http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...ild-spoilers-here-s-the-plot-of-the-play.html

New link ^ The original source doesn't work.

I stopped at Voldemort's Nazi school - what in the world? Nevermind that a lot of the characters are out of character (I don't think I could ever see Harry basically disowning his son), the plot is just so fucked up its unreal.

 

I saw the play a couple of weeks ago. A lot of the criticism is pretty fair, the plot is at times meandering and ridiculous, and some of the acting (Hermione/Draco/Delphie) downright shoddy. That said I thought other actors (especially Harry and Scorpius) absolutely nailed it. Most of all however the scenery, special effects and overall creativity of the production was utterly extraordinary. This easily overpowered the real life equivalent of the urge to click the X on a fanfiction with a cliche-ridden first chapter. I do heartily recommend seeing it if possible, while at the same time I can't imagine ever electing to read the novelisation.

 

While I do agree that the plot is ridiculous and I would never pay anything above £20 to see it, I'm trying to consider how much of that is due to all the fanfiction I've read over the years.

I think the main reason that most of DLP (And even the majority of Reddit) dislike it and critics like it is because many of it's ideas had already been introduced in Fanfiction over the years. Most of the people who have seen the play are probably not fanfictions readers, same with the critics.

I'm trying to imagine if I had never read Fanfiction before and this wasn't a play but rather a book written by Rowling herself and I think I may find it a decent time waster.

And in regards to what people are saying about the special effects being quite good in comparison to the plot: Is that not the same/similar argument for the Transformers Movies?

 

Warner Bros filed a film trademark for Cursed Child.

Who the fuck would actually want to watch this shitpile in film format?

 

People who can't see the play, and those too lazy too read the book that's who.

 

The cash is too good. heck

They would probably use the old cast but...
Emma Watson or Black Hermione? I am not sure anymore.

 

How about Emma Watson with black body paint.

 

More than likely this is simply about broadcasting the play in cinemas rather than actually making a film of it.

 

Yo, that's racist!

 

Umm... I'm very sorry. I didn't even know that until you gave me the link, and I certainly didn't mean it as a racist comment.

 

I recently read the play's plot summary. That is, if you can call it a plot. It just read like awful, awful fanfiction and I don't think that I'll be buying the book/script (though I don't think I need to anymore).

I had hoped that this would be more of a "What challenges are they facing now?" story. What happened after the Battle of Hogwarts? How are they working towards squashing out blood purists? How did they round up Dark Wizards? How was the socio-political background restructured? Are the issues still prevalent amongst the Hogwarts students (since the story HAD to be about Albus Severus)? All of this could have been addressed through this play, and it would have given the fans an understanding about what had been done, and what remained to be done, in order to resolve the very, very obvious issues that had permeated the Wizarding Society during Harry's time there (because, believe it or not, killing the Bad Guy doesn't mean that the issues will be resolved ~magically~). This probably would have been a little boring (and I was against the very idea of a play), but it would have left the fans with a glimmer of hope and closure, which the original story had lacked.

Instead, we have this.

The presence of Nott and Malfoy in the story, and their being on friendly terms with the protagonists certainly makes it seem like the issues had been resolved, or that they were at least making progress on them. Instead, we are supposed to take their cordiality for granted.

On an slightly unrelated note, I am dreading Fantastic Beasts now.

 

Well, that about sums up the quality of this story for me.

 

So I bought this and read it. It's like B grade fan fiction, but done as a play so the author can skip the boring "world building" and narrative drama bits, and just do dialogue.

The plot itself is an absolute disaster. Why the hell would anyone want to save Diggory of all people? Yes I'm talking about the bad guy - it makes no sense to think that intervening in the tri-wizard tournament would be the way to save Voldemort. Bellatrix and Voldemort having a baby is conceivable within canon if a bit of a stretch... but her plot to save the dark lord is not.

On the magic side, it's a total writeoff. Harry has actually regressed in the years since the battle, despite rising through the auror ranks. He is now only apparently barely capable of basic spells. The action, such as it is, cannot compete with even the worst action sequences in canon. The only new magic introduced is the uber time turner, a terrible innovation that basically makes the plot of the whole rest of the series redundant. The good guys could have used one to kill off Voldemort before he made any horcruxes, the bad guys could use one to stop Voldemort killing Harry (oh wait that's the actual plot here). If Theodore Nott could make one surely Dumbledore or Voldemort could manage it. As others have mentioned it is totally against the time travel rules established in canon proper.

