The year was 2007. The book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The dedication on the first page was, in part, to the fans, to those of us who have stuck with Harry "until the very end."
Whenever that may be.
After that book, J.K. Rowling announced she was done, an announcement she echoed after this summer's Cursed Childand which I'm sure we'll hear from her again. With the extension of Fantastic Beasts into a five-film franchise, the fact of the matter is: This will never be done.
SEE ALSO:Sorry, but you can NEVER have too much Harry PotterI sobbed my way through the final chapters of Deathly Hallowsand called in sick to work for two days, but I knew it wasn't reallyover. There were still three more movies, and I planned to attend fan conventions until at least 2010 (more on that later). By the time the movies ended, there was the theme park to visit, and life post-Potter turned out to be just fine.
The end of Harry Potterwas clean for me. It was what was always promised: Seven books, seven-ish films, seven years at Hogwarts. Good defeats evil and the hero gets the girl, and like so many such stories before it, it restores faith and equilibrium in the universe.
When Peter Jackson announced and split The Hobbit and when Disney acquired Lucasfilm and greenlit a whole new Star Wars trilogy, I smiled superiorly down from my perch upon the Hogwarts Astronomy tower, where we simply didn't hold with such nonsense.
In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie writes: "everything ends...dreams end, stories end, life ends." It's not the sunniest thought to carry with you, but it's grounding.
I survived the end of Harry Potter, so I could survive other inevitable endings.
But stories don't end in Hollywood, not anymore. Not when you can have a spinoff, a sequel, a revival, a reboot, a rerelease. It's perfectly acceptable for Hollywood producers to now renege on a promised feature and triple or in this case quintuple the content and profit. Arrested Development didn't end, Indiana Jones didn't end, Gilmore Girls didn't end. I live in constant fear of a Back to the Future reboot, the only story from my formative years that remains untouched.
I don't doubt that Jo has five full Fantastic Beasts screenplays in her, but I'm terrified I won't like them. I thoroughly disliked Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and that disagreement put a divide between me and fellow fans who loved it. Having spent more than half my life as a hardcore fan, Who am I if I'm not the Harry Potter girl?
Incidentally, you know what's really good? Harry Potter. This summer I started my first reread since 2011, and those books are something else. Rowling's imagination, her use of language, the meticulous visuals that populate every scene -- it's unreal, and it's only grown more magical.
Oh my god. I'm a Harry Potter purist. We have those now.
So you win, J.K. Rowling, Hollywood and everyone else complicit in the puppetry of this scheme. I can write all the think pieces I want, but my butt will be in a seat for the Fantastic Beasts franchise and every Avengers movie there is planned. I'm going to hope you'll use this as an opportunity to populate the wizarding world with queer people and people of color. I guess now I'll take comfort in the lack of endings, the reminder that life, like movies, is a work in progress.
But I will destroy whoever remakes Back to the Future.
TopicsHarry Potter
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