing hurts much, much>/i> less.

We didn't do it just to make our game more dark. We did it because of the parellels that it has to the real event. We're not trying to dismiss the tragedy, we're trying to understand it through our writing. The HP fandom is where we write. JK Rowling technically started the war that is playing and it's based off what would have happened if her character Grindelwald hadn't necessarily been defeated after the end of ww2. He was in all parellels, Hitler, everything he did "was for the greater good" of their kind, like Hitler's politics towards the non arian races. The name Kristallnacht is used to show that parellel, because the same thing is occuring again.

And we have apologized, but the only apology people want is a name change, which we aren't willing to bow down to because it fits with our game and the connections it has.

But HP ISN'T about the Holocaust. No matter what you do you will offend people because it's a kid's fantasy series! You won't understand its villain because Hitler was a real life person who committed a genocide with real people.

which we aren't willing to bow down to because it fits with our game and the connections it has.

Good God. A 'fitting name' is more important than respecting other people's tragedy?

You see, you aren't writing about Hitler, you are writing about HP's villain. No matter which parallels were there, you are trivializing the tragedy because you aren't talking about the Holocaust.

It was something BIG that happened in reality.

The difference is, however, that while JKR did indeed parallel the Holocaust, she kept it as only a parallel. There were no tangible connections to RL events - she didn't use any real life events, groups, figures, etc. The same with LotR, the Narnia books, etc. All of those have real world parallels, but the authors kept them as parallels. They didn't bring any real world events into the fantasy.

That's the difference here. It's not that this game is taking parallels to real life events - parallels that no one will deny are in the source material - it's that it's strayed beyond parallels with the name. Using that name takes it a step beyond, by linking the fantasy parallel to a real world tragedy. The line between fictional parallels is negated with that, taking it out of the realm of fiction and expression. That is what most people are reacting to.

In other words, when you pull the wings off flies, you do it for the betterment of science and humanity benefits from your actions. You're an arteeest. Got it.

Let me guess, you're the type who is against stem cell research.

0 for reading comprehension. I'm sure your writing is fabulous and makes all the hurt you cause totally worth it.

My great grandmother died in Dachau and I'm not even remotely offended by these girls

Boy, if only she were here today to tell us all about how extreme and closed-minded we were being.

OH WAIT.

My great grandmother died in Dachau and I'm not even remotely offended by these girls. So grow up

That's fine.
But you aren't the only one who lost relatives in the camps. There are those of us who aren't of Jewish hertiage whose family members were rounded up, deported, tortured and DIED. I am offended by the use of this real world event to play a game in a fantasy fandom. I would be offended by the use of this in anything other than an attempt to role play out the situation as it happened in an attempt to find a way to prevent it from happening again. To claim that they are using a fantsy world to accomplish this is... inexcuseable. Whatever paralells they are in the Harry Potter canon to WWII they are implied and not stated. The Wizarding world as developed by JKR is a fun place for fen to play. It's evils are clear cut and mainly two dimensional. The real world Holocaust, it's causes,results and every thing in between are not clear cut or two dimensional. Fictional villans can not and do not hurt real live breathing humans. Hilter, Goering, et al did and the affer effects are still felt to this day. Other instances of genocide in recent history clearly show that ignoring tham

Yes, these people have a right to name their game anything they want to however I would prefer to assume that they are adults and therefore capable of realizing when they have crossed a line.

a portion of my comment got lost so i'm going to go ahead and finish what i wanted to say.

Other instances of genocide in recent history clearly show that ignoring them does not make them go away. Whether we call it genocide or racial cleansing it is still happening. People are dying and others are hurting. There is no need for a game to add to that level of social pain.