In the week following the release of HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD script, J.K. Rowling had one chance to address the concerns of her fans that the play lacked a basic continuity with the other books on their shelves. We saw our friends reaching out to her on Twitter. We watched and waited.

We told her it wasn't canon. We attempted to point out the errors. And her response told us a lot about how she viewed the new material.

Canon... CANON? Wait... WHAT?? You're telling us that this is ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO BE CONSIDERED CANON? So, just to get this straight, Voldemort definitely had a child with flipping Bellatrix Lestrange?

And... Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy were *physically* present during the Triwizard Tournament? And Cedric killed Neville? And... No! No! I don't believe you.

You told us all would be well!

You promised!

. . . So now what? What in the world do we do with this? There's nothing we can do except try to make sense of it. I, for one, was in the camp that Polyjuice Potion had been administered and we were no longer dealing with the actual J.K. Rowling. In reality, fans started to question Jo's affiliation with the script.

She couldn't have been involved too much. The writing was all wrong. The characterizations were extremely off, and closer to the movie versions. The plot was filled with holes and conveniences and tropes. There's no way she wrote this. She just signed off on it. Right?

Her old tweets told us differently.

And when we really thought about it, we knew the truth. JKR has always had a huge hand in everything beyond the books, from the casting of the movies to the menus at the theme parks. Her's is the single most important opinion on whether something is or is not up to the highest Harry Potter quality. And we have since learned that JKR supported this play 100%, which is confusing. Because...just...how?

It puts her in one of three camps.

The first is that she is unaware of her own canon, and characters, and what the fans want. We know that she's had difficulty recalling her canon at will. Okay, fine.

The second is that JKR was too kind to tell them that something needed to be corrected. This I doubt, because it's the first time in nearly a decade that fans are revisiting Harry and discovering what comes of his life in a meaningful way. She had been thinking about this forever. The expectation was massive, and JKR seemed very eager and was concerned with pleasing the fans.

The third is that this was, at least in some part, her idea. Before it was passed to Jack Thorne to be formatted into the play script and dialogued. But... that would mean she is responsible for...

No... I can't.

It's so hard for me to believe that she participated in the plotting. I'm sure I'm lying to myself, but I almost physically can't admit that based on everything she has given us. Which goes to my argument that she was influenced to believe this worked with her canon by someone who claimed to be a true Potterhead - i.e. Jack Thorne. The original intention for the play was altered to fit into Thorne's recommendations, and then he must have assured her that it all fit the canonical details of her books. And... she believed him.

Dumbledore, please give us some wisdom.

"The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed." - Albus Dumbledore from Prisoner of Azkaban

Fine, maybe they couldn't have known that fans would be so upset. It's not as if they can know the future. Expectations are so high, maybe we would never be satisfied.

But NO, I disagree with that assumption. We will always be satisfied if the book is actually canon, or at least accept it as reality if the characters and the story followed the logical progression of what came before it.

If Cursed Child had actually been the 8th story...

But it wasn't.

When realization set in that there was nothing we could do to unread that book, or to unknow that the creator of the wizarding world believed it to be canon, I had a moment of true clarity. After so many years, the cabinet opened and I finally saw my boggart step into the light. I've wondered for so long, since first reading Prisoner of Azkaban. But there it was, staring back at me.

My boggart was the potential ruining of Harry Potter.