#we get all the fun of the marauders fandom but with CANON QUEERS and no transphobic bullshit

[journish]

The old hexside crew had fucking better become the new marauders or I swear to titan

[elisedonut]

🧡💛🖤🏳️‍🌈💀

🧡: What is a popular (serious) theory you disagree with?

Oh! I was going to say oh i can't really think of anything else other then Imperioused Percy but immediately after thinking that my brain went pst pssst Stan-

so yes

Stan Shunpike NOT being under an imperious during the last few books

he's not a bad guy he's just a dumbass who talks to much and said something stupid to a veela while trying to flirt

I know like where it comes from because Remus is all like 'this is war how could you possibly know that Harry you're being naive blah blah blah blah you should have killed him you idiot' *not actually what he said but something like that

but like idk Harry is so convinced of him being under and I believe him it makes the most sense to me also puts more weight to the claims of imperious from the first war if there is a character that we know of going through that

unlike Percy where being imperioused takes away from his arc and makes things just less fun Stan being sent to Azkaban on bs charges and getting broke out just to be imperioused and then have to live with that is fascinating to me

he still was an idiot and said something he shouldn't have but the punishment life throws him is so extreme in a way he really doesn't deserve

and there are so many DE characters that are just DE's that stripping one of the more complicated character situations and just changing it to that is just lame to me

a very boring choice imo

💛: What is a popular ship you just can't get behind, and why?

uhhhh most of them ngl but in specific

I'm not really into any of the endgame ships except like Bluer but Bluer isn't really popular

but to be fair I'm like that in most fandoms canon ships just don't tend to do much for me overall

I'm very picky on my Draco ships and for me Drarry and Dramione are both kind of yeah ok ig

Pretty much every big marauder era ship that is like a nobody characters

Like why would I ship Barty jr. with who ever Evan is when I can think about him wanting to break his dads new toy (Percy)

🖤: Which character is not as morally good as everyone else seems to think?

Molly Weasley I think she tries yes but i don't think she's as good of a person as some people try to act like she is

🏳️‍🌈: Which character who is commonly headcanoned as queer doesn't seem queer to you?

Most characters are inherently Bi to me just because so that's difficult

maybe Pansy??? i guess??

💀: If you had to choose one major character to die, who would you choose?

Hermione

Not that I don't like her and would be like happy that she died but because i think losing someone from the trio would have been neat and out of the choices (Her and Ron) she would be more fun to kill off since Ron already has the scare moment of him abandoning the group that I think would cheapen his death if he came back after that just to die

[sunshinemarauders]

Why do people babygirl-ify Death Eaters?

Hi everyone! I'm back with more of my research!

After returning to the marauders fandom to study it, I was particularly interested in why fans were drawn to characters that were canonically death eaters. I understood the obsession with Regulus Black and Draco Malfoy- they were canonically children and they canonically defied the Death Eaters, but I was curious about Evan Rosier and Barty Crouch Jr. To my (pretty extensive) knowledge, all we know about them is that they're Death Eaters, they're Wizard Nazis. So why did I, in doing my research, keep finding people saying these two characters were their "babygirls"? It concerned both me and my professor, who thought it indicated a bigger problem within fandom as a whole. The ability to think that making a character queer erases them of their ties to the Death Eaters is, in my opinion, dangerous. How will this be played out in the real world? Will we see actual Nazis, or actual terrorists, or actual war criminals be called babygirls?

This is a short summary of why people said they think people "babygirl-ify" Rosekiller (Evan Rosier and Barty Crouch Jr.) from my research. As always, if you have any questions or if you want to chat about any of this, reach out to me! My asks are open

Because its fun

I truly think it has less to do with their evilness, and more to do with what we have in canon. We know characters Draco Malfoy, we know what they're like, what they've done. Then, we see something 'uncharacteristic' and it stands out, like a literary uncanny valley. It stands out, and if someone was to try, I know I'd just swipe past it. However, when you compare them to "empty vessel" name-only characters, because we don't have many fully-fleshed out evil characters in the material, it's easy to slap a babygirl sticker all over him, and be like oh its my headcanon. A popular character, with facts and details about them, will stand out when you make a new headcanon that doesn't fit inside what we know about HP. I think characters like Barty, Evan, and even Regulus, are ragdolled around and basically original by the time nearly anyone writes them. This isn't a condemnation! Just how I understand it.

