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I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child finally this weekend and enjoyed almost all of it very much. I could have done with Ron being a little less useless,* and Harry and Ginny left me almost exactly 100% lukewarm, but I liked Hermione fine and I was very pleased with Albus, Scorpius, Draco, and Snape. ♥♥♥ I mean what can I say. I rolled my eyes as hard as anyone when Snape's whole motivation turned out to be Love Of Lily the whole time, but given that that's what his motivation was, I thought the sainted Alan Rickman played it perfectly (of course) and it wasn't a huge lift to hear his voice coming off the page in the script. (I assume the actor in the play does a decent Rickman imitation. Whom else would he imitate to play Snape?) Barring McGonagall, the other characters have all had a chance to grow and change since we last knew them, but - okay, not that adults don't also grow and change over a period of 20 years, but not in the same way or to the same degree as teenagers growing into adults, right, so. I thought the playwright(s? it's not entirely clear to me how many people it took to write this thing) got their voices down very well. And I mean what's not to love. Snape knows he's dead in the alternate timeline and helps bring about the alternate timeline anyway because he knows it's the right thing to do. Hands up if, like me, you were thinking "How do you know the other world is any better than this?" "Because it has to be."
* Having just said all that about reconciling myself with canon!Snape's Love of Lily, I was pretty annoyed to hear recently that JKR has apparently said she wishes she hadn't had Hermione end up with Ron the way she first planned when she wrote the epilogue all those years before writing half the books but had had her end up with Harry instead. In the zeroth place, Death Of The Author, so stoppit. In the first place, god, feed the energy creature much? The Harry/Hermione vs. Ron/Hermione warriors must be in a frenzy. Feh. In the second place, no, of course the two other points on the triangle have to get together and neither of them can marry the hero. See above re: Luke Skywalker et al. for just one example. In the third place, if anything was going to change from how it was in canon, wouldn't it have been a step in the right direction for someone, anyone, in this crowd to marry someone they haven't known since they were eleven? So okay, the play resolved a fair amount of the Ron/Hermione conflict by having him suggest they renew their vows or similar, but I frankly would have preferred not to have that sub-sub-subplot in the first place, because to me it seemed the only thing it added was an unsupported-by-history loser!Ron and a little chum for the Harry/Hermione vs. Ron/Hermione waters. Ugh.
I am knitting things for the baby. I'd say I'm about 3/5 through the thing that generally flies when I bother to work on it, but I finally had the needles and the yarn and the markers in one place and the time to begin working on the second thing, which it turns out takes forever. I have 15 weeks left before the baby comes and I'm already thinking the idea that this blanket will be done on time is laughable.
I've been in a protracted argument at work, apparently, about capitalizing things that aren't proper names. (I'm against it.) Everybody I actually work for is on my side, partly because I'm right and I have no fewer than three style guides to back me up but mostly because I'm the one they pay to know this stuff and the people arguing with me are not. Like I have all these good defenses for doing it my way plus the concept of my letting you get on with what you're an expert in and your letting me do the same. Fun times.
Back to the first point, even before I read Cursed Child (by the way: we're pronouncing that "Cursèd," right? I certainly am. The whole title flows better that way), I was inexplicably back again in a HP place. I have this sort of six-page draft of the beginning of a thing in the HP world I was writing - comprehensively non-canon-compliant now, of course, but it is what it is; the one where Harry ends up with Snape, Bill Weasley ends up with Remus Lupin, Hermione marries a boy she met at university, and Ron's long-term girlfriend is a descendant of the Borgias - where eventually the Weasleys find out what happened to Random, who was between Charlie and Percy, which Bill has known all along but it's a protected secret and he hasn't been able to tell but Remus worked it out and they end up having to tell the family because Reasons. It's been sitting there on my hard drive forat least five it looks like about nine years, with a major overhaul maybe five-ish years ago, and hanging out in a gmail draft since last summer because I don't feel as comfortable having fan stuff on this computer as I've felt at other jobs. Anyway, lately I've been trying to achieve the velocity to get back to it. Maybe soon I will.
* Having just said all that about reconciling myself with canon!Snape's Love of Lily, I was pretty annoyed to hear recently that JKR has apparently said she wishes she hadn't had Hermione end up with Ron the way she first planned when she wrote the epilogue all those years before writing half the books but had had her end up with Harry instead. In the zeroth place, Death Of The Author, so stoppit. In the first place, god, feed the energy creature much? The Harry/Hermione vs. Ron/Hermione warriors must be in a frenzy. Feh. In the second place, no, of course the two other points on the triangle have to get together and neither of them can marry the hero. See above re: Luke Skywalker et al. for just one example. In the third place, if anything was going to change from how it was in canon, wouldn't it have been a step in the right direction for someone, anyone, in this crowd to marry someone they haven't known since they were eleven? So okay, the play resolved a fair amount of the Ron/Hermione conflict by having him suggest they renew their vows or similar, but I frankly would have preferred not to have that sub-sub-subplot in the first place, because to me it seemed the only thing it added was an unsupported-by-history loser!Ron and a little chum for the Harry/Hermione vs. Ron/Hermione waters. Ugh.
I am knitting things for the baby. I'd say I'm about 3/5 through the thing that generally flies when I bother to work on it, but I finally had the needles and the yarn and the markers in one place and the time to begin working on the second thing, which it turns out takes forever. I have 15 weeks left before the baby comes and I'm already thinking the idea that this blanket will be done on time is laughable.
I've been in a protracted argument at work, apparently, about capitalizing things that aren't proper names. (I'm against it.) Everybody I actually work for is on my side, partly because I'm right and I have no fewer than three style guides to back me up but mostly because I'm the one they pay to know this stuff and the people arguing with me are not. Like I have all these good defenses for doing it my way plus the concept of my letting you get on with what you're an expert in and your letting me do the same. Fun times.
Back to the first point, even before I read Cursed Child (by the way: we're pronouncing that "Cursèd," right? I certainly am. The whole title flows better that way), I was inexplicably back again in a HP place. I have this sort of six-page draft of the beginning of a thing in the HP world I was writing - comprehensively non-canon-compliant now, of course, but it is what it is; the one where Harry ends up with Snape, Bill Weasley ends up with Remus Lupin, Hermione marries a boy she met at university, and Ron's long-term girlfriend is a descendant of the Borgias - where eventually the Weasleys find out what happened to Random, who was between Charlie and Percy, which Bill has known all along but it's a protected secret and he hasn't been able to tell but Remus worked it out and they end up having to tell the family because Reasons. It's been sitting there on my hard drive for