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I don't want any more Harry Potter stories, and neither should you

 
Let the end be the end for all these beloved stories: Harry Potter, Gilmore Girls and The Sopranos.
Let the end be the end for all these beloved stories: Harry Potter, Gilmore Girls and The Sopranos.
Published Nov. 1, 2015

Halloween is over, but for those who care about pop culture, there's something spooky in the air. Dead franchises are coming back to life, sometimes only to suffer gruesome deaths.

Gilmore Girls has been resurrected for a six-episode Netflix series. The '80s musical cartoon Jem and the Holograms, reanimated as a live-action movie, died in grand fashion in its opening weekend in theaters. Grimmest of all, a new Harry Potter theatrical production, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is going to continue the story of the boy wizard nine years after creator J.K. Rowling published his final showdown with Voldemort.

Before I go any further, it's worth noting that this is a stage play rather than another "Harry Potter" novel, and if it stays on stage, rather than migrating to book form, it will be available to a much smaller audience than Rowling's novels. But the inevitable way Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be dissected and Rowling's inability to stop futzing with her internationally famous creation — whether via Twitter notes or with new material — embody some of the most vampiric elements of a kind of fan culture and an entertainment industry that demand to suck the last drop of storytelling out of our favorite fictional people.

I'm not opposed, in principle, to setting more stories in the magical universe that Rowling created. As I wrote a couple of years ago, you could do all sorts of dandy procedural things with wizarding law enforcement or wizard journalism, and I'd love to see stories set beyond England, given the somewhat cursory and often slightly stereotypical treatment Rowling gives magical practitioners in other countries.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the planned movie spinoff starring Eddie Redmayne, sounds dandy, and I'm particularly curious to see how magic, as practiced by North America's indigenous people, manifests in the film. And there are plenty of other fictional universes, among them Star Wars, Star Trek and Tamora Pierce's "Tortall" saga, where artists have mined rich stories by looking at different parts of a single universe and different sets of characters living in it at different points in time.

But as far as stories about Harry Potter himself go, I'm done. (Which is not to say that I would refuse to go see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child if the opportunity presented itself. Critics gotta critic.)

"It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn't much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children," according to the play's outline. "While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places."

That may be a story that some readers have a desire to learn more about. I'd suggest, though, that the dopamine rush that might follow when you hear the words "new Harry Potter" might be one worth resisting.

Contemporary audiences, their appetites stoked by artists themselves, seem incapable of grappling with ambiguity. Rather than treating the sudden cut to black at the end of The Sopranos, the decision to cut away before the final battle at the end of Angel, or the "All was well" that ends the Harry Potter novels as an invitation to form our own theories — or even better, to sit back and reflect on who the characters are and where they've been — we often act as if these are mysteries to be definitively settled.

Focusing on plot at the expense of character and theme like this has a tendency to ignore what makes Harry Potter or The Sopranos great. It distorts the extent to which great works of art are, in fact, creations that were meant to lead us to a certain point and end a particular way. It blows past the idea that stories have beginning and end points, that there's a difference between seeing part of a fictional person's life and knowing another human being for real. Maybe it's painful to relinquish the unreal people that we love, but it's worth recalling that our relationship with them is distinct from our ties to our friends and families.

And having more information or more stories is not the same thing as having what made a work great and compelling in the first place. Whether Tony Soprano is dead or alive doesn't change the extent to which he lived his life in the sort of Hell envisioned in No Exit. Finding out how Harry Potter struggles with the legacy of killing Voldemort doesn't necessarily teach us more about his road to self-sacrifice, and even if you do view him as a real person, insisting on more story denies Harry the normal life he wanted and that Rowling seemed to grant him at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

As readers and as people, it's worth remembering the difference between keeping an actual person alive and trying to revive a fictional corpse.

— Washington Post