![\"Harry](\"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/14\/2016\/03\/Harry-Potter-and-the-Cursed-Child-Cover.png\")
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Potterheads rejoice! It\u2019s been five years since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2<\/em> was released, and finally we get something else to satiate our wizarding-world needs: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child<\/em>, a play opening in London in July. Fear not, fellow Americans, those of us stuck on this side of the pond will still get the experience in book form, as the script is being published and sold on July 31st<\/sup> (That\u2019s Harry\u2019s birthday, but you already knew that, didn\u2019t you?).<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of hype about this, which is both expected and unwarranted. Yes, the Harry Potter Fandom is one of the largest and most passionate ever, but it\u2019s not like we have been starving for content. Between the new Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them<\/em> movie, the expanded theme park, and J.K. Rowling\u2019s near weekly tweets about who should have been with whom and who shouldn\u2019t have died and who was or was not sorted into Gryffindor and who is or is not gay, we\u2019ve gotten more content than fans of a finished book series should. And now, a play about Harry being overworked and his son not wanting to live up to his father\u2019s legacy. How exciting! How whimsical? How\u2026necessary?<\/p>\n It\u2019s strange that the first book, full of puns and childish imagination, led to such a mature play. I suppose it makes sense to aim the play at the original Harry Potter audience, who are now adults, but the real question is: why have a play at all?<\/p>\n That\u2019s right folks, I don\u2019t want any more Harry Potter. You may think I should be sent to Azkaban for such a crime, but hear me out.<\/p>\n Harry\u2019s story is done. It finished neatly\u2014and then had a clunky epilogue that a lot of people found unnecessary. This play, an extension of said unnecessary epilogue, feels to me like the last episode of How I Met Your Mother<\/em>. It is taking the story too far. Sure, Harry\u2019s sons probably would feel like a lot was expected of them, and sure, Harry probably would be overworked, but I don\u2019t want to know that. I don\u2019t want a Return of the King<\/em> style ending to this saga; the one(s) we got were enough.<\/p>\n Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them<\/em> is more exciting to me because it is a new story in the old world. A different time, with different characters, in a different country, with the same magic? Brilliant. But the same characters, after their story has already come to an end? Seems like it\u2019s just J.K. trying to wring out all the money she can.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t blame her, though. The Casual Vacancy<\/em> didn\u2019t do as well as expected, and the miniseries based on it (yes, there was a miniseries based on it) did even worse. Her mystery novels, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, were plain forgettable. When your tweets about a children\u2019s book you wrote ten years ago get more attention than your more recent adult novels, it makes sense to resign yourself to keep branching off of said children\u2019s book.<\/p>\n Why can\u2019t one of the most successful authors in the history of time write successfully about anything beyond wizards and magic? Frankly, because we, her fans, won\u2019t let her. After all, we\u2019re the ones who didn\u2019t read her adult books. We\u2019re the ones who will pre-order The Cursed Child<\/em>. The same audience who propelled her to fame are now limiting her creativity.<\/p>\n Harry Potter was and is an international phenomenon. People will read those books until the end of people, and we were lucky enough to grow up with them. I will never forget the excitement of the Barnes and Noble premiers, surrounded by hundreds of kids with lightning bolts drawn on our foreheads in Sharpie. I\u2019ll read the books to my kids someday, I\u2019ll still watch ABC Family\u2019s Harry Potter Weekend every year, and yes, I\u2019ll probably see the play when it comes to the states. But perhaps we should let J.K. write about something else, for once. After all, imagine if Harry only learned one spell? He\u2019d never get anywhere if he just yelled \u201cExpelliarmus!\u201d at everything.<\/p>\n Oh, wait\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christina Bagni \/\/ Blog Writer Potterheads rejoice! It\u2019s been five years since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 was released, and finally we get something else to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalinformation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}