Partial transcript from episode 328 of Alohomora podcast.

00:00:00 – 00:01:00 – AD BREAK 

00:01:01 – START OF SHOW 

Katy: This is Episode 328 of Alohomora! for August 14, 2021. Welcome to another episode of Alohomora, MuggleNet.com’s in-depth exploration of the Harry Potter series. I’m Katy Cartee Haile. 

Tracy: I’m Tracy Dunstan. 

Alison: And I’m Alison Siggard, and our guest today is Lorrie Kim. Welcome, Lorrie! 

Lorrie Kim: Hello! Thank you! 

Alison: Tell us a little bit about you, your Hogwarts house, your history with Potter. You’ve been on this show before, right? 

Lorrie: I have. I was on an episode talking about my love for Cursed Child. 

Alison: YEEEEEEEESSSSS!!! 

Katy: Alison has a friend. Another, I should say. She has many friends. 

Lorrie: I am a Ravenclaw, I love Snape, and I wrote a book about him called Snape: A Definitive Reading. But I have love for many, many characters. 

Alison: I don’t know. I may have to debate you about Snape because I’m not a Snape fan, but the fact that you love Cursed Child is POINTS. 

Tracy: I agree with you on Snape, Alison. 

Katy: And congratulations on being a published author. That’s very impressive. 

Alison: Yeah, that’s amazing. 

Katy: We love having authors on the shows especially. All of our guest hosts are fantastic and bring their own thoughts and world views and their opinions to the show. But since this is a novel that we’re talking about, having a published author on is always a special treat, to get to talk to someone who has written something themselves and get their viewpoint on literature. So yeah. 

Alison: But we are not talking about Snape today, actually… 

Katy: Thank goodness. 

Alison: But we are talking about something related to Cursed Child, because we are doing a chapter revisit. From Deathly Hallows, we are going to look at the epilogue, Nineteen Years Later, so make sure you read that before you listen. It’s a quick one. If you want to listen to our last visit of this one, that would be episode 188 with Michael, Kat, me, Caleb, Rosie, and Laura. That was only four years into the podcast. We’re going on ten now?! So it’s been a minute, I guess, since we looked at this 

epilogue? But looking back at that episode, it was when we were like, “This is the end of the re-read,” which seems kinda crazy. 

Katy: I was listening live at that point. I had caught up and I was listening to y’all do the last several chapters. I don’t remember exactly where I picked up and was doing it in the proper time. An episode would come out, and I would listen to it immediately, but I was definitely there by, at some point, Deathly Hallows, so I remember being just like, “Oh my god! What are they going to do next? What’s going to happen?” 

Tracy: Yeah, same. I remember that. I was like, “No, it’s over!” 

Alison: Yeah, I remember the conversations around that. We were like, “What do we do next?” And here we are, six years after that. This one was suggested by a recent guest host of ours, Ev McLaughlin, so we’re excited to look at this epilogue. 

*Tracy talks about sponsorship* 

Alison: Before we jump into the epilogue, we wanna give our SHOUT OUT MAXIMA from episode 326, which is our episode looking at Spinners’ End from Half-Blood Prince, which was a fascinating episode that I think went much longer than any of us were anticipating because we had a lot to say. Our comment comes from FrumpyButSuperSmart. Love that name, still. They say, “Narcissa comes off as genuinely desperate in this whole chapter. What clinches it for me is that Narcissa’s energy is exactly the same, both before and after entering Spinners’ End. If she was being deceptive, why would she bother acting desperate in front of Bellatrix, who’s probably her only confidante at this point? All the ellipses and dashes are just used to indicate speech patterns. It’s not as definitive as ellipses mean the speaker’s always deceptive. It just indicates hesitation. The speaker could just as easily be under pressure and wanting to choose their words carefully. They could be nervous, they could be tired, etc. I would also say that Snape doesn’t even try to read Narcissa’s mind. From what we know of mind magic, it usually has to be a deliberate action, right? Eye contact is often essential in legilimency. We see Voldemort reading the wand-maker’s mind. What’s his name again? The one that made Krum’s wand? Side note: it’s Gregorovich. In Deathly Hallows, where his pupils got really wide and threw them into a memory. It’s definitely stated that Harry and Voldemort’s mind magic link is absolutely unique, which allows them to flip in and out of each other’s heads accidentally. My point is, the person usually knows that when someone is trying to read your mind, and if they’re good at Occlumency, they can stop you. I don’t think Snape would be so foolish as to violate Narcissa’s privacy in a room with a very angry and protective Bellatrix. It wouldn’t work well because Narcissa is a boss Occlumens and they’d both just get mad at him.” So a couple of things. Bouncing off the conversations we had, I think Irvin and I especially got into it, to no one’s surprise, on whether Narcissa is desperate or if she’s acting and trying to deceive Snape. It looks like FrumpyButSuperSmart agrees with me.

Katy: I agree with you two, as well. That’s the way I’ve always read that chapter, is that she is just completely at her wit’s end and doesn’t know what else she could possibly do and this is it. This is her only option, and she’s so desperate to keep her son safe, or as safe as possible, that she’s doing this thing that is totally out of character for her. Yeah, I’ve always read it as desperation as well. 

Alison: I also think there is an interesting point that FrumpyButSuperSmart makes about how dangerous it would be for Snape to try and perform legilimens at that moment, because Bellatrix would know exactly what he was doing and she would be pissed. That would not end well for anyone in that situation. 

Katy: He would literally have to kill her to get her to not go back to Voldemort and say what happened. There’s no good way for that to have gone down. He had to just read her by her expressions and by the way she’s acting like a normal person, not using magic, which I think he was accomplished at doing as well. 

Tracy: Do you think Bellatrix’s protectiveness over her sister is why the Malfoys… they get punished a lot, but not as severely as I would expect throughout the series. 

Alison: Oh, that’s an excellent point. I could buy that very much. But I could also see Bellatrix not interfering with Voldemort and what he wanted to do because she’s so devoted to him. I could see her maybe trying to somehow make it so that Narcissa, and maybe even Draco, doesn’t get the brunt of it, but I can see her not interfering with what Voldemort does to Lucius. 

Tracy: Yeah, I think there’s no love lost there. 

Alison: Because she’s so devoted to him. 

Katy: Lucius is a grown man. He can take care of himself. Draco is a child. 

Alison: Though Bellatrix at Spinners’ End doesn’t necessarily seem to care about that, but that’s a different point. I also think it’s interesting to think… reading this made me think of the flip of, Is Snape performing Occlumency at that moment? 

Katy: To keep them out? Probably. 

Alison: Yes! And how subtle must he be with that, because Bellatrix would go straight to Voldemort and be like, “Um, he’s not telling the truth. He’s performing Occlumency, blah blah blah.” 

Katy: I feel like he has to be employing it all the time. To be in the room with Voldemort and he not pick up on the truth. Maybe they’ve come to expect that he’s always doing it, so it’s not odd to them. 

Lorrie: I think he’s in the same mindset all the time of protecting himself but showing his feelings, because legilimency can only show you somebody’s feelings and general impressions and not their actual thoughts. The fact that he actually dislikes Harry? He hides behind that, because the Death Eaters would not understand that you can dislike somebody and still try to protect them. 

Katy: That’s a really good point. Yeah, anytime the baddies are around, he could just focus, “I hate Harry Potter. I hate Harry Potter,” over and over again. 

Alison: Oh my gosh, that reminds me of the Chaos Walking trilogy, and Todd trying to… where he just says his name to keep his thoughts from really showing up at the surface. 

Katy: I don’t get that reference, but yay! 

Alison: Has anybody read that? Anyone? No? Okay. Never mind.

Katy: I’m sure some of our listeners have, and they will appreciate it. “Yeah, that was a great comment.” 

Alison: We wanna give a special shout out to some new listeners and commenters that made themselves known on our last episode. RavenPuffPrefect, Bellatrixisaqueen, and Snitch-Fix. Welcome! 

Katy: Great names. Welcome! 

Katy: Now it’s time for the chapter summary! Nineteen years have passed since the Battle of Hogwarts, and we are granted a glimpse into the lives of some of our favorite characters whom we’ve followed for seven novels: Harry, Ginny, Ron, Hermione, and Draco send their children off on the Hogwarts Express for a new year at school, and all is well. Whether you love, hate, or are impassive about the inclusion of the epilogue, it’s there and we’re here to talk about it. Let’s get this discussion started. The first question I have for all of us: When you first read Deathly Hallows, how did you feel about the epilogue, and have your feelings changed since then? I’ll let you guys talk first, and then I’ll throw in my own experience. Who’s going to take the bait first? 

Alison: I’ll go first, because mine is quite simple: I love it. I loved it then, I love it now. Harry gets a happy ending, which I think is really important. Especially, I appreciate it now because a lot of YA fiction now either does not have a very nice ending — it’s too ambiguous for me, which annoys me, or it’s very depressing. But I think we see that Harry gets a happy ending, but it also doesn’t negate the lasting effects of what has happened to him. It very much is a small snapshot of one day, one moment, but it’s the best moment Harry could get. I think it’s so important because… we were talking about this on our MuggleNet movie marathon for Harry’s birthday. This is the future that Harry almost did not go into the forest for, and we know that because he was… I’m looking for the quote. It says, “Ripples of cold undulated over Harry’s skin. He wanted to shout out to the night. He wanted Ginny to know he was there. He wanted her to know where he was going. He wanted to be stopped, to be dragged back, to be sent back home.” That’s the only moment, when Harry is going towards the forest, that he hesitates. He doesn’t hesitate thinking about Ron and Hermione, right? He more thinks of, “I am going to go secure the future for them, their future.” But it’s when he sees Ginny that he thinks, “I want to be stopped. I want that future, too. I want my happiness. I want to be able to live that.” I think he thought he was going to be denied that. It’s why he hesitates, but he gets it. He has been able to have that future, and I think it’s beautiful and I think it’s everything Harry deserves. 

Katy: I love that. 

