Correct me if I'm wrong but they probably aren't mentioned because I think Newt said there hadn't been one in centuries before the girl in Africa (I believe). Also, we can discuss Harry's abuse with the Dursleys all you want but I don't think he had it worse than Credence. Harry was neglected and malnourished while also being called names. Credence was also psychologically abused but also suffered constant beatings. He was also at least 20, meaning there was more time for the abuse to manifest as his transformation.


At the end of the day, one could just argue that Harry could 'withstand', if that is the correct word, the abuse better than Credence. I'm not a huge fan of the movie but I don't think that Credence is there just for the plot holes.

 

I don't think Harry tried to repress his magic since he didn't even have the faintest idea as to what happened around him was his fault. I could be wrong, but I don't recall Harry trying to stop doing freakish things, and certainly he wasn't trying to stop doing magic either. Of course, he couldn't fear his own magic for obvious reasons.

 

OK, so I thought about starting my own thread for this, but Pottermore twitter put out something that read completely bonkers to me today and this was the most recent thread I could find about JK's post book statements.

(Hogwarts didn't always have bathrooms. Before adopting Muggle plumbing methods in the eighteenth century, witches and wizards simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence. #NationalTriviaDay)

https://twitter.com/pottermore/status/1081242428105998336

I mean... that doesn't seem like the most efficient way to go about things, even if you CAN just vanish it. What did they do for children?

 

Yeah ... that seems incredibly stupid. I can buy that they used vanishing spells instead of plumbing back in the day, but doing that kind of thing privately and in a designated area is something that's pretty universal to human culture.

Also, it is now only a matter of time before fanfic writers have Harry taking nasty diarrhea dumps in public and vanishing the results. So thanks for that, Pottermore.

 

I decided not to take anything post DH seriously around the time Fantastic Beasts came out. Crimes, as my brother tells it, only confirms my suspicions that Rowling basically just forgot everything and doesn't care anymore. She even retconned the Slytherin exit from the battle of Hogwarts by saying that Slughorn led the ones who wanted to fight for the school back, which is almost exactly like the time Spielberg edited walkie talkies into the hands of the cops in ET. The only difference is that she doesn't even have to use film editing, she just types something on twitter and it changes the canon.

 

I pretty distincly recall that happening in Deathly Hallows. At least in the book, I think the films left it out (not sure, haven't seen the films since they were out in theaters).

 

I'm of two minds about it. So, if an author continues to add to their canon in the form of further works, it's generally something I would accept (though some fanfiction where you ignore later books CAN be fun). Some of the things she's changed, like Dumbledore being gay, can be supported in the text itself and in the story. But random factoids that are about the world hundreds of years before the story seem irrelevant, as do total retcon jobs - generally massive retconning is done by a different author, because authors usually try to be at least somewhat coherent. Basically, I would take things I know she herself wrote in a narrative as canon. A random tweet is easy, writing a story that involves it is not (imagining a non crack story with wizards shitting themselves constantly as part of the plot is impossible). So Fantastic Beasts yes, Cursed Child no.

The Slughorn thing doesn't sound impossible to me, either.

Really has to do with the amount of effort the author puts into it. GRR Martin writing some massive encyclopedia with some of his most diehard fans should probably be taken as canon, even if there's no narrative, while this tweet seems... poorly thought out.

Cursed Child is one of those things where she can say it's canon, but there's probably better than even odds that she writes her own sequel in a decade or so and ignores it, and no one could really object (aside from maybe CC's authors, but it has such poor reception...).

I actually read it as they just did it in their clothing... not even the floor... which somehow sounds even worse to me.

 

Okay, so I just re-read DH from the scene where Slughon leads the Slytherins out to the end, word for cringe-inducing word. It's not in there. To see where I had heard of it, it turns out that it wasn't a tweet either, it was a book called Pottermore Presents: Short Stories from Hogwarts.

 

Books are canon, Cursed Child is canon, ALL THE MOVIES are canon, Pottermore, Twatter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat if she has them (hell, even if she doesn't), all fan art and anything a cast member ever said in an interview is also canon. JK is free to invent the stupidest trivia. In fact , I'd like to know more about the details of wizarding midwifery in Madagascar in the 1400s.

