The Sword and Laser discussion

I've been a Potterhead for 20 years, since discovering the books way back in the 90s. I sent my little boy to daycare today wearing a 'Wizard-in-Training' T-shirt and 'Hogwarts' trousers. I even contrived to time his birth so that he shares his birthday (31st July) with the boy wizard - now that's dedication to a fandom! (I dunno what I'll do if he grows up to hate Harry Potter...!)

However, like many first-generation Potterheads, I've not been happy with more recent developments in the Potterverse. The final book was a disappointment - especially the epilogue - and I haven't been impressed by what I've seen of The Cursed Child, the Fantastic Beasts franchise, or anything on Pottermore (the wizards-used-to-shit-on-the-floor revelation was the final straw). The more the 'wizarding world' is extended, the more its flaws and weaknesses are apparent, and let's not get started on the amount of fail in the casting for the films.

But... there's something so nice about revisiting the very first book, taking down my battered much-loved paperback copy and remembering the way the magic unfolds. Letters delivered by owl! The steam train at Platform 9 3/4! The cosy atmosphere of Hogwarts - so reminiscent of those old boarding-school stories I loved as a child. The endlessly appealing idea that there's a magical world hidden behind the mundane, and that if you just tap on the right brick in the wall you too could find Diagon Alley, buy a magic wand, and head off to Hogwarts.

tl;dr I don't like the recent Potter stuff, but I do love this book!

Fortunately I'm too lazy to get involved in any fandoms, so I basically stopped engaging in any HP fangirling after the last of the seven books was released. I haven't even watched all the movies although I have them all on BluRay at home. I'm also slightly annoyed by all the retro-diversifying done by J.K. Rowling, she basically just forgot to create a diverse enough cast, so okay, not great, but forgiveable, but don't tell me that X was Y all along WHEN THERE WAS NO FORKING CLUE IN THE BOOK!

But then again, I don't follow her on Twitter or any other channel, so I don't care too much.

(I did read and like some other Rowling books, though.)

tl;dr Not a fandom person, loved the books, like the movies I saw, will re-read at any time.

I love the core 7 books (including the last and I'm not really mad about the epilogue) but the other Pottermore stuff doesn't do it for me. I'm glad there are those who love it. I'm sure there's a whole new generation that adore Newt Scamander the way I adored Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

Reading my old, battered dead tree editions is like the literary equivalent of wrapping myself in a cozy blanket. Hogwarts is comfort and adventure and friendship. Those books have such a magical quality about them that few things have been able to replicate for me. When things are bad in my life or the world is too stressful, my old friend Harry and his pals are always there to make things a little brighter.

I hated The Cursed Child with all my heart, what a hideous fanfiction. The Fantastic Beast franchise was exciting at first but it has been bogged down with controversial casting despite fans concerns and some strange new twists (not in a good way, at least yet) to the story, including when JKR 'forgot' that a character was not even born at that period. *shrugs* Pottermore has lots of weaknesses but at least I got to know my Ilvermorny House (Thunderbird) and what my Patronus is (A Russian Blue Cat!).

However, I still dressed up with my Slytherin stuff and my wand for fan gatherings. I listen to Mugglecast religiously. I am also happy that the illustrated editions came out because they are such a joy to read! (Note: I do have some concern on the weird lack of Ginny's picture in Chamber of Secrets.) And last but not least, we have more younger fans who discover their love of reading through the newly published editions - which I swear come out almost every year. Lucky that our local publisher is always diligent in translating all these, even the screenplay books for the FB movies. Reading is a very rare hobby where I live, so I'm glad every time someone becomes a reader because of HP.

Mur Lafferty did a whole Ditch Diggers podcast about Rowling and whether it was a good idea to continue adding to the world and retconning. And also also whether it was good to keep offering snippets on Twitter.

I’m very much part of the ‘only the 7 Harry Potter books’ part of fandom. I’ve never read or watched anything that’s come out after Deathly Hallows. So no Cursed Child, no Fantastic Beasts, no Pottermore has been in my life and after hearing what has happened since DH, I’m happy I stayed in this limited bubble.

Two things:

1) I've become more and more of a firm believer that your head cannon can end whenever you want it to. If you want to say nothing after book 1 happened, you can. (Subject, of course to interacting with other SFF fans on the net)

2) I used to always WISH for something like Pottermore for every series I finished. I didn't want it to end. I wanted to know what happened after the book and for all loose ends to be tied up. And if it was something like The Walking Dead - I'd want to know how/why the zombie outbreak started! But then, thanks to the Internet, I started to see more and more things like Pottermore and realized that these universes are like being at Disneyworld. It's all awesome magic as long as you don't look too hard and see the emergency exits in the rides and the wires moving the old animatronics or wonder about who's under the costume.

As someone who likes the original books but isn't part of the 'fandom', I have to ask what is it you did not like about the epilogue in the last book?