Alison: So I love it. And I think I love it more as I get older, too, just because this is everything Harry deserves. It’s also a full circle to Sorcerer’s Stone, where Harry sees his whole family, generations past, in the Mirror of Erised, and now, here at the end, we see Harry passing on that generation’s future. He gets to see and have that connection of everything that he wanted as an 11-year-old, his deepest desire of his heart, and that brings me so much joy. 

Tracy: I love that. 

Katy: I know Lorrie has some extensive notes. Tracy, do you wanna say yours first? 

Tracy: Sure. Yeah, similar to Alison, I loved the epilogue when I read it for the first time. I thought it was great that it was a little snapshot, like Alison was saying, and that it wasn’t… we’re still able to figure out, make our own endings for the characters in a way because we got that one day. The reason why I got the tattoo, “All is well,” is because as someone who’s kind of anxious and always worrying about the future, I like the idea that it summed up the story where even though there’s some struggle, he’s okay and he’s fine. It’s going to be great. 

Alison: Oh my gosh, I love that. Tracy, I love that so much. 

Tracy: I just needed that reminder that things may suck for a little bit, but it’ll be fine. Now I think I like it… not that I like it a little less, because I listened to it on the way… I’m podcasting someplace else. I listened to it on the way in the car, and I still love it a lot. I think it’s just a great ending. I just think Cursed Child dilutes it a little more for me, which makes me sad. 

Katy: Yup. I hear that. Alright, Lorrie. I’m really interested about your waves of feeling. 

Lorrie: Yeah. I had three different waves of feeling about the epilogue. One was when I first read it, I was disappointed because it wasn’t what I wanted and expected from the epilogue. Because we had waited with so much anticipation for Deathly Hallows, it’s sort of like when you want something and you hope for it, then you have to go through some time of settling with what you wanted vs. the reality. 

Alison: *clears throat* EVERYONE WATCHING CURSED CHILD! (coughs) 

Lorrie: I had expected that if there was an epilogue, that it would continue with the extremely complex psychological insights into everybody’s characters because, especially with Deathly Hallows, this book goes so deep into what Harry’s thinking, the connections he has between himself and Voldemort, how he learns to occlude. Then suddenly, the tone changes so drastically through the epilogue and it goes from the tone of a novel, which is inside of everybody’s mind, to more back to the fairy tale that it started out as being with Sorcerer’s Stone. It starts out with a baby on a doorstep, and it ends, “All was well.” There is also this… I really was bugged by the super hetero-normative “everybody has to pair off and get married, even when you’re taking them to school and you’re telling your children, ‘oh, you’re going to grow up to marry so-and-so.’” That was startling and weird to me, and I felt, “Well, okay, that’s kind of signaling a fairy tale, happily ever after ending, I guess.” It was surprising, the shift in tone. And then I was most surprised because we had been told for years that the last word would be “scar,” so I was looking for “scar,” right, and it wasn’t. “All was well” struck me as so generalizing and pat compared to how complex everything had been before and it made me realize… so that was my first wave of feeling. 

On the second wave, when I had thought about the epilogue more, I thought, “Okay, I thought the epilogue was going to be about the story and the characters, but for me, it’s about the author.” Then it made sense to me, because the phenomenon of Harry Potter, we all knew that this single author had been under enormous pressure to finish off this epic saga, under enormous pressure. She was having catharsis, and the epilogue reads like somebody who is just depleted and relieved to me. “I had this orphaned wizard boy and I made the worst things I could think of happen to him, and I felt really terrible about it. But can I do it? Can I get him to the finish line? Can I get him to defeat his arch-nemesis without actually killing him? I did it! I did it! Oh my god! And billions of dollars are waiting on my finishing a book, and everybody cares. I did it! I hurt this boy over and over again for a million words, but I got him to the finish line.” Also because there are little glimpses in the epilogue, like of the children being like, “Why is everyone staring at our famous parent?” That was a little bit to me, ‘the author is not the same person she was when she started writing this series.’ Yeah, that changed how I read the epilogue. To me, it brings the presence of the author and her creative process more into the story for me. The third wave, which I’ll talk about later, was after Cursed Child. 

Katy: Gotcha.

Alison: I… yeah. We’re going to talk about Cursed Child, and I’m very excited. 

Katy: We can hold onto that for a little bit. We’ll get there. So when I first read it, my first read through, I loved it. I had no problems with it. I was just happy for Harry. He finally got the happy ending that he so deserved, and it was a very happy feeling at the end of this very rough book, in many ways. When you’re so invested in these characters, you want the best for them, and to see them all happy and fulfilling their futures the way they wanted to, etc., I was like, “Aaawww, what a happy, beautiful ending.” Let’s see… that was 2007? Right. When that came out, I was 27. As I got older and… so I got married in 2008, and started thinking about having my own family, as far as children go. Me and Adam are a family, I wanna make that clear, because a lot of people think family means children. No, a family can also just be two people. But we started thinking about having kids because we were still… I’m still a Gen Xer, he’s barely on the cusp. Some would classify him as a millennial, but barely. He was born in ‘83, I was born in ‘79. We were on the tail end of Gen X, as far as I think about it. I talked to my brother about this recently, because he’s three years older than me, and he and his contemporaries were still very much in the same camp as our parents were. It was just after you’re done with school — whether that’s high school, college, whatever — you get married, you have kids, that’s just what you do. I was still in that same mindset as well, but when things didn’t work out for us as quickly as we wanted them to, and then eventually didn’t work out for us at all, it started making me think harder about those things and like, “Wait, does everyone have to do that, or can some people choose not to?” “What does that look like if you choose not to have kids? What’s a child-free life like?” Taking that on for a year just to see what it felt like, and then going, “Oh, actually, this fits us really well.” I see now, with the millennial generation, them making decisions much later. They’re getting married later, some of them are choosing to not have children, and they’ve gone into the relationships knowing that from a young age, even. When whereas I was growing up, that’s just what we saw in media. Every TV show was about families with kids, so it was expected. It was societal norm, it was in everything we consumed. Every store you went to, they were shoving it down your throat. But I feel like this next generation has much more choice, and I love that for them. So when I look at this epilogue now, and I think, “Okay, this took place in 2017 and I realized that Jo didn’t know that 2017 was going to be different than 1997 when this story was actually wrapping up. She had no way of telling the future, and even in 2007, we didn’t know that about the millennial generation yet. Maybe some did, but it wasn’t as widely known as it is now. I’ve come to know that, mostly through working for MuggleNet and knowing a lot of millennials, becoming friends with them, and hearing about their life experiences, and it’s been very educational for me. Yeah, she had no way of knowing that society was changing and that societal norms were changing. I think that’s why she did it the way she did the whole hetero-normative, ‘everybody has kids immediately after school.’ But now, reading it, it’s a little like, “Oooh, in 2017, actually, that’s not what people…” Well, I take that back. People who were 17 in 1997, yes. That is probably what they did, because Harry and company are Gen Xers. They were born in 1980. Sorry, Hermione was born in 1979, she’s slightly older than me by a month. But yeah, Harry and company are Gen Xers, so they’re on the tail end, like me. It does make sense for them to have gone ahead, gotten married, had kids. If this had been set in any other time frame further in the future, not so much, I feel. 

Alison: See, I disagree with that, because as a millennial myself, I know that a lot of people in that age bracket are putting those things off, not necessarily by choice. We’d love to be doing these things, but a lot of it is trying to be so… I feel like millennials are such planners, overarchingly, that we like to have everything… we know exactly how it’s going to go. We don’t like to take the risks that I think some older generations would’ve been happier just like, “We just go with it, and we figure it out as we go.” I think I disagree with that, necessarily. I think, too, the Wizarding World is kind of behind culturally, almost a little bit, like the Muggle World. Not that I’m saying people can’t make that choice or have… sometimes their circumstances mean they need to make that choice where it’s different. But I guess, to me, it makes sense for these characters. Obviously, the Weasleys come from a big family. They’re going to want family. Harry’s always wanted a family, so I don’t know. It makes sense to me, still, but I think that’s an interesting perspective on it, for sure. 

Tracy: I kind of agree with both. I do think that if it was set now, the expectation wouldn’t be there. Like you said, the older generations’ expectations that you’ll do this were… I do think millennials, even though we may want to, we can’t afford it or whatever is going on, there’s no expectation as much. But I do think that for these characters, I think it makes sense. She doesn’t show everybody. She only shows the people who you’ve had inklings that they would be together. It’s not like she goes into Neville. We know that later on, Neville gets married and stuff. It’s not like she goes into that. I think it works for these characters, but it is a little… I do think if if was coming out now, people would be a little like, “Oh, this is a little too… everyone’s paired off like it’s Noah’s Ark.” 

Alison: That’s a good point about Neville, though, because we do know Neville’s married, but he doesn’t have children. 

Lorrie: That we know of. 

Alison: I think we would have known that if they did, though, because we know Luna has kids. 

Tracy: Twins, right? 

Katy: That’s true. I hold onto Neville as my child-free buddy of Harry Potter. 

Alison: He and Hannah are having a great time, living at Hogwarts, doing their thing with their plants, and they’re happy. Yeah. 

Katy: Exactly. Their plants are their children. 

Lorrie: I did see a change, though, because when I saw Nineteen Years Later the first time, I realized, “Oh, that’s longer. Harry and Ginny waited to have children longer than James and Lily and longer than Rowling’s own parents, who had her at the same age that James and Lily had Harry. 

Katy: Well, that’s true. So how old would they have been? 

Alison: James Sirius is 13 nineteen years later, so they waited six years? So Harry would’ve been 23, and Ginny would’ve been 22 when they had their oldest. 

Lorrie: That was the first thing I saw. Nineteen is such a strange number. Why 19? That was the first thing it told me. The other thing that’s a little weird about the way Rowling’s universe works is that she shows having a family, having a partner, and possibly children as something that some people don’t deserve, or they feel like they don’t deserve, like Dumbledore, McGonagall, or Snape. We see Harry totally going… even quoted earlier when he was hesitating by Ginny like, “Am I going to choose that path? No, I have this other fate, and I’d like that but I can’t have it.” And Draco definitely has that during Half-Blood Prince, contrasting the path that Draco’s on with all the other Sixth Years who are dating and having drama.

