“Harry Potter” & the rogue author

USD students discuss their discontent with the Rowling’s additions to the story they love

Paulina Sierra/ Opinion Section Editor / The USD Vista

J.K. Rowling has found herself in the middle of a scandal surrounding Nagini, Voldemort’s pet snake from the original “Harry Potter” franchise. According to new information from the team behind “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” Nagini is now said to be a Korean woman who lived in the era portrayed in the film. According to the new film, Nagini was a circus performer and was eventually left to permanently be a snake. The specific circumstances surrounding this are still unknown.

For fans, this is another example of Rowling adding representations of minorities into existing content (as the snake does appear in the original franchise), something that Rowling has been doing for years. For USD sophomore Alex Schwartz, this announcement was particularly distasteful due to its racist implications.

“I started reading about it and got mad, so, I took a step back,” Schwartz said. “I think it’s more than just the retroactive continuity thing. It’s stupid to go back and add things that weren’t there, and I agree that it makes you see things in the past differently, when something suddenly new is thrown at you. But also, the idea that this whole time, in eternal imprisonment, this snake was basically a slave, and then this slave was a woman, and then this slave was an Asian woman. I just think that’s so distasteful. Of all the things you could have done, if you have any sort of awareness about anything in the world, you would know that that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths, and you know that that was done completely thoughtlessly and tastelessly.”

“Harry Potter” has become one of the most beloved franchises in history, and Rowling could have been even more of a cultural mogul than she is had she kept her positive status. However, her scandals may have opened up fans to viewing Rowling, who could have been their hero, in a different light. For senior B Carucci, this was a positive realization.

“A big part of my growth as a ‘Harry Potter’ fan was realizing that I could have problems with it; I can have certain things that I don’t agree with, and I can still like it, as either a whole or just like part of it,” Carucci said. “I’ve started seeing things about Nagini being an Asian woman, and that’s ridiculous. No, just no. End of story. I think this whole conversation can be summed up with this: Eventually I realized that J.K. Rowling is a biased, fickle human being who sometimes tries to go past her limits, and that’s admirable, but there are certain times where it just causes more problems.”

A lot of fans see their dissatisfaction with the novel as something that has opened up a new idea: perhaps the content was never perfect in the first place.

On Oct. 19, 2007, during a question-and-answer session at Carnegie Hall in New York City, J.K. Rowling answered a fan question about Dumbledore’s potential past marital status by announcing that Dumbledore, in her eyes, was gay. This became a pivotal point in fan’s understanding of “Harry Potter.” Rowling was adding to the published books in real time, something that had never ocurred before.

As time passed, Rowling continued to surprise fans with new additions. Soon, her Twitter became full of announcements about a new “canon,” which is a phrase used online to describe legitimate content surrounding the story.

For  B  Carucci, this began in 2007, with Rowling’s announcement about Dumbledore.

“That was my first idea that ‘Harry Potter’ wasn’t perfectly formed and complete already,” Carucci said. “She’s still making edits, even though she’s published the material. There are things she feels she should correct. That was the first time I thought ‘oh, this isn’t perfect.’ That was a good realization, probably.”

The realization that the book, according to the author, is not finite or perfect, is a new one in literary culture. In the eyes of fans, however, the original published novels are not the end of the story. For those who feel short changed by the series, dislike a major aspect, or simply want to engage with new content, fanfiction becomes an option.

Fanfiction began in the age of the internet, and can be attributed largely in part to the fans of “Harry Potter”. The universe that Rowling created is vast and highly detailed, and for some fans, the details she focused on are not the ones they care about or find interesting. Often, the fans  take it upon themselves to fill in the gaps. According to many, Rowling’s retroactive additions to the content of the novels has taken away their sacredness, and has opened them up to the fans. Because of this, USD junior Grace Strumpfer feels apathetic to Rowling’s announcements.

“I think (Rowling) can do whatever she wants, but so can we,” Strumpfer said. “She can say whatever she wants to say; I just don’t accept it. People are out there sort of spewing stuff, and you know, things like a movie sequel will come out and people will kind of pretend it never happened.”

As a result of the discontent with both the original content and Rowling’s constant additions to it, the original novels have become, in Strumpfer’s eyes, almost obsolete.

“It’s the idea that means a lot to me, it’s not every single word in the text,” Strumpfer said. “It’s what people can create with it, and I love the art, and I love the fanfiction. And people have these really cool ideas, and they take the world, and they run with it. It’s sort of like how people interpret the Bible. Some people are literalists… and some people are like ‘let’s take this, and loosely follow the teachings.”

