Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
May. 5th, 2019 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficIn my last post I'd mentioned I'd seen Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Since it has thrown me straight back into a Harry Potter fannish headspace, I must purge myself in the traditional manner by writing a DW post.
First non-spoilery, for anyone planning on seeing it:
- Don't buy a seat under the balcony overhang (back of the orchestra section). There will be things you will not be able to see. Not a huge amount, but enough to be annoying.
- The house is fucking huge--second balcony is a very very long way from the stage (I've been there for other shows), and might make it hard to see some of the effects.
- Two three-hour plays two nights in a row is a lot of play. I had a headache by the end of the second night. Also, as a regular theatre go-er, I know to run for the bathroom at intermission. First night, I was the second person there. Second night, there was a stampede. People had learned.
- There are things in this play that might be intense for kids, though none moreso than the books themselves are. There was one scary moment where I saw the ushers all step into the house in case someone freaked out, then step out again once the moment passed. (It's fine for adults--this ain't 1984 or Grand Guignol or anything, just, there are a lot of kids in the audience.)
This play was like a rollercoaster--it was serving up so many thrills in succession, that I didn't really care about structural problems as I was watching it. That being said, yeah, there are missed opportunities:
- Ginny has no development, and Astoria is Lady Not Appearing in this Play.
- Albus has an idea of what his father's time at Hogwarts was that is wildly untrue, and he doesn't learn isn't true despite time travel.
- Harry never tells Albus that he was almost sorted Slytherin.
- Part One of the play leads you to believe that there's going to be some lesson about saving Cedric--either that you can correct your mistakes, or that he wasn't actually a "spare," and his death played an important role. In Part Two, you learn he turned into a death eater (which I don't even disagree with necessarily--humiliation can be very powerful), and then that entire plot and any lessons from it are chucked aside for the Augury story in Act IV.
- There are some unexamined themes in this play about blood and predestination, just as there are in the books. There are the rumors that Scorpius is Voldemort's son, but then we learn he isn't, and Voldemort's daughter is in fact evil. So there's no rebuttal to the idea that Voldemort's child would have to be evil. They provide other reasons for why she is--how she was raised, and that she's largely motivated by wanting her father's love--but still, it's shorthand and it's sloppy.
- In the year of our lord 2016, if you are going to write whole scenes about how Scorpius and Albus's love for each other will save the world, JUST FUCKING MAKE THEM GAY. It is too late for this queer baiting nonsense. JKR, make your gay characters gay in the text, thxbye.
But, you know--I don't care that much about any of that.
Because I loved the take on the characters in this play.
I had a lot of problems with books 6 and 7, and particularly with the epilogue. I felt like Harry, who had always been a black and white thinker, who saw people as either good or bad, hadn't learned anything over the course of the books. And I felt like the epilogue snapped everything back like a rubber band to how it was at the start, erasing all of the moral complexity in the intervening books. Which, of course, it did, since she wrote the epilogue first.
This--fixed most of those problems for me.
Because:
- Harry Potter is a deeply traumatized person who's never dealt with it and still thinks of things as black and white. It was satisfying to me to see that he's the one that went full fascist with the Marauder's Map and it was Draco that had to counsel moderation, because Harry Potter has never learned that bad outcomes aren't always because of evil people. He spent his adolescence fighting Voldemort, the incarnation of evil. He still thinks that people are capital E Evil, and if he just rids the world of them, everything will be perfect.
- Harry Potter is also an incredibly crap father. His entire parenting strategy is--I'm not dead, why are you unhappy.
- Harry remembers his time at Hogwarts as the happiest time in his life, despite the fact that it was objectively terrible: he got into semester-long rows with his friends; he was bullied relentlessly by his classmates who at various times thought that he was attacking Muggle-borns because he spoke parseltongue, put his name in the Goblet of Fire because he was a gloryhound, and lied about Voldemort's return to make himself seem important; he was hounded by the tabloid press, who wrote vicious lies about him; his teachers actively bullied and in some cases tortured him; not to mention the many life threatening battles with Voldemort and the deaths he witnessed. The fact that he then tells his bullied, unhappy child that Hogwarts is amazing is FUCKED UP.
- Harry probably married Ginny to marry into the Weasley family, the only family he's ever had, and probably started having kids very young because all he's ever wanted is to be part of a family--two parents and children. This is not a super awesome reason to get married or to have kids.
In short, Harry Potter in this play is a basket case, which makes perfect sense to me.
By contrast, Draco is a snarky bad-ass who clearly loves his son immensely, despite the fact that the son he named Scorpius, with some ideas of what kind of man he would be, is a shy nerd, a follower, and the least traditionally masculine person imaginable. And yet Draco spends the whole play trying to get people to stop bullying his son, trying to rescue his son, and trying to make Harry Potter stop making his son cry.
Draco is awesome.