Alison: That almost goes to the theme of love in the book, too. Characters feeling they deserve love, and they should be open to it. That could be a whole ‘nother episode of thematically… characters who may feel that they have to do something and sacrifice more vs. those that say, “No,” or are coming to the realization that you can accept the love around you. 

Lorrie: That was something that I was crazy about with the Lupin story-line, is when we see him. He’s the most extreme example that I can think of somebody saying, “No, I can’t. I don’t deserve it. It’s going to be too hard.” Then he has the life force that says, “I’m going to go for the happiness anyway.” It was a big risk, but I loved seeing the joy when he went for it. 

Alison: Oh my gosh. Now I’m going to be crying about Lupin and Tonks. Whew! 

Katy: Well, my last, final thought, which will keep you from crying or make you mad again, is that now reading the epilogue for this episode, it’s tainted a bit because of Cursed Child. 

Alison: To which I think you’re wrong, but we’ll get there. 

Katy: We’ll get there. I’m hoping this is the last time I’m going to be reading it through that lens, because I was literally having to take notes on that for this and I had to pull out my Cursed Child book, which I hate to even touch. But I still own it. I haven’t thrown it in the trash or burnt it yet, so at least be happy for that, Alison. I was like, “Okay, this one last time, I’ll read it with that in mind and take my notes and then from now on I’m just going to try to leave that behind and not let it affect my reading and just go back to the first time I read it. The happy-go-lucky, warm and fuzzy feelings that it gave me that first time. 

Tracy: Yeah. I have to literally stop myself and be like, “Stop thinking about Cursed Child and just look at what you’re reading in front of you.” I kept being like, “Well, no, this happens and that happens.” 

Alison: I have a reason why! I have a reason why! But we’re not going to get to that yet. I’m going to change your whole viewing of any inconsistencies. 

Tracy: It’s not the inconsistencies, it’s that they ruined everything. But… 

Alison: No, they didn’t! 

AD BREAK – 00:33:11 to 00:34:54 

Alison: Anyway, things that aren’t ruined… I really love that we get a lot of tidbits of a lot of the family dynamic, just in this small, little scene. I love we’ve got the older brother, who teases the younger one. James is a tease. 

Katy: He’s a jerk! 

Alison: The kind of black sheep, Albus. No, he’s being a normal, older brother. Totally normal. 

Katy: I know. 

Alison: I have three older siblings, and every time I read that, I’m like, “Yup. That!” Then we’re got the Black Sheep son, who’s kind of nervous about this life change, but doesn’t wanna show it to his brother, right? He’s trying to… he waits until James is gone before he really lets his insecurities out. You’ve got the younger sister, who really wants to keep up with her older brothers, which I totally relate to because I’m the youngest and I feel like I spent my whole life doing that, trying to keep up with my siblings. You’ve got Ginny, who can silence James with just a look. He’s trying to push buttons, and Ginny just gives him a look and he’s like, “Never mind. Shutting up now.” You’ve got Harry and Ginny, they’re both being very reassuring to all their kids. We’ve got Harry comforting Lily when she’s crying as they walk into the train station. He’s like, “It’s okay. It’s only two years. It’ll go by really fast.” They both comfort Albus and we find out that they write to James regularly, so they have a good relationship there. You’ve got this nice closeness of all the cousins. We see that the wider Weasley family is still close, even though Harry’s like, “Percy’s talking about broomstick regulations, and I really don’t wanna say, “Hi.”” That awkward brother-in-law moment. I love when James comes running back, and he’s like, “I just saw Teddy kissing Victoire!” and Ginny is like, “You interrupted them? You are SO like Ron!” That cracks me up every time. James is like, “Yeah, Al and I can share a room, and Teddy can move in with us!” And Harry’s like, “You and Al will share a room when I want the house to fall in!” I see so much joy in this family, and so much… it’s everything Harry deserves. 

Tracy: 100 percent. 

Katy: Yes! 

Alison: We officially learn that Harry’s watch was Fabian Prewett’s, who is Molly’s brother. We get to tie that together, because we know from when he gets it that Molly says it was her brother’s, but we find out here that Fabian is her brother, so that’s wonderful. Harry tells Albus, “You’ve got tea with Hagrid on Friday. Don’t get into duels, look out for Peeves, don’t let your brother wind you up,” which is very much echoing Harry’s first year. He had tea with Hagrid, he got into a duel, he got into trouble with Peeves, he let some people wind him up, and so he’s very much like, “Learn from my mistakes.” It’s just so good to me. It’s just… wonderful. 

Katy: It is very wholesome. 

Tracy: Agreed. 

Katy: I just had a thought, though. Why is Percy there? Does he have a kid going to Hogwarts? 

Tracy and Alison: Yes! 

Katy: Okay. I guess I never really thought to question that until just now. 

Tracy: Molly’s his second, I think. 

Alison: I was going to say, which one’s younger? What’s his other daughter’s name? Molly’s one of them. Oh my gosh, I gotta look up the family tree now. 

Katy: I forgot there was a family tree. 

Alison: Yes! It’s extensive. 

Tracy: I think he’s there because he’s close… I feel him and Ginny have a close relationship.

Alison: Yeah, I can see that. Molly, and Lucy is his younger one. Obviously, we’ve got Molly and Arthur, we’ve got Bill and Fleur’s kids; Victoire, who I believe she would be 17, she’d be a 7th Year; Dominique, which we don’t know if that’s a boy or girl; and Louis. Charlie doesn’t have children. Percy married someone named Audrey. They have two kids, Molly and Lucy. Obviously, there’s Fred, RIP. George married Angelina, and their kids are Fred and Roxanne, which is cute. Ron and Hermione, who have Rose and Hugo, and Harry and Ginny, who have James Sirius, Albus Severus, and Lily Luna. Then we know that Luna is married to Rolf Scemander, and they have twins, Lorkin and Lysander Scamander. Presh. 

Tracy and Katy: Love it. 

Katy: Thank you for that reminder. I needed it. 

Alison: Yeah, that’s the family tree that we know. 

Katy: It is interesting that even though Percy is there with Ron, they’re not the ones hanging out together. Percy’s off with someone else. 

Alison: Well, we don’t see Bill and Fleur and their kids, either, or George and Angelina, and I think we can assume that their kids are all around Hogwarts. Maybe some of them have grown out of it, depending on when they were born, but I think we can assume at this point that most of those cousins are there at this point. 

Katy: Yeah. I guess the parents were probably off talking to more people from their class. That makes sense. 

Alison. Yeah, or seeing their own kid off. I definitely have a big headcanon that the Weasley family gets together a lot. All those cousins and all those families are hanging out all the time. Maybe they had an end-of-summer… before we all go to school. 

Tracy: I can definitely see that. My only thing is that it annoys me that James is so much like his grandfather. I know he’s just a big brother and he is very cute, but I feel like he should have been a little different. 

Alison: I see that. But I also see James as what Harry could have been if his life had gone a little bit differently. I definitely think he’s only that way with his brother. Just the way that Ginny makes him shut up with a look. I definitely see him as… he’s their first kid. I don’t wanna say he’s spoiled, but maybe he’s indulged a little bit. Harry would be ecstatic to have this kid. 

Katy: He was probably getting presents from McGonagall and Hagrid and everyone. 

Alison: Oh my gosh, yes. And I can see Harry just being so ecstatic to have his first child that he was like, “MY SOOOOOON!” 

Tracy: What’s this fanfic you speak of, though? I’m curious. 

Alison: I brought this up on the show before, but when I was in high school, I wrote basically a self insert fanfic where a character that was myself, who was Oliver Woods’ daughter, becomes best friends with James Sirius and has this whole adventure. So I feel a strange closeness to James Sirius.

Lorrie: I love that. That’s adorable. 

Alison: I think we put it on our Patreon at one point. 

Katy: I think so. 

Alison: Patreon.com/alohomora, if you wanna read my bad high school fanfic. 

Tracy: Do the characters, nineteen years later, meet your expectations? Lorrie, what do you think? 

Lorrie: Oh, goodness. Well, I remember being very uneasy about the dynamic between Ron and Hermione because he accuses her of not believing in him. She was not even doing anything. She was just standing there. He just accuses her out of nowhere. Then she reassures him, and he reveals that he lied to her. I know a lot of people find that completely fine and kind of cute. It makes me uneasy the same way that the dynamic between Molly and Arthur had sometimes made me uneasy. I was a little worried for them. I wanted to send them to marriage counseling. I don’t know. Is this where I go into Draco? 

Katy: Sure. 

Alison: Well, before you go into Draco, I think it’s an interesting point. But I don’t feel that way, necessarily, about Ron and Hermione. 

Lorrie: I know a lot of people don’t. 

Alison: This is very… this is very uptight Hermione and very laid-back Ron, balancing each other out. I feel like of course, Hermione being Muggle-born, like, “You don’t use magic at all when you’re driving! You have to be exact!” And Ron would be like, “Eh, I could always rely on it a little.” He has that growing up, you know? To me, it almost feels like in Star Wars, compared to using the Force to enhance your perception and awareness. I don’t know. 

Lorrie: We don’t see Hermione saying that, though. She didn’t provoke him at all. Anyway, I don’t want to get into this too much. I know some people like it. 

Alison: But I feel that’s them almost teasing each other. That’s always been Ron and Hermione’s relationship, challenging each other and balancing each other a little bit. I can see it almost being like a tease, like, “Yeah, she didn’t believe in me,” then being like, “Well, I gotta own up. I didn’t.” 

Tracy: I don’t know. Ron annoys me a little bit. I re-read the whole series and watched the movies again recently and he’s so good in the books, and I feel this is a little bit of movie Ron here where he’s just jokes. I think he’s so much more than jokes. I wish there was a little more to him in this part. 

Katy: Yeah. Throw those quotes out at us that you had some issues with, because I agree with you. 

