Cursed Child was the run-away best-seller for J. K. Rowling in 2016, but outside of thespian Potter-philes with pockets deep enough for travel to London and tickets, enthusiasm for the so-called ‘Eighth Harry Potter‘ has been short-lived. The Presence approved the story but it didn’t show many of her signature story-telling magic.
I’ll go out on a limb to make a prediction I doubt anyone will remember and say that 2016 will be recalled by fandom much more for the first Fantastic Beasts film than for Cursed Child. There’s a lot more to talk about, really, in speculating about where the story is headed and the artistry and meaning of Rowling’s return to the Wizarding World than there is in thinking about Harry Potter as a father failure and a Time Turner tsunami.
The real challenge in talking about Fantastic Beasts 1: Newt Goes to New York is that we have to try to isolate Rowling’s work from the Heyman-Yates mish-mash of a movie. As Rowling said Steve Kloves told her, the agony of making a movie out of a Rowling novel or script is “fitting the woman to the dress,” i.e., forcing the natural figure into the mechanical formula of blockbuster movies.
Can we re-create Rowling’s actual ‘Original Screenplay,’ the approved shooting script out of which Heyman-Yates cut 15 scenes that we know about? When the published ‘Original Screenplay’ does not include the sliced scenes — and doesn’t even match up with the movie as released?
We can, but it’s still a work in progress. Here’s a reminder of where we stand in the effort, our first stabs at interpreting the recreated texts and the underlying, re-invented mythology (Theseus!), and what we have left to do. Enjoy! [Read more…]
On 7 July, I thought to check J. K. Rowling’s twitter feed to see if she had posted anything about the anniversary of the 
The faculty here at HogwartsProfessor spent some time back then discussing that painting, ‘Allegory of the Vanities,’ amongst ourselves about what it might mean in terms of Lethal White, the Cormoran Strike mystery we’re waiting on and the work we assumed The Presence was working on then. We came up with little more than ‘remember death.’ Which given the first word of the Lethal White title and it being a murder mystery, did not seem to warrant a post. I’ll return to that in a moment after noting that Rowling was then working 
What makes her choice of the ‘Three Fates’ mortuary relief that much more interesting in this regard is that
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