Thoughts After Reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

SPOILER WARNING, for those who are trying to hold out (stay strong! I’m sure it would be delightful to see the play without knowing what was going to happen, but I just don’t have that much willpower).

I remember when book 6 came out, and I sat in my aunt’s attic with my cousins, each of us reading straight through, and I got to the ending first and SCREAMED, and then I couldn’t talk about it until they’d both gotten to that part too. Holding Cursed Child, which I couldn’t help going out and buying immediately, makes me feel young and old at the same time, as I sit here waiting for my husband to finish reading so we can talk about it. So, here are some thoughts I jotted down while reading Cursed Child, in no particular order.

Rose is amazing.
Scorpius is amazing.
Albus is...a very believable teenage boy. He is definitely the son of Book 5 Harry.
Was Hermione Albus’s first kiss? ...I’m just saying he does not even hesitate in embracing that role, pun very much intended
Why are we still protecting dangerous magical objects with riddles that can be solved by children?
On that note, why hasn’t the Ministry of Magic come up with security that would prevent people Polyjuicing themselves into the Minister of Magic and just walking right in? I feel like Hermione would have thought of this
Harry: “[dramatic pause] My scar is hurting.” Draco: “Oh come ON man not this again”
Hermione is amazing in every iteration except the one where she and Ron didn’t get together and she became a mean professor, which was like the “she’s about to close up the liiibraryyy!” scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life”; I’m bothered by the implication that beautiful intelligent women won’t be happy if they don’t end up with their childhood sweethearts
But I’m mostly willing to forgive it because Warrior Hermione is such a boss
Scorpius appears to have taken over the role of Protagonist and I support this
Speaking of protagonists though, I miss Rose and kind of wish she was the mc of this story
Seriously I would read seven books about Rose, Lily, and Scorpius and their exploits at Hogwarts, I guess Albus can be in it too
But we've established I’m a sucker for rebooting beloved male-centered stories with female leads, see: Star Wars and Ghostbusters
Delphi? ...Didn’t leave much of an impression. I would have liked to see her as one of the kids at Hogwarts. Her whole story and development happened before the play started and we don’t get to see anything about how she got this way. However she has a great name and cool hair/tattoos
Dang it JKR you’re making me like Draco Malfoy now and I love it
I’ve heard a lot of people say Cursed Child reads like fanfiction, and I agree; in fact, one of the things that I think it does quite cleverly is deconstruct the whole concept of story canon. Through the conceit of time travel, elements of the original story are changed, new futures are created: anything can happen. Characters can become dramatically different. I didn’t like the original book 7 epilogue because it felt like too much and too little info at the same time, but Cursed Child is a much better version: one that imagines multiple possible futures for its characters, and allows the audience and the actors to interpret each in their own way. JKR’s choice to do this story as a play also lends itself to this interpretation: plays by nature are subjective; they live not in the text but in the performance, and each performance is different just as each possible future is different. How happily you think things have turned out for each of these characters will depend a lot on how the actors play them, and how the audience interprets them.
I also really like the way Cursed Child deals with the idea of parents projecting their wishes and hopes on their children, and the different ways that Albus, Scorpius, Harry, Draco, and Delphi react against that pressure
How are they doing these effects on stage???