Steph🎀

What are J.K. Rowling’s three biggest mistakes with the Harry Potter franchise? I have my answer, and the third one still drives me absolutely insane. 3. Dumbledore being gay. I have no problem with Dumbledore being gay. It doesn’t make him a worse character, and representation isn’t the issue. My problem is that the books never explicitly establish his sexuality. Rowling revealed his romantic feelings for Grindelwald after the series ended, and while there are passages that can be read in that light, I wish that relationship had been explored in the actual story rather than revealed afterward. 2. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. The first Fantastic Beasts film was enjoyable enough, but the sequel introduced a whole new set of continuity problems. McGonagall appears at Hogwarts decades before her established birth date, Credence’s parentage becomes a major mystery, and the Mirror of Erised is used in a way that raises questions about its established function. The films were officially written by Rowling, so these aren’t just random fan theories. They’re problems within the wider franchise. 1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This is where my patience runs out. To be fair, Scorpius Malfoy is a genuinely great character. His friendship with Albus, his loyalty, and his role in the alternate timeline made him far more compelling than I expected. Snape’s appearance in the alternate reality was also an emotional highlight. But then we get the time-travel plot, Cedric Diggory becoming a Death Eater because of humiliation at the Triwizard Tournament, and the revelation that Voldemort and Bellatrix had a daughter: Delphini. DELPHINI. VOLDEMORT’S DAUGHTER. This is the part I struggle to accept. Voldemort spent his entire life rejecting ordinary human limitations. He feared death, despised weakness, and pursued immortality through Horcruxes. Love, family, and ordinary human attachment meant practically nothing to him. Having a child because he wanted an heir feels completely at odds with the character we spent seven books getting to know. And before anyone says he might have wanted a successor, why would a man who believed himself superior to everyone else need one? Voldemort wanted to live forever. An heir would be a concession to the possibility of his own death—the very thing he spent his life refusing to accept. The timeline only makes the situation more frustrating. Delphini’s account of her birth places it close to the Battle of Hogwarts, yet the original books offer no indication that Bellatrix was pregnant. That absence doesn’t make her existence literally impossible, but it does make the revelation feel disconnected from the story that came before it. Could Rowling have written a convincing explanation? Possibly. But the play doesn’t do enough to make this feel like a natural extension of Voldemort’s character. And the time-turner plot introduces its own problems, especially when compared with the rules established in Prisoner of Azkaban. The story seems more interested in creating dramatic alternate realities than in carefully preserving the logic of the original books. Ultimately, I don’t hate Cursed Child because it tells a story I wasn’t expecting. I dislike how many of its biggest revelations seem to depend on characters behaving in ways that the original series gave us little reason to expect. My biggest problem isn’t that the franchise expanded beyond the original seven books. It’s that some of those expansions seem to misunderstand the very characters and rules that made the original story work.