People started to realize that Regulus was an interesting character himself, rather than him being a bratty younger sibling to Sirius. Therefore he had to have friends, so we started to see a surge in Evan and Barty. In the early Reggie appreciation era (early 2022) we saw quite a bit of Bartylus, but that has died down as people like to think of Jegulus as their endgame now. I also think that fanfiction greatly shapes the minds of the fandom, especially well written popular ones. The first and most prominent one that Rosekiller character appears in is Just Lovers (like we were supposed to be) on ao3 by bizarrestars. Here, they are playful and sarcastic best friends of Reggie who help him through his lil emotions. Everyone loved them so much that the zar (the author) gave us their own lil intermission of it.

Because it's fun! I really don't think it's deeper than that. People started liking Regulus and then they decided that his friends could be nice too, and then they decided that his friends could be queer or even dating each other and they could be babygirls and who cares it's just fun. I'm not a big Rosekiller shipper and I'm more of a Wolfstar girl lately (but that's just because most of the Jegulus fics are sooo poor quatlity, like yes I know that Regulus is mean, but if you make him an absolute ass with no redeaming qualites I'm not gonna want them to get together) so I might not have the most insight on this, but I don't really with there's a deeper reasoning here other than the fact that it's fun.i guess because people just wanted to see them as "normal teenagers" like the marauders, like to remember that before they became death eaters they were boys as well doing stupid things and getting in trouble like everyone else did, and also because they fit well into regulus' potential circle of friends, idk i like the idea that the three of them (evan, barty and reg) were friends in school and then they took different paths where regulus "got" his redemption arc and the others just went insane following voldemort's ideals, i guess i just love angst and it would be a tragic story of how their friendship ended tbh

For a long time we had very few Slytherin students in the Marauders era, and whether we like it or not Slytherin is the most popular house of Harry Potter, people love characters with tragic pasts and dubious morality and also they are characters with very poor description and easy to shape in their personal desire, I don't think that's wrong, but I have no interest in them as characters, to me they're just irrelevent, occasionally appearing in my ideas for fanfics I'll never write, usually as future death eaters

i think the current fandom is less inclined to read/write self-insert fics or OCs, and evan and barty are essentially blank slates that authors can overlay whatever personality they want to that will help fill out their story. also, it’s fun to add characters to the slytherin house during years we don’t know much about. also x2, most fics aren’t writing about them killing people and enjoying it. i don’t think the fact that they were death eaters is the reason people are babygirl-ifying them or wanting to ship them.

this is a very interesting question, and i haven’t thought about it in these terms. personally, as i mentioned briefly in the last question, i hate babygirl-ification in general. i don’t like the way that it infantilizes men, and despite the fact that in this case they’re fictional, i’ve seen it happen with real people several times (dan and phil, crankgameplays, even markiplier a little bit). it has very weird connotations and i just don’t vibe with it at all. he’s not your softboy cinnamon roll babygirl, he’s a man in his 20s. it’s just odd to me, and i’m FTM transgender, so i’ve seen it happen to trans men too and it just feels gross to me. like i’m not softboy cinnamon roll i’m just. a guy. i am literally just a guy. but like in general i hate the concept of babygirl-ifying anyone, as for it being characters without a redemption arc, i think it’s because they got popular in a fic where they were never evil in the first place. i could be wrong, but from what i noticed barty and evan only became liked characters in Just Lovers, which is a no-voldemort AU, meaning they were never death eaters. and they were given nicer roles in the story to serve the plot and further regulus’ character development. like they only got a better reputation because the author needed them to for the plot and they were in a setting where that made sense, and ever since then they’ve been big characters. like i don’t think it’s necessarily about them in canon at all. i think people liked who they were in that one story and it just kind of exploded from there and now they’re being written with redemption arcs in other works too. and really, i don’t see anything wrong with that. i will say i am Not A Fan of those AUs where someone joins the death eaters to save someone else, like james joining for reg, i refuse to touch them. that’s icky to me. but yeah idk. i don’t like babygirl on the whole, i think it’s gross and infantilizing and weird, but as for why these characters are getting that treatment, i think it’s literally just because of a fic they read where they were interesting characters and weren’t morally reprehensible and it’s snowballed from there.

