Hogwarts Bathroom History Revealed

Comments

1. Kelly Loomis says

   January 13, 2019 at 8:56 am

   This was old news. For some reason everyone has flipped out. Rowling gave out this information ages ago when discussing Chamber of Secrets. It just happened to come up on a trivia game recently. People must not be reading Pottermore!
2. John says

   January 13, 2019 at 11:39 am

   The post headline, then, should be ‘Reviewed’ rather than ‘Revealed.’

   I’d note two things.

   First, people still love Harry Potter. Listen to the ovation from the crowd when the late night talk show host asks if anyone cares for the Hogwarts Saga. It’s sincere and deafening, not a just a live audience response to a prompt or coaching. And people are still following Pottermore and reading their twitter notes or there would have been no response. This is very much a living reality in the imaginations of millions, the global Shared Text.

   Second, people are eager to mock and criticize Harry Potter and anything they see as unnecessary twiddling with the beloved canon. Something like the boogeyman Fundamentalist Christians that live in the imaginations of Rowling’s fans alongside Dolores Umbridge and Peter Pettigrew, fans now want the Sacred Text left alone; canon is closed, long live the canon.

   The host’s digs at the ‘revelations’ about wizard hygiene before the adoption of toilets and sewage systems are received enthusiastically by his audience and the Pottermore tweeting critics beg Rowling to “stop writing” or just shut up.

   Is this Potter fatigue, the inevitable postmodern turning on whatever it senses is a metanarrative (even if that story-myth is an anti-metanarrative fable), Rowling having at last jumped the shark with the Cursed Child and theme park Potter profit-taking for her various charities, or just adults laughing at themselves and what they treasured as children (and still do today to their sophisticated selves’ embarrassment)?