Draco clearly has had the wizarding equivalent of therapy to deal with his issues. He openly tells Harry all he wanted in school was to be happy, and that he was jealous of Harry's friends since he didn't have any real friends, just sycophants. In order to have raised Scorpius, a boy who's a Harry Potter fanboy (they've gone to the Harry Potter monument in Godric's Hollow, for godsake), he must have raised him not to have the prejudices he was raised with.
There were a lot of characters I felt got short shrift in the books, especially Draco and Snape, so I enjoyed the hell out of seeing them in this play.
This has of course made me incredibly fannish about the play, but there is almost no fic in AO3, and certainly none about Harry's and Draco's parenting skills. (My age is showing here--Harry Potter the fictional character is a year older than me, so yes, I'm way more invested in the story of the parents than in the kids.)
I want all the fic about Draco taking toddler Scorpius to visit Lucius and Scorpius coming home saying "mudblood" and Draco freaking out and yelling at him never to say that word. I want the fic about Draco having to explain to Scorpius that he was a collaborator in the war. I want the fic where Scorpius is worried that he won't make friends at Hogwarts and Draco gives him an enormous bag of sweets for the train to bribe people (worked for Harry Potter, after all). I want the fic about Draco having to clean out Malfoy Manor after his parents' death and finding all the shit his dad still had secreted there despite everything, and having to reconcile his love for his father and his desire for his father's approval with all the terrible things his father did. I want the fic where Scorpius starts writing to his father about Albus this and Albus that, and Draco's like, of fucking course his best friend's a Potter, but then just is happy and a little jealous his son has a best friend. I want the fic where Albus and Scorpius try to piece together what their parents' school years were actually like by comparing the TOTALLY contradictory stories they grew up with. God, I want the fic where Ginny bullies Harry into having to go to therapy and he starts to develop actual coping skills for his trauma.
None of this, as far as I can tell, exists. And at this point in my life, I don't really have time to write it myself. Given the cost of the play, I don't imagine it's ever going to be a big fandom.
But this play scratched an itch I didn't know I had, and I'm now rereading the Harry Potter books with this canon in my head of the kind of men Harry and Draco grow into.
This is also a very long way of saying I haven't seen Endgame and don't know when/if I'm going to. I'm in the wrong fannish headspace, and I don't want to blow half a day on seeing a movie in a theater. I think I've also come to the point with the MCU where I don't need the canon to answer any questions for me about the characters. IDK. I will probably see it eventually, but feeling immense resentment while looking at showtimes on fandango kind of made me go, why am I doing this? I'd rather stay home and rewatch Prisoner of Azkaban. (And yes, I know that means I'll be spoiled. Not that I want to be per se, but seeing something just to avoid spoilers is not very motivating to me at this point in my life.)
First non-spoilery, for anyone planning on seeing it:
- Don't buy a seat under the balcony overhang (back of the orchestra section). There will be things you will not be able to see. Not a huge amount, but enough to be annoying.
- The house is fucking huge--second balcony is a very very long way from the stage (I've been there for other shows), and might make it hard to see some of the effects.
- Two three-hour plays two nights in a row is a lot of play. I had a headache by the end of the second night. Also, as a regular theatre go-er, I know to run for the bathroom at intermission. First night, I was the second person there. Second night, there was a stampede. People had learned.
- There are things in this play that might be intense for kids, though none moreso than the books themselves are. There was one scary moment where I saw the ushers all step into the house in case someone freaked out, then step out again once the moment passed. (It's fine for adults--this ain't 1984 or Grand Guignol or anything, just, there are a lot of kids in the audience.)
This play was like a rollercoaster--it was serving up so many thrills in succession, that I didn't really care about structural problems as I was watching it. That being said, yeah, there are missed opportunities:
- Ginny has no development, and Astoria is Lady Not Appearing in this Play.
- Albus has an idea of what his father's time at Hogwarts was that is wildly untrue, and he doesn't learn isn't true despite time travel.
- Harry never tells Albus that he was almost sorted Slytherin.
- Part One of the play leads you to believe that there's going to be some lesson about saving Cedric--either that you can correct your mistakes, or that he wasn't actually a "spare," and his death played an important role. In Part Two, you learn he turned into a death eater (which I don't even disagree with necessarily--humiliation can be very powerful), and then that entire plot and any lessons from it are chucked aside for the Augury story in Act IV.
- There are some unexamined themes in this play about blood and predestination, just as there are in the books. There are the rumors that Scorpius is Voldemort's son, but then we learn he isn't, and Voldemort's daughter is in fact evil. So there's no rebuttal to the idea that Voldemort's child would have to be evil. They provide other reasons for why she is--how she was raised, and that she's largely motivated by wanting her father's love--but still, it's shorthand and it's sloppy.
- In the year of our lord 2016, if you are going to write whole scenes about how Scorpius and Albus's love for each other will save the world, JUST FUCKING MAKE THEM GAY. It is too late for this queer baiting nonsense. JKR, make your gay characters gay in the text, thxbye.
But, you know--I don't care that much about any of that.
Because I loved the take on the characters in this play.
