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Fantastic Beasts

There Should Be No New Harry Potter Stories For Twenty Years

Everyone just needs to stop.

It’s understandable that we don’t want to let go of Harry Potter.

For anyone who was a kid in the late 90s – or later – the Potterverse was a comforting world you could disappear into for hours. Hermione was the passionate, bookish heroine so many young girls needed; Ron Weasley and Harry himself, the unremarkable but brave boys who did their best in remarkable situations.

For many, it was the first online fandom, or the first time they sat around discussing theories with their friends IRL or on message boards. Until the final book came out in 2007, ten full years after The Philosopher’s Stone, an entire adolescence later for some of us, it was a story nobody knew the ending to, and we all didn’t know it together.

Now we know too much, and JK Rowling must be stopped.

Part of the problem is that fans and the creator of Harry Potter now have a direct line to one another, allowing readers to ask Rowling questions about things that really matter to them: why is Harry’s scar a lightning bolt? (It’s not.)

Or more importantly, are there queer or Jewish wizards? And with a wave of a wand, Rowling can just declare that in fact there was representation of certain groups, even though it was never mentioned clearly in the books.

The fan responses to the continued story of Harry, Hermione and their families in the sequel play The Cursed Child have been mixed too; some felt it doesn’t count because it wasn’t a book, or seemed unsure of why it existed at all except the prospect of one of the most successful series of all time making even more money.

Meanwhile, extra plot details and timeline warps are being shoved into the increasingly messy Fantastic Beasts sub-franchise to try and tether the 1920s-set films to the original seven-book series and its mythology.

Some of these feel genuinely damaging to that mythology, like when characters who shouldn’t have been born yet show up in adult form, or others are shoved retroactively into significant family trees that were already well and truly explored by the end of book seven, or still others play into uncomfortable stereotypes that may have been less obvious when she wrote them into the backstory, but emerge into a time when people are more conscious of the nuance.

And sometimes she’s just talking about wizards pissing themselves.

But as the creator of this world, whatever Rowling says about it goes, and if she wants to fill in extra details, tell more stories, or make more money, that’s her right.

Before the final book in the series, Deathly Hallows, came out, fans clamoured for every scrap of info they could get, analysed it to pieces; now they seem to resent every extra dimension being added.

Whether Rowling and the other people tasked with telling these stories get it “right” or not, there are going to be people who complain about the new information being wrong, or performatively woke, or somehow unfaithful to the books they loved as kids and still do.

So Rowling should just stop.

Let the Fantastic Beasts series fizzle out with its passionate, but tainted and messy second instalment. (It won’t, but it should.)

Let The Cursed Child run as long as people will see it, but then no more plays. Write as many Robert Galbraith books as she likes. (Rowling writes crime novels for grown-ups under that name now, and they’re actually good.)

Let fans sit with what we already have: seven novels, ten movies, an entire online platform, three supplementary books, a travelling exhibition, the theme parks…

If she wants to write more, she absolutely should.

But release it twenty years from now – enough time for a whole new generation to discover it anew, and have the parents of all these pre-teen Hermiones and little gay Albuses actually enjoy it again, instead of complaining.