L'Appel du Vide

I feel wrong saying I am hopeful, because I understand that I am in a position of privilege being white and straight, and I know there are a lot of people who are going through a very traumatic time right now

but I am a positive person by nature and I see hope in small things, and as a preschool teacher, I see hope in small people 

I am hopeful because on Tuesday, my students participated in a mock election by listening to snippets of speeches and unanimously nominated Hillary Clinton. When asked why, they simply said that we have to be nice to everyone, and that Donald Trump wasn’t 

I am hopeful because on Wednesday, when my students came in and we discussed the election results, they told me that sometimes we don’t get what we want or what we deserve, but we just have to keep working and keep helping each other

I am hopeful because my students are learning Spanish, Hmong, Arabic, Chinese, and English all from each other; they greet each other in their home languages and get responses in another

I am hopeful because my students want to learn about the cultures of their classmates. We start every morning eating breakfast together and talking about what we had for dinner the night before. We talk about our weekend plans, visiting our families, our families from other countries and the countries my students have lived in. They teach each other and they teach me every single day

I am hopeful because children do not have prejudice or hatred, and they have the capacity to grow up and be anything. And their empathy, encouragement, and curiosity makes the world a better place very single day 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Hey, thanks for asking! Heads up, this will be very spoilery.

Let me start with this… I enjoyedreading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child while I was actuallyreading it. I loved Albus and Scorpius and their relationship, and Iloved being back in the wizarding world. But after I finished, afterI started thinking about it more and more, I realized that I was justenjoying the nostalgia of reading about the Potter world again.

One of my biggest issues are theplotholes. JK Rowling has spent years building this magnificent worldwith established rules and boundaries. Magic is powerful, but it hasits limitations, and Cursed Child threw all of these right out thewindow. In the books, Polyjuice Potion takes months to prepare –apparently now it can be done in a matter of hours. Also, now if wejust try hard enough, we cancompletely forgo Polyjuice Potion and transfigure Harry to look likeVoldemort. What about the Fidelius Charm? When our gang travels backin time to the night Voldemort kills Lily and James, there is noreason any of them should be able to see the Potters’ house or itsoccupants. I’ve seen it argued that these characters already knowwhere the house is so therefore the charm doesn’t apply, but that’sjust not true. It’s made explicitly clear in the books that Voldemortcould know where the Potter house is, but unless he is specificallytold by Peter Pettigrew,it won’t matter, he won’t be able to see or access it. That’s thewhole point of the Fidelius Charm, and these magical laws make almostthe entire last act of the play impossible. I’m sure there are othermajor violations of the laws of magic within the play, but these arethe major ones that stuck out to me.

Then there’s the characterizations. Look, I’m actually totally fine with Harry andAlbus have relationship issues. Harry is an impulsive person and helashes out when he’s frustrated, it’s one of the character flaws thatmakes him profoundly human, especially as far as children’sliterature is concerned, so I didn’t think it was totally out ofcharacter when he reacted in anger towards Albus. What wasout of character was the manipulation, the lockdown he placed uponAlbus, the mistreating of Minerva McGonagall, and the arms lengthfrom which he seemed to hold Ginny at all times. Ron was another caseof horrible mischaracterization – it seems that Cursed Child’sversion of Ron was written by the creators of the Harry Pottermovies, where he is often reduced to a comedic sidekick. But at leastin the movies he was just harmlessly goofy. This Ron was too drunk toremember his wedding and we’re supposed to find that endearing. Thatis not Ronald Bilius Weasley, the fierce and loyal and insecure youngman from the Harry Potter literary saga. That’s Ron “Bloody Hell”Weasley from the Harry Potter movie series. Not to mention some ofthe other ludicrous things that happened, like Cedric becoming aDeath Eater (which was also very confusing and came out of nowhere… it wasn’t explained or evenr evealed at all and thensuddenly they were like, “OK, Cedric’s a Death Eater, we need tofix that.” Wait, what?). So Cedric, “exceptionally hardworking,infinitely fair-minded, and most importantly fierce, fierce friend”Cedric Diggory, gets “humiliated” at the Second Task and he goeson to… kill Neville Longbottom and become a Dark Wizard andsupporter of Voldemort? What?! Absolutely ridiculous.

