As of this week, September has begun and we are officially leaving summer behind. However, it seems like not very long ago that bookstores across the world (as well as armies of social media fans and critics) were gearing up for the big mid-summer release date of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the latest installment in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. The bright yellow cover of the book was plastered all over social media as the world celebrated the continuation of Harry Potter, a series that has arguably one of the largest and most passionate fan bases of any popular culture phenomena in this generation.
So now, a little over a month after Cursed Child has been published, that conspicuous yellow cover has all but vanished from social media. Could this simply be due to the Internet’s ability to move on from any topic extremely quickly? Maybe. But there’s another reason I’d like to present that could explain why the conversation around the play has all but stopped, at least among its everyday fan base: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is TERRIBLE. Here’s why.
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- Everyone — literally everyone — in the play is written completely out of character.
For the sake of brevity, let’s focus on the main trio from the original series: Harry, Ron, and Hermione.
The writer of this play, Jack Thorne (that’s right, folks, JKR didn’t even write this story) made Harry Potter, our titular character, just the worst father imaginable. Harry does and says things in this play that many fans have found unrecognizable. (Spoilers, I guess?): Toward the beginning of the play, Albus and Harry are having a tense argument. In a completely baffling moment, Harry says, “I wish you weren’t my son.” WHAT? Not only is this a completely immature thing to say, but it is compassionless and even spiteful. It’s almost impossible to believe that the Harry Potter portrayed in the original series, a character who values family above all else, would be so cold as to say this to his 11-year old child. This isn’t the first or last moment that Harry is foreign—he also makes disrespectful remarks to Minerva McGonagall, his former Head of House, regarding her inability to have children, and he is all but completely dismissive of his wife, Ginny (who, for the record, is completely unrecognizable herself).
Ron and Hermione are similarly poorly written. Ron is nothing more than a bumbling drunk (in a conversation with Hermione he admits to having been drunk at their wedding and his jokes are obnoxious and flat), and Hermione’s character suffers from a lack of respect on Thorne’s part. Hermione becomes a cardboard cutout, used whenever Thorne needs to move some aspects of the plot along (ex. Ministry events) and is continually disrespected by the writing. The play deals with multiple changing timelines, and in each timeline, Hermione is seen as miserable and bitter, seemingly because she is no longer married to Ron (read: the scene in which Hermione is “teaching for her sins” as the conspicuously single Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts). Thorne has no idea what makes Hermione...well, Hermione, and it shows. The same can be said for the writing for Harry and Ron in Cursed Child.
2. Albus is not particularly likable as a protagonist.
Throughout the play, Albus Severus Potter, our main character, makes it extremely difficult for us to like him. Many fans of the series have said that they preferred reading scenes in which Scorpius, Albus’s best friend, had more of a starring role, and it’s understandable why: Albus is continually whiny and negative throughout the play, and never really grows as a character. For example, at the end of the story, his relationship with Harry has not really grown as much as could be hoped, seeing as their rocky relationship at the beginning of Cursed Child seemed like it was going to be the play’s main focus. Albus also pales in comparison with Scorpius, whose sense of humor and buoyant personality leap off the page and make our main protagonist’s personality seem dull and reactionary.
3. The plot depended too much on storylines and ideas from the original series.
Many readers have accused the play of reading almost like fan-fiction. This could be because Jack Thorne makes a point to include or at least namedrop almost every event, character, and plot point of the original series. As the complicated time travel plot of Cursed Child starts to take shape, our main characters Albus and Scorpius literally revisit previous events in the HP timeline such as the Triwizard Tournament and even the attack on James and Lily Potter at the beginning of the original series. Characters like Cedric Diggory and even whole scenes, such as the first, second, and third tasks of the Triwizard Tournament from Goblet of Fireare recreated whole cloth from the original series. Even the play’s main antagonist, Delphi, seems like a weak shadow of Voldemort from the original books. In the end, the play’s reliance on reference to the source material seems weak and unimaginative.
4. It wasn’t even written by J. K. Rowling.
That’s right. The play is written by English playwright Jack Thorne, and is “based on an original new story by Thorne, J. K. Rowling, and John Tiffany.” JKR was involved in the play’s conception, to be sure, but all her original characters were written by someone else. As any EN101 professor worth their salt will tell you, an author’s voice is a very specific and very unique element in a story that cannot be recreated or imitated. The fact that JKR did not do the actual writing of this play could account for a lot of its missteps and its trouble with capturing the magic of the original series.
5. It was never going to live up to the hype or to the fandom’s expectations.
Now that the play has been out for a while, I can peacefully settle on the conclusion that it was always going to be disappointing in some way. When Cursed Child was announced, its publication carried the weight of millions of dreams for what fans thought was a finished series. It was impossible for one play to support all the hopes that each reader brought to the book.
All being said, the play has many serious issues that do not stem simply from disappointed hopes (four of them being listed above). As a work unto itself, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has a lot of glaring flaws that make it impossible for me and thousands of other fans to consider it truly canon in the Harry Potter series.
