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thiswasthebadplaceallalong-blog · 6 years ago

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Harry Potter and the Horrible World We Live In

What a horrible world we live in. What a terrible, evil, awful place- the space we occupy.

How did we get here? How did centuries of living lead to a world just as barbaric as the old one? How are we so hateful? How are we so vile? How can we continue this way? How can it get better? How can it get solved? We have had evil and hate throughout modern history. Always resolved. Evil loses. Good wins.

We circle back to the present and we are back at square one. Another war. Another fight. Another evil. Evil will always rise up. Star Wars knows this. Harry Potter knows this. The Star Wars original trilogy ended with evil being defeated. The new Star Wars trilogy begins in a world where a new evil has risen to take its place.

The Harry Potter novels and movies were about an evil that was eventually defeated. How did Harry’s life go on without any disturbances from the world? Another evil to take Voldemort’s place. The play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child which many fans do not adopt as canon despite author JK Rowling saying that it is, does not really have an evil power replacing Voldemort. Instead it is an intimate story about Harry and his son who had the spotlight in the final book and movie’s epilogue scenes, Albus Severus (For a protagonist, he has quite the unfortunate name). Albus Severus lives in his father’s shadow. The story of Harry’s adventure to defeat Voldemort is probably something every single adult and child knows about - just like us Muggles do in the real world.

Everyone knows Harry’s story. How can you not? And children born today and in years to come will all know about Harry Potter, and one day it will be a distant classic that one just knows about but hasn’t necessarily experienced because of all the other popular media that has taken over since Harry Potter existed. In the same way, Albus Severus experiences his father’s story. He then goes on to literally experience events from his father’s story by using an extremely powerful Time Turner to go back to moments in Harry’s life and interfering, creating different and terrifying alternate timelines. Some are downright insane to even comprehend as coming from JK Rowling or even from her approval. Albus is actually on this journey with his father’s school bully’s son (what an unlikely and fan servicey pairing, bordering on a romantic slash fiction story you would only find on the internet). He is also on this journey with a girl who becomes their “Hermione.” Now we have a classic trio of Albus’ friends matching his father’s adventure companions and friends to this day, Ron and Hermione.

The twist comes when we learn that the girl, Delphi, is in fact Lord Voldemort’s daughter. The daughter he had with none other than Bellatrix Lestrange. This reveal is the deepest you can possibly go down the well of fan fiction. Voldemort’s daughter with Bellatrix Lestrange? What the actual fuck? How did JK Rowling think this was remotely okay? How cliché! How awfully thought out. So the entire time Deathly Hallows was unfolding, you’re telling me that Voldemort and Bellatrix were parents? That there was a baby at Malfoy Manor being looked after. If this is really true, we would have had a hint of it in the final book. Imagine if the trio had discovered a baby born of Voldemort and Bellatrix while at Malfoy Manor. What would they have done? Even if the plot played out the exact same way but they just knew there was a child, the world would know about the child after the battle ended.

The child would be living in complete public view of the world as the offspring of Voldemort. Just like Harry lived his life as the most famous wizard in the world for surviving Voldemort’s killing curse, Voldemort’s kid would probably make a very interesting 7 book series itself. How do you live in a world where you are the evillest being in the world’s child? I think that would be a better story to explore. Instead we get the child of Voldemort being the traitor who was trying to change the timeline to have their father live? I don’t even remember if that was the ultimate motivation and I’m too lazy to look it up. But I believe Delphi was just trying to recreate the legend of her father’s death to have him survive? That’s no First Order. Harry even gets to experience the night of his parents’ murder and has the choice to intervene and save them, thus altering every single damn thing in the Harry Potter universe. Nothing we would have seen before would have happened.

The night Voldemort killed Harry’s parents and Harry survived defined the wizarding world for the rest of time. A world where Harry and his parents survived and just went on would never have involved Harry stepping up to defeat Voldemort. Maybe this world would have Neville as the one taking Harry’s place which in itself would make such a great alternate universe story, which I bet has been done a million times already. But imagine this as written by JK Rowling?

This all leads me to believe that the entirety of the plot of Cursed Child takes place in Albus Severus’ imagination. He imagines what it would be like to go back in time and experience some of the most significant events in his father’s life and altering some of them to create such different possibilities. He imagines that this would be orchestrated by Voldemort’s child and it comes together all too neatly and everything goes back to normal. Albus just now has a new appreciation for his dad.

Albus and Harry realized their relationship is not working, Albus imagines an entire adventure to mirror and exist with his father’s real adventure. He comes to realize that his father really is an amazing hero, but at the end of the day is still his father and he loves him. What a beautiful story. It is much better if this is how you see the story play out instead of as a complete literal sequel. That way, I accept it as canon as an intimate study of the effects an epic story like Harry Potter’s has on the psychology of him and his children.

Back to my analogy of a new evil taking over. The Fantastic Beasts series takes place before the events of Harry Potter. In fact, it begins just before the actual birth of the Harry Potter villain and while all this is happening, an evil has risen to ultimate power in the current 20’s story. JK Rowling will take us up to 1945 when the current villain, Grindelwald was defeated. It’s interesting that out of all the possible plots JK Rowling could have chosen to write about as a follow up to Harry Potter, despite the millions of pleads for a Marauders series, she chooses to take the character that the movie studio wanted to make a film about and insert him into the ultimate good vs evil plot occurring during the time he was alive.

She manages to insert the most unlikely of heroes into the events of the backstory of Harry Potter that has to do with an evil power before Voldemort. I bet that if Warner Bros never wanted to make Fantastic Beasts into a movie (Originally as a documentary-style film about the creatures in the wizarding world, what a terrible unimaginative idea), JK Rowling would still have maybe one day written the story about the rise of Grindelwald, but it never would have included Newt Scamander and his companions. JK Rowling had to create a whole storyline for Newt and his companions as they get involved in the rise and defeat of Grindelwald. Now we are going to have relationship drama with Newt, Tina, Theseus, Leta Lestrange and even between Jacob and Queenie. All this soap opera-style stuff along the epic story of good vs evil. And this time everyone is an adult and not a child in school growing up throughout the films and books. That’s why Fantastic Beasts is really just for the die-hard fans who were kids and grew up with Harry Potter and are now adults.

Back to my first thoughts – the world is an evil place. It always will be. What will happen after we have defeated Donald Trump and his supporters? The Nazis, the racists, the white supremacists, the homophobes, all the evil ones. How will that fallout affect those that still are all those things? How will it affect those who are actually the good people in the world? If we don’t defeat them, the world will end. No doubt. Something will happen to bring on the apocalypse. Whatever it is. Society will break, and we will be done. We cannot continue on this path. We can’t keep letting all these atrocities keep happening. When will something be done? What is the damn tipping point? What is the fucking final straw? This? This week? With the bombs, the shootings, the EVIL. Will you finally wake up and do something? You. The person reading this. The random citizen of whatever country you are in the world. What will you do? Will you act? Will you do something about it? Vote? Protest? Argue? Fight? Make a difference? BE HEARD? When will this end? When we decide to finally fucking do something. When will we finally fucking do something? The armchair activism can only go so far. Something needs to be done.

If we lose, the world ends. If we win, we win for now until the next fight. But the next fight is not for us to worry about right now. What will we do to defeat the evil in the world? What will happen next? We are not far from finding out. So let’s do something.

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