harry potter j.k rowling

J.K. Rowling, For The Love Of God Please Stop Shitting On Our Childhood

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I have some serious beef with J.K. Rowling.

She doesn’t know it. In fact, she doesn’t know me from a bar of soap, but like most people my age she was one of my heroes growing up and I was totally, 100% obsessed with Harry Potter.

My copies of the Harry Potter series are lovably worn down. I’ve read The Goblet Of Fire so much the front cover fell off the book (takes about 23 reads FYI). I lived in the age of pre-ordering all the books as they came out, and I read The Deathly Hallows within the 24-hours it was released because I did not want anyone to spoil it for me.

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The anticipation of sitting in a movie theatre at midnight to see the latest movie is a feeling that I can conjure up in my imagination like it was yesterday. Again, like most people my age, Harry, Ron, Hermione and co. were like my own friends. I still reread the series, not chronologically necessarily, but whenever I feel like I need some form of comfort.

So all that nostalgic stuff aside, I need to say I am really freakin’ mad at J.K. Rowling and I’m definitely not the only one. I don’t want to get TOO dramatic, but J.K. Rowling is ruining Harry Potter for me.

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Let’s examine the evidence.

Pottermore, an interactive platform for Harry Potter fans to keep experiencing the magic of the series, launched in 2012 and it became a way of seeing Rowling’s unpublished pages and her thoughts. And oh God, her THOUGHTS.

There’s an old saying “Quit while one’s ahead” and it’s not just something I say to myself when I decide to try a winged eye. J.K. Rowling failed to quit while she was ahead and now she’s torn down the magical world of Harry Potter and took a giant dump all over it.

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Rowling started revealing little tidbits about the series, and it started off fine. Dumbledore was gay? Good! That explains a lot about his connection with Grindelwald. “Maybe it could have actually been written into the books, so it didn’t seem like J.K is just saying it years later?” I hear you tentatively ask. Pfft, away with your logic.

Rowling then announced Hermione should have married Harry, not Ron. Why did she feel the need to spill that opinion years later? Who knows. It’s like she got bored one day and a BuzzFeed quiz told her it should’ve happened so she just threw it out there to shit on people’s fave OTP. (Because let’s be real, Ginny and Harry weren’t anyone’s fave OTP.)

Just last year Rowling announced Nagini was an Asian woman, cursed to transform into a snake. If so, and if Rowling’s known this the whole time, why wasn’t Nagini’s backstory explored in the books? Nagini was a central character throughout the series from the very start — there’s no reason we couldn’t have learned more about her journey and what led to her eventual demise at the hands of Neville Longbottom.

With more details leaking out of Rowling and Pottermore faster than your bowel movements after a bad dose of food poisoning, it’s getting hard to believe Rowling had this planned the whole time. Rather, it seems she’s inserting these thoughts years later in a bid for the books to remain relevant in a more woke society.

The build-up of Rowling tweeting and writing about things long after the last book was published, turned into its own joke many years ago… yet she still hasn’t stopped.

Regardless of Rowling building on the story of central characters long after the books have been published, there are also tidbits of information released that now just create huge eye-rolls amongst fans.

Like the latest Pottermore update from this year, when she revealed wizards used to piss and shit on the floor and then clear the evidence away with magic.

There’s a line, Joanne, and you didn’t only cross it, you long-jumped over it.

So why are fans getting annoyed?

It can basically be broken down fairly simply: There’s no necessary harm in J.K. Rowling elaborating on her stories and announcing more diversity but the more announcements made without any actual backing or depth from the book or movie series itself, the more performative and attention-seeking it appears.

It’s one thing to say a character had a certain backstory years later, but the lack of exploration of it within the original text (when it could’ve been a central part to understanding the character), makes it hard to believe Rowling had indeed formed these opinions from the very beginning.

There’s also a certain fatigue to finding out so many new weird traits (like the whole plumbing/shitting thing) when it comes to a series you grew up with and loved just the way it was. I never thought about the bowel movements of wizards and witches while reading the series, and I just don’t know why we’ve all been armed with this information in 2019.

So for the love of God, J.K. Rowling, please listen to your fans: We’re truly begging you to stop shitting on our childhood.

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