Here's a statement a lot of people may immediately reel back from: I don't like Pottermore.

Here's another one that I'm inclined to think most people will agree with: I don't like George Lucas' revisions to the original "Star Wars" movies.

Here's why those are kind of the same thing.

Pottermore was a creation of J.K. Rowling post-Deathly Hallows, after each of her seven "Harry Potter" books had been made into films and had their way with all of us who grew up with Harry, Ron and Hermione's adventures in magic, puberty, and near-death experiences. As what tends to happen, fans were left bittersweet, happy that everything came full circle and found its ending, but still left wanting more, as fans almost invariably are wont to do. In that wake, Rowling was left with a supreme question: what to do next?

The answer was to write another book, "The Casual Vacancy," which had absolutely nothing to do with the esteemed franchise she had spent north of a decade building. The book saw moderate success, but not the same that "Harry Potter" had. And so J.K. Rowling went to work creating "Pottermore," a web-based platform on which to continue writing stories that could expand the universe she had created.

The whole idea behind "Pottermore" was that Rowling could keep adding to her world essentially whenever she saw fit. The eventual problem, though, is one that really comes down to the risks of coming off as disingenuous as a writer. Let's bring in that George Lucas comparison, yeah?

If you're not familiar, in the early 2000's, George Lucas, the man who first created "Star Wars," decided that the technological advances of the age allowed him to do new things with the original "Star Wars" trilogy from the 1970's. These "new things" comprised basically of a series of CGI creatures added into the background of scenes where none had been before, and a couple alien characters completely replaced with more detailed, computer-rendered versions. The changes were largely seen as a waste of time and money by most fans, but they did well enough that, over time, Lucas has actually had several different versions of the trilogy released in various collections, each with different things added or taken out. None of those things really add anything to the movies, and end up just feeling out of place.

What's really key about bringing Mr. Lucas up in this discussion is the fact that he didn't just revise the movies once and leave them be; he kept doing it. It's like he would finish up the project, go home, and suddenly burst back through the door shouting "no, wait, I changed my mind!" It's like he kept doing that, over and over, for years. After a while, it just made people mad at Lucas altogether, and had contributed to a general consensus that he is almost the weakest link in the whole Star Wars picture.

And so it is for Rowling. Pottermore, over time, has basically devolved into a series of stories and thoughts that don't really mean anything, and just feel cheap. The way Pottermore is handled, echoed by a lot of Rowling's public attitudes and tendencies to sort of just randomly declare things as canon, feels like any care is gone from "Harry Potter." It's a stream-of-consciousness addition to a much more planned and thought-through story.

I'm not often one to quote YA lit, but there's a scene from a John Green novel I really like that I think sums this all up quite well. In "The Fault in our Stars," the two main characters bond over a novel that one loves and introduces the other two. Their questions over the book's vague and ambiguous ending lead them to eventually meet the book's author. They start asking him questions about what happened after the book ended, who lived and who died and who went on to do this or that, and then he stops them. He tells them that, sure, he could pull something out from the top of his head and answer it all, but it wouldn't be genuine. If he had wanted to put those answers in, he would have. If he had wanted those in the book, he would have put them in there, or written a sequel. But he didn't, and sitting in front of his fans and telling them that something in his story is true doesn't make it true, because it's still not actually in there.

And that's really it, I think. J.K. Rowling can tell us a random vignette about the founder of a Hogwarts house or a shopkeeper in Diagon Alley, but that doesn't give it the same weight. "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" released earlier this year, and was not written by Rowling, but signed off on by her, as if that somehow makes it right in line with the world she created.

It's not, by the way. "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" is garbage. But that's a whole other article.

Later this year, the "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" movie is coming out, with Rowling as a screenwriter. She has also confirmed that the movie will be the first in a series of five. There's planning, there's fleshing things out, and there's a complete story being created, not just some kind of leech latching onto the side of stories we already knew. Even George Lucas' "Star Wars" prequel trilogy, as universally disliked as they are, are just that; full stories, a full saga in the universe he created, and something to which he knew had a beginning and an end. That's a hell of a lot better than a seventh revision of "A New Hope" with a brand new CGI alien-camel in the background of Mos Eisley.