It's very short, poorly plotted and without any depth. It wouldn't be close to library material here. Even some of the crappier post-Hogwarts fics are more enjoyable and canon-compliant than this mess.

I wonder how much of the plot JKR actually wrote - wouldn't be at all surprised if it was just "Harry and Albus have a falling out, but then have a tearful restoration at the end of the book after uniting to save the day".

Having written that, I'll be sure to go watch it if the play ever comes to Sydney... sucker.

 

I wonder if the cast tearfully sings Don't Stop Believing or something after this scene.

 

Now that I've read it, the plot is frankly just stupid. Also, can someone explain to me how everyone can see a fideliused house?

 

Okay I'll say this, but I did enjoy it for what it was. I don't think it's the worst thing ever, though I won't say it's all that great either. If I had to categorize it by site rules I think it'd belong in the Almost Recommended section. There was stuff I liked and there was stuff I didn't.

That being said, I would like to address one of the big complaints people have toward it and my thoughts on it, and that's the whole thing with Cedric killing Neville because he lost the Tournament in the alternate timeline. Now while I first I agreed that it was stupid and unlikely to happen, in hindsight thinking about it I'm going to give it the barest of passes, and that's mostly because the time travel adventure from before hand in the book brought up the whole Butterfly effect aspect of time travel with the whole Ron/Padma and ridiculous Snape!Hermione thing.

All we know is losing the Tournament caused Cedric to begin to go down the he did, however we don't know what other unexpected effects caused by him loosing afterwards which would have brought him further on that path. We simply don't know what happened to this alternate Cedric after the tournament, other than that by the Battle of Hogwarts he was a Death Eater and that he killed Neville.

That's the one thing in the story that I'm willing to excuse, simply because if Rowling tried to, she could maybe be able to perhaps explain it away. As for the other stuff I didn't like, well I've got nothing.

 

So, it looks like none of the pre-release theatre spoilers were wrong on their main points, like some people expected/hoped. Laughing so hard right now. I've been waiting for a month now for this day, to see the fandom blow up and lose their collective shit. It's going to be a long and hilarious night...

It's not often that I like seeing a fictional series that I tended towards liking take a turn for the worse to this extent, and so it's not often that I'm after all glad that it crashes and burns as it deserves, but there are limits to everything.

The whole thing can eat my dick. It did nothing to build on the HP world, there was no further development of the characters which we knew and loved (that didn't suck ass and got insta-rejected by our sense of acting in-character), the whole plot was time travel muckery which we've seen done much better in fanfiction and that is saying something, and I genuinely do not give a fuck about the privileged few who have seen the live play and weigh the acting/special effects/etc. as overall better than the clusterfuck that the plot was.

As for "canon development": Come on now, folks. Voldemort had sex with Bella. It's canon. Get over it. :lol: Not like they didn't forever ruin my favorite pairing* with a stupid fucking child that I always edit out of the search for fics on the rare occasion that I dare search for this pairing and not expect to get squicked out of mortal life by 99.9999% of writers doing it wrong, but I mean, I've been foreseeing this being canon since 2004, so... It's just so hilarious seeing people jumping through mental hoops (but maybe it was artificial insemination! but maybe someone lied about Delphi's parentage!) just to push that particular image out of their minds. Ockham's razor, mofos. P.S. Delphi is the stupidest name ever P.P.S. It's OOC for them to have a goddamn kid for all the reasons mentioned previously, like wtf, but I guess that's FamilyValues!Rowling for you

* = will not apologize for my tastes, will churn out something to act as mind-bleach for CC, eventually

Whatever the mere passage of time didn't manage to alienate, or at least mellow down, the HP fandom, this piece of shit is going to. It's official -- I'm so done with this series.

 

Ok, so I blitzed through the script today, and I have a few thoughts. *disclaimer* Inevitably, some of my criticisms would probably disappear if I was basing this on having seen a production; the script is, by its nature, bare bones.