Tracy: Okay. He’s like, “If you’re Slytherin, we’ll disown you.” I know he’s kidding, but it’s just like, Why are we still so strict in these houses? I’d hoped that they’d become a little bit more, less rigid, and it still bugs me that Albus is in Gryffindor in the same vein. Both sides of the same coin. I wish he 

wasn’t an outsider in that way. And then he says that Arthur’s going to be mad that Rose marries Scorpius, and I’m like, “What? Why?” Arthur could care less. Molly, maybe. 

Alison: This is funny to me, because I’ve never taken this very seriously. This is just Ron joking around to me, and he’s just kidding. It’s almost like maybe other people expect that or maybe the kids are so serious about it, but Ron is past that. It’s almost showing that Ron’s grown up, because I think Ron as a 13-year-old would really say, “If any of my children were in Slytherin, I’d disown them.” He’d be totally serious. But I think, at this point, he’d be like, “Yeah, we’ll disown you. Whatever.” But he’s kidding because he doesn’t care anymore. 

Tracy: But he knows that they’re worried about it. Why is he trying to egg them on again? I don’t know. 

Alison: I think he’s just winding them up a little bit, almost like James is winding up Albus. He’s kidding. Maybe it’s traditional… I can assume it’s traditional that wizarding families tease each other about, “Oh, you’re going to be in this house, you’re going to be in this house!” Winding each other up. 

Katy: You would hope after the Battle of Hogwarts that some of that would’ve died away, and the whole house system would’ve been re-evaluated. Nineteen years later? You saw what the house division did to Hogwarts. 

Alison: Yeah but it’s almost like when parents and families, if their kids go to different universities, and they’re like, “Oh, you’re going to go here, blah blah blah,” or “Oh, you’re one of them!” That’s how I see it. 

Katy: Well, sure. But in Hogwarts, it’s a much smaller space for four divisive houses that have these rivalries, and we’ve seen this one’s associated with dark wizards and dark magic. Even nineteen years later, Albus is so scared of being a Slytherin because he still has this in his head that it’s the dark wizard house. They should’ve made so many changes by this point that that’s not even a concern for him. I feel like Hogwarts should’ve either abolished it, come up with new names for it, or just done something to completely change that. Yeah, Slytherin did keep turning out dark people and people associated with that. Not all of them, obviously, but that’s where people went if they wanted to be evil, and how about we not make a house where evil people not feel like, “Oh, this is our place to go be evil and learn dark magic, and make friends with all the bad people who have family in Azkaban.” I don’t know. I’m still like, “That shouldn’t be such a concern nineteen years later.” 

Lorrie: I have my hand up. 

Katy: Okay, please. Feel free. 

Lorrie: I wouldn’t dismiss the feelings around this kind of joke, because it’s not just about houses. This is post-war, and we know that there’s a generational aspect to the houses where if your whole family has been in Slytherin, that’s typical. And if you think about… if we transpose this to real life, if there has been a situation where there are clannish wars and the people go to school together and you might be going to school with someone who killed your dad, it’s very fraught. The other thing about it is that when the sorting hat looks into your soul and tells you who you are, that can’t be casual. It tells you something about who and what you are, and it’s a point of great fear and anxiety for a lot of these little 11-year-olds. I see Ron’s joking about it as this is a moment of high tension. Some people joke about it. I personally wish that he wouldn’t because I would have been tense enough already, and I wouldn’t have needed to hear the annoying uncle going on about it like, “Oh my god, shut up!” But that’s in the range of human personalities. When there’s an issue that’s this fraught, some people joke about it. Some people, like Albus, take their dad and have huge eyes and whisper their concerns. But I don’t think it can be dismissed as equally a small deal for everybody, because I think for some of them, it really is a huge deal. 

Alison: I see that, yeah. 

Lorrie: And the tension around it is unavoidable, whether you joke about it or whether you are super protective. 

Katy: And I think Lily and Hugo were off discussing what houses they were going to be in when they went to Hogwarts, and I’m like, “Honeys, y’all are two years away from even going. Why is that the thing you’re so interested in?” 

Alison: Because when you’re a kid, when you looking forward to something like that, that’s going to be something that’s really on your mind. That’s part of the Hogwarts experience, is getting sorted and being part of your house, and so I think… yeah. They’re on the Hogwarts Express, they’ve got siblings that are going for the first time. Of course, they’re thinking about that. Of course, they’re wondering, “In two years, when I’m there, what’s it going to be like for me?” I think that seems totally natural. 

Katy: I wish they had done something different with the house system by then, but I’ll get off my soapbox. Is there anything else about Ron we wanted to say? 

Lorrie: My favorite things about Ron in the epilogue are things that are not in the epilogue that we find out later, like how successful he is. My personal preference for Ron is gravitas Ron, not jokester Ron. It’s just a personal preference. 

Alison: See, I think he can have both, and I actually really love that Ron becomes the stay-at-home parent. 

Lorrie: Oh, yeah. 

Alison: That makes me really happy. That fits Ron, to me, that he can have a bit of both. He’s the stay at-home parent, he’s the lighter one, but also the one that’s more involved day-to-day. 

Katy: He’s a stay-at-home parent in one version of the canon. Anyway… 

Alison: Not going to argue right now, because it will go on forever. But it’s canon. 

Katy: Just saying. In this chapter, it doesn’t specify that, so we can’t make that assumption for everyone, but I do like that he’s successful at the Joke Shop and that he’s making jokes here. That part’s cute. Although, does he even mention the Joke Shop in the epilogue? 

Lorrie: No, he doesn’t. 

Alison: I like that he stepped out of Harry’s shadow. I like that we find out that he tried to be an Auror for a bit, but then he was like, “Nah, not really for me,” and went to the Joke Shop, which I think is great. I think that helps Ron really become himself.

Katy: Yeah. That was stuff we found out before Cursed Child. 

Tracy: You don’t think he’d feel like a Fred substitute in a way, too? 

Alison: No. 

Lorrie: Well, the thing about Ron – and again, this is not in the epilogue – is that the kind of person he is is stuff that he learned from Molly. 

Alison: Yes! 

Lorrie: Whether he’s making money or not, and we know he wants to make money. We know that as a child, he’s done with being poor. But whether or not he’s making money, his focus is on partnership and community building, so he can do that at home or at work. He can do that in the Joke Shop or not. 

Alison: Being part of the Joke Shop, I feel like he’s also supporting George. He’s there to support his brother. He stays home with his kids, because he’s there to support his wife and he’s there to support his kids. That’s the place he may find that he feels happiest in. Think about in Prisoner, where someone is upset and he says, “Shall I make a cup of tea? That’s what my mum does.” 

Tracy: Ron’s the most like Molly, out of all the kids. 

Lorrie: In my mind, when he got the Order of Merlin, it was for doing things that he learned how to do from Molly. 

Alison: Yeah. 

Katy: Aaawww, I never thought about it that way. I like it. I like it a lot. 

Alison: Ron Love Fest right here. 

Lorrie: But it’s not from the epilogue, though. It’s all from outside the epilogue. 

Alison: But interesting, if we think about gender dynamics that we were talking about earlier. That’s very much not the traditional role that Ron would have. 

Lorrie: And he’s okay with it. 

Alison: Yeah, and Hermione’s okay with it, too. And I think everybody around them seems okay with it. There’s no weirdness. 

Lorrie: After all he’s been through, he can do whatever he wants. 

Alison: “Baby, you can do whatever you want. It’s okay. We’re happy for you.” Katy: I wish Hermione had gotten to speak more in the epilogue. She was there, but barely. 

Tracy: Same with Ginny. Yeah, I agree.

Alison: Yeah, but I think we miss out on that, because I think they’re fussing over the children that are leaving, whereas in some ways, Harry and Ron are… well, this goes to a point I’m going to make, but the epilogue is very much from Harry’s point of view again, and I think in the epilogue Harry’s very focused on Albus, specifically, because we learn that Albus looks most like Harry, so I think he feels that deeper connection. His son has this worry, so think he’s got that. But we can see Ginny’s trying to wrangle Lily and James at the same time, and James is a handful, Lily’s in tears right now, and Hermione is probably most worried because her oldest child is going to Hogwarts and leaving them for the first time. I see her like she’s in a movie, where she’s very like, “You have your bag, you have your jumper, you have all your supplies. Are you okay? Are you sure? Did you double check?” Hermione is that kind of mom. 

Katy: Yeah, that makes sense. 

Alison: “You have all your books? Are they all alphabetized? You have all your robes. Are they all pressed? You have all of your things. Do you have your owl? You have plenty of quills?” That’s how I see Hermione, freaking out. I can see her not being so much in conversation with the adults at that moment, because she’s like… 

Tracy: As always, she’s focused on the matter at hand while they’re doing their own thing. 

Alison: Yes. Let’s talk about another person who shows up here. 

Tracy: Draco. 

Lorrie: Draco, Draco… 

Alison: Oh, Draco. 

Alison and Katy: Woooo! 

Katy: We totally jinx woo’d, and I love it. 

Alison: Tracy, you have a question to start us off. 

Tracy: What do you guys think is behind the Nod? You guys had some good responses to that. 

Alison: I’ll go first again. I think he’s just acknowledging. He and Harry are here at a very similar moment, sending sons that are the same age off to school, and I think he’s acknowledging the past they have, but also that it’s in the past. That they’re no longer children, they’re no longer school boys that have a grudge against each other. They’re never going to be friends, but they tolerate each other now. I think they’ve come to understand each other a bit, more than they ever could’ve as children. They’ve come to understand, “Hey, we’ve been through a lot. We were on opposite sides. We both realized where we had made mistakes, and here we are. We both made it. Nice to see you.” Not, “Nice to see you,” but “I see you.” I couldn’t think of another way to phrase that. It’s almost like, “I acknowledge you, I see you.” 

Katy: “Thanks for saving my life a couple of times.” 

Lorrie: “You’re still a jerk.” 

Alison: There’s that. 

