Harry Potter & the Cursed Child

[borg-princess.livejournal.com]

For anyone who's curious, the plot of the play has been discussed in spoilery comments at the following links:

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3 UPDATE: Snitchseeker took down their spoilers as JKR called out another website for doing the same and TPTB have been contacting people to request they don't post any details. *eyeroll*

But never fear, Andrew Sims of Hypable (whom JKR called 'Wormtaily' for betraying the secret, lmao) linked to a cohesive recap of the entire two-part play.

When I first read about this, I thought it was someone trolling, but there's multiple sources? Either there's a conspiracy afoot or it's legit, IDK what to believe!

What kind of crappy fanfic, lmao! A Time-Turner plot, seriously? To save CEDRIC DIGGORY, of all people, wtf?

How shitty that anti-Slytherin prejudice is still going strong to the point that Albus is ostracized for being sorted into Slytherin. :/

Cackling at Ron & Hermione never getting together as a result of the temporal shenanigans, hehe. But I'm pissed that her being single results in her becoming a bitter Hogwarts teacher as opposed to happily married Hermione being the Minister of Magic, the implications there are pretty gross.

I can't even process everything I just read. Wow. JKR should be fired from her own world, just what even.

Comments

[dracasadiablo.livejournal.com]

Wtf?
I was expecting a disaster but this? It really exceed expectations.

All of it is so stupid, filled with unfortunate implications and only serves to make WW and everything and everyone in it; looks even worse then they did before.

It tells us that Harry never learned to control his anger and caps lock abuse. And that he and WW never bothered to learn anything.

Also, I supposed it's "nice" to know that Hermione's and Ron's relationship was fully and only based on jealousy on his part.
What with him never getting interested in her without seeing somebody else interested in Hermione.
Btw, are we to think that nobody ever asked Hermione out? So Ron never got to be jealous about it?
Or that she spent her life being bitter and only wishing to be with Ron? Hell, is that supposed to be some "Hermione turned into Snape" bs?

And yes, implications of married Hermione being Minister of Magic and unmarried bitter one being Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher are terrible. Also why that subject? Is it only because it's easiest and laziest choice for Jo (no need to retire any old teachers or come up with some other DADA teacher) or was it deliberately going for some warped Snape vibe?

[josephinestone.livejournal.com]

Until I read these spoilers I didn't even consider Rose/Scorpius being a thing, but now I'm like: duh, she hinted at it in the epilogue. And as much as I love Albus and Scorpius being friend, I don't think I could stomach any Rose/Scorpius.

Also, yeah. This sounds like really bad fan fiction. They should have spent a few months reading all the good fan fiction before they tried this.

[elanor-x.livejournal.com]

Since I almost never liked time-travel fanfic, I was disappointed to hear it's such a central point in the new book.

Also, I was shocked to see Draco claiming "do you know who else had no one Harry?! VOLDEMORT DID AND SO DID I GROWING UP!"

Wasn't Narcissa's love for him crucial in HBP and DH, leading her to betray Voldemort and save Harry's life? She begged Snape to save Draco's life too.

\\ there's a rumor that Scorp is Voldy's son

Completely ridiculous. Scorp was born long after V's death and for all 7 HP books, we have never seen wizards having easy access to Time-Turners or explaining any mystery by linking it to time travel.

Also, Voldemort, as we've seen him, would be much more likely to kill Astoria rather than sleep with her, being an asexual representation of evil. Being uninterested in children suits V for another reason too: since he wishes for immortality, he has no need for heirs.

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

Laventadorn (on FF dot net and AO3) has finished the first part (Year Two to Year Four) of her AU girl!Harry fic called "The Never-ending Road". Go read that instead.

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

I’ll explain in two words: Bad fanfic. Honestly, I wouldn’t read this story if I found it on fanfic-dot-net.

A niece named Delphinus? Are we talking about a female-to-male transsexual who has changed hir name from Delphina or Delphinina to fit hir self-identified sex? Or a male-to-female transsexual who has not bothered to change hir original name? I know wizarding Latin is bad, but I didn’t think it was so bad as to screw up the simplest point of grammatical gender.

