Before I say anything at all, let me first be very clear about one thing: I adore Harry Potter and everything that comes with it. My personal copies of the books are cracked and falling apart and held together with packing tape, and I still can't find it in myself to buy new ones. J.K. Rowling is one of my personal heroes and nothing she does will ever change that.
That being said, the Pottermore organization troubles me. For the uninitiated, Pottermore is a website dedicated to the unknown parts of the wizarding universe that readers did not get to see in the books. The original format of the site retold the stories in an interactive way, sorting members into houses and giving them tasks and assignments as though they were Hogwarts students. At the moment, the site is under reconstruction as it transforms from an interactive game to an interactive blog.
Being privy to information that did not make it into the books can be tremendously exciting to some people, and it's not an uncommon occurrence. A recent Humble Bundle collaboration with Neil Gaiman included the release of unseen or out of print stories and comics written by or in collaboration with Gaiman himself. It can be fun to metaphorically pick the brains of your favorite authors.
There is something of a difference, though, when it comes down to unreleased stories versus blatant editing of canon. By reading stories and backstories for characters within the Harry Potter universe on Pottermore, readers who may have made up their minds about those characters are suddenly influenced by information they did not have access to while reading the physical novels. Someone who had little sympathy for Draco Malfoy might suddenly find themselves feeling bad for him after reading what Rowling has to say about it.
People might remember the hysteria that broke out when Rowling made headlines by saying that Ron and Hermione were not meant to be together and that she had written them together as a sort of personal wish fulfillment. In saying this, she took canon that she published and set in stone and completely changed it, traumatizing readers along the way.
As John Green, author of "The Fault in Our Stars" and "Paper Towns", said in partial response to Rowling's comments, "Books belong to their readers." On a separate occasion, he expanded on the subject: "[Books] belong to their readers now, which is a great thing - because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands."
Green's statements touch on the fundamental problem of Pottermore: stories that have been published and sent into the void stop being, at some point, the property of the authors. Yes, people do own them and can sue readers who violate the physical, legal part of authorship, but readers and audience members are as much a part of the experience as the author is.
This, then, brings up the somewhat sensitive topic of fanfiction. Some people enjoy reading and writing pieces of unpublished fiction that springboard off of pieces of published and popular fiction. Some people don't. Either way, however, fanfiction establishes the fact that readers take great pride in their involvement with literature. It is, to some, more fun to not be told what happens after the end of a novel, because it allows you, as the reader, to speculate and enjoy the process of creating your own ending.
A large part of the fanfiction community is "slash" based, meaning that a lot of the works that appear online revolve around relationships between characters and, quite often, those characters' sex lives. The most well-known example is the popular work "Fifty Shades of Grey", which began as slash fanfiction. However, not all fanfiction is smut in which the same two characters fall in love with each other in different ways. In a fit of curiosity, I searched through Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction site, and found a smattering of Harry Potter works that took genuine care to examine individual characters and their motivations.
Rowling once wrote that Dudley Dursley's relationship with Harry after the end of the series was cordial at best, but strained. I found a work of fanfiction that wrote, in loving detail and with no small amount of skill, about the efforts of Dudley and Harry to repair their relationship as adults. People take time out of their lives to write, without pay, about the lives of fictional characters they don't even own because they love them and because they have their own versions of what happens after the happily ever after.
Markus Zusak, author of the Printz Honor Award-winning novel "The Book Thief," wrote on Tumblr about reader involvement with books. He is often asked whether or not two characters in "The Book Thief" stay together romantically, and at the end of the response, he wrote, "[...] for me (and it is only my opinion), Max and Liesel DO stay together but not necessarily in the way some people think…But of course, I’m still more than happy for readers to believe they do get married and live their lives together. At the end of the day, it’s still up to you, and that’s the beauty of books. In so many ways, they never really end." Zusak gives his opinion based on his own work, but also concedes to his readers, as he recognizes that a book as well-loved and respected as "The Book Thief" is a part of something much larger than himself.
That, in the end, is what matters most. Some readers genuinely love Pottermore, and as a Harry Potter fan myself, I enjoy knowing that Rowling has extensive backstories on her characters and that she knows so much about the world she created over twenty years ago. But as Zusak and Green both say, the books belong to the readers more than they do to the authors once they make their way into the land of published works. What, after all, does it do to the readers when they are told that their versions of post-happily ever after are wrong?