To summarise, I think it's a flawed but potentially interesting story, and the biggest issue with it is that there's really two different things happening; on the one hand, you've got a serious, emotionally driven character piece about the difficulties of real life, and on the other you've got two kids bombing around time causing chaos. Both are perfectly fine ideas on their own, but the mash-up doesn't quite work for me.

The Good:
- There's at least two legitimately awesome scenes, both in the first part of the play - the first shows us the true nature of the witch with the sweet trolley from the Hogwarts Express, and the second takes place in an unusually aggressive library.
- I actually genuinely enjoyed Scorpius Malfoy as a character. He's kind of an odd combination of Hermione and Ron, a massive nerd whose main priorities in life are enjoying himself with his best friend, with a good sense of humour.
- Ron is written really well, and actually seems to have matured the most out of the trio; he's more at ease with himself, and seems to have grown out of his flaws for the most part, and he's still funny.

The Mixed and Indifferent:
- The time-travel shenanigans. I do wonder how I'd feel about them if I hadn't read more than a few fanfics that do very similar things - not necessarily better, but there's a definite sense of 'this again?' It's the same for the new and improved Time Turner. In and of itself, there's nothing really wrong with it...but it just recalls too many lazy fanfics to come across as any good. It's even gold, for heaven's sake. As I said above, the basic timey-wimey plot isn't especially bad, but it feels like a random episode of Doctor Who - fun, but knockabout nonsense in a play which is trying to cover deep themes. The Alternate Dystopia is pretty uninspiring, essentially just one of those hilariously torture-porn-esque settings from some of the more grimdark fanfics (Muggleborns being tortured in the Hogwarts dungeons, a 'Blood Ball', and 'Voldemort Day'). Maybe the staging redeems it, but eh.
- The father/son issues. Honestly, it's not a bad idea for a follow-up. The problem is, it doesn't seem to fit with previous canon, tonally. For all that there's deeper themes and ideas in the HP books, they are essentially a kids series about teenaged wizards and witches fighting Dark Lords. We can bemoan the lack of realistic characterisation, and we can write all the fanfic we want addressing this, but when it's done in canon, it just seems jarring.
- Albus and Harry. Harry has at some point in the last twenty years turned into a well-meaning ball of neurosis and borderline incompetence (not quite as bad as the early plot summaries made it seem, but he barely seems to have improved as a wizard since his teens). Albus...you can see why he's the way he is, but most of it is glossed over. We see him go from a nervous first year to moody little shit in the space of a montage, and it just feels a bit forced.

The Bad:
- Delphi. Just...Delphi.
- The magic. I didn't mind the blend of spells from the books, films and videogames, although I know there are those that will, but I did mind that a)90% of the magic done in the play is spells that the trio learned during their school years and b) that two other people get to use the wandless flying spell that Voldemort does in DH - the spell that showed just how powerful he was, to have transcended normal magic - and one of them is fucking Umbridge.
- "By Dumbledore!" is actually a thing. People say that, in all seriousness.

Edit:
With regard to Delphi...it's specifically said that Bellatrix gives birth at some point before the Battle of Hogwarts. So...what the fuck? She was pregnant during Deathly Hallows? Bullshit!

 

You... you thought this was good:



Immediately after she says this, Albus/Scorpius leave the Hogwarts Express with absolutely zero consequences. It's... pointless. No, worse, it's adding syrup to what should be a fast-paced scene.

Edit: Some math on the '6 million pumpkin pasties' bullshit. According to the Wiki, Hogwarts Express has been in use since 1827. So let's go with that. It's, what, 2020 or so in Cursed Child? So that's 189 years of the robot trolley witch making pumpkin pasties.

The Hogwarts Express travels twice a year, as best we know (is it used at Christmas?). There and back. So 189x2 = 378 trips since 1827.

6,000,000/378 = 15873 pumpkin pasties available on the train per trip.

What's the average accepted number of students? About 1,000, yeah?

So each train journey the trolley witch makes enough pumpkin pasties for each little bastard on the train to eat 15.87 pumpkin pasties?

I call bullshit. If even just 10% of the students on the train don't eat their 15.8 fucking pasties, that's about 1500 pasties going to waste at the journey's end.

 

I liked the idea of it. The execution...maybe not so much, but I thought the idea was pretty cool. Sue me