Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Or, yes, it's problematic, but the magic goes on)

Let's talk Potter.

Again.


I don't want to say that the HP fandom has been dead since 2007 (when Deathly Hallows came out) or even 2011 (when Deathly Hallows Part 2 came out). Because it hasn't been. There are intriguing fan theories, beautiful fan art, the continuing lives of the actors. There is and was the site pottermore.com, the controversial quasi-canon source of extra-series information.


Willow started reading Potter around 2009. At least, that's when she started talking about it. [correct me if I'm wrong] I started reading Potter in the summer of 2012. It was part accidental, part a long time in the making. My family had owned Sorcerer's Stone for a while. I finally picked it up, and I was hooked. I went through the series in about two weeks, averaging a day for each book: I'd start a new book in the morning, read it during the day during breaks, and finish it usually by the time I slept. Neither of us followed the fandom from the first book release. But now we're both die-hard Potterheads, and I don't think either regrets it. I am a Potterhead.

But The Cursed Child is changing all that.

Primer: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a new play. It's Rowling-approved, technically canon. It's a script published on July 31, 2016 (because that's Harry's birthday, and also Rowling's. Though obviously not this year). It's a two-part, four-act play currently being performed in London. And it's a Thestral in the room for the fandom, and the fandom is doing some weird discourse about this.

Here's the problem as I see it, based on the discourse of other people who see it. The magic of the Harry Potter books is based on the fact that these characters do not just exist in paper and ink. They live. And Hogwarts and the Wizarding World live, too.

**Very Mild Spoilers**

Harry Potter is problematic. People can write essays on his flaws and his actions and his choices and his bumping into suits of armor when looking at maps and the significance of this in the revealing of his innermost thoughts. (Has anyone ever read Harry Potter and Philosophy? It's actually a quite fascinating set of essays.) Ron Weasley's friendship can be expanded by people who fill the spaces between the lines and between the scenes and between the chapters with day-to-day life at Hogwarts and the power of friendship and platonic love between two boys--men--who might as well have been born brothers. Hermione Granger's very canonical descriptions can be analyzed to their core by scholars or by fangirls or by the beautiful people who can be both or by the artists who bring their vision of Hermione to their very own lives.

Joanne Rowling took an idea that came to her on a train to Manchester and expanded it to fill seven volumes, thousands of pages of words that built a world hiding just behind a platform barrier from ours. And she set it loose into the world, and people built their own magic upon it. And since 2007, people have been drawn into the world of those books. People have been building worlds inside worlds, the stories of unvindicated characters.

And we were Book Eight. "We Are Book Eight" is a slogan of the Harry Potter Alliance. It's an organization that gathers fans of fantasy to bring them together in acts of real-world activism, fantasy expanding into the real world, love of community and words weaponized. "The Weapon We Have Is Love."

But now Book Eight is a position that's taken, a position usurped by a play that comes in nine years later. A position that was filled before it came. A position filled by the millions of pages of fanfiction and fan art and headcanons and ideas and activism that is Book Eight.

And all that. Gone. Vanished like potion out of Harry's cauldron in Snape's dungeon. Officially noncompliant. Cather Avery's Carry On, Simon after Simon Snow and the Eighth Dance. The feeling of finality of headcanons and fanfictions that all became AUs at the crack of midnight on July 31st.

People have written about the nextgen. Rose Weasley. Teddy Lupin. Albus Severus Potter. Scorpius Malfoy. Poof. Avada Kedavra.

So I'm against Cursed Child, on principle. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to read it or not.

My takeaway: Cursed Child has the same kind of impact as Pottermore.com. It's technically canon. Fanon doesn't agree. And while I was doubtful at first, I agree with fanon.

I want to read canon where Harry is no longer a main character. Where the nextgen is about the nextgen. Where the children of Dumbledore's Army have, like their audience, accepted the problems of the previous generation and moved on to bigger and better things. Where Teddy Lupin unites the Blacks and the Potters and the Weasleys. Where Albus Severus's name is a homage to two problematic headmasters who did wonderful things and terrible things and both for wrong reasons and redemption is in the form of a hero's son's name. Where not all the drama happens around the Quidditch field. Where there can be Slytherin hangings in the Room of Requirement. Where you don't need a time-turner to explore new worlds. The canon that's already been written by fans in the void of online and the caverns of seventeen-cent notebooks and in the King's Cross stations that are imaginations.

But I read The Cursed Child. In an evening.

And, well, objectively, I disliked the first three acts (of four). In hindsight, that might be due to the script medium, a medium I feel maybe didn't capture the magic in its stage directions and cast descriptions that can be built up by a few well-written full sentences or a shot in a movie. It might be due to the time-travel plot that I felt was a little bit cliché. It might be due to the characterization, where every returning character felt like a shadow (Ron, Ginny) or a parody (Hermione, Harry). And all the opportunities that fans have written for Ginny's strength or Ron's imagination or Harry's hope or Teddy Lupin's power to unite families or anyone's opportunity to build interHouse relationships weren't there. It might be due to the worldbuilding and the flashing through different realities that seemed almost without plot. It might be due to the fact that I didn't really like it from the beginning, and I went in with a preconception, something I regret.

But the fourth act got better. And it redeemed, for me, a little bit, the plot. In the fourth act, I was reading to find out what happened next, not to move through pages. This feels hollow and short, but I quite liked the ending. Considering the beginning, I think it was a good ending.

But it's like the How To Train Your Dragon movie adaptation. I don't think they're the same characters. I don't think Cursed Child Ginny is Original Ginny. I don't think Cursed Child Draco is Original Draco. Because Original Ginny would have grown up differently. Original Draco would have been redeemed.

Here's what I'm doing following The Cursed Child.

1. I've read the book. I've acknowledged its existence and its impact. I've noted that objectively I disliked the book at first, but it got better in the end.
2. I will continue to recommend Harry Potter as one of the best things I've ever read. I will recommend Harry Potter as the original seven. I don't think I will recommend The Cursed Child.
3. If I want to write fanfiction in the near or distant future, I will write is as if J. K. Rowling's final words on the subject were on Pottermore.com or in the "All was well" of the epilogue.
4. I will continue to Be Book Eight.

What are you doing?
~Citali