The Best Way To Consume 'Harry Potter'
Welcome to Fan Service, a guide to engaging with gargantuan, lore-heavy stories. In each volume, we'll recommend a watch/read order to approach the given series with and dissect our argument for it. Today: embracing the magic and mystery of J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World (light spoilers throughout).
J.K. Rowling's first novel, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" — okay, Philosopher's Stone if you'd like — turns 20 years old this month. That's both cause for joyous reflection and for the howls of twentysomethings coming to grips with the passage of time.
There was a time when you might've thought it was easy to know Rowling's fictional universe inside and out. All you'd have to do is read the books, right? Alas, dear reader, this was never the case. Before the second book came out, Rowling was already adding supplementary material, writing wizarding newspaper articles for the nascent Harry Potter fanclub. Nowadays there's enough to pack a roomy vault in Gringotts.
J.K. Rowling's "Wizarding World" is still a thriving franchise juggernaut: last year's "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" film is set to receive four sequels and England's "Cursed Child" stage production will cross the pond for Broadway in 2018. Potter and pals are also more than just entertainment cash cows: the Harry Potter books are practically a Millennial culture Rosetta stone. You could say "The X-Files" was the first pop-culture phenomenon to evolve alongside the early web, but modern internet fandom took off with Potter.
When recommending the best way to experience J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World, it's unfortunate that we can't hook you up with a Time-Turner; as the books trickled out, loving "Harry Potter" was much about speculation and the wait between installments as it was about devouring every new addition. That experience is all in the past now and, as we'll get into, it's unlikely that future stories from Rowling will generate that same excitement. Our recommendation is tailored to cover the Potter stuff that newcomers and old diehards will find excellent and essential, regardless of where the series goes in the future. Let's get to it.
Harry's Story Still Comes First
Anything officially tied to the Harry Potter books and their spin-offs falls under the Wizarding World umbrella. This means the novels, last year's sequel play, the Eddie Redmayne-led prequel movie, all J.K. Rowling-written or approved content and even Rowling's on-the-record comments in interviews or in tweets. Our recommendation acknowledges all these parts but does not endorse every last one.
- The Harry Potter story (Books 1 through 7 or1 movies 1 through 8)
- Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (Prequel spin-off film)
- Quidditch Through The Ages (In-universe textbook)
- Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (In-universe textbook)
- The Tales Of Beedle The Bard (In-universe children's stories)
- Daily Prophet Newsletters (In-universe newspaper articles)
- "The Harry Potter Prequel" (Short story)
- Pottermore Presents (eBooks of collected short stories and vignettes)
If that list seems short, well, there's Harry Potter stuff you're definitely better off skipping.
"The Restricted Section" a.k.a. Don't Bother
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
- J.K. Rowling's Interviews, Tweets, out-of-print chocolate frog trading cards…
Hopefully, this order should help you get the most out of the Wizarding World — both from the stories, and from their cultural impact.
The Movies Should Be Approached Separately For Their Merits, Not For Canon
You probably noticed that the order refers to the "Harry Potter" books and not their movie adaptations. First, there's no airtight rule on originals versus adaptations to follow here. Sure, it wouldn't make sense to recommend the book adaptation of "Alien" over the film (no disrespect to humble movie novelizations), but you can argue that watching "Jaws" is a better use of your time than reading the not-as-popular book it's based on.
Second, if you're just starting out with "Harry Potter" and you'd rather watch the movies over reading the books, that's fine! In fact, if you want to appreciate the movies for their qualities as films first-and-foremost, that will probably be easier if you haven't read the books. A lot of fans experienced the Harry Potter movies the other way; the first thought on their minds after leaving the theater was "how does it compare to the book?" not "was it a good movie?" The most heated debates about the movies amongst fans have to do faithfulness to the source material, not the movies' strengths and weaknesses as cinema.
There's nothing wrong with having high standards and high hopes for film adaptations, just like there's nothing wrong with the "Harry Potter" films making some departures. Critically, the films all performed well: every installment is rated fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. The incredible art direction earned the series a third of its Oscar nominations. The decision to cast a handful of children and follow them through their whole adolescence for eight movies is about as audacious as Richard Linklater's decade-long shoot for "Boyhood" (and hey, there's far more risk attached with a blockbuster series riding on the ability of teenage actors). They might not be great, but to argue that any of them are terrible is pretty harsh.
The books and movies should be appreciated and critiqued as separate works at least to this extent: Worrying over the differences between them like they're supposed to tell the exact same story will get you nowhere fast. The books and movies can't be canon together.
Take this example: A side character whose fate after a climactic battle is left ambiguous in the last book is shown to be pretty dead-looking in the movie. That's a difference between the books and movies that wouldn't have caused too much of a stir on its own. The problem blew up years after the movie came out when Pottermore, the officially-sanctioned hub for J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World, launched profile pages for individual characters. The page for that student weirdly listed them as "presumed dead" (spoilers in the links to follow). Fans noticed this and had a small freak out, followed by another freak out when the statement was removed from the Pottermore page.
From one perspective, the argument is settled. The student's fate was ambiguous in the books, they're dead in the movie and an official website tried to split the difference before deciding to just sweep the issue under the rug. It's an admission that it's messy and downright annoying to try making the books and movies seem like they match up on canon.
What is and isn't canon really matters to Harry Potter fans for a reason we're about to touch on. The judgement here, though, can be said to apply to most franchises: in the case of an adaptation, you can either defer to the source material as canon or talk about the two as separate, uncontradictory universes. Pretending you can weave the two together just doesn't work, even (or especially) if you're an official source for the series.