Lorrie: Oh my god, I have so much about… I have many feelings about this. First of all, when I was reading the epilogue for the first time, it really impressed me how much the steam was super thick from the Hogwarts Express, and they couldn’t find each other, they could only hear voices. Then the steam clears, and it shows the three Malfoys. You know how when Harry is younger, like in Prisoner of Azkaban, he is left to struggle with this world in which things are happening because of his parents’ generation? Remus and Sirius, what are they? What is all this? And nobody is telling him anything. He has to struggle, no one’s explaining anything, and it all impacts him so much. So here we are. It’s a new generation, and we’re focused on the kids, and then the steam clears. To me, it’s that time clearing. Now Harry is of the generation where everything they went through is affecting how their children are going to have to go through school. These are people who are in their thirties. 

Katy: Which is the whole point of Cursed Child. 

Lorrie: Yes, and once you see Draco, it’s like, “Oh god, there’s so much history there. And these kids, we’re just sending them, until Christmas, to fend for themselves.” And the receding hairline, that was… that hurt, because it was quite realistic, but that felt like a little bit of a low blow. It reminds you of when Draco was little and super good-looking and confident and privileged, and saying, “Hi, I’m Draco Malfoy. I own this place.” Now, we’ve never seen him buttoned up before, but it said that his cloak is buttoned up to his throat, which is something that we associated earlier with Snape. He’s very defensive, because imagine how frightening it is to wonder if you’re even going to be allowed or if people are going to spit on you, and then you’re going to give your child over? He’s coming in very much the opposite end of privilege, whereas little James is coming in, having had all this privilege. That eye contact between them and Draco… Clearly, Draco’s the one that has something to be nervous about, but it was also really beautiful to me to show he did it. He made it. He survived the almost impossible situation he was in as a 16-year-old, and he was allowed, even after taking the dark mark, to come back from the dark mark and have a family and have love for himself, which is a big thing. That’s what Dumbledore and Snape were aiming for. Dumbledore and Snape were people who had done something consequential at that age, and they decided, “You know what? I can’t have a family. I have to give the rest of my life to making up for what I enabled.” They were trying their hardest to prevent Harry and Draco from going so far that they would spend the rest of their lives with the guilt of having caused somebody’s death. Both Dumbledore and Snape gave their own lives to try to prevent Harry and Draco from doing that, with Snape even going so far as to bring Draco back after the dark mark, which I don’t think anyone had done before Snape. I don’t think anyone was able to save somebody with a dark mark until Snape saved Draco. It showed yes, Draco was able to have this, and that is very impressive and emotional. The way that they nod at each other, there’s all this tension. It made me think, “This is how it could have been if Snape and all the Marauders had survived, and instead of being 30-year olds with these schoolboy grudges that lead them to want to kill each other, they could’ve been like, “I don’t like you, I’ll never like you, but here’s my kid and here’s your kid, and hi, a***ole.” Because the difference, which Dumbledore and Snape were so focused on, is if you can keep your soul from being burdened by guilt of having caused somebody’s death, you can have something. You’re allowed to have a life. Is this also where I keep talking and talking about “To Kill A Mockingbird”? 

Alison: Please, please bring up this thing about Mockingbird, because this is fascinating to me and I never put this together. Please.

Lorrie: The single nod from Draco made me wonder if this was a call-out to “To Kill A Mockingbird”. It may or may not be, although later in this chapter there is a direct reference to To Kill A Mockingbird. 

Alison: Yeah. Point these out, because I teach Mockingbird and I was like, “What the heck? I can’t even.” 

Lorrie: About the nod, it’s a moment of empathy. In To Kill A Mockingbird, there’s a lynch mob, and Scout, the 8-year-old, sends the whole lynch mob home by calling out one individual in the mob and talking to him about his son, who is her classmate. He’s pretending he can’t hear her, and she’s saying, “That’s your son, right? He’s my friend. We had him over to eat lunch.” Slowly, he can’t ignore her anymore, and he does this little nod, and that’s it. She’s invoked the ancient blood magic, she has gotten him thinking about his child. Then they’re looking at Atticus and his children and the guy that they’re trying to kill, and it goes against the emotion of a lynch mob. If you’re looking at your enemy that you tried to kill each other many times, you do the nod like that because you’re both bringing your children to school. It’s a protective commonality that you cannot be trying to kill each other after that. There are moments of empathy that are similar that lead up to this nod. One example is during the Occlumency lessons, when Harry and Snape both see how the other was tormented as a child, and they can’t deny it. They have to admit, “You know what? I know how that feels.” Then there’s… in the sectumsempra bathroom scene, where Harry walks in and sees Draco crying, and their eyes meet in the mirror right before Draco curses him. It’s like they have to admit they understand the feeling. Then after he witnesses Draco lower his wand in the tower at the end of Half-Blood Prince, he says that of course he hates Draco, but there’s the tiniest drop of pity. A single drop that was enough to undo Voldemort, a single nod that’s enough to send the whole lynch mob home. That’s all it takes. That’s ancient blood magic. 

Alison: Yeah. Oh, man, I love that. 

Lorrie: Yeah. I will get to the rest of To Kill A Mockingbird later. 

Alison: Man, that’s fantastic. I don’t think I’ve ever put those two together. These two books feel like they’re on two different planes, to me, I guess. But wow. That’s awesome. 

Lorrie: To me, the call-outs are so clear between them, because it was… what year was it? Was it 2007, 2006, where Rowling was asked her top ten books for schoolchildren, and she listed To Kill A Mockingbird as one of them, so it’s not an accident. 

Alison: Interesting. That’s fascinating. 

Lorrie: So yeah, Draco. 

AD BREAK – 01:07:54 to 01:09:54 

Katy: Somebody that we hear about but we don’t actually see is Teddy Lupin, speaking of children. Teddy!!! 

Tracy: I love it! I love that he’s so close to Harry and once got to live with them, and he goes to visit them four times a week. That’s adorable.

Alison: And I love that he’s almost like Harry in so many ways. Obviously, we get the parallel of the orphan from the war that’s taken into the family, but he’s also already becoming part of the Weasley family because he’s dating Victoire. I feel like I always say her name wrong, by the way. Someone who speaks French, help me. So he’s dating and he’s come to see her off, because Teddy will be 19 at this point, right? He’s come to see his girlfriend off to school. Look at you, charmer! I just love, too, that he’s obviously part of the family, and Lily being like, “If they get married, he’ll really be part of the family!” Harry’s like, “He already is, man. What are you talking about?” That makes me happy. So cute. SO CUTE! 

Katy: I was glad that he got a shout-out in the book, at least, since they didn’t include him in the movie. 

Alison: Well, there’s a reason for that, I think. I think the reason he doesn’t show up in anything else is because you’d have to cast someone, and casting someone could be a lot for this 20-second interaction that he’s just talked about. 

Katy: Well, they cast all the kids. Well, most of them, anyway. 

Alison: No, they just do Harry… 

Tracy: They do Harry’s kids, and also Ron and Hermione’s kids. 

Katy: Yeah, Harry and Hermione and Ron’s kids. And Ginny, obviously. I just… Hermione and Ron. They are not a family unit. Sorry, that came out weird. But yeah, they cast some of the… I don’t even think we hear Hugo say anything. They could’ve had just a random teenager with blue hair. 

Alison: Yeah, but you’d have to… Hugo’s a different story, but I see why they cut him.

Lorrie: Well, Teddy could look like anything, though. Right? 

Katy: That’s true, but we would expect blue hair. It would’ve been like, “Ah, there’s Teddy!”

Lorrie: He’s busy! He’s off-screen. He’s not concerned with us. 

Alison: He’s only got a few more moments with his girlfriend until Christmas. What are you supposed to do? Precious. Speaking of love, though… 

Tracy: I love the mention of Neville. I always thought it was weird that the professors never had partners, really, or kids or anything, so it’s nice that Neville actually has a wife. We don’t hear about it in the epilogue, but just the fact they mention him is cute, and that they’re still friends. 

Alison: I also love that Ginny’s like, “Give Neville our love,” and James is like, “Ugh, I can’t give a professor love. UGH!” He’s horrified, and she’s like, “You know Neville!” and he’s like, “Yeah, away from school, but at school he’s Professor Longbottom. Ugh, I can’t act like I know him!” It’s such a kid thing, and I love it so much. I picture him walking by Neville one day and he’s like, “Mum and dad say hi,” and he’s walking away, but he’s trying to do it where no one else can hear him. Especially because I think we find out at some point that Neville is head of Gryffindor, right? 

Lorrie: He’s popular. He’s a big deal.

Alison: Yeah, so I feel that would be even more mortifying as a 13-year-old. 

Tracy: I didn’t know that. That’s amazing! I love it! 

Alison: I feel like we heard that somewhere. I may have to go look up specifically.

Tracy: Doesn’t he also become an Auror for a little bit with Harry and Ron, or am I making that up?

Alison: I think he does. Now we’re going to have to look it up, guys. 

Katy: I think he does, too. Yeah. I’m pretty sure the three of them do clean-up duty for a couple of years. Harry sticks with it, and the other two are like, “Nah, this is not for me.” 

Alison: Let’s see. Let’s find out what the Lexicon says. “After the Battle of Hogwarts, Neville, Ron, and Harry were recruited to join Kingsley Shacklebolt’s progressive government as Aurors to clean up the department and finish the job of ending Death Eater power once and for all. After that, he became a beloved Herbology professor at Hogwarts. It is probably while a professor that Neville married former Hufflepuff Hannah Abbott, who eventually became the landlady of the Leaky Cauldron. Neville still has his charmed coin from his Dumbledore’s Army days.” Maybe I totally made up that he’s the head of Gryffindor. 

Tracy: I’ll take it, though. 

Katy: It could be when he’s older, maybe. I could totally see that eventually happening. Although, gosh, how long… I guess he’s been a professor for how long at this point? A while. 

Alison: It would depend on how long he stayed an Auror. 

Katy: That’s true. I guess we don’t know exactly how long. 

Tracy: But props for the kid we made fun of becoming the head of Gryffindor. I love it.

Alison: For real, though. 

Katy: That would’ve been amazing. The one that could’ve been the Chosen One.

Alison: Precious. PRECIOUS!!!! 

Katy: We need someone to count out how many time we’ve said precious in this episode. 