[spindrifters]

idk if this is unpopular or hinged or unhinged or whatnot but imma say it anyway

trying to annoy wolfstar shippers by telling them that wolfstar isnt cannon is pointless

because remus and sirius are such background characters in the series we probably wouldnt be getting any new content or shippers if they were together and because 98% of the fandom does ship them they're included in nearly all fan made content. To find a fic or fanart or edit or fanfilm or whatever that does not contain at least any wolfstar crumbs youd have to really look for it

and considering that the marauders fandom is purely made of fan content we really wouldn't be any better off if they were cannon therefore constantly telling wolfstar shippers that their ship isn't cannon is the equivalent of talking to a brick wall because it doesnt make any difference to anything

on the whole I agree, but I also disagree with a bit of your reasoning.

the mwpp fandom is not purely fan content, actually. I see this take sometimes, about sirius and remus being background characters, or their personalities being made up by fanon, and that's just?? blatantly not true?? I mean, sure there are versions of their characterization out there that are completely made up, but they're also objectively just not correct. like I don't know them. because they're ignoring what's actually on the page.

idk when I -- or honestly most of the writers and artists I vibe with -- am writing them, I'm fully extrapolating from what I know about them in canon. that's what makes it fun. I'm fistfighting with god, you know? reading what's in the text and okay, joanne, maybe you didn't intend to write this but what I'm reading is a queer dynamic. a depressive, adhd sirius. a disabled remus. same thing with reading luna and going, "okay, you know what? she obviously set out to write 'a kooky girl' but what she actually wrote is a neurodivergent character and that's what I'm rolling with." and that's what fanfiction is. that's why no one can annoy me by saying wolfstar 'isn't canon' because that's just, like, your opinion, man.

send me unhinged headcanons/opinions

[so-much-history-in-these-streets]

Question One: Why

Well, first of all, you have to apply old fandom laws to this and not morality laws (ie - it's cool to take characters and do fun things with them regardless of who they are). And I'm mostly just saying that because I don't want to get yelled at for answering 😂

And I haven't been here from the beginning but I would assume it was from expanding on Regulus - like you start getting into who his friends would have been, who he would have spent time with, and expand from there. And when you use the actual canon characters from that timeline (instead of OCs) so can everyone else, so you end up with a cohesive fandom experience

Also, objectively, Barty is cool - he's one of the only wizards known to get all 12 owls, managed to trick the Goblet of Fire, etc etc

And all we really know about Evan Rosier is that he took out Mad Eye Fucking Moony's eye like *come on* he had to be a badass - who else got that close?

And then other characters, like Dorcas (who Voldemort himself killed), and Pandora (Luna's mother) who fell into the timeline too

I think the Rosier Twin thing came up because Pandora was likely a ravenclaw so to mix her with the others there needed to be an 'in'. (Barty was a Claw too but I don't think that is commonly known in fandom / just harder to work with). And because we don't know her maiden, which leaves plenty of open narratives. I've seen her as a Malfoy and a Greengrass too, but tying her to Evan really does make sense in a way I can't quite explain until you've read the differences.

Question Two: Lore

Fairly simple - if one is writing Regulus' school years, he needs roommates. Harry's year had 5, the marauder boys are 4, so likely 4-5 is the norm. Most people write Reg, Barty, Ev to a room but sometimes they do have a 4th that they either don't vibe with or get rid of.

Barty - canonically, has Big Daddy Issues and is a little insane along with being ridiculously brilliant, so he and Reg are usually besties. Generally, Barty is written as 'only loyal to his friends, fuck everyone else' and doing whatever rebellious shit he can to piss off his father. Who, as we all know, works for the Ministry, so a lot of fandom decides his deal with Voldemort is pissing his dad off

Evan - Rosier is an old pure blood family, canonically I believe, so he likely had an upbringing like the Black's. He's often written as the bridge between Reg's 'fuck off' personality and Barty's 'fuck you' personality. But he also, again, took on Moody so badass enough to put up with Barty, which is usually why they end up getting shipped. His deal with Voldemort alternates between going wherever Barty goes, and a deal like Reg (familial obligation)

