My Thoughts on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, revisited

I wrote this back on August 2nd, 2016, just two days after the script book was released. I remember how excited I was to read it, and I did so in the middle of the night after having picked up my copy at midnight from Barnes and Noble. 

⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The first act was great. The second, third, and fourth acts were an absolute plot disaster. It ignored previously-established rules within the story (Voldemort didn't love anyone, and he certainly didn't love anyone enough to have a child with them), and I wish it had never been published. I can only hope it's better as a play. The only reason I didn't stop reading halfway through the book was because Albus and Scorpius are fantastic characters, and there was a ton(≥ 12 specific examples) of evidence to support the notion that they would eventually come out of the closet and be a couple, but alas, it didn't happen. I am by no means a fan of forcing straight characters to be gay for the sake of diversity, but I consider forcing gay characters to be straight for the sake of heteronormativity just as bad. 

Unfortunately, my opinions are exactly the same three years later. Cursed Child is a plot nightmare, and an obvious money grab. 

The notion that Voldemort had sex with anyone is absurd. He could not love as a result of his conception under the influence of a love potion. He would’ve had no need for an heir, as he had gone to great measures to ensure that he would never die in the first place. Finally, while I don’t have the details on the potion from GOF that recreated a body for Voldemort in the Little Hangleton graveyard, I highly doubt that his new body would come with a functioning penis, and even if it DID, it’s still not something anyone wanted to have to think about. But alas, I guess the Dark Lord did “rise again.”

Moving forward (or rather, backwards), the overwhelming use of time travel as a cheap plot device was horrifying. Time-Turners were destroyed by J.K. Rowling in book five for a reason. They open up way too many plot problems that JKR had the foresight to get in front of before it came back to bite her, only to later undo that decision in a shoddy turn of events that served one purpose: creating this bullshit story to milk the fans for even more money. 

I could go on for a while, but I’l make this my last point. Everyone acknowledges the obvious chemistry between Albus and Scorpius, except for the writers, who apparently thought the last scene of the play was a good opportunity to unveil their supposed heterosexuality. There are SO MANY EXAMPLES of these boys literally crying over each other, hugging, and talking about how miserable they are without each other, and none of this comes across as being in any way platonic. We all know what they’re getting into in the Slytherin dormitory after the lights go out, and it ain’t Gobstones.

All in all, I wish this play did not exist. It is clear that it only serves as a way to make more money off of the Harry Potter franchise. I am immensely pleased that the Harry Potter fandom has generally decided to reject this play and consider it non-canon. It was a thinly veiled venture from the beginning, and three years later, the promise that everyone would be able to see it is not even close to having come to fruition. It would cost most fans hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to arrange for travel accommodations to one of the very few cities where this play is being shown, and then they still have to buy tickets, which cost far more than any Harry Potter book ever did (there’s still no word of it being available as a film, which is about the only way it will every be available to all the people who care about Harry Potter’s story). I really wanted to like it, but there are just too many issues I can’t ignore.