Um okay so I’m seeing a lot of hate against JK Rowling for avoiding Dumbledore’s sexuality in the new Fantastic Beasts film, and you know, I get it. I’m disappointed in her too. But I just want to let everyone know that the Harry Potter universe and the characters are not purely JK Rowling’s anymore. Sure, she created it, gave it a skeleton, but the fandom colored it in.
We characterized characters who got maybe a couple lines in the whole series, didn’t even show up in the movies. We brought LGBTQ into the series with Wolfstar, Deamus, Dumbledore/Grindelwald and countless others. We collectively shat on Rowling’s version of Harry’s future because there is no way in hell that he wasn’t a professor at Hogwarts. We gave voices to characters who were already dead when the books started through our fanfiction, and to characters who were never even mentioned (next-gen). We made some of the main characters POC because there isn’t enough in the books. We argued the morality of several of the ‘bad’ characters, we all have a burning hatred of Umbridge. We eradicated Slytherin’s bad reputation, we made Hufflepuff Pride a thing.
We were all so excited for the Cursed Child and then we all hated it together when it was the worst piece of HP fanfic ever written. We fangirled so hard for the first Fantastic Beasts movie, and we all ship Jacob and Queenie because goddamnit even straight couples can be relationship goals. We all love love love A Very Potter Musical, even if a bunch of us haven’t even seen it.
We drew and wrote and headcanoned and we still do today. We ship random people and we argue over them. Some people wrote songs. Some people poured their heart into fanfics, instead of into original stories. Some people drew incredible pieces of fan-art, for the pure purpose of sharing it with other fans. Some people came up with fantastic headcanons that are widely accepted (Remus is addicted to chocolate, Scorbus, McGonagall is immortal).
I haven’t seen a single fandom that hasn’t sorted their characters into Hogwarts Houses, and drawn the fanart of it. I haven’t seen a single fandom w/o a HP alternate universe fanfic. I haven’t seen a single fandom w/o HP crossover fanfics. We sort literally everything in the world- celebrities, songs, movies, seasons, food, animals, aesthetics, books, even school supplies for god’s sake!
The point is, Harry Potter no longer belongs to JK Rowling. Sure, her name might be on the cover of those books, but the Harry Potter universe is ours. We filled in the gaps, and added on. These are our characters, our stories, our ideas. It is ours now. We took the skeleton that Rowling created, and we gave it life.
There is absolutely no reason that we have to take whatever Rowling says as canon anymore. The Cursed Child proved that. So what if she’s being a coward and not showing Dumbledore’s sexuality in the new movie? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because I cannot count the number of lgbtq fanfics I’ve seen centered around HP. I cannot count all the fanart, the headcanons, the people who ship Dumbledore/Grindelwald.
We’ve already ignored JK Rowling on so many things.
We can do it with this too.
Because Harry Potter doesn’t belong to JK fucking Rowling anymore.
And we can do whatever we want with it.
