I didn't even know she had written thing outside of Harry Potter and spin-off.
But once she was done with her book under pseudonyme, she went right back to HP...

 

She wrote Casual Vacancy, two other (Three total) Cormoran Strike/Robert Galbraith books, and published that commencement speech into a book too. She's basically published a non-Harry Potter thing every year for the last four years. Just because YOU don't know about it doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

 

The money...

She accumulates and insane amount of money from harry potter. She still gets royalties from previous books and films and now has a play... she is megamoney rich.

 

I managed to snag a hardback copy of The Cuckoo's Calling (in perfect condition) while volunteering at the local library's used book sale. Who knows when I'll get around to reading it, though.

I wonder if the newer copies of those books still credit her pseudonym with certain military honors; that really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, at the time.

I saw the HBO miniseries of The Casual Vacancy, though, and they had to wrestle the gun barrel away from my mouth. I sincerely doubt the book version was much better.

Very reminiscent of Harry Potter in some ways, though...

Spoilers, seriously.

Spoiler

Reminiscent, that is, if Snape had been a blonde teenage girl who drowned at the end of the book because Mundungus Fletcher tried to ditch a stolen TV in the black lake, and Snape got tangled in the power cord, trying to rescue a student.

...and Dumbledore had been a fat, duplicitous, adulterous, asshole, instead of just a regular duplicitous asshole.

...and Harry ended up getting sent to Figg's by social services, but his life was more or less just as shitty there as it had been before, but at least the shit smells different.

...and the whole draw of the book had been this big mystery about the identity of the Half Blood Prince, but then it was revealed in the third chapter and wasn't really a big deal at all, having virtually no impact on the rest of the story, making the real point of the plot how utterly depressing it is being a wizard, leaving you wondering why the hell you ever bought the book.

 

One of the most notable things about Rowling other than her status as an author is that she ceased to be a billionaire due to her charitable contributions.

 

Her mystery books are pretty good.

 

Which sounds a lot more impressive than it is. If I remember correctly, she was only just a billionaire before and is now not quite a billionaire.

 

I didn't know that. How much do you think she's donated? 10 million, a 100 million?

Still more influence, hopefully for good, than the vast majority of people manage to wield, of course.

 

And she chose to stay in Britain and not go to a tax haven. That in and of itself puts her above most super rich people/companies who go to an extreme length to not pay taxes.

 

Besides the money, I would say she is connected to the world she built.

 

Because Harry Potter is fucking awesome and it's her sandbox. She created it, nurtured it and gave it to the world. Why shouldn't she play in it from time to time?

 

That "guy" (it's a girl) is one of the myriad stupid Cracked theory writers. That theory is ridiculous, the parallels are super slim.

 

Why does she have to let it go? There is so much she could dig into and write about. The Marauder's era (as many mention), Founders, or something else, are all different things to explore. I would love to see more written by JK about this world.

 

I'm curious about this new movie which she "allegedly" wrote. Will it address the flaws of the other movies or create their own?

 

No one's denying J.K. has the right to do what she wants with her own IP. And I'm certainly not going to suddenly hate her because she produced content I dislike. Obviously.

However. Just as the Star Wars prequels did not exactly endear me to George Lucas, just as Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did not endear me to Steven Spielberg, just as every new episode of the Simpsons slowly drags the show into mediocrity, lots of J.Ks newer stuff isn't really leaving me wanting more.

Honestly, J.K. doesn't even rank all that high in terms of creators that have received shit for producing content of lower quality later on. Patton Oswalt once joked that if he had a time machine, he would go back in time and kill George Lucas with a shovel. And people laughed. For good reason.

All I'm saying is that a lot of the content she has produced since the end of the series has been, in my mind, sub par. And no, I'm not going to just follow the mantra of "don't like, don't read/watch" because how the fuck am I supposed to know if I like it if I don't do those things?

BTW, J.K. Rowling spending a shit ton of money for causes she believes in does not mean she isn't producing content out of a desire for money. Spending money on causes she believes in is a great motivator for wanting more money - so that she can spend more money. Her not being particularly frugal isn't evidence that she's a saint who cares not for monetary compensation.

And yeah, I'm sure she loves the world she's built. Doesn't mean money doesn't play a role.

I don't feel an ownership over Harry Potter. I like Harry Potter. Thus, when I read or watch HP content I dislike, I am disappointed. Especially if I paid for it.

 

I personally would love a Dumbledore book. It would be more exciting than the school years of 4 bullies.

 

I'd say there's a point where getting more turns into a negative instead of being positive.

Basically every time we encounter a new imaginary world we start filling in the gaps and extrapolating the world with our own imagination. If there's very little canon material there's not enough gaps to fill, so getting new stuff is a good thing and helps us expand the world in our mind.

But the thing is, our personally extrapolated world doesn't have to be consistent or set, and as such it can have infinite amount of variation; we can imagine Harry getting older while being an amazing Auror, we can imagine a future where he becomes a curse breaker, we can have him as a professional Quidditch player. All these states can exists simultaneously. And at some point (which probably varies from person to person) the personally extrapolated universe can grow to a size where new canon introduced culls more branches from the infinite imaginary multiverse than the added information helps grow. So adding to the world makes it less.

My guess is that this is one of the reasons why so many people hate the epilogue: in only a few pages Rowling removes all the infinite possibilities we can imagine for Harry, and explicitly states that Harry becomes Head Auror and has three kids with Ginny. While this is cool enough on it's own, it's decidedly less cool than the sum of infinite amount of possibilities. It's like saying to a high school graduate what their future is going to be, instead of encouraging them to go out and explore the world and themselves.

Of course there are works of fiction where the canon is so extensive, that exploring that alone is rewarding enough without the need of imaginary extrapolation. LotR with all companion works definitely belong to this category. And of course some people just prefer "the real thing" to the imaginary, and for them every word added is a plus.

 

I think it has something more to do with fleshing out her legacy and that she's not quite sure what else to write more than money. Her other non-HP books haven't been that well received and honestly, I don't think she's that good of an author. Most of her characters in the HP universe were really underdeveloped and a lot of their motivations/actions didn't make any sense as the stories progressed.

That being said, the world she created has so much potential that you could spend decades fleshing it all out and maybe she was more attached to the world itself than the characters in it.

It's possible that the fanfic genre for HP is so large because the characters are so two dimensional that it gives a lot of authors room to make changes or rewrite them. A LOT of HP universe is undefined; magic has little to no reason to act the way it does when you compare it to magical systems in other book series, there's almost nothing discussed about the magical world beyond the UK and you hear very little about history beyond goblin wars and bits of Dumbledore's fight with Grindelwald.