Dorcas Meadows - not a death eater and usually bc in most fics she's with Marlene, but a slytherin girl. She's usually also a year older than the boys but falls in with them for some reason (queers group together, generally). She's usually the voice of reason and a bamf in her own right, and generally chooses Marlene over the war (often, she comes from a less influencual family)

And then of course Pandora, who probably gets lumped in with them bc there's a ton of Gryffindor's already and their stories have been told. Sometimes she's Dorcas' friend, sometimes (like when she's a Malfoy), she's Regulus'. I'm not sure who started the Rosier twin thing but it's pretty cool imo

Fic Recs (Jegulus centered): Just Lovers by bizzarestars and Only The Brave by Solmussa

ALSO, to anyone reading, if I got anything wrong / you've been here longer pls feel free to jump in, just be kind 🫶

okay marauders gang help a girlie out. I was here for quarantine. I got depressed and stopped looking at all socials. When tf did we decide a) the death eater coded slytherins were cool (this excludes regulus, he was always great. I’m talking Barty and Evan mostly) and b) since when are pandora and Evan twins XD

like. I’m here for it if I could just get a brief summary of the updated fanon lore that would be *gif of pacha from emperors new groove doing the 👌*

[unfunny-mcsqeak]

nobody asked for my opinion and this discourse doesn't really matter ig but

i feel like a lot of jegulus fics involve james just completely barreling over regulus' boundaries. like i have read a few fics where it's like regulus is being an angst boi tm and james is like the savior who forces his way into his life, ignores his privacy or boundaries, or like fucking stalks him. and that's not cute. it's not fun. we are still romanticizing these same shitty things. and i know that there is nothing non problematic in the marauders fandom because it is fundamentally the fandom of a terf, even if we mostly use headcannon that is still the source material. but so many people ignore that and act like because we have moved farther from cannon and made charecters queer and stuff we aren't part of the problem when that's just not true. and that's kind of a whole other conversation. but like particularly with jegulus, you are dealing with one of the marauders charecters we know the most about in cannon. his bones are in cannon. and even if he is like an uwu sunshine boy who loves his best friends brother. he is still fundamentally a guy who spent years harassing a woman and who was a bully. and like let me clarify that im not a snape stan. but the current version of him in fanon is built on people romanticizing the idea of him as like a Good Guy™️ who spent years harassing lily who canonically hated him and wanted him to stop. and who was so fun because he pulled pranks on people, which we see him taking too far in canon even if i don't give a shit about snape. and it just annoys me that people act like this is an unproblematic area of the fandom when it includes this character and, once again, by being in this fandom we are maintaining the broader harry potter fandom which means that jk rowling can continue to get paid money that she can put towards being a terf.

basically: the marauders fandom was built on fucked up shit that we still continue to romanticize, even if we are doing it in an uwu gay representation way. and fundamentally all this is maintaining the power and legacy of a terf.

[nought-shall-go-ill]

This is such an interesting take! I cannot comment much on Wolfstar as I didn’t ship it back in the day (as I do now), but I did ship Jily and loved Marauder era fics, and I was definitely excited (and a little relieved) to discover how much a lot of the fics have become longer and more serious (at least exploring more serious themes) when I rediscovered the fandom last year.

Adding on to all the wonderful things @billsfangearring has said, I do think that the “lightening” of the Wolfstar ship (at least largely my younger shippers) might be a lot to do with people’s inner optimism that there just might be a happy ending for queer folk these days. For years, so much LGBTQ+ media (even and often especially those written by queer people) focused on unhappy endings. I’ve read several articles arguing that it was a sort of internal pessimism cultivated during the nineties and early noughties, because though queer culture was becoming more and more accepted, people were still sceptical of whether an actual happy ending was in sight. Like I said, I didn’t ship Wolfstar back in the day, but I can totally imagine a lot of Wolfstar writers writing with that sort of mindset too. However, now people are finally starting to see happy queer media elsewhere and it’s rewriting our brains, and finally we are able to write the happy endings or “lighter” stories that we previously felt unable to write. Some people may be young enough that they didn’t even have these preconceptions and are just able to write and freely engage with this sort of media from the get go.