Just Try To Ignore J.K. Rowling's Meddling With Canon And Fandom
The origin story of the Harry Potter books has a touch of the apocryphal about it — J.K. Rowling was a down-on-her-luck writer, stuck on a train, when the idea of a boy wizard (who didn't know he was a boy wizard) suddenly came to her. In a 1998 interview at the The Elephant House cafe in Edinburgh, where Rowling wrote much of the first book, she said "the story chose [her], not the other way around."
It's a nice "a-ha moment" tale. There are countless stories like it, a continuum of yarns that all go something like "it came to me, all I had was a pen and a cocktail napkin, I scribbled it down and now I'm a billionaire." It suggests that with a spark of inspiration and some long days at a cafe, you too can go from poverty to pop-culture superstardom.
There's a problem with these stories though — they tend to bring focus back on the creator instead of on their work. Rowling's fame and willingness to share details in interviews doesn't change what she's put on the page. It seems, as the years pass, like Rowling really doesn't get this.
In the 10 years since the publication of "Deathly Hallows," Rowling has made statements intended to add to or change the audience's understanding of characters with little or no textual evidence to back them up. Each of these proclamations is newsworthy amongst fans, but they're not all received with excitement.
Most notably, it's on Rowling's word alone that Hogwarts Headmaster Dumbledore once had romantic feelings for another man, that this attraction did not turn out well and that afterwards Dumbledore spent most of his life celibate. This isn't a spoiler because none of this narrative appears in the books. Simply saying that one of your characters is gay is also a pretty non-committal bordering-on-disrespectful way to claim representation. It hits on a few crummy tropes, too; forcing gay characters to be chronically lovelorn and equation of asexuality with chosen celibacy or aversion to intimacy. All that said, the Dumbledore backstory is probably the most well-intentioned and well-received of Rowling's revisions. Some of her other comments have been divisive in the fanbase, especially those regarding some (spoilers) key relationships.
The frequently-trotted-out "death of the author" argument applies here — the text simply stands on its own, separate from the author's biography and their interpretations of the text. That applies to every other comment Rowling's chosen to make in the intervening years: about regretting writing main characters into couples, the fates of characters' offspring and so on.
To be sure, "Harry Potter" is more than just the source material. The mistake is in thinking that "more" refers to the fictional world as it exists in Rowling's head. Instead, that expansiveness beyond the text comes from the series' fans. Bloggers, fan fiction writers, roleplayers, everyone who ever turned up at a midnight book release or film premiere — together they made the Wizarding World culturally significant beyond the scope of what's on the page and screen. Hell, modern internet fandom owes a lot of it's best and worst traits to "Harry Potter" fans of old, who were amongst the first massive communities coming up with theories and arguing about romantic couplings on LiveJournals and message boards.
That fervent love for the series and the anticipation that preceded each installment is undoubtedly the best reason to go back and acquaint yourself with "Harry Potter." Reading the books or watching the movies will put you "in the know" and can serve as a jumping off point for the "Fantastic Beasts" movie (which really doesn't give you a point of view character to introduce you to wizarding), for fanfictions (both speculative and salacious) and for parodies like the excellent Wizard People, Dear Reader. Rowling's comments retroactively adding to or changing the Harry Potter canon, by contrast, don't feed into the fandom the same way as the books did.
With all that said, this relates to the "8th book" as well…
So Is 'Harry Potter And The Cursed Child' Really Worth Skipping?
The end of the final "Harry Potter" book is pretty conclusive, while still leaving a door open just a crack to allow for future stories (or prequels, of course).
Last year Rowling, Jack Thorne and Jack Tiffany busted through that door with an eighth Harry Potter book — sort of. "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is the script to a two-part play that opened in London's West End theater district (its American run on Broadway starts in 2018). The demand for tickets is pretty high… but not that high. It's not sold out through the year for a few reasons. For one, the two-part play is nearly six hours long, with some performances split across two nights. Two, the script was released as a book at the same time, so fans who prefer Potter-on-the-page might be happy just to read it. The big issue is that, despite rave reviews for the play, many fans really don't like the story. At all.
Many readers roasted the "Cursed Child" for reading like bad fanfiction and pointed out inconsistent behavior from characters who were steadfast in their convictions through all the books. The story challenges some of the outcomes of the series in a "what if" fashion and recontextualizes old information in ways that ring less like revelations to hardcore fans and more like revisionism.
Sound familiar? The criticisms leveled against "Cursed Child" echo the concerns of people who are tired of Rowling's controversial statements on canon. You could read the entire play as a rebuke to fans who're critical of Rowling's post-novel decisions, like a big (literally) theatrical way of saying "I control this."
If you're into the series and have a chance to see the play, you should consider going — the performances and high production values have all garnered praise. That said, you'd probably be better served living out your wizarding fantasies at the Wizarding World amusement park at Universal Orlando than by sitting through six hours of a play that retreads the magic of the books.
What's Next?
J.K. Rowling says she's done with Harry Potter (the character) now, though a few years ago an eighth installment as a play seemed very unlikely. Still, there's four more "Fantastic Beasts" movies coming that are sure to dig into the pasts of some of Potter's old friends. It's likely that more companion stories penned by J.K. will continue to trickle out of Pottermore and it's almost guaranteed that Rowling will keep making the occasional proclamation about Potter canon.
After the movie contract is up, Rowling could move on from the Wizarding World. Between "Deathly Hallows" and "Cursed Child," Rowling released "The Casual Vacancy" and a series of three detective novels under the name Robert Galbraith, all successes in their own rights. Maybe she'll pass the mantle on to other writers. It's normally unheard of for big, successful multimedia franchises — new Star Wars movies will outlast us all — but there's a chance the series will end for good. Would that be so bad, leaving fans with a collection of work that they (mostly) enjoy instead of stringing them along for more and more installments? What's wrong with the series just dying?
After all: To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
