Throughout my lifetime, there was a constant flow of novels. When I was younger and just learning to read, both of my parents would read to me every night. It would range from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” to “Sherlock Holmes” to my favorite series growing up, “Harry Potter”. I first started reading the books when I was in elementary school and continued them up until the final installment in 2007. I was so excited to finish the series I only paused reading to eat and to mourn some character deaths. I eventually finished it within the first 24 hours of its release. I will always remember the books as being better than the films, but still going to see them in theaters on opening night dressed up in last year’s Halloween costume. However, my current predicament with the “Potter” series is not with the characters, books, or even the films, but with the writer, J.K. Rowling. Throughout the past few years since the release of the final film installment of the series, it seems to me that Rowling has become bored and often takes to Twitter to see who is still interested in the lives of her characters (spoiler alert: there are millions). While posting things on what some of the characters could possibly be up to in a fictional universe, I found myself uninterested. These were characters that I had grown up with so why wasn’t I chomping at the bit to learn every little detail about their lives post-Hogwarts?

I thought about myself in fifth grade writing an “essay” to Warner Bros. in the hopes that I’d win a contest and be able to walk around the castle where they filmed the series and how disappointed he’d be in me for not wanting to know who went on to become Minister of Magic or a powerful Auror or even who went on to be the best darn magical accountant in all of Cardiff. I felt that the way Rowling ended the series in her books was just that, the ending. If I wanted to know what happened to the heroes of the wizarding world, then I could think up different ideas and that would be enough for me. However, with the constant flood of tweets from the author specifically telling people what was happening in the universe seemed unsettling to me. The author couldn’t let the story end. She had spent so much time with the books as well as the films that she couldn’t remove herself from the legend that it created. And why should she? She as the creator has every right to be able to tell people what is happening in the world she created. But no author has ever done this in the way that Rowling is constantly doing this. People were interested in what happened to Danny from Stephen King’s “The Shining” so he wrote a sequel called “Doctor Sleep”, but the author doesn’t go out of his way to let people know what Danny’s first relationship was like or when he purchased his first house, because it doesn’t matter. What happens in the books are all that matter to me and, in my opinion, if Rowling wants to let her audience know what Harry, Ron and Hermione are up to, then she should keep writing the novels.

Note how in the previous paragraph I said “novels”. The world was indeed graced with information on the whereabouts of Harry Potter some 20 years later in the form of a two-part play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” which ranged from decent to awful reviews. For the sake of time, I won’t go into my ten-page long rant about my thoughts on it, but know that I didn’t like it much at all.

In short, I feel like the wizarding world of Harry Potter should have ended with the final installment of the series, but here we are with a mediocre play and a new series of films coming out from a textbook that was mentioned in the books once or twice. The cash cow that is the world of “Harry Potter” will continue onwards until people will grow tired of Rowling’s random interjections of “plot” and it will soon become “Harry Potter and the Author Who Couldn’t Just Let It Go”.