Unfortunately she was also already committed to having written a setting that established all this stuff like Ton-Tongue Toffees and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans and Platform 9 3/4 It's not that the transition was impossible but I think it would've taken a defter hand
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
Like, dark and gritty HP fanfic that I think succeeds more than the canon books does so because it's willing to *openly* be fanfic, like it has this self-aware tone of making fun of the cutesy children's stuff from before or openly distancing itself from it
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Replying to @arthur_affect
you don't have to distance yourself from any of that. it's all still there. bertie bott's every flavor beans still do have every flavor. but they're fucking jelly beans. at some point the characters need to realize that the beans were distracting them from literal slavery
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
that all this cotton-candy happiness is gilt on rotten wood
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Replying to @perdricof
Yes If she had actually had the courage to do that -- to make the euphoric joy of Book 1 turn retroactively into a vicious lie -- that would've been the correct ending to the series The series would've legit been great literature, revolutionary for its impact on culture
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
But alas, she did not That was the book she had the *potential* to write and the person she had the *potential* to become But the depressing JK Rowling story is that she simply fell short, she didn't have the gas in the tank
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
Harry Potter was a paradoxical victim of its success here I think Who knows what would've happened in the alternate reality where HP was only a middlingly successful series But in our world, it was a billion-dollar franchise that had a brand to maintain
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
It couldn't end on "What if Hogwarts is bad, actually? What if the wizarding world is bad, actually? What if the Every Flavor Beans were a fucking stupid distraction from a rotten society, actually?" Because then you couldn't have a theme park selling the fantasy of those things
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
Looking at it that way, it’s even worse in that the seeds were there. The Ministry is incompetent, Snape is complex but not really misunderstood or “good”, many authority figures suck in various human ways, Aurors turn out to largely be useless Then Harry winds up an Auror
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Replying to @muddlewait @perdricof
Yeah so I used to just be like "Harry being an Auror is just genre tropes, it's this lazy default to make being a good guy synonymous with being a cop" But the existence of the Cormoran Strike series makes me retroactively go "Okay no you were right JKR really is pro-cop irl"
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Especially since the most obvious way to take Harry's story full-circle is to have him become the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts and have that be the way the curse Voldemort placed on the position be broken It's openly foreshadowed multiple times in the series
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The Dumbledore's Army arc was even explicitly about how government institutions can't be trusted in the long run and members of a community need to take direct responsibility for protecting themselves and each other That all went away when the bad guy died
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Oh, they WANT you to think it all went away. That final scene as Harry’s kids go off to school and - oh, look! - there are the Malfoys!
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