I write fanfiction and I don't have to give a shit.

 

You have to make it sound like JKR when you do this so, "Transgender wizarding midwifery in Madagascar" would be more like something she would say is canon at this point.

The original 7 books are canon in my eyes. Ancillary stuff like birthdays, house affiliations, etc., that doesn't contradict the books, is acceptable information to fill out the characters.

Sexual preferences, LSD induced backstories, race changing, etc., in order to seem more inclusive, is trash and nothing else.

 

I feel like anything officially approved by JKR can be considered canon, but it's ultimately up to the author to determine what he/she believes is canon.

For example, I only consider the books, movies, and Fantastic Beasts 1 canon because those are the only HP media I've consumed. Therefore stuff like Pottermore isn't canon, but could very well become canon if I decide one day that I want to read it.

 

The whole concept of each individual getting to decide what they consider to be "canon" rather misunderstands the whole concept of having a canon.

The whole point and definition of a canon is a set of universally authoritative works. A Christian doesn't get to say "I personally don't consider the gospel of John canon". Where a canon exists, individuals are not entitled to opinions on its content. The whole purpose of the canon is to be binding on individuals. A personal canon is a contradiction in terms.

A statement that "my canon is X" logically amounts to the view that there is no canon. I.e. you do not consider yourself bound by any set of authorities, but rather simply decide what you like. Which is fine, but at that point all discussion about Harry Potter might as well end, because you've lost your standard of correctness. There's no point discussing "Is X or Y the case?" if there is no evidence either way. You'd just two people sharing their equally baseless opinions.

When it comes to debates about the content of the HP world, I think if you are to take the concept of canon seriously then there's really no other answer than everything personally produced by JKR. And if you don't take the concept of canon seriously then the only sensible thing is to stop wasting your time with a pointless debate.

When it comes to fanfic, people of course can write what they like.

 

Plenty of Christian sects actually do decide which books are Canon, however.

While I mostly agree with you, entire Christian sects have been formed by individuals deciding books are or are not canon. The Catholic church has the Deuterocanonical books, Mormon's have four extra books. There's also the apocrypha. Granted, the bible is a collection of books by different authors who are mostly anonymous, so it's a lot different from HP.

It's very obvious to me that Fantastic Beasts should be considered canonical, but I'm not sure what to make of the Cursed Child. JK says it's canonical, but she didn't write it. The Star Wars Christmas Special was made by George Lucas, but he declared it non canonical, as a comparison. I think it's totally possible (perhaps even probable) that JK writes something that contradicts CC some day.

The tweet about wizards shitting themselves does seem like the logical conclusion of how idiotic wizards are in the HP world, but I kinda wish I had never read it.

 

Personally, the way I see it, the canon is the body of work a reasonable fan could be reasonably expected to know.

Which effectively means the published works, and that's about it. If it's been published in an official work that hasn't been declared non-canon by JKR (read: the original books, movies, Fantastic Beasts, etc), then it's canon.

Random statements on Twitter or interviews or whatever (and I would include Pottermore in this) are not canon. They're tidbits of flavor that you can't really expect any given fan to have actually seen or possibly even heard of before, and so can be entirely discarded (same as contradictory information in the above canonical sources). There might be some interesting bits that you may want to use for fanfiction or whatever, but they're not binding on the universe and shouldn't be treated as such.

 

It's not like any random person on the Internet has any authority to decide what is and isn't canon. JKR is the author, the HP world literally belongs to her, what she says is canon IS, that's all, and she's the only one with any right to decide. There's a reason authorial statements are called Word of God, after all.

It doesn't mean you have to like it or use it in your fanfiction, however: as Taure said, you can choose to follow whatever you want. Cursed Child is canon, but I'll probably never write a Harry able to offer some old blanket to his son.

Also, could everyone stop saying that the wizards-shitting-themselves thing suddenly appeared as a random tweet last week? This bit of trivia has been around for years on Pottermore in the Chamber of Secrets text (Nauro linked a drabble where he referenced it in 2012, for example). Damn normies.