Alison: All of them are precious. I just wanna take this whole epilogue and wrap it in my arms and hug it, tell it how wonderful it is. 

Tracy: Speaking of precious, what do you think of the kids in general? 

Alison: I love them! 

Tracy: I like that they don’t know why everyone is staring, and then Ron’s like, “It’s because of me.”

Alison: Yeah. 

Katy: That’s a good joke, I gotta say. That was a funny one. 

Alison: I love that Lily’s so eager to go to Hogwarts, which is like Ginny at the beginning. Albus is like the shy, sensitive one. James is super outgoing and eager to see his friends. They’re all like Harry and Ginny, but they’re also not. 

Lorrie: The part about Lily’s eyes really got to me, because it was too pat, for me, that it was a picture perfect day, and it’s just like Harry always dreamed of. But then when you see Lily’s eyes in Albus, then it’s like, “Oh, yeah. This is so hard earned.” 

Alison: And I love that only one of his kids got that. James may look like Harry, but he probably has closer to Weasley eyes, and Lily probably looks more like Ginny. But Albus looks like Harry, which I wonder if that’s why Harry wanted Albus Severus. For the son that looked like him. Maybe that’s why he gave his kid that name. 

Katy: Wouldn’t you know, though, as a just-out-of-the-womb baby that it’s got somebody’s eyes? They look pretty… 

Alison: I don’t know anything about his eyes, but maybe Harry had seen baby pictures of himself by then, so maybe he recognized himself. Maybe he was like, “he looks like me.” 

Lorrie: I don’t think with Harry Potter that he waits until after a baby’s born to know its name. I think he planned the names out first trimester. 

Alison: Yeah, you’re probably right. I can see him having a list. I can see Ginny being like, “We are not deciding until this child is born.” I can see Harry being like, “And here’s my list of…” 

Katy: Well, I love all the memes out there that’s like, “Rubeus, Remus…” including all the names of people that he could’ve chosen instead of Dumbledore and Snape. His name is five names long. 

Alison: I think Albus’s name speaks to Harry’s forgiving nature. It is the epitome of how forgiving Harry is, because I know we all make fun of him for it. Because we’re like, “Really, Harry? Both of those guys did terrible things to you.” But I think we see, by the end of Deathly Hallows proper, Harry is a very forgiving person, especially once he understands motivation of someone. He is so willing to forgive. I think this is the epitome of it, that he’s like, “I have fully forgiven both Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape.” Do I think he’s completely right in that? No, but I think it shows Harry is so willing to forgive. Enough that he will name his child after them. 

Lorrie: I’m totally not agreeing with this. 

Katy: Oh, what do you have to say? Tell us, tell us! 

Lorrie: I don’t think it has to do with forgiveness. We see him forgiving Dumbledore in King’s Cross. I don’t think his integration of Snape’s name involves any sort of forgiveness at all. I see the children in this epilogue as not being written as characters on their own so much as the author showing aspects of Harry as a person. James is the aspect of him that could have had a privileged childhood, and his baby Lily… they’re all showing what he wanted, and Albus Severus is the part of him that is uncertain, that has Lily’s eyes, that wonders, “What if I’m Slytherin?” When I first read the name Albus Severus, it to me looked like this is Rowling showing the moment that Harry turns from being an almost adult, an adolescent, to being a completely mature integrated personality because since book one, he’s been terrified of the parts of him that are Slytherin. This is a constant theme for him. He quite justifiably has the hardest time knowing how much of that is him truly, intrinsically, is warped because this monster traumatized him. Can he claim it as himself, or is it something evil that he should cast out? In Deathly Hallows, we see him. The more he becomes strong and adult and the more he gains ground against Voldemort, the more he accepts the part of himself that is Slytherin, that has those skills for real, not just because Voldemort attacked him. He integrates and becomes not so scared of himself, but they’re his secondary characteristics and that’s something… that’s part of what it means to become mature and adult is to be not just your primary characteristics but to understand the parts of yourself that are less developed that you might be a little afraid of, that are your shadow self. To me, Albus Severus is… Severus has to come in second. Definitely secondary characteristics, but he’s more integrated. There’s also the ego projection of putting all of that on a baby. Like, “Okay, Harry. This is definitely you, but god, that’s a very small baby for all those names.” The thing is, too, that if you are the child of someone this extraordinary, that is going to be part of your heritage, whether you want it or not. 

Alison: CURSED CHILD! 

Lorrie: Anyone who’s got parents who have been through this is going to have to deal with the aftereffects of war. The thing that I think is so important to Harry about both Dumbledore and Snape, whether it’s forgiveness or not, is that to be real, Harry is in a really unique position. He’s not an ordinary person. The only people who could really help him and tell him how to live his life were also extraordinary people. It’s this extremely exclusive club, and what he and Snape and Dumbledore all have in common: they’re all totally on their second or third or fourth chances at life. Harry committed, he cast Unforgivables. They had all committed dark magic, and then done something to reintegrate their souls and have remorse or atonement, come back from that, and they all… Not only did they die for people that they all loved, they also died for people that they didn’t love and people that they actively hated or that hated them or tried to actively hurt them. This is really rare, and both Snape and Dumbledore gave their lives to enable Harry to do that. This is a tiny, tiny club of masters of death, basically, and if you’re going to have a dad who went through that, that is something that you’re going to have to grapple with, whether you want to or not. This is his kids’ heritage. Alright, did I get everything I want to say. Okay, there’s one last thing. We can easily forget this now. I forget all the time. At the time that we first read the epilogue, Rowling had not really rehabilitated Slytherin. She was a lot more still in the “Slytherin is evil” camp than a lot of her fans and readers were. By that time, a lot of the readership was like… if a quarter of the population was like this, maybe you should stop dehumanizing them. Deathly Hallows, the book, was where she started to do that a little more and explore it a little more, and the name Albus Severus and saying you were named after a Slytherin was one of the first times that we saw a serious effort from this author about that. 

Alison: Yeah. Yeah. 

Katy: That’s a really good point. 

Alison: Speaking of all the kids’ names, too, because they’ve gotten crap for James and Lily’s names, too, but I think they work. I would have liked to see something for Remus, but I also really understand why Harry left that for Teddy. Fred, of course, is being left for George. There’s not really anyone else that Harry or Ginny might want to honor through their kids’ names, except for maybe Arthur. I don’t know. That’s the one that throws me. Percy really named a kid Molly, but no one has given Arthur’s name to someone. Though maybe it’s like, Hugo Arthur or something? I don’t know. That’s cute to me. 

Katy: It would be cute. 

Alison: But I think… yeah. A lot of people would be like, “Well, Ginny got cut out of this process,” and I’m like, “I don’t think so, because I think Ginny would’ve been very okay with James Sirius because she would understand it’s Harry’s father and his godfather, and Ginny knew Sirius, too, so I think she would be okay with that.” I am convinced that Ginny definitely suggested Luna for Lily’s middle name. She was like, “We’re throwing Luna in here, because we have to,” and Harry was like, “You’re right, we do. Let’s do it.” I definitely see that, because I’m like, “Who else would they have named their kids for, though?” 

Lorrie: McGonagall? 

Alison: That’s a great point. Oh shoot. 

Katy: That would be amazing. 

Alison: Harry and Ginny, you gotta have another kid. You gotta have another girl, come on! 

Katy: Lily Minerva. Nah, I really like Luna as inclusion, but dang. There needs to be a Minerva. There does. Maybe they did have another one. 

Lorrie: Yeah, we don’t know that they’re done. 

Alison: That would be quite the gap, but yeah. 

Katy: Well, we’re going by Cursed Child as the definitive… some of us leave our imaginations to the possibilities. 

Tracy: I don’t know what book you speak of. 

Alison: See, you say that, but I think a lot of the reason a lot of people have issues with Cursed Child is because they didn’t leave their minds open to something that wasn’t the headcanon everybody had put on the internet. 

Katy: We’ll get to that in a minute. So finishing up the people that we see on the platform: Ginny. Why is she not talking much either? Her and Hermione, I guess we already covered that. They’re doting on the kids. 

Alison: And I think she’s very much still a presence there. We see her, again, silence James with a look, she reassures Albus, like, “We wrote James three times a week last year.” She’s very tactful, like when Albus wants to talk to Harry and she pretends like she can’t hear, even though she’s listening. I think she’s there. I think she’s just… 

Tracy: I felt like she and Hermione were a little domesticated, but we already talked about it. I just… yeah, and you made some good points about it. They’re just focusing on the kids, so I get it. She’s so… I don’t know. Like with Ron, there’s so much more to her and she’s just there, not doing anything. 

Katy: Tracy, do you have one more question before we get to Cursed Child? 

Tracy: Why do you think the author chooses to tell us about the characters she does? I’m not sure, because I have Percy there, there’s a little mention of Neville, a little mention of Hagrid, but we don’t hear about McGonagall. We don’t hear about much like Molly or Arthur or anything. Just curious what you guys think. 

Alison: I think, again, it’s because it’s this specific moment. You can only bring so much into one specific moment without it feeling like, “Okay, now you’re just name-dropping.” 

Katy: CLASS REUNION TIME!!! 

Alison: Yeah. I think it is a very singular moment that I think is supposed to illustrate Harry’s great happiness in his life, and is supposed to give us a window to the great joy that he was able to achieve. We get bits and pieces and bobs, and that’s okay. I’m okay with that. 

Lorrie: There’s a rhythm to some of the ways that Rowling writes where it’s as though you took a time turner and the point at which Harry’s life, one of the divergence points of his life, was when he went on the Hogwarts Express for the first time. This is sort of like, “Okay, we’ve gotten this kid to adulthood, and he has a family now. We’re going to return to that point.” If you manage to save this kid and get him to functional adulthood, what’s it going to be like when he brings his own children? It’s like the moment when your present catches up with the point at which you started your time-turner journey. 

Tracy: Oh, and I think the characters that we see are the characters that he talks to when he’s about to get on the train. It’s Percy, and I think he talks to Draco, and then… yeah. That’s a good point. 

Alison: I think it mirrors Harry’s… yeah. Mirrors, because he hears from Percy very much. He meets Ron and Hermione, he’s met Hagrid, he meets Draco on the train. 