Theusage of previous characters also left me largely disappointed. Ididn’t care about seeing Cedric Diggory or Ludo Bagman or DoloresUmbridge again. I wanted to see – or at least hear about – TeddyLupin and Andromeda Tonks, Luna Lovegood and her adventurous husbandand children, somethingabout Neville Longbottom other than what we already knew. There’s awhole, giant family of Weasley cousins out there now and they’re noteven mentioned. We seeGinny and Ron and they mention Molly, and that’s it. No Bill, noVictoire, no Dominique, no Louis, no Charlie, no George, no Angelina,no Roxanne, no Fred, Jr., no Percy, no Audrey, no Molly II, noLucy… even Hugo, son of Ron and Hermione, is barely mentioned inpassing once. There was so much time spent on digging up the pastthat we got virtually no new information about any of the characters.Even the characters we spent time with, like Harry, Ron, Ginny, Dracoand Hermione, were occupying roles that we already knew they hadthanks to JKR’s interviews and Pottermore. I also would have liked tosee some familiar names among Scorpius and Albus’s classmates…throwing in a Creevey, a Zabini, a Finch-Fletchley, or aThomas-Finnegan would have been a nice nod, but instead we got abunch of no-names.

Speaking ofdisappointing characters, Delphi is perhaps the worst thing to everhappen to the Harry Potter universe. She makes no sense, herconception is virtually impossible and highly illogical, she’s acharacter straight out of a really, really bad fanfiction and I havenot one positive thing to say about her. She’s not even interestingas a character. What I thought was going to happen, and what I thinkshould have happened, was a reveal that Delphi was actually BellatrixLestrange trying to bring back her Dark Lord. She’s never confirmeddead in the books, only in the movies, it’s only mentioned that Mollyhits her with a spell and she falls, so it’s totally possible shesurvived the Battle of Hogwarts. Instead we get Delphi.

Can wejust take a moment here to talk about how this story is almostdirectly out of Back to the Future 2? Our hero goes to the past tochange something, and when he returns, things are mostly the same,but with slight differences. So he goes back again, and when hereturns, the world has been turned upside down and the bad guy –Biff or Voldemort – now rules the world. So he has to go back againand change it again.Even Albus sending Harry a message via the baby blanket was veryreminiscent of Doc sending Marty the letter from the Old West. Not tomention, of course, the A Very Potter Sequel vibes we all undoubtedlyfelt throughout this whole thing.

Andthe fan service. Theportrait scenes with Dumbledore felt clever at first but then justgot weird. Severus Snape acting as a rebel during the Voldemorttakeover was just absurd, all a way for JKR to say, “See? He’s acomplicated man but he was gooooood!”

This brings me tothe thing that made me angriest about Cursed Child, and I think thisis the thing that made most people the angriest about it. Albus andScorpius. I loved their characters, I loved their dynamics, I lovedtheir relationship. It is mentioned many times throughout the scriptthat they need one another, that they belong together. BoxingScorpius into having a crush on Rose Granger-Weasley at the very lastminute was uncalled for and even hurtful. JKR says over and over thatshe supports the LGBT+ community… but somehow she can’t bringherself to represent them in her stories. She’s written aboutthousands of characters, thousands of names have been dropped, andthe only one she has identified as gay is Albus Dumbledore, and thatwasn’t even within the canon. This was an amazing opportunity and sheand her fellow writers dropped the ball. But even with all of thatset aside, what it comes down to is that these two characters, Albusand Scorpius, were written with strong feelings for one another anddenying what was right in front of us at the last minute was justblatantly untrue to the story that was written. Don’t tell me thatScorpius’s crush on Rose was clear because he liked the way shesmelled in one throwaway scene when we went spent five hoursdeveloping a real relationship between Scorpius and Albus. Scorosewas forced and unnecessary.

I just don’t knowwhy this story needed to be told. With virtually no new informationand a bounty of conflicting content, JKR seems to have finallyexecuted our worst fear – continuing the story for the sake ofstory continuation. Nothing has ever felt like more of a cash grab.

I wasn’t expectingthis to be the eighth book. By its very nature as a script, we’reonly getting the bones of the story, so it was never going to feel asrich and full as our seven sacred tomes. This story is meant to beseen, and I’d love to watch some of the magic scenes they describe tosee how the effects are executed onstage. But the grossmischaracterizations and sloppy handling of the wizarding world forthe sake of convenience do not Disapparate when you see it instead ofreading it. Like I said, I enjoyed reading it, but the same way youenjoy a fanfiction with a strange concept… we just like seeing ourcharacters again. The problem is that these characters are allegedlycanon, and that’s a hard thing to wrap our minds around.