Saying all of this, I personally love the @chdarling interpretation of Wolfstar, because as they said — not all our loves are the one true loves to end them all, and that’s utterly, totally and completely OK! I also think it fits a lot more with the complex themes that come with Sirius and Remus’ characters, explaining the doubt that comes with the prank, and absolutely allow sfor Remadora and Remus’ growth in the later canon books.

Anyway, as a queer person, I am glad to have both interpretations of this ship to read. Coming back to the fandom as someone with a more literary academic background than 12 year old me, I was eager to finally look at the flaws of my favourites and see them explored and be imperfect in fics. I was finally mature enough to see the implicit repercussions of the prank, and James and Sirius’ bullying, and the imperfect friendship/relationship of Wolfstar. However, sometimes I don’t want all that negativity. Sometimes I want fluffy fluffy Wolfstar (or Jily) fics that warm my soul and remind me why I loved this so much back in the day to begin with. Sometimes I just want a little bit of silly fun to remind myself (in these dark times) that we can still have good times. And I want to say thank you to so many writers on both sides of the Wolfstar styles — both have been a joy to me during this pandemic.

Early Wolfstar Fandom vs. Today

I'm going to use @chdarling's response to an ask earlier about Remus and Sirius both being "messy, troubled, imperfect characters" and the effect that would have on any sort of relationship between them as a jumping off point to talk about changing trends within the Wolfstar fandom over the past 22 years that I've noticed. I'm specifically going to focus on 1999 to 2005ish and then compare that era to today.

Please (respectfully) chime in if you disagree with anything or have something to add! I would love to learn more, especially from those who were active in the fandom at that time!

Disclaimers

These are just my observations as a longtime Wolfstar/Jily/Marauders fan who has recently spent some time mucking around in Wolfstar spaces from the aughts/noughties. I have not made any attempt to review Wolfstar fandom history in any sort of comprehensive or systematic way before spouting off like I know something in this post. Also, I wrote this on a whim after dinner, so please forgive any mistakes/sparse sourcing.

My Qualifications (?)

I started dipping my toe into HP fanfic spaces as a reader in 2005. My understanding of fandom has been shaped by the time I've spent on MuggleNet Fan Fiction, FFN, LiveJournal, AO3, Reddit, and Tumblr. If you've seen this post about fandom generations, I sort of straddle the "I was there Gandalf" and Citrus Cheesecake generations. I'm much too young to have participated in online fandom when the ship first sprang into being in 1999 with the publication of PoA. Most of what I know (or think I know) about early/mid-2000s fandom comes from later efforts to locate fics from that period (see above) and learn about fandom history.

State of the Early Fandom

Wolfstar was a Serious Adult Ship for Serious Adult Writers

Older fans of the Harry Potter series were naturally more drawn to the adult characters and their relationships than those of us who were reading the books as children. I at least heavily identified with Hermione as a child and grew to love Remus and Sirius more in my teens. Therefore, ships like Wolfstar that featured characters who were adults in the series attracted a much higher proportion of adult authors than ships like Harmony or Hinny did at the time. (Remember, we don't get our one glimpse of the teenage Marauders until HBP, which came out in 2005.)

A lot of people wrote Wolfstar as a messy relationship between adults with complicated pasts. That was the whole point for these authors—it's what drew them to the ship. Plenty of Wolfstar writers, such as busaikko, wrote both Remus/Sirius and Remus/Snape (or Sirius/Snape).

Marauders/MWPP-era Wolfstar was relatively less common at this point, and the long Marauders-era epics rarely included Wolfstar. There was a Marauders/Jily fandom and there was a Wolfstar/broader HP slash fandom, with limited crossover, though I should note that this split was the result of broader fandom trends than just the higher average age of Wolfstar authors.

I'm not super confident on this point, but I don't think the ship really took off among teens until it was popularized with a broader audience by The Shoebox Project (2004-2008), which is set in their Hogwarts years and also includes broader Marauders gen and Jily plots. That fic was able to pull people from both sides of the fandom interested in these characters.