I had a lot of problems with books 6 and 7, and particularly with the epilogue. I felt like Harry, who had always been a black and white thinker, who saw people as either good or bad, hadn't learned anything over the course of the books. And I felt like the epilogue snapped everything back like a rubber band to how it was at the start, erasing all of the moral complexity in the intervening books. Which, of course, it did, since she wrote the epilogue first.
This--fixed most of those problems for me.
Because:
- Harry Potter is a deeply traumatized person who's never dealt with it and still thinks of things as black and white. It was satisfying to me to see that he's the one that went full fascist with the Marauder's Map and it was Draco that had to counsel moderation, because Harry Potter has never learned that bad outcomes aren't always because of evil people. He spent his adolescence fighting Voldemort, the incarnation of evil. He still thinks that people are capital E Evil, and if he just rids the world of them, everything will be perfect.
- Harry Potter is also an incredibly crap father. His entire parenting strategy is--I'm not dead, why are you unhappy.
- Harry remembers his time at Hogwarts as the happiest time in his life, despite the fact that it was objectively terrible: he got into semester-long rows with his friends; he was bullied relentlessly by his classmates who at various times thought that he was attacking Muggle-borns because he spoke parseltongue, put his name in the Goblet of Fire because he was a gloryhound, and lied about Voldemort's return to make himself seem important; he was hounded by the tabloid press, who wrote vicious lies about him; his teachers actively bullied and in some cases tortured him; not to mention the many life threatening battles with Voldemort and the deaths he witnessed. The fact that he then tells his bullied, unhappy child that Hogwarts is amazing is FUCKED UP.
- Harry probably married Ginny to marry into the Weasley family, the only family he's ever had, and probably started having kids very young because all he's ever wanted is to be part of a family--two parents and children. This is not a super awesome reason to get married or to have kids.
In short, Harry Potter in this play is a basket case, which makes perfect sense to me.
By contrast, Draco is a snarky bad-ass who clearly loves his son immensely, despite the fact that the son he named Scorpius, with some ideas of what kind of man he would be, is a shy nerd, a follower, and the least traditionally masculine person imaginable. And yet Draco spends the whole play trying to get people to stop bullying his son, trying to rescue his son, and trying to make Harry Potter stop making his son cry.
Draco is awesome.
Draco clearly has had the wizarding equivalent of therapy to deal with his issues. He openly tells Harry all he wanted in school was to be happy, and that he was jealous of Harry's friends since he didn't have any real friends, just sycophants. In order to have raised Scorpius, a boy who's a Harry Potter fanboy (they've gone to the Harry Potter monument in Godric's Hollow, for godsake), he must have raised him not to have the prejudices he was raised with.
There were a lot of characters I felt got short shrift in the books, especially Draco and Snape, so I enjoyed the hell out of seeing them in this play.
This has of course made me incredibly fannish about the play, but there is almost no fic in AO3, and certainly none about Harry's and Draco's parenting skills. (My age is showing here--Harry Potter the fictional character is a year older than me, so yes, I'm way more invested in the story of the parents than in the kids.)
I want all the fic about Draco taking toddler Scorpius to visit Lucius and Scorpius coming home saying "mudblood" and Draco freaking out and yelling at him never to say that word. I want the fic about Draco having to explain to Scorpius that he was a collaborator in the war. I want the fic where Scorpius is worried that he won't make friends at Hogwarts and Draco gives him an enormous bag of sweets for the train to bribe people (worked for Harry Potter, after all). I want the fic about Draco having to clean out Malfoy Manor after his parents' death and finding all the shit his dad still had secreted there despite everything, and having to reconcile his love for his father and his desire for his father's approval with all the terrible things his father did. I want the fic where Scorpius starts writing to his father about Albus this and Albus that, and Draco's like, of fucking course his best friend's a Potter, but then just is happy and a little jealous his son has a best friend. I want the fic where Albus and Scorpius try to piece together what their parents' school years were actually like by comparing the TOTALLY contradictory stories they grew up with. God, I want the fic where Ginny bullies Harry into having to go to therapy and he starts to develop actual coping skills for his trauma.
None of this, as far as I can tell, exists. And at this point in my life, I don't really have time to write it myself. Given the cost of the play, I don't imagine it's ever going to be a big fandom.
But this play scratched an itch I didn't know I had, and I'm now rereading the Harry Potter books with this canon in my head of the kind of men Harry and Draco grow into.
This is also a very long way of saying I haven't seen Endgame and don't know when/if I'm going to. I'm in the wrong fannish headspace, and I don't want to blow half a day on seeing a movie in a theater. I think I've also come to the point with the MCU where I don't need the canon to answer any questions for me about the characters. IDK. I will probably see it eventually, but feeling immense resentment while looking at showtimes on fandango kind of made me go, why am I doing this? I'd rather stay home and rewatch Prisoner of Azkaban. (And yes, I know that means I'll be spoiled. Not that I want to be per se, but seeing something just to avoid spoilers is not very motivating to me at this point in my life.)