Lorrie: There’s mention of Neville. 

Alison: He hasn’t met McGonagall yet. Yeah. Neville, yeah, we see Neville on the platform. Yeah, it very much does mirror Harry’s first trip. That’s so beautiful to me. 

Lorrie: So for me as a Snape fan, the most memorable part of the epilogue was when Harry says, “Albus Severus, you are named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin, and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.” And that phrase, “the bravest man I ever knew,” I found really startling because that’s a direct call-out to Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, who is a revered character considered good. To compare Snape to him is a really bold move, and I know a lot of people dislike Harry giving Snape so much credit in the epilogue, but I think that the author tried to make it very clear that she was saying something deliberate with this, that… You can dismiss it as a reader. It’s your choice, but she herself was trying to say something here. I also laughed as a Snape fan because even in death, Snape can’t get full credit. I could just hear his voice from the grave going, “Typical.” It was very interesting to me that in the movie, they dropped the word, “Probably.” I know we haven’t mentioned… we keep skirting around Cursed Child, but in Cursed Child when Scorpius talks to Snape, he also omits the word, “probably.” 

Katy: I never noticed that. 

Lorrie: Wait, no. That wasn’t Scorpius, was that? Scorpius or Albus? Well, when the kids talk to Snape in Cursed Child, they drop the word “probably.” 

Alison: Yeah, I don’t necessarily agree with that, though. 

Lorrie: But the thing is that created three different meanings of this really divisive, controversial moment. The fact that there’s so many strong reactions to it, and the fact that there are three different versions of it, that’s a part of our fandom. When you think about parts of this saga that resonate with people and that create a lot of really strong emotion, this is one of them to me. The definition in To Kill A Mockingbird, when Scout thinks that her father Atticus is the bravest man who ever lived, he does something that’s exactly like Snape: when he was 19, he stopped using the Killing Curse. He was a marksman, he was a famous marksman. At the age of 19, he stopped because he said he thought that it gave him an unfair advantage over other living things. 30 years later, there’s a rabid dog and the whole town is trying to get him to shoot the dog to save the town’s life, and he doesn’t want to do it because he said he swore off of it. Finally, they make him do it, and they say, “It never leaves you.” That’s what they said about his marksman ability, and that, to me, is so much like Snape saying, “No, I’m done with dark magic. I’m not going to cast a killing curse,” and Dumbledore saying, “You have to for me, and you have to do whatever it takes in yourself to deal with that.” Also, Scout thinks that her father Atticus is brave because there was this racist woman and she taunted him so horribly, and he was always completely courteous to her. But when she thought that her father Atticus was brave, he told her, “No.” He thought that that racist woman was the bravest person he knew because she was on her death bed but went through withdrawal to break her addiction to painkillers before she died. He told his kid, Scout, that “bravery is when you know your licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through, no matter what.” That is so similar to how Harry and Dumbledore define Harry’s bravery in Half-Blood Prince, when you know you’re defeated, but you go fight anyway. This is Harry and Snape and Mrs. DuBois, all being masters of death, doing something that’s really difficult because you think it’s right, even though you have the fear of death. To me, you can dismiss Harry’s and Rowling’s mention of Snape in this part, but I think you’d be missing something really important if you did. 

Alison: I definitely think Snape is a great character, but I’m not a Snape fan for many reasons. That is an interesting parallel. I’ve never thought of that. 

Lorrie: I Was so amused when my kid was in 8th grade, and she was assigned To Kill A Mockingbird, because she hadn’t read that but, of course, was familiar with Harry Potter. Then she got to that line, the bravest man who ever lived, and she gasped out loud. She looked at me and she said, “IS THIS…” and I’m just like, “Yes, yes. That is what she’s referring to.” 

Katy: Interesting. 

Lorrie: She’s like, “How do you know?” I’m like, “Well, there are parallels between Harry Potter and To Kill A Mockingbird all over the place. The Gaunt family, Tom Robinson, and Mayella is a parallel to Tom Riddle Sr. and Merope. 

Katy: Oh my god! I’ve got to re-read that book now! It’s been a long time. 

Alison: I teach it every year, so this is really fascinating because I’ve never made these parallels, and I teach that book every year.

Lorrie: The ending of the epilogue is the same thing as the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird. The ending is that Harry has this scar and it never goes away, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. In the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird is all this stuff happened when my brother was this age, and he broke his arm. But after a while, he never thought about it anymore. Then it goes into telling this story. Scar is the link between these two books. 

Katy: Interesting. 

Tracy: Never thought of that. I mean, I love that book, To Kill A Mockingbird. This is cool. 

Katy: Very. And I’ll throw you a bone since you need some more Snape love in your life. My 14-year old niece is on TikTok now, and she just put up a video in the last day or two saying, “Like this if you ship Snape with literally anybody.” She was a little shocked when one of her friends shipped him with… I think it was Lucius. She just put a shocked face, and I was like, “Oh, just google slash Harry Potter fanfiction for all of that.” She hasn’t read all the books. She’s read most of them, I think, but she’s seen all the movies. But she loves Snape enough that she wants him to have a partner. There are still Snape lovers being born and brought into this fandom even today. 

Alison: I can’t forgive him for threatening to kill a 13-year-old’s pet. 

Lorrie: That was abusive. 

Alison: And body shaming a 14-year-old girl. 

Lorrie: Yeah. The thing about Hermione doesn’t bother me as much, because she totally doesn’t care. She just ignores him, but the thing about… 

Alison: But she does! She runs off crying. 

Lorrie: Yeah, and then she turns out to be the belle of the ball with her Cinderella moment, and Snape is going to live and die ugly and single, and he hates that. 

Alison: Still, I don’t think it’s right to body shame a 14-year-old girl. 

Lorrie: There’s other circumstances around that, but we’re not talking about that. I do think that the threat against Trevor is inarguably abusive. If I had been Dumbledore, I would’ve put him on probation, but Dumbledore doesn’t… 

Alison: Yeah. That’s Dumbledore. 

AD BREAK 

Alison: Speaking of Dumbledore and Snape, let’s talk about Cursed Child. Yay!!!!!! As we talk about this in tandem, my one big point that I’m going to make is that when… because a lot of people complain that, “Oh, Cursed Child changed the epilogue.” Yes, and I will give it… I’m not a huge fan of that. I wish it had stayed a little bit more true. However, I think it’s important to look at it through the lens that Deathly Hallows is from Harry’s point of view, and Cursed Child is from Albus’s point of view, because it’s Albus’s story. Cursed Child is Albus’s story, so I think we can help… or at least I can give 

it a bit of a slide here at the beginning, if we realize we’re talking about two different points of view or they could be remembering it differently, etc. 

Katy: But this last chapter, this epilogue, as Lorrie said at the beginning, is not specifically from Harry’s point of view. 

Alison: It is, though. 

Katy: What did you call it, because you compared it to the first chapter of Sorcerer’s Stone, Lorrie. I don’t remember the name of that narration style. 

Lorrie: Oh, it’s a fairy tale. 

Alison: Yes! 

Katy: But there’s also a storytelling, God-type narration. 

Tracy: Omnipresence? 

Alison: It’s limited omniscience. 

Katy: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking of. Because it says, “A little family is walking by,” not “Harry Potter and his family are walking by.” It’s from this outside perspective. 

Alison: But by the end, it’s going into more of the kind of narration that we get throughout the rest of the books, where we are seeing from the outside but we get Harry’s feelings and emotions. “Harry kept smiling and waving, even though it was like a little bereavement, watching his son glide away from him. As Harry looked at her, he lowered his hand absentmindedly and touched the lightning scar on his forehead. ‘I know he will.’” 

Katy: So it’s a little of both. 

Alison: Yeah, and maybe the beginning is a little bit more of that kind of more omnipresent idea, but I think that’s because it’s trying to echo the beginning because its the beginning of a new story. It’s the beginning of a new chapter. That is Cursed Child’s big thing. I hate that they marketed it as the eighth 

story, because it’s not. It’s not Harry’s story. It’s Albus’s story, and we’ve talked about it before. It’s Albus having to deal with the repercussions of who he is and the family he was born into and how he fits into that family and into this legacy that he didn’t choose, but is there. It’s like Shakespeare’s Henriad in that way, where Albus is kind of the Prince Hal, going against what the family thinks he should do at the beginning, but he’s going to come into himself and find that he is going to be the strong next link. Should I write an essay on how Cursed Child is like the Henriad? I think it’s important to remember that we are not seeing that story from Harry’s point of view. Even the moments that we go to Harry in the play that’s not Albus, it’s the things that affect Albus. It’s almost the things that Harry could not tell his son that are impacting his son’s story at this point. And that is going to be my big thing about this. 

Katy: I still don’t see how that justifies giving lines to different people. 

Alison: No, and I’m not thrilled with that, either. 

Katy: Okay. I’m at least glad to hear that. We’ll get into the differences in a moment. I’m curious to hear what you have to say, Lorrie. 

Lorrie: Well, I have one thing to say about that, and also in about twenty minutes, I’m going to have to leave to go pick up my kid. 

Katy No worries. 

Alison: We should be done by then, yeah. 

Lorrie: I’m going to just do my Cursed Child dump now. I actually think it is Snape’s story. I understand that there’s really strong reasons why people disagree, but for me, it actually reopens the epilogue in a way that I was hoping for because I define the Harry Potter story as having three major questions: Who  would try to kill a baby? Why did that baby survive? What does it takes to raise that baby safely to adulthood? Then what I want to know is, “Well, what happened to that baby after that?” He’s middle aged and has kids. Oh, how is that going? I don’t believe that when you’re a parent, your scar can ever not hurt again. In my experience as a parent, when your children are the same age as when you went through trauma, you’re going to have to revisit it if only because seeing them at that age brings home to you the pity of how young you were at that time, except as a parent you’re providing the nurturing for your kid that perhaps you didn’t get yourself at that age. You can’t be a post-traumatic, post-war parent and have all be well. Not day-to-day. 