Remus and Sirius's canon story was unfinished

You can clearly see the shifts between post-PoA, post-GoF, post-OotP, post-HBP, and post-DH fics featuring Wolfstar. Everyone wrote their take on what happened when Sirius went to "lie low at Lupin's" after GoF came out. OotP gave Wolfstar shippers a ton to work with between that year they lived in Grimmauld Place and Sirius's death, and those events were fresh and raw for authors. They're what writers had Opinions about and wanted to "fix" or explore. HBP, of course, threw a bit of a wrench in things by confirming Remadora was canon, but Wolfstar shippers (obviously) carried on by either disregarding Remadora entirely or writing Remus as bisexual (previously more of a Sirius thing).

I'll add here that before Remadora, a lot of readers thought Wolfstar was canon—the thought was that JKR couldn't have openly written a same-sex relationship into the biggest children's book series in the world so she'd limited herself to subtext and hints for the discerning reader to pick up on. Obviously, we now know this wasn't her intention, but it's a completely legitimate and easily understandable reading of the text. Wolfstar is the only queer Harry Potter ship with years of history of readers thinking it was intended to be canon. See the first meta post below for more!

Fic Trends Then vs. Now

A heavy ship lightens up

As a result of both of these factors, and probably others I haven't thought of, I'd say, overall, Wolfstar was portrayed in a much more dysfunctional, sometimes toxic way than the softer, sweeter Wolfstar relationship that's popular now. People wanted to explore Remus and Sirius's trauma and difficult past together without necessarily healing them or resolving their issues. Post-Hogwarts fics were more common, and there was a lot of enthusiasm about writing missing moments from the most recent book or speculating about what was in store for Remus and Sirius. Modern/non-magical AUs were a relatively niche genre given the focus on developments in canon; they've really skyrocketed in popularity in the past 10 years.

As someone who started out in Jily/Marauders gen spaces before discovering Wolfstar, I want to stress the massive tonal differences between the two communities during this time. Jily and Marauders gen was a fun romp, pretty clearly written by teens and young adults, that focused a lot on teen dramas and relationships. The older Wolfstar authors spent more of their time trying to tackle serious themes in a serious way. They liked to pepper in a lot of literary references, and the comment sections often turned into deep literary analyses that I personally found very intimidating and never participated in!

It's been interesting to watch the Jily/Marauders fandom shift in a slightly more serious and complicated direction as the Wolfstar fandom has moved in the opposite direction. This trend toward the middle has coincided with a greater blending of the two groups into a more integrated Wolfstar/Jily/Marauders community. It's wild to compare the proportion of long Marauders-era fics that feature Wolfstar alongside Jily now vs. back then.

Accessible writing wins out

I've noticed that the average fic length in the early years seemed to be a lot shorter than in recent years. One-shots used to be the dominant format—maybe they still are, but if so it's to a lesser degree. I’m not sure whether this is a Wolfstar- or HP-specific trend or whether it’s indicative of a broader shift in fanfic. If I had to guess, I'd say one of the drivers of the length differences is the shift from slash fics in particular mostly existing on sites that were set up in such a way that each chapter had to be a separate post (e.g. LiveJournal) to primarily being housed on AO3, where it’s easier to read and write multi-chaptered fics and really long chapters.

Style-wise, there's been shift toward a more straightforward writing style compared to the lyricism common in the early days. Again, this is on the macro level! There are still plenty of Wolfstar writers today who write in a more poetic style. I just think there seems to be a bit more directness with narrative and storytelling now than in the past. The differences in average author age and word count may have something to do with it, or perhaps this is just aligned with broader writing trends in the past 20 years. I'd love to hear from someone who actually took a literature course in college/university on this one!

Old Ship Meta Posts

These are sadly hard to track down these days, but if you're interested in learning more I highly recommend checking out some of these old-school ship manifestos and trope bingo cards!

The Case for R/S by elwing_alcyone (2003): An incredible textual analysis of PoA-OotP using direct quotes from the book to make the case for Wolfstar being canon. In addition to the character insights, read this for the snapshot of how much trust HP fans had in JKR's writing skills and in her care for her LGBTQ+ fans at that time. Oh, how she has fallen in our collective esteem...

Strange and Beautiful by blacksatinrose (2004): Another shipper's manifesto that focuses more on compatibility (and incompatibility) and potential than a close reading of the text. The author likes the ship precisely for their mismatch and the infinite number of stories that can be told depending on when and how you start their relationship.

