Harry Potter – please no Pottermore J.K., we’ve had more than our fair share…

Posted by Cody Chalmers on Sunday, June 26, 2011 · Leave a Comment 

Pottermore? I feel inclined to say it should be ‘Potter-no-more’, which may be a terrible pun – though when has that ever stopped me? – but still pretty much sums up the situation.

When J.K. Rowling first apparently finished with Harry Potter there were plenty of rabid muggles out there crying out for more. The rest of us heaved a sigh of relief. It’s not necessarily that we didn’t like it but, you know, enough is enough.

Now, however, the fanatics seem to be getting exactly what they were after, and the rest of us will be unable to pull ourselves within safety distance of the deluge of publicity that follows. According to the writer herself Pottermore will provide “an online reading experience like no other”, delving deeper into the world she created and extended over the course of seven books and their movie adaptations.

As though World of Warcraft and its peers were not immersive enough, now a true storyteller will be bang in the middle of creating an interlinked community able to enrich a fantasy world so deep that it’ll be like stumbling into a fully realised alternate universe.

Well, either that or it’ll be a bunch of clueless geeks hunching over their computers while in full wizard garb, further ruining whatever may to them constitute a ‘life’ by instead engaging in further pointless speculation over intricacies.

Either way, it’s an admirable attempt at engaging with those who have given Rowling riches beyond her wildest dreams, rewarding them for their devotion. But isn’t it also feeding an unhealthy addiction, like sticking a button onto the arm of an obese person’s chair that’ll instantly provide them with several litres of liquid chocolate shooting from a precise stream directly into their gaping yaws should they press it?

There’s nothing wrong with escaping from reality into a fantasy world per se. It’s great, through literature, cinema, music, gaming and other media, to be able to take on and understand different perspectives, to take a break from the rat race or from family life or from whatever else is weighing on the mind for a mere hour or two. But becoming obsessed with a bunch of children’s books doesn’t exactly seem like an ideal way towards attaining greater life fulfillment.

And what’s there to get so engrossed by anyway? Harry Potter as a character is nothing more than a wee nyaff waving his wand around far too much and getting his friends into all sort of bother, each year becoming more and more mopey and unbearable as a variety of wearisome wacky eccentrics show exactly how teaching shouldn’t be done .

Then there’s Quidditch, with its myriad rules so joylessly complex that it makes cricket seem as uncomplicated as playing keepie uppie, and about as fun to watch as quantum physicists discussing Einstein’s theory of relativity while doing pelvic thrusts to the strains of The Monkees’ I’m a Believer. And as for Dobby the House Elf, who’s like Jar Jar Binks stuck in a charisma vacuum and left devoid of any charm whatsoever…

But forget about the fans: what about Rowling herself? Evidently talented, it seems rather sad that she’s still obsessing over her best known creation rather than striving onwards towards pastures new. In terms of megabucks franchises, George Lucas followed up Star Wars with IndianaJones; who knows what Rowling might come up with next? Let others bother with the minutiae of the world she initially envisioned so she can get on with grander things – you don’t see God knocking about at the side of a motorway mucking about with floral arrangements. No, he’s probably conjuring up creatures with tentacles for eyes and a rhinocerous for a nose, or something else similarly imaginative to try and keep boredom at bay until it’s time to inflict the next biblical plague upon us hapless humans.

In short, there’s far more interesting things to be getting on with than continuing onwards with the increasingly dull world of Harry Potter. In fact, there are probably few things that are less interesting. J.K., why don’t you cast a spell – it only needs to be a sentence in length and written on the back of an Edinburgh café napkin – that finally rids us from the spectre of more Potter forever and ever? It might just be the greatest magic trick you’ve ever pulled.

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About Cody Chalmers