The Deathly Hollows was by far the weakest of the books for me too, but that was largely due to Rowling's strange decision to mostly 'tell not show' mayor story beats (especially that overly long explanation Dumbledore gave to Harry). Don't know what came over her, the writing just wasn't as good as in the other books.

Aside from the books I've seen the movies and found them to be okay - with the exception of Prisoner of Azkaban, which was great. I also saw the first Fantastical Beasts but didn't care for it, maybe I'll watch the next one on when it comes to VoD and I have nothing better to do.

I've sometimes noticed some ruckus going on on Twitter about some of the weird additions JK made to the world, be it the toilet thing or some retroactive wokeness that's more designed to fit current US progressivism than the Potterverse. Personally, I don't care for those tidbits.

Jannik wrote: "As someone who likes the original books but isn't part of the 'fandom', I have to ask what is it you did not like about the epilogue in the last book? "

Ok. *cracks knuckles* here we go...

So, the first thing I would say is that I'm very far from alone in my dislike of the epilogue - it's almost universally derided in the fandom. One of the most popular tags for HP fanfic on Archive of Our Own is 'EWE' or Epilogue? What epilogue??

But why?

Several reasons. I'm just going to bung the lot behind a spoiler tag.

(view spoiler)[
1) Because it's jarring in tone after the dark, desperate mood of the end of Deathly Hallows. Nothing wrong with a happy ending but something slightly more bittersweet would have felt appropriate imho. Sure, they've defeated Voldemort and won the war, but at the cost of many lives and a lot of trauma.

2) Because a lot of people had views on how they wanted things to go after the end of the books - eg Hermione to marry Ginny and become Minister for Magic, Harry to marry Draco and become DADA teacher at Hogwarts - to name some of the possibilities. Obviously we can't expect JKR to come up with a solution that would make everybody happy, but a more open/ambiguous ending would have allowed people to feel that many things were still possible within the world of HP. Instead all that was shut down - hence why people like to pretend the epilogue doesn't exist so they can imagine their own preferred ending.

3) It's just... boring and basic af. Het marriages to teenage sweethearts and 2.4 children apiece? Getting on the train to Hogwarts exactly as before? Everything exactly the same? How... tedious. Harry's even named his kids after his parents. Oh, which brings me to...

4) Albus Severus Potter. As others have noted elsewhere, both Dumbledore and Snape were not exactly model mentors, and I would expect the adult Harry to feel super conflicted about them, not name his second-born son after them. This detail really rubs a lot of people up the wrong way, including me.

If that response isn't exhausting enough for you, you can find more answers here: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-peo...

(hide spoiler)]

tl;dr the epilogue is too bland and simple after the dark complexity of the final book.

Hm, fair enough. Even though I really did not get any vibe from either (view spoiler)[Hermione and Ginny and especially not Harry and Draco. Reshuffling the couples in such a short epilogue would've also opened up a lot of questions as to why everyone broke up etc. etc. But, well, I'm not a big romance guy anyways and rarely care about who ends up with whom. So, stuff like that usually does not rub me the wrong way. The Albus Severus Potter thing, on the other hand, I can, at least to a degree, understand - even though Severus is a pretty cool name. (hide spoiler)]

Still, very different stuff from the issues I had with the last books subpar writing/storytelling. Anyways, thanks for your summary!

Also, I think I'd prefer JKR to release some short stories or novellas that fill out gaps in the world instead of those weird, disconnected Twitter hand-outs. I'd definitely buy a Potter anthology book. Hell, even the toilet thing might end up being a humorous read.

Ruth wrote: "3) It's just... boring and basic af. Het marriages to teenage sweethearts and 2.4 children apiece? Getting on the train to Hogwarts exactly as before? Everything exactly the same? How... tedious. Harry's even named his kids after his parents. Oh, which brings me to...."

Actually, I think of all the objections you list, to me this is the only one that doesn't make sense as an objection. We learn through the series that the previous generation also had a time of war and then everything returned to normal. So to me it's a neat "history is cyclical" sort of thing. Maybe even implies another Voldy type could emerge. Also, look at the aftermath of WWII - which would be equivalent to the HP kids. Their parents were in a war and now they were in a war. What did America do after WWII? Go into SUPER normalcy - the whole Eissenhower Era where it was bad to be different.

As for the het thing. I've come to understand in recent times that both gender identity and sexual attraction can be more fluid than just born one way or another. But, unlike Cursed Child, there really aren't any LGBT overtones from any of the main characters. It would be weird as eff for HP and Draco to get together - protagonist/antagonist slash fic's long history notwithstanding. Now, if their kids had realized they were gay (I mean, that is some Grade A Queer-baiting in Cursed Child) that would make a lot more sense to me.

