#ancient text = atyd

[eggerson2]

real talk this is my favorite wolfstar- fuck it HARRY POTTER FANART EVER!!!!!

this is coachella 2016

[greenerteacups]

In future film adaptations of the HP series, DH is the one book I'm happy for future filmmakers to "mess around" with as much as they like to improve the visual / story experience for all the reasons you mentioned. I'm very happy for them to do a somewhat Twilight film Breaking Dawn-esque departure. Like, instead of focusing on the trio in the woods the whole time, let's get into what the Order are up to, let's show our friends keeping the DA alive at Hogwarts, let's show the other muggleborns having to go into hiding, let's flash over to Draco suffering the worst house guests ever... like we have this expansive cast of characters, let's not waste them for the extended camping trip from hell... also the best part of HP is the wizarding world itself, so many amazing magical set pieces in the world... and we spend the last book mostly in the forest...

Speaking of which, with there being a new series adaptation in the works (with rumours of potentially more HP series to come... perhaps even a Lily Potter / Marauders/ Snape based one...) is there anything you're excited about finally seeing adapted from canon or are terrified of potentially seeing butchered onscreen?

Yeah like and also it isn't even an INTERESTING forest. Like the "children wander into the enchanted forest and face [insert monstrous metaphor for adulthood]" is one of the oldest fairytales in recorded history, with a ton of creepy lore to draw on — you could have had the kids running through mystical haunted forests of ancient Britain! Running into the ghosts of Roman soldiers and Celtic ruins and magical creatures! Forest of Dean could have been COOL.

To your other point: I'd much prefer a Marauders series to a remake of the original. I'm of the not-unpopular opinion that the HP movies are as good as any adaptation of any book can get (save probably the Lord of the Rings movies) in terms of how they balance story structure, fidelity to the text, and onscreen pacing. The cinematography decreases sharply in energy and verve after Alfonso Cuarón, and the later movies unfortunately suffer from the mid-2000s trend of desaturating the frame, but they're solid movies and like — okay, in my heart of hearts, there's a little part of me that's like. Daniel Radcliffe will always be my Harry. I grew up with Rupert Grint and Emma Watson and Tom Felton, and seeing someone else in those roles will never hit me like it did to see eleven-year-old Hermione Granger alive for the first time on that screen. Which is not a real reason. But there you go.

There's also the problem of the genre pivot — the first few movies are obviously children's films, and a whole generation of millennials got to grow up as they gradually changed to Y/A films. But how many children are going to be watching a full season of a HBO miniseries? And how many adults are going to watch that miniseries and then complain it was underwhelming because, again, it's a children's series? It would be better, in my opinion, to start over with the Marauders, whom you can write into adventures that more naturally fit the pacing of a TV show. You can also start with them at like, age 14, which would solve the problem of years 1-3 essentially being about kids in middle school. Unlike HP, nothing happens that we know of in the first 3 years of the Marauders Era that's plot-essential, so strong writing in the pilot and a carefully chosen flashback or two could easily set the stage for a series starting in Year 4.

What I'm nervous about is the contingent of fandom that would expect it to be essentially a TV adaptation of All the Young Dudes, which — while it's an all-time legendary work of fanfiction, like all-time, incredible, wonderful story — does not much resemble what I think HBO writers' room would come up with. ATYD is a slice-of-life bildungsroman about Remus Lupin, and most of its stakes come through emotional tension — you can really easily transplant it outside of a magical setting, and you lose almost nothing. A Marauders show would be an action-adventure series modeled after the Harry Potter books, and it would need an episode-by-episode plot. In ATYD, Remus's development is the engine powering the story. That's not enough in a television series pitching itself as an action-adventure fantasy story, and I don't think the HBO team would be bold enough to depart from genre in this respect. After the failure of Fantastic Beasts, the execs are probably going to clock "Harry Potter show without Harry Potter in it" as a major business risk. Sowhile I'm open-minded and eager to see what the creatives would come up with, I wouldn't envy them the job of having to build out new personalities and arcs for characters that fans have already grown quite attached to their self-designed interpretations of.

It strikes me, too, that Rowling has never gone back to the Marauders as a potential vein for more books, even though she easily could have. She clearly doesn't mind dabbling in the HP universe, and the Fantastic Beasts movies show she's happy to bring the audience back to Hogwarts when she wants to. But for some reason, Harry's parents has always been a little too close to the original series, and I think maybe there's something in her that's afraid of revisiting that period — like if she fucks it up, she's damaging something directly connected to the books that made her famous, cheapening them. Or maybe she just doesn't want to write those stories. Who knows!

I do know that the most important name in that show would be the writing credit, because JKR has demonstrated (1) she isn't great at writing original stories for the screen, and (2) it's really easy to fuck up the pacing of a TV show, and if you don't get the pacing of Harry Potter, then you're not going to adapt it well. The HP books are essentially mystery novels that turn into spy novels. If you don't have that — if you think you're writing a high-fantasy epic from the jump, as the Fantastic Beasts writers seemed to believe, and as the Cursed Child writers seemed to believe — then you're going to write something that doesn't feel like Harry Potter, and most people will notice, even if they don't understand why.