Wolfstar circa 2005 by @theprogressofspring (2016): A bingo card based on popular tropes/elements in Wolfstar fics back in the day. (They also posted a screenshot of the earliest recorded use of the name "Wolfstar"—2001!) If you want to compare this with bingo cards covering more recent tropes, @bloodyhellharry made this one and @bookspark made this one five years ago.

Anyway, those are my personal observations about what Wolfstar looked like back in the day and how it compares to now! I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this topic, and whether I missed anything or got something wrong. Let me know what you think!

[droo216]

Hey Drew, do you think you could go into detail and explain your feelings on the recent Harry Potter debacles (The Cursed Child and also what Pottermore has become)? Your opinions usually mirror mine but I'm having a hard time putting it all together. Cheers! Hope you're doing alright (I think you live in Florida?) watch out for that nasty, nasty weather.

Hey there! Let me see here. I’ll try to express my feelings, I’ll be eager to hear from you to see if you agree!

So basically the current expansion of J. K. Rowling’s wizarding world breaks down into three categories: Pottermore, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the Fantastic Beasts series. I’ll take them one at a time.

Pottermore started out as this amazing addition to the Potter fandom. We were all so excited to be officially Sorted into our houses, learn what kind of wands we might receive, and delve deeper into the world of Harry Potter. Pottermore was excellent at the start when we were learning more about Jo’s writing process and fun facts. Why were Hufflepuff’s colors yellow and black, for example. Even the character biographies we got at the start were thoughtful and creative and felt like an extension of the universe that was already there. Pottermore has deteriorated as we’ve moved further and further away from what Jo already had written down and we’ve gone deeper and deeper into material invented for Pottermore. Ilvermorny is obviously the biggest example here. The American copy-and-paste version of Hogwarts is so clearly an afterthought developed for a quick name-drop in the Fantastic Beasts movie. It truly makes no sense as an actual American school for reasons that plenty of people smarter than me have expanded on – the trivialization of Native American culture, the absurdity that one school would suffice for the entire United States, the dismissal of the canonically established Salem Institute. The inclusion of “houses” is particularly frustrating for me. I’m sure we have private schools in the States that have houses but in general it’s an extremely British concept that doesn’t translate here. More importantly, the Hogwarts house system is so incredible. The house mascots and colors, the association with the four elements, and the values prescribed to each category all come together in a truly beautiful way. Our generation in particular has come to adopt the Hogwarts houses as core elements to our personality. It’s our way of discussing our values – the morality of ambition, the importance of loyalty, the discussion of mind versus heart or knowledge versus instinct. The Ilvermorny houses belittle the brilliance of the Hogwarts houses and it honestly infuriates me.

As a tangent to this, I think Jo also insults her own system by continuing to sort the “good guys” into Gryffindor and the “bad guys” into Slytherin. Celestina Warbeck would have been a great good-Slytherin but Jo says she’s a Gryffindor. Dolores Umbridge would have been a fascinating bad-Hufflepuff but Jo says she’s a Slytherin. Remember that meta about how Hagrid’s house is never identified in the books and how it makes way more sense for him to be a Slytherin than a Gryffindor? The houses have so much depth to them, Jo even talks about how Hufflepuff is her favorite house, but she treats them in such a superficial way.

My frustration with the Fantastic Beasts series is not dissimilar to my frustration with Pottermore. Mostly my feeling with Fantastic Beasts so far is a lot like my feelings for Pandora – The World of Avatar at Disney’s Animal Kingdom: it’s beautiful, it’s amazing, but who cares? I don’t care about Newt Scamander and I don’t care about Gellert Grindelwald, especially if we’re going to continue to avoid Albus Dumbledore’s sexuality in telling this story. I wouldn’t mind all of this extra history if I had the history I want. I want Marauders! I want Founders! We know more about the founding of Ilvermorny than the founding of the school we actually care about! If we already had the stories that we’re all deeply fascinated by, I think we’d be more invested in these additional stories. Instead, the Fantastic Beasts series feels like a distraction so that Jo doesn’t have to tell the Marauders and Founders stories. Plus, including the abuser Johnny Depp in the cast is disgusting and infuriating.

