J.K. Rowling has just published a short story on her website Pottermore penned under the guise of a column written by Rita Skeeter and filed from the Quidditch World Cup. The Daily Prophet clipping details a reunion of ‘Dumbledore’s Army’ (“No longer the fresh-faced wizards they were in the day, but recognisable nonetheless“), once your favourite three wizards and now a group of maudlin thirty-somethings with thinning grey hair, the lingering signs of severe trauma and marriages on the rocks who were once the sole focus of the Harry Potter novels.
The update – which you have to be a member of the temporarily-crashed Pottermore to read – provides a brief precis of each characters’ life in the interim decade since the final Potter instalment. Harry is now an auror with a few new scars, a sham marriage and a difficult ward. Ron co-manages the Weasley joke emporium and appears to have never recovered from the no doubt horrific events of the final novel; Hermione is a “femme fatale” bureaucrat and the Deputy Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Her hair remains at large. Ginny too is there as she always was, an unwelcome intrusion in the background. She’s now a hack reporter who has both benefitted from a certain kind of nepotism in being married to Harry and has been filing World Cup dispatches, which will continue to be published on Pottermore.
It’s the first time Rowling has explicitly addressed the respective futures her beloved characters in the last seven years, timed neatly as it is to coincide with the finals of the World Cup in Brazil. She’s also writing the screenplay to the Potter spin-off films, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.
The brief resurgence of Dumbledore’s Army, Luna Lovegood included, ends with the faint glimmer of hope for further Potter-related shorts, reading: “And for those of us wanting to know how imperfect [Potter et al] are, my new biography ‘Dumbledore’s Army: The Dark Side of the Demob’ will be available from Flourish and Blotts on July 31st.”
Also, Neville Longbottom is now an alcoholic.
via Pottermore
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