Here's my take on the epilogue as a person who does not hate it:

(view spoiler)[After the desperation and darkness of Deathly Hallows, the lighter tone of the epilogue is necessary. We spent so much of our lives with Harry, through so much tribulation, uncertainty, and pain. It was important to show that he got his happy, peaceful ending (as cookie cutter as it may be in many aspects). But that bittersweet feeling is still there because we see Lupin and Tonks's son. We are reminded that he lost both of his parents without ever getting to know them, orphaned before he could walk.

I was annoyed by so many characters marrying their Hogwarts sweethearts but then I read that it's a common thing with people who experience similar traumatic events (like WWII when everyone rushed to get married). They all experienced the same thing and that bonds them. Nobody else has that same experience and so much of it happened at Hogwarts. So they married the familiar, similar to those that lived through WWII and then had all of those babies. On the flip side, maybe Rowling was too lazy or uninspired to think outside of her already established characters and honestly, that would be on brand for her.

I can't defend Harry's kid's names. They're stupid and lazy. (hide spoiler)]

Dara wrote: "Here's my take on the epilogue as a person who does not hate it:

After the desperation and darkness of Deathly Hallows, the lighter tone of the epilogue is necessary. We spent so much of our lives..."

I agree with all of this. I thought the epilogue was fine (though to be fair the last two books of the series are my least favorite and I've read each one only once).

(view spoiler)[I'd also add that in a world where you go to high school with EVERYBODY who is in your cultural demographic, then it just makes sense that the majority of people are going to marry their high school sweethearts/friends. Sure, there are going to be the outliers who, say manage to make peace between old enemies, marry someone outside the culture, or, like Bill, marry someone in the culture but beyond the normal physical boundaries. But those people are going to be the outliers. (hide spoiler)]

Yes! Another great point, Melani.

(view spoiler)[It's basically the equivalent of living in a small town. You know everybody and you make connections when you are young during the most formative time of your life that are hard to break. Then add a huge wizard war. (hide spoiler)]

Also, I wonder how much pressure is put on wizards to marry within the wizarding community? I mean, we know that muggle/wizard marriages happen as one of the other boys in Harry's dorm was the product of one, but I wonder how common they are. Especially given the secretive nature of the wizarding world in general. You'd think that marrying someone outside your culture, a culture you have to keep secret, would be more then a little frowned upon. Obviously, this isn't touched on in the books and I'm sure Rowling would deny it (given how hard she tries to make the wizarding culture a progressive one-despite some very strong clues that they're kind of regressive in a lot of ways), but I wonder.

Eric wrote: "look at the aftermath of WWII - which would be equivalent to the HP kids. Their parents were in a war and now they were in a war. What did America do after WWII? Go into SUPER normalcy - the whole Eissenhower Era where it was bad to be different. ."

I feel obliged to point out that the epilogue is set 19 years after the events of Deathly Hallows, and that 19 years after the end of WWII wasn't the Eisenhower Era at all, but the 1960s - ie a time of great upheaval.

On a less persnickety note, yeah I take your point about trying to make things normal again after a big conflict, but... I still think it's an extremely boring storytelling choice to just make everything the same as before.

As for the het thing, well I have read so much Harry/Draco slashfic that I sometimes forget they didn't actually end up together in canon, but if I take my slash goggles off for a second no I didn't seriously expect JKR to make everyone gay. It just would have been nice if she'd left the possibility open, instead of saying 'Everyone married their het Hogwarts sweetheart and had 2-and-a-half children!'

It's not that I expected/wanted JKR to give us something wild and wacky at the end of the story, I simply think a more open ending would have worked much better. For a good example of what I mean, look at the ending of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tv show:
(view spoiler)[
Buffy and the gang have defeated the evil, but not without great loss. She is asked what she wants to do next, and as the camera focuses in on her face, she just... starts to smile.
It's happy but a little bit bittersweet, and it leaves things open to viewer interpretation.
(hide spoiler)]

Ruth wrote: "...I still think it's an extremely boring storytelling choice..."

Totally agree on that. It's very boring and uninspired. At least it's easy to skip if you know you don't like it.

Dara wrote: "Here's my take on the epilogue as a person who does not hate it:

After the desperation and darkness of Deathly Hallows, the lighter tone of the epilogue is necessary. We spent so much of our lives..."
I agree with pretty much everything you say here, except that it clearly got on my nerves a lot more than it got on yours!
I think the difference is perhaps that, because I've read a lot of HP fanfic, I've read a lot of visions of how things could have turned out differently after the end of the books, and every. single. one. is more interesting than the actual epilogue. I would have greatly preferred something a bit lighter in tone, yes, but more open.

Incidentally I love that our discussion of HP book 1 has turned into a discussion of the epilogue to HP book 7...

Astute observation! I think that's exactly our difference. I've never read any fanfic so I might be more annoyed with the epilogue if I had.