Now we come to the ultimate insult to the Potter fandom: Cursed Child. I almost don’t know where to begin with this one. It is unfathomable to me that Jo, who cares so much about her characters, signed off on this and said it can be considered canon. There is just so much wrong here. The characterization of our existing characters, particular the Golden Trio, is so off. Hermione is a shadow of her former self; Ron seems to be based on the film interpretation rather than the book; and while portraying Harry as a misguided father is certainly an interesting choice and could be argued as a plausibility given the fact that he grew up without James and with Vernon, it is certainly the sadder choice, especially considering the wonderful father figures he’s had in Lupin, Sirius, Hagrid, Arthur, and even Dumbledore. It seems like this character choice is only there to serve up drama with Albus.

Next up, perhaps the most absurd piece of the Cursed Child puzzle, is Delphini Diggory. She might as well be named Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way. Delphi is the worst part of the entire Harry Potter universe. Her very existence makes no sense - not only would Voldemort have absolutely no need or want for a child and no need or want to have sex with Bellatrix, it also doesn’t fit into the timeline as far as I know. On top of that, she is so illogical as a character, underdeveloped in every way and uncompelling as a villain.

The story itself is aggravating because it seems to be entirely manufactured as fan service while simultaneously letting the fans down. The time turner storyline is clearly all about allowing the play to show us scenes and characters from the original books, yet the scenes we go to are the Triwizard challenges where very little actually happens to advance the Potter story. It’s such an odd choice. And so much centers around the Diggory family, who we hardly know anything about and it’s not like we really learn any new information about them except that apparently if Cedric hadn’t died he would have become a Death Eater, which is so absolutely ridiculous. They clearly just wanted to show us some of the old characters and that’s where this story came from. Even in the present story we see how fan service affected the writing - Jo has said the McGonagall wouldn’t be headmistress by the time Albus got there, and yet here she is. I haven’t even touched on the concept of returning to the night James and Lily died and forcing Harry to watch this trauma or the various stupidities of the alternate timelines like Ron and Hermione’s loveless fates if they aren’t married to one another. 

Also, I have to mention that Jo establishes some very clear laws of magic that this story just decides do not apply. If we all just believe hard enough, we can make Harry look like Voldemort! I know there were other cases of this, but it’s been a while since I’ve read the play so I can’t quite remember them off the top of my head. I could say though that this is probably the aspect that makes the whole thing feel so much like fanfiction (along with Delphi). The Potter world has rules and Jo sticks to them very carefully. The play’s disregard for these rules is sloppy.

The final issue I have to discuss regarding Cursed Child is, obviously, the relationship between Scorpius and Albus. It's been discussed to death, I know, but any criticism of the play is incomplete without mentioning it. These two boys are great characters on their own. Albus living in his father's shadow is compelling. Scorpius in particular is a wonderful character. I also have to applaud the choice to sort these two protagonists into Slytherin, finally breaking the mold I talked about earlier. But the queer baiting in this play is blatant and painful. Honestly, it wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't forced Scorpius into asking out Rose at the end of the play. I get it, fourteen-year-olds don't always understand their sexuality, and maybe you could even say attaching Rose to Scorpius is part of that, but the play certainly doesn't imply it that way at all. It's particularly hurtful because Jo is amazingly progressive in her politics and actively talks about LGBT rights, feminism, Black Lives Matter, and so on, but she does not demonstrate all of these powerful values in her books, especially when it comes to LGBT characters. The only character she has identified as anything other than straight is Dumbledore, and even that is never mentioned in the literature, and if you know it's there it's still  only implied as a tragic barely-there subplot. The wizarding world struggles with diversity across the board. Jo's made steps. Casting black actresses as Hermione and Rose is absolutely incredible. We're starting to see characters of color appear in the Fantastic Beasts series, although way too slowly in my opinion. But despite all of her politics, Jo is dragging her feet when it comes to LGBT representation, and denying us even an implied future relationship between Albus and Scorpius is just... frustrating. I could go on and on about the details of their relationship throughout the play and how the writing clearly indicates feelings between them, but others who know the text more thoroughly have already been there and done that.

Basically it all boils down to this: Jo is giving us an overload of information that we either don’t want or don’t care about and denying us the stuff that we do. Maybe she should have quit while she was ahead. Goodness knows the Potter fans have enough creativity to fill in their own blanks. I can only hope that as Pottermore and the Fantastic Beasts series continue to grow, maybe she can do better.