Warning! Contains spoilers!
The Harry Potter franchise is one that I thank my lucky stars every night I got to live when it came into existence. It’s touched my life so deeply that I can’t imagine my life without it, and I genuinely think I would be a different person if it didn’t exist. I have spent the majority of nights the last seven years falling asleep to the dulcet tones of Jim Dale’s voice on the audiobook recording. I take “Are you a true Harry Potter fan?” quizzes in my spare time. I just got third place out of 16 in a rather intense game of Harry Potter trivia.
I would consider myself a Harry Potter fan. I go so far as to say that I am a Harry Potter addict.
That does not mean I love everything about it. In the seven books there are certainly some inconsistencies that tugged at the back of my brain (hell, even JK Rowling admitted to it). The series is not perfect, just like everything else.
The charm of this series is that despite the fact that it is fiction, and the books contain magic that I doubt any of us have been able to see in real life, the books feel real. The universe of Harry Potter feels like an actual, real-life friend of mine. I think that’s why readingHarry Potter and the Cursed Child by Jack Thorne upset me.
Don’t get me wrong; the play certainly has its perks. The bromance (romance?) between Albus and Scorpius, for one. And one of the biggest perks is that there is new Harry Potter material to dissect and discuss, which to me is just like I’m experience a real-life Hogwarts feast, just in an English discussion class kind of way.
But for me, reading Cursed Child both excited me and broke my heart. I was in London when they began performing it, and I wanted so badly to get to see it. Two friends of mine actually did go see it. I had been getting higher and higher expectations for it in the lead up to the script release, and that was all built on top of me obsessing over Harry Potter for my entire life. Needless to say, it might have been impossible for the story to match my expectations. But the story was more than just a disappointment to me: it was disheartening.
For a story to seem real, it needs to be consistent. There needs to be a sort of connection to real life, and a connection to the audience. Despite Harry Potter having its own inconsistencies, it was overall a complex (just like real life, if not more) story that has characters that feel so real they could be your friends. Ron is your sensitive and loyal best friend, who is insecure and is working out his own issues. Hermione is the intelligent, rational friend who wants the best for everyone. These characters are consistent and realistic.
The characters in Cursed Child were not. They wore the names of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, but that was the only way they were the same. Hermione was harsh and uncaring. Ron was a two-dimensional jokester who somehow thought it was okay to hook his nephew up with a love potion and a girl twice his age. Harry seemed like a machine through which Jack Thorne delivered every single cliché and cheesy line he could think of.
Things happened in the story that I would never in a million year imagine would happen in the Harry Potter universe. Although I can certainly imagine that the actress playing Delphi would make an unbelievable and magnificent sight, the existence of Delphi at all makes no sense to me. Imagining Voldemort voluntarily having sex with someone, especially someone as clingy as Bellatrix is unfathomable to me. People have discussed the idea that Voldemort did this as a back up plan, in case he did die. But even this is inconsistent with the Voldemort we learned so much about in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Voldemort was far too trusting in his Horcruxes to have decided he needed a back-up plan, especially one in which he genuinely did die.
The trolley lady side plot felt like fan fiction to the extreme. It was something too silly for me to believe, and I would be surprised if JK Rowling said she had always imagined that to be the trolley lady’s secret. Having Cedric Diggory turn into a Death Eater, in any timeline, is inconsistent with the Cedric Diggory from the previous seven stories.
Because of the inconsistencies and the paradoxes that Cursed Child put forth, the entire Harry Potter universe came crumbling down for me. That’s something I never, ever imagined would happen to me. It was sad and upsetting and all I wanted to do was find someone who I could talk to about it and relate to. Obviously, I wanted to love it. I want to love everything about Harry Potter. It’s not fun to find faults in anything or anyone you love.
I read an article recently that proclaimed everyone who didn’t like Cursed Child might as well ‘delete their Pottermore account” because they weren’t a real fan. Since the series means so much to me, I feel the need to say that that kind of behavior and language is disgusting.
If you liked Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, I am so happy for you. I am so jealous. This means that your love for the series is completely untarnished, and it is still alive and well in your mind.
For me, the only way I can feel that way is if I erase much of the play from my memory. Too much of it messes with the actual series that I love and doesn’t make any sense. For instance, how could Bellatrix have been pregnant with a child when she was torturing Hermione at Malfoy Manor? Even if she had concealed the bump, I’m not sure someone that was eight months pregnant would have had the energy that she certainly did in that chapter.
Saying things like ‘you’re wrong for disliking Cursed Child” or telling someone they aren’t a real fan if they disliked it is disturbing behavior. It’s an opinion. None of Harry Potter is perfect. But when something means a lot to someone, shaming them for disliking some aspect of it is rude and insensitive. Be supportive to your friends! Don’t make them feel bad when they probably already did in the first place.