Some above have mentioned The Cursed Child.
I listened to the audiobook read by a full cast. It was brilliant!
Hopefully, it gets adapted as a film, even an animated one.
I can't imagine that the play looks very convincing (magic), but I'd still love to see it. I only dislike the film version of the epilogue because of the aging makeup. Maybe it is a bit mundane, but The Cursed Child totally makes up for it in my opinion.

Melani wrote: "You'd think that marrying someone outside your culture, a culture you have to keep secret, would be more then a little frowned upon. Obviously, this isn't touched on in the books and I'm sure Rowling would deny it (given how hard she tries to make the wizarding culture a progressive one-despite some very strong clues that they're kind of regressive in a lot of ways), but I wonder. ."

Yeah, that always felt off to me as well. Essentially wizards are a rather secretive and isolationist bunch with some of them being deeply racist (mudblood, hello?).
If she has regrets about the culture she invented, why not write a follow-up where the wizarding world makes some cultural advances? Or set up a completely new fantasy series that touches on these topics?

It's not like people will burn her at the stake because her YA-series from the 90s (when she was a completely unknown writer) did not talk openly about the fact that Hogwarts' headmaster is gay!? Let's be honest, there is no chance any publishing house would've picked the books up back then if she would've addressed stuff like that more openly.

Is there by any chance an interview where she talks about why she isn't going back to write new books in the Potterverse or why she isn't writing fantasy at all but rather seems to focus on her Robert Galbraith books?

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Dara wrote: "Astute observation! I think that's exactly our difference. I've never read any fanfic so I might be more annoyed with the epilogue if I had."

Pretty much the same for me. Never was a big fan of fanfic and probably never will be. Sometimes I actually prefer it when writers want to keep their world consistent and ask people to not write fanfic (GRRM for example, but he also puts A LOT of effort into filling the history of his world).

Jannik wrote: "Pretty much the same for me. Never was a big fan of fanfic and probably never will be. Sometimes I actually prefer it when writers want to keep their world consistent and ask people to not write fanfic (GRRM for example, but he also puts A LOT of effort into filling the history of his world)."

I'm totally cool with fanfic - I never sought it out in the past perhaps because of its reputation (which was unfair and dismissive of me) but I'm also lucky in that as a cishet white woman I can find myself in mainstream media. I think a lot of fanfic exists because there's such a lack of representation of LGBTQ+ characters in mainstream stories. So fans create stories in existing storyworlds to see themselves in things that they love.

Dara wrote: "I'm totally cool with fanfic [...] but I'm also lucky in that as a cishet white woman I can find myself in mainstream media. I think a lot of fanfic exists because there's such a lack of representation of LGBTQ+ characters in mainstream stories. So fans create stories in existing storyworlds to see themselves in things that they love."

Sure, not denying that possibility. I just think there are some stories where it is more respectful to let the author do their thing because lot of work is put into keeping the world consistent. Sometimes a lot of the culture is derived from the worlds' history, and relationships are less about their personal and more about their political impact. GRRM' A Song of Ice and Fire is just one of those instances, and, I think, a good example of a fantasy world where fanfic is more disrespectful and less of a compliment to the original effort. Another example would be Erikson's Malazan series.

I can, on the other hand, totally see fanfic for stuff like Firefly, Buffy, Dresden Files, the whole Marvel shabang and so on as a compliment to the original authors and a benefit to the respective worlds as well.

tl;dr We've gone completely off the rails at last ^^

My biggest issue with the epilogue is that I hate big time skips in general. If a time skip happens early or even in the middle of the story, it will take me some time to get to know the older versions of the characters, but if the story is good enough, I will usually be okay. However, if a time skip happens closer to the end, or worse, at the very end, my last moments of a story are spent with strangers. It loses any emotion an ending might invoke in me because my connection was with who they were, not who they become.

Jannik wrote: "We’ve gone completely off the rails at last"

I refer you to my thread on fanfic I started...

Ian wrote: "Some above have mentioned The Cursed Child.
I listened to the audiobook read by a full cast. It was brilliant!
Hopefully, it gets adapted as a film, even an animated one.
I can't imagine that the p..."

I have seen the Cursed Child (my best friend bought me and my wife tickets as a wedding present) I wasn't a fan of the book but seeing it translated onto stage was amazing. The effects that they manage to create to create the magic are brilliant and I would say that the awe that inspires makes up for the weaker story elements.

Unionjill wrote: "Ian wrote: "...I can't imagine that the play looks very convincing (magic)..." I have seen the Cursed Child (my best friend bought me and my wife tickets as a wedding present) I wasn't a fan of the book but seeing it translated onto stage was amazing. The effects that they manage to create to create the magic are brilliant and I would say that the awe that inspires makes up for the weaker story elements.."

Thanks for the review of the play, Jill. :-)