Has Harry Potter moved beyond J.K. Rowling’s vision?
Rowling created the successful franchise, but is no longer its god
Ron Weasley’s ‘patronus’ is a Jack Russell terrier. Moaning Myrtle’s full name is Myrtle Elizabeth Warren. Harry Potter’s uncle loves Top Gear. Fluffy, the three-headed dog, was repatriated to Greece. Tuition at Hogwarts is free.
With just a tweet, J.K. Rowling can change and shape the world of Harry Potter with new, authoritative information. And she has, quite a bit, in the years since concluding the story of the book and movie hero’s days at Hogwarts.
Once, Harry Potter’s biggest fans obsessed over every new word from Rowling, the details taking on an almost scriptural authority. But lately, that’s changed. Rowling remains a central, beloved figure among the Harry Potter series’ still-dedicated fan base. But she is no longer their distant, omniscient god.
“It’s obvious that people have this conflicted relationship,” said Andrew Slack, co-founder of The Harry Potter Alliance and a fellow at Civic Hall Labs in New York. “But it has less to do with Jo and more to do with growing up.”
What’s changed? Slack turned to one of the most important lessons he learned from the Harry Potter books: “Our heroes are not what we think they are. They’re just like us.”
While the vast majority of Rowling’s readers have probably never ventured onto a ‘headcanon’ Tumblr or bought a Wizard Rock album at LeakyCon, the core Harry Potter fandom has a presence on the Internet like no other. The huge fandom dragged fan fiction culture from the online fringes into the mainstream, as a generation of insatiable readers filled the gaps between Rowling’s books by reading and sharing their own stories, ranging from the creative and imaginative to that of, uh, questionable literary merit.
“The gap between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix,” said Claudia Morales, who works for The Harry Potter Alliance, “was the longest and most torturous wait of the first wave. We all needed something to fill that time with, because our interest definitely wasn’t waning.”
Fans created news sites, encyclopedias and Harry Potter-influenced charities. They scoured every statement Rowling made for a hint at the next story and used those tiny details to write new ones. The Deathly Hallows publication day came and went, and readers considered what the future would be like now that the final story in the Harry Potter series was published, read and debated.
“There was a time after Deathly Hallows came out — and a good deal of the time leading up to its release — where we thought there would never be more Harry Potter stories,” Morales said. But Rowling didn’t stop. On her Twitter account, on the encyclopedia-like Pottermore website, in a new play called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and in the upcoming movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the official magical world of Harry Potter keeps expanding. Yet, hardcore Potter fans have increasingly considered the possibility that Rowling’s vision for the world she created has diverged from the world that exists in their own imaginations. Given a choice, they might prefer their own.
Some have suggested Rowling risks becoming the next George Lucas, a beloved figure who continues to amend and tweak the Star Wars universe he created, until fans can no longer stand it. And though Rowling has said that The Cursed Child is probably the end of new stories about Harry, the future of officially sanctioned content about the wider Potter world seems endless.
The Cursed Child was written by Jack Thorne, with the input of Rowling, and sanctioned as official canon. While commercially successful as a published script, the play has earned a mixed reception in the core fandom.
“As someone who is a long-term member of fandom, it felt like I was reading a worse version of things I’d seen done for years,” said Sonja Petrovic, a fellow at the fan nonprofit group Imagine Better. “And that hurt to finally return to my favourite magical world and think that.”
Said Morales: “At the end of the day, I’m always going to be thankful to J.K. Rowling for creating this world, for teaching a generation of fans how to fight evil with love and guts and friends, for revolutionizing literature and revolutionizing fandom and revolutionizing me.
“But to put canon on a pedestal and build fandom around canon alone is incongruent with Harry Potter’s messages. Everything about Harry Potter is different; its fandom is no exception.”