This is one of the first instances of an author attempting to have a heavy hand in public perception of the novels post-publication. With lack of social media and personal reader engagement in the past, this separation was not necessary, but has been fan-made in the case of Rowling. This dissociation of content from the author allows fans of the series to continue interacting with content created by someone toward whom they are so highly critical. For Strumpfer, what matters isn’t the author or even the story.

“I think it’s the world,” Strumpfer said. “Sometimes it’s the books, or sometimes it’s the movies if they did something I like better. And sometimes it’s fanlore. I feel like I have all this knowledge about ancient and noble families work, and how Gringotts works, and all these behind the scenes things, and they’re not legit, technically. They’re not endorsed by trash queen (J.K. Rowling) herself. They’re just really interesting things that people have taken and played with, and they’re really fun.”

Due to such recent controversies surrounding “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” in which Johnny Depp had been cast despite controversy due to his history of relationship abuse, and  young Dumbledore not being openly gay, this disconnect can be important to fans. Alex Schwartz thinks the possibility of redemption for the author is bleak.

“I don’t think she’ll ever redeem herself,” Schwartz said. “I don’t give her money anymore, I won’t pay to go see her movies if she lets Johnny Depp star in them. I won’t pay to go see characters that won’t be explicitly gay that she said were gay in canon. I don’t think she’ll ever redeem herself when she continues to be rewarded for bad behavior and paid by jaded fans that don’t want to realize that their hero and the creator of this thing is a bad person. You can like things made by bad people in certain circumstances, but I don’t think she’ll ever change. More of the fanbase is disowning her, and I think in the future, the train will be off the rails and flying away in the sky with all the people who have stolen her franchise from under her, and made it to be their own while she flounders in her bigotry.”

First-year Leah Ring believes Rowling’s additions are best ignored.

“Right now, I kind of try to ignore everything that (Rowling) says about the books, truthfully,” Ring said. “I like to look at what they were, and what the author says on Twitter, I can’t really trust that. That’s just word of mouth. And she could change her mind, she could just strip away everything she said on Twitter.”

Other fans, however, think the content that Rowling is putting out is not something to be ignored, but directly criticized. For Schwartz, the experience of reading and interacting with “Harry Potter” has always been one that involved criticism, especially toward Rowling herself.

“From (watching) the movies, she meant nothing to me, but after growing up in the age of the internet and seeing things about her online, when I went into the books, I had different ideas of what it was versus what she wrote,” Schwartz said. “Because of things like Tumblr and Twitter where people were dissatisfied and came up with their own ideas for, like, what characters would look like, character dynamics, and things like that. I was already dissatisfied with the book before I read it, so I went in with a different state of mind than what she intended.”

Schwartz believes the added content is a direct slap in the face to people who seek cultural representation in literature.

“She didn’t earn it,” Schwartz said. “I think that if you’re gonna go out there and make a book full of positive representation of different ethnicities, gender identities, and sexual orientations, you gotta earn it like the rest of us earn it. The people who you’re supposedly writing about are real people, and we work very hard to be put into these categories that we then apply to your characters. To take it without having worked in the narrative to make it real, I think is unfair.”

For these fans, the consensus is clear: Rowling’s additions are to be ignored. The power of the Harry Potter franchise was already pivotal in literary culture, where fans became deeply involved in the content on a personal level, more than ever due to the rising use of the internet and the interconnected community that it created. This newness, however, is only strengthened by the new phenomenon of disowning the author, and giving the content over to the fans. For Schwartz, the magic of “Harry Potter” is in the community, not the author.

“I think when you put anything out into the world, it doesn’t belong to you anymore,” Schwartz said. “And I think that with how much the fans have taken the books and changed them into something incredible, something about inclusion, and adding our own representation in there. The book doesn’t belong to her anymore, it belongs to us. And we are the ones who get things out of it, and we’re the people that need it. It was ours for the taking, and we took it. These books are the foundation that has built upon it an enormous culture of inclusivity and friendship amongst people, ones with similar interests and things like that. When you have fan ideas about how your childhood heroes were gay, or your childhood heroes looked like you, or sounded like you, that’s what I’m a fan of. Maybe that’s not the way she wrote the books, but it’s what the books did on their own.”

To fans of “Harry Potter”, the power of the franchise lies with them, not the author. With Rowling constantly adding new controversial content, it seems like only a matter of time before fans of the franchise close their ears to her musings entirely, and take full ownership of the franchise, be it through eventual disinterest in her new canon content, or an eventual apathy towards anything she says and her celebrity presence. Given the fact that this has never happened before, only time will tell if Rowling’s authoral magic will fade any time soon.