Cursed Child is now in previews on the West End, and even though J.K. Rowling was very adamant that she didn’t want any spoilers to leak, these things tend to happen anyway. I decided that since I’m not headed to London any time soon and wouldn’t be seeing the play any time soon, I wanted to know what happens enough to look at the spoilers. I had heard good things coming out of the previews, and I actually got a bit exited about this thing for the first time.
That excitement was short lived. Because I read the spoilers about the plot of the story. And you guys… it sound terrible. As in, it’s so bad that I think it has to be a huge joke. There are bits and pieces all over Tumblr and Twitter, but this page was one of the only ones I’ve come across so far that has a lot of details gathered together and laid out comprehensively, so if you want to know and were having a good day that you wanted to ruin, check it out. I’ll highlight a few of the more interesting ones here. Obviously, possible spoilers for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ahead.
A few main points:
Hermione is the Minister of Magic, Harry works at the Ministry, as does Draco it seems. All of their children go to Hogwarts together, and the play spans several of their years there. Hemione and Ron’s daughter Rose is sorted into Gryffindor as a first year, and Draco’s son Scorpius as well as Harry and Ginny’s son Albus are sorted into Slytherin. The two become super BFFs. A large amount of the story centers around Time-Turners and creating alternate timelines by using them to try and go back and change things.
Okay. A few things here. First of all: What? Second of all, if people think that a Time-Tuner was already used for something, how is destroying all of them now going to change that viewpoint?
I sincerely hope that they have some quality therapists in the magical world, because both Harry and Ron are clearly going through some stuff. I get that everyone gets frustrated with their children, but saying something that terrible to your kid seems like…a bit much. And Ron, love potions are basically magical roofies. Way to give that to a kid.
Tying in to the Time-Turner plot, Amos Diggory goes to Harry and demands that Harry use one to go back in time and save Cedric from being killed in the Triwizard Tournament. Albus and Amos’ niece Delphie (who is a new character in this play) hear this exchange. Pissed at his father about the aforementioned emotional scar inducing comment, Albus decides that he and his bestie Scorpio need to steal a Time-Turner along with Delphie to try and right this wrong. However, messing with time has unforeseen consequences.
We’re beginning to fly off the rails here.
There are a lot of alternate timelines going on throughout the play. Even Snape makes an appearance in some of them. But long story short, at some point everyone realizes that Delphie causing a ton of problems, and is a little too into Voldemort and that she has to go.
I’m done. Why is there more than one plot line in this story that involves Voldemort having sex with someone?!
Surely, surely JK Rowling is playing the most elaborate and well thought out prank on all of us. She wanted the story to remain a secret so badly that she wrote a decoy story and has convinced everyone who has seen the previews to far to leak these fake spoilers to throw everyone off. That somehow makes more sense to me than most of this plot. Tumblr has had a field day.
I don’t want to be that person. I really don’t. I hugely dislike when people rag all over something. I’ve never written a work of fiction before, so I don’t want to sit all high and mighty judging what someone else has done and pointing out everything that I don’t like about it. But some of this is just too much for me. I have to believe that this all seems to work better when you’re watching it happen live, because otherwise I can’t imagine the reviews being as good as they’ve been. Either that, or everyone who’s seen it so far is such an obsessive Harry Potter fan that they’d blindly love this show no matter what it was about. The show is still in previews, which means it’s still being worked on, but I can’t imagine that means providing the story a complete overhaul. I’m just not feeling this one. A Bellatrix and Voldemort love child, for goodness sakes…
Please be a joke. Like, really. Please.
Have you seen Harry Potter and the Cursed Child yet?