Ron married Padma because you can’t marry anyone you didn’t have a date with in high school. And Hermione is teaching Defense because it was always her weakest subject.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

I haven't absorbed too much of the plot but it sounds horrible, 'bad fanfic' as so many fans seem to have opined. Major mistake to bring in time travel - that's a topic that automatically makes for a failed story unless the author knows what she's doing.

Joanne ('oh, maths!') Rowling is not that sort of author.

We'll have to look up our books and see exactly where Time Turners are mentioned. Wasn't there a hard-and-fast rule that they couldn't alter the timeline? Or if they did the universe would explode? This will have to be checked out.

Thanks for the links and post!

[fdsfd (from livejournal.com)]

ok sorry for the intrusion but can I join please? I need a place to vent/erupt like a volcano made of hate...

All JKR's post DH stuff has been so thoughtless that it really made me reread the entire series in a new (worse) light. She is quite a callous author, it seems to me now. And based on the spoilers I'd say that CC seems "callous" for the following reasons:

1. Harry re-enacting his trauma with his own children. I never bought the "oh he's such a loving hero" the first time I read the books, but on reflection he never did much to empathise with other people, like properly empathise, by treating other people as equals - naming his son Albus almost seemed like a condescending gesture to a dead guy - "oh I will bestow forgiveness upon you from on high" (as if Snape would ever old out for his approval) but even worse is to impress a child with some other guy's sins and then forcing the child to bear witness to your own childhood abuse (like wtf is it with giving his youngest son his orphan blanket when the other kids get bomb gifts... like dude your kid doesn't need to know every detail of your life that you failed to come to terms with or get proper help for)
... ofc he'd still hate Slytherin and fail to move on from his past and become a cog in a Ministry Machine that probably still perpetuates the rotten status quo... and treat his kid poorly based on his own shitty prejudices... ofc... progress is for muggles....

2. Girls, especially Next-gen girls being plot points rather than people (Rose, Delphina (who kind of looks like a less well thought out version of Calypso in Harry Potter and the Boy Who Lives), Ginny, Hermione demonstrating what happens when she doesn't marry Ron in another timeline (becoming a shrew))
with Hermione and Ron...whats the bet she posted a ship manifesto in 2007 under a pseud and got shredded online for it?? she comes across as so bitter to her fandom

3. "Harry Potter and the ode to manpain" - see Draco's "redemptive arc" (which ofc his wife has to be dead for); Albus's pain of having a shitty father; Harry's pain of having a shitty childhood, Albus (the first)'s pain of being a shitty person, Snape's pain of treating a dead girl like an icon rather than a person (somewhat understandable but does he need to be in this play???), etc... but of course (before you even ask) Delphina's pain of having a dead father and mother and a non-existent childhood is revolting

4. Re-writing her own established facts in a way that is obvious (like explaining how time-turners work, destroying all of them, oh one was saved, oh Sirius never appears at GH)... like she is the only one whose reading of her own book counts even if she never bothered to re-read it...

5. Albus and Scorpius's relationship is best friends but not gay!!!! No gays at Hogwarts no sir!!!

6. Treating Cedric like a disposable toy is probably the worst part of the spoilers imho... like her characters are her own personal toys and she can just change whatever integrity they had based on her own whims... ugh I wish she'd never written this horrible play.

Thank god I still have my favourite fanfics; gotta get the taste of these awful spoilers out of my mouth

[t0ra-chan.livejournal.com]

Wow, if that is really the plot of the play, then Rowling has truly lost any talent she might have had. She basically destroyed the whole message of HP that was so important to her: death is final and we need to accept it. But nope, instead we just go back in time to save a character nobody in canon has cared about since book 5. And didn't she destroy all the time turners in book 5 precisely to avoid people asking why the characters don't use them to save people?

And then there is all the minor stuff:

Why is Albus in Slytherin when he clearly didn't want to end up there and Harry told him that he can ask the hat to put him somewhere else? He seemed neither cunning nor ambitious, so it seems he is there just for drama.

Why is Draco saying his parents didn't love him when at least Narcissa clearly did?

Why would Harry give a shit about this blanket? He has no positive connection to the Dursleys and he never came across as sentimental to me.

