Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - SPOILER THREAD

I'm sure one of the boys said something along the lines of, "Thanks to Delphi's potioning," - I took the implication that she'd been preparing the potion already.  Certainly the ingredients that McGonagall mentioned had been taken from the potions stores in the first Extraordinary General Meeting scene are Polyjuice ingredients.

I've seen a lot of 'Scorbus' stuff on social media and I personally just don't buy into it, not once when watching the play did it even cross my mind. While you could use Harry and Ron as a form of friendship and compare Albus and Scorpius from that, I think the nature of the individuals defines the friendship type. To me, both Albus and Scorpius are lost, lonely and vulnerable boys who struggle to interact and make friends, and the reason why I say this friendship is different to those of Harry is that despite a troubled upbringing Harry didn't appear to struggle making friends and had many more than Albus and Scorpius. For me, it's their uniqueness and vulnerability as well as social awkwardness, such as the 'hugging do we hug scene', their lack of social awareness means the struggle to define the limits of what we would consider 'normal friendship', and the strength of their friendship bond is a result of the fact, for me, that they are the only people that understand each other.
Obviously theatre is subjective and relationships can be perceived and explored individually based on life experiences - the beauty of art in effect - and it is from a personal context and experience which appears as Scorpius' and Albus' lost nature which renders their relationship unique and what some might consider 'different' which is why some could identity it's 'different' nature as it being romantic.

I saw both on 10 August (when Rupert Grint was there - cue much screaming) and both Myrtle and the centaur Bane were in it.

What I wondered was (sorry if this has been mentioned before but there are too many pages to read and I didn't want to get into this thread until I'd seen the plays):

- when they went back in time the second time to influence the second (lake) triwizard task, I assume they did so from the position of the changed world that had resulted from the first time travel. Why didn't they just go back to the first time and correct that back again before trying to move forward? Otherwise what made them think starting from the changed world, they could put everything right by changing something completely new in the second task?

I know this is the wizarding world but surely logic still applies?

I guess they're kids and weren't thinking it through properly!

Also, from a writing perspective, it's dramatically more interesting to visit a different task second time round.

Oh, you humans and your earthling humour.

The worst changing-the-past story I've read in recent years was Stephen Fry's Making History. Unfortunately I had the Kindle version, which made burning it in disgust a bit of a problem. Worth it, though.

Disfigured as he was is fine. According to the books, he got less human-looking the more Horcruxes he made, and Harry was the last one. It was splitting his soul that ruined his looks, not nearly dying.

I thought they were pretty good from mid stalls, you can't exactly remove his nose on the stage as they did with CG in the films

www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/aug/16/harry-potter-possible-example-queerbaiting-cursed-child?CMP=fb_gu

What utter tosh.

This is actually a pretty interesting piece on what the author calls "toxic masculinity" through the lens of the alleged "queerbaiting" in the Cursed Child, and it could be better if provided with a more detailed analysis. I saw the play twice and found what Scorpius and Albus have quite special. It certainly doesn't fit the Ron-Harry friendship, the definition many of us accept under the paradigm of today's society. The idea of "bromance," not sure how this word surfaced, seems to function like many other terms as the cushion between the orthodox and a world void of stereotyping or forcing people to behave the way they "should." It's kind of like the struggle in Straight, a play I saw in New York, where the male protagonist tries to deny that he is gay for the fact that after "coming out," all he's got is being gay, and his other identities won't matter as much anymore.

I would like people to stop criticising the idea of Albus and Scorpius possibly being in love on the grounds that they're 11. Sure, at the beginning, but they're 14 by the time the action kicks off. While nothing has to be actively sexual at that age, you're certainly old enough to be very interested in the idea of participating in romantic relationships.

I honestly think it's a writing misstep and maybe a tonal issue from Thorne - obviously Albus and Scorpius's friendship is going to be different from, say, Harry and Ron's friendship. Once Harry got to Hogwarts, he largely found it easy enough to get along with pretty much everyone who wasn't a Slytherin, whereas Albus can't even seem to get along with his own cousin. Combine the loneliness of Albus's social life with the loneliness of Scorpius's (THESE NAMES ARE REALLY HARD TO TYPE OVER AND OVER AGAIN, I DON'T KNOW HOW JACK THORNE DID IT), and it seems right that their friendship would be very different, very intense and very exclusive, which I believe Thorne was going for, but which is also how a romantic relationship could come across to outsiders.

The problem is - having latched onto existing fanfiction tropes such as "time travel to fix the past!" and "a previously unsuspected daughter!" - the show immediately feels tonally very familiar to people who have spent even the smallest amount of time reading fanfiction. And another common trope in fanfiction is queer representation. A LOT of fanfiction is about taking the evidence - real, imagined, or otherwise - that an author has left in their work that a same-sex pairing could be in love with each other, and making it happen in your work. So when you're reading or watching a story that exhibits itself in a way you've seen hundreds of times before, always ending up with boys kissing (or sometimes boys dying tearfully in each other's arms, or sometimes girls kissing, or whathaveyou), it must be REALLY JARRING when they suddenly go "LOL NO". Hence the disgruntledness and thinkpieces.

So I can see both sides - I can see what I think they were going for, but I can also see how it's coming across in entirely a different way. Basically.

"Reading into things that aren't there" is pretty much the point of fanfiction. If we took stories at face value, then an awful lot of stories are just about men having all the adventures, and if there are any women, they're usually the love interest and rarely have any drive of their own. And let's not even talk about the representation of gay characters in mainstream fiction, mainly because such a conversation wouldn't last very long at all. So when a straight white boy reads, say, Lord of the Rings, he gets to picture himself right there having all the adventures without any need to stretch the reality of the words on the page to encompass him. Everyone else (gay? Black? Female?) doesn't have that immediate sense of connection to the characters, but that doesn't mean we don't want to be able to see ourselves having adventures. So in the absence of "official" works having characters that could represent us (and that representation is SO IMPORTANT; Leslie Jones knew she could be funny on TV because she grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, who knew she didn't have to be a maid because she grew up watching Nichelle Nicholls, for instance), we take matters into our own hands. We take the work we love, and we transform it.

So yeah, people who create fanfiction and read fanfiction are going to read things in the text that aren't technically there. Because we're GOOD at it. Because we HAVE to be.