Tracy: Even in a day, it’s all is well. Not necessarily forever. 

Lorrie: If it’s the moment that you’re seeing your kids off on a train, like, “We did it. We sent our kid off to Hogwarts,” that’s a moment. But then if the story continues, then it’s like that was a provisional ending, and Cursed Child opens up that provisional ending for me and goes into what it’s like to be Harry when you don’t have children, when it’s just yourself. When he’s 17 or younger, then whatever decisions he makes mostly affect himself. To the extent that they affect anyone else, he feels terribly guilty. He feels bad for the Weasleys, but mostly it’s just himself. But the moment that you have a dependent, no matter what you do, you’re going to affect them no matter how hard you try to not harm them. The more you try to get away from that, the more it’s going to catch up with you. That happened to Harry with his dead parents’ generation, only they weren’t around to explain it to him. Here he has the opportunity. He is a living parent creating these negative effects on his child. It’s imperative for him… he has to do this as a human in life to meet the challenge and go make it right with his kid because unlike Harry, Albus’s father is there and can still do that. I find that thrilling and I find it completely fitting that it’s going to be as rough for Harry as the Cursed Child shows it to be. I think that the amount of suffering that Albus goes through, because of generational trauma, is really the story I wanted to see. I love that it shows us Harry going through that, how hard it was, and that he did it for Albus. 

Katy: I would’ve loved to have read that novel, not read and seen that play. I think it would’ve been so much more powerful if we could’ve had those background feelings and memories. 

Alison: I think, in some ways, it has to be a play if you really wanna get to the emotional core of something. Theater is a great medium, because theater is all about emotional core and internal conflict. 

Katy: Yeah, but I didn’t get any of what she just said from Cursed Child. Listening to her talk about a post-war parent, I’ve never even really considered that, because that’s not something our generation has had to deal with like our parents and grandparents. We’re lucky enough that we’ve lived in a time of relative peace for our country, so we don’t know what that’s like and I would love to read more about what that’s like. 

Alison: I still don’t understand how you didn’t get that from the play, but that’s me because that was shouting how everything that happened in Harry’s story has such repercussions for Albus, and how Albus has to face that. He has to face the past and where he fits in the future as having to bear that burden, because he’s never going to get away from it because he can’t. Harry feels bad about passing that burden on. 

Lorrie: But if you’re going to have children, you will. You have to deal with it. 

Alison: Yeah. In order to have a future, you have to acknowledge your past, and that’s a big part of it. 

Lorrie: Yeah. 

Katy: I guess at the very end it does, when he takes him to the graveyard where Cedric’s grave is. Maybe that part I’m forgetting, but that is a good example. They really did a good job. 

Lorrie: It’s when Harry goes back to his past and witnesses Voldemort killing his parents, which is something so awful that when Cursed Child first came out, people were appalled, like, “Oh god, does he have to see that? That’s so awful.” Yeah, actually, he does because whether he sees it or not, it’s affecting Albus. 

Alison: Well, even before that at the very beginning, Albus says, “I didn’t choose to be his son.” He gets all this backlash from people that are like, “Oh, he looks just like Harry! He must be just like Harry!” And he’s like, “But I’m not.” 

Lorrie: “I’m unique.” 

Alison: And as soon as he’s sorted into Slytherin, people are like, “Oh, maybe he’s not like Harry,” and he’s like, “Well, part of me is.” He’s trying to find that balance of, “I am myself, but part of me is what had come before me,” and trying to find the place where he fits. I think that’s really the power of it. Albus has to discover that, and Harry has to discover that everything that has affected him is going to go on, and he can’t dwell on his guilt of the past. He has to live for the future. 

Lorrie: If he doesn’t face it, it will hurt his children even more. 

Alison: Yes. 

Lorrie: I’m a second-generation immigrant, so I am the child of war survivors. In the US, there are waves of immigrants where that is why these populations have come in waves of immigration to the US. This is an ongoing truth for a lot of people. 

Alison: Even if you’re not an immigrant, I think the collective past… we’re seeing lately the repercussions that we’re having to deal with in the US, the history of slavery. The UK still has to grapple sometimes with the history of everything that happened in WWII. Germany is still grappling with the sins of WWII. The past really never goes away, so we have to find a way to live forward through it.

Lorrie: The metaphor that she uses in Cursed Child about that is the Blood Curse, the thing that only intensifies over time and it hurts people. It’s not your fault, and it’s not your kids’ fault, but that is a curse that is part of the human condition, and if we don’t look into it and really face it, it does hurt. If you’ve made the choice to have children, you do have to face this. 

Tracy: My problem with Cursed Child is that… I think you all made great points. I didn’t need any of this. I like that it had an ending. I like the epilogue and that it’s a very clear, vague, fuzzy, make-your own-ending. We just talk about trauma and how parents’ decisions can affect their children with the whole Harry Potter series, and I’m not sure you need to have Albus Severus’s story to really drive that point home, if that makes sense. 

Katy: Yeah, that makes sense to me, because you’re right. Harry’s parents were in a war. They died from it. His whole classmates… not the Muggle-borns, but all of the wizarding ones, their parents were maybe not part of… I almost called it Dumbledore’s Army – Order of the Phoenix, but they were standing against Voldemort, or at least trying to not die. They were living through a war, and if they were in that part of the world where Voldemort is attacking people, they were trying to stay safe. So yeah, that affected that entire generation and their kids. Harry being an orphan because of it, Neville basically being an orphan because of it. I’m kind of with you, Tracy. I didn’t need another generation of war-beaten children raising other children. 

Alison: That is a good point, but I think the difference is, to some extent, for Harry’s generation the war wasn’t really over. For Albus’s generation, the war is over. That war is over, and now we finally can see the full repercussions and how all of those two generations plus that now are all coming to a head here. I see it that way. I do understand that it’s like, “Well, we could also say did we need Harry Potter at all, then?” You could say that about a lot of creative things. 

Tracy: I just feel like sometimes franchises can just keep going and going, and I hate that. 

Alison: No, I agree. 

Tracy: I like things to end, I don’t know why. I like that it was contained, I like that it had seven books. I just didn’t really need Cursed Child. 

Alison: No, I do agree with you. Sometimes, franchises go too far. 

Tracy: And I just didn’t like Albus. The only thing I like is Scorpius. He can stay. Everyone else can go. 

Alison: I love Albus. My precious boy. 

Katy: They can both go away. 

Tracy: He’s so whiny. 

Alison: He’s so precious. 

Katy: Okay, who’s making a drinking game out of Alison saying ‘precious’, because we’re wasted by now.

Alison: Like I just said, I wanna take everything that happens here and just wrap it in a hug and just be like, “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.” 

Tracy: When we’re reading it, it’s like, “Well, Albus and Harry aren’t really that close, because he messes him up. Then this-and-this is wrong because of this.” It’s just so annoying. 

Alison: I don’t see that, necessarily. I see it as a very typical parent-teenager relationship. 

Tracy: For sure. I just didn’t need to read it. I don’t know. I like that he’s… I was like, “Oh, he’s a good parent. They’re a happy family, and this is the end,” which is weird because usually I really do like more nuanced sad stories, so I’m surprised I don’t like Cursed Child. I just… I really don’t. 

Alison: And I don’t think it takes away from the happiness. Again, I think it’s just… the epilogue is one moment of pure joy, Cursed Child and the things that happen there is one moment of a rough patch that then we go to… 

Tracy: And it’s been a while, isn’t it? It’s a couple years, I thought Cursed Child was. 

Alison: They start with the epilogue, but it mostly takes place in Albus’s fourth year. 

Lorrie: Yeah, it goes back to Goblet of Fire. 

Alison. Yes, and it’s Albus’s fourth year and it’s over in only two months, really, of the time. Maybe a little bit more, at the end, we’ve skipped a little bit. Most of the action takes place between September 1st and Halloween. 

Katy: Well, Lorrie, since I know you need to take off soon, do you have any final thoughts? 

Lorrie: I saw Cursed Child on Broadway with my child when she was 14. 

Alison: That’s so special! 

Lorrie: It was intense. Yeah. 

Katy: I can imagine. What did she think? 

Lorrie: She loved it. 

Katy: Okay, cool. 

Alison: As she should. Good job. 

Lorrie: What it says to me: people can be super unhappy or happy with it, but no two people are happy or unhappy about the same things. There wouldn’t have been a right or better way to do it. Probably the same proportion of people would’ve been happy or unhappy no matter what it had been. It tells me it’s a mirror of what each reader found resonant for them. You say, “Oh, this seven-book series of a million words was really important to me.” A million words is a lot. Which parts were important to you? Not the same for any two people. If you see that again in auxiliary canon, then you claim it. If the part that was resonant for you isn’t there, you don’t have to have it.

Katy: Thank you. Auxiliary canon. Separate canon. I’m okay with people referring to it that way and not using the Big C canon. 

Tracy: 100 percent agree with you, Katy. 

Lorrie: Yeah, they’re very deliberate about saying this was not written by the same author. This was in consultation with. 

Katy: Yeah, but then the author comes out and says it’s canon. 

Alison: Yeah, because their fingerprints are all over it. 

Katy: I don’t care about her fingerprints. I’m caring that she said in an interview that it’s canon, and it’s not freaking canon and it cannot be due to what I’m about to point out. 

Alison: This conversation is not about the canon. 

Lorrie: I don’t even understand the conflict, because to me, the category of author-involved but not as the writer seems perfectly clear boundaries. That’s the category it’s in. According to how important the story is to you, it either matters or it doesn’t. Before I run off, let’s see… epilogue. Yeah. I’m a Snape fan. I love the epilogue, and I’m glad that there are versions of the epilogue in which the word ‘probably’ is struck from the record. And my guy is the bravest man that Harry Potter ever knew. 

Katy: Love it. Lorrie, thank you so much for being on this episode. 

Lorrie: Thank you for having me so much. I love talking about this series, and I do kind of love the epilogue. 

Katy: Well, good. This was the perfect episode to have you on, then. 

Lorrie: Thank you! 

Tracy: Thanks for being here! 

END – 02:00:20