Does Rowling have any idea how often they would have to spin the time turner to get back more than 25 years? That would be about a quarter million spins, that would take ages.

It's all just so stupid, filled with plot holes and characters being ooc.

[snapes-witch.livejournal.com]

Here's Part 2. Read it and weep.

http://victorkrvm.tumblr.com/post/145680264471/in-depth-plot-summary-of-cursed-child-part-two

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds like an unintentional comedy? So...Harry's son Albus is upset that people shun him and his friend Scorpio, and so they decide to travel through time to make everyone love them? But they just fuck shit up further? Sounds like the comedic possibilities are endless.

Am I a bad person-

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

-for liking all the Snapey goodness in part two? Honestly, Rowling seems to treat him better here than she did in either the books or her interviews. And I love the idea of his being friends with Ron and Hermione. That said:

Voldemort's daughter. Ugh! More genetic determinism; of course the child has to be evil because both her parents were evil.

No real attempt, in either universe, to examine the root of evil in the Wizarding World. Again, it's all got to be related to Voldemort. There's no suggestion that racism is natural to this world, nor that Albus Dumbledore contributed to Voldemort's rise.

Harry as a lousy father. That I can believe, unfortunately, but I can't get over his giving Al that ratty blanket. I had to read the second part to even understand why Harry himself would have been fond of the blanket, and what it meant to him. Even so, what a lousy gift for a young teen boy!

And then, the whole thing -- both parts, both universes--seems inconsistent with the books in small and large ways. To give one example, why is Draco so evil in the alternate universe? Wouldn't his whole family still have been under threat, and wouldn't his mother still have risked her life twice to save him? I don't see how that leads to his being a monster. I also can't see Cedric turning to the dark side just because he lost the triwizard tournament. That good, brave, selfless boy who was willing to share the prize? That's just ridiculous!

I'm probably curious enough to read the book when it comes out, but it does seem an awful mess. And yes, everyone is right about the relationships, and how they are based on jealousy. But I will read it for the Ron/Hermione/Severus stuff.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

So, how sure are we that the reports of the (horrible, terrible, ridiculous) play's script are correct?

I've told a few other people about it and their first reaction is "you must be joking".

And face it, Rowling has the resources to foist a con on the entire internet, and can hire the smarts to do it. She's internet-savvy these days, lecturing everyone from Twitter, making up hash-tags at the drop of a hat, the idea might have occurred to her. The "don't read the tweets of @hypable" might have been a cute way of getting people to do exactly that and take the bait.

Have there been multiple sources/corroborations of this, such that we know the reports are authentic? The Reddit site seemed to have different sources than the hypable one.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

If the point was to save Cedric, wouldn't it have been better to stop Barty Jr. from tinkering with the Goblet?

[dracasadiablo.livejournal.com]

. . . okay.
I've just read all of this (here and all linked spoilers) and I don't even.
Sadly, I'm sure it's all true. But I'm having troubles understand how it happened.
Yes, JKR lost any ability to write even slightly okay HP (or anything else). But we knew that since, at least, book six.
What I don't get is; why did everybody just nod and go along with this BS? There must have been many, many people involved in the process. How is it that nobody noticed that everything about this is crap?

It's worse then a lot of badfic. Hell, it sounds more like a crack/bashing fic then anything else.
Nothing makes any sense and all characters are shown as abusive or unsympathetic idiots.

[traverse.livejournal.com]

Andrew Sims of Hypable (whom JKR called 'Wormtaily' for betraying the secret, lmao)

She has an extremely juvenile morality, befitting a 10-year old, not a grown woman. This actually explains a lot about the books. :)

[oryx_leucoryx]

It looks like Rowling decided to play 'Best of Possible Worlds'. It is a common response to people raising 'The Problem of Evil' as a criticism of the belief that our world is being run or supervised by an omnibenevolent and omnipotent deity. The claim is that bad things happen because if they did not things would be much worse. I'm not sure if this is what Rowling uses to answer critics of her plot or something she uses to console herself (it was OK that her mother died of a terrible illness, because otherwise some catastrophe would have certainly happened and God in his ultimate kindness just had to kill Rowling's mother like that to prevent disaster).