Me at first not realizing this was a compilation and thinking it was a roast of the Pottermore extended lore. Nonetheless I am not complaining

Voldemort having kids is even more egregious since it goes completely against the story. Voldemort would never produce a heir, he is his own heir, he craves immortality above everything else.

Back when cursed child came out, I pirated a copy of the script. I read maybe five pages, thought I had downloaded a bad fanfic posing as the new thing, and forgot about for a few years and realizing I had the real thing

4:59:56 To give the slightest bit of defense to Slughorn bringing a love potion to class:  He does ask the students if anyone can identify what the potion is before he tells them, and Hermione is able to identify it by smell, and says that it’s smell is dependent on what a person is attracted to or something.
If an intelligent writer were writing this scene they could’ve framed it as Slughorn providing a sample to the students so that they could get familiar with their own unique olfactory interpretation of the potion so that they would have a means of defense against it by being able to identify it before consumption.
Of course the scene wasn’t written by someone intelligent but by JKR, so instead of that we just get Hermione embarrassing herself by oversharing what smells arouse her before just moving on.
It’s especially frustrating because while I was able to get that idea from subtext, something like this shouldn’t be relegated to subtext, either in universe or on a meta level.  Slughorn, as a teacher, should be explicitly telling the students, and by extension the audience, that if something seems off about your drink, then don’t drink it!

2:58:00
Someone else's Harry Potter video included a twitter exchange where someone asked Rowling how long she'd been hiding that Nagini Maledictus thing. She claimed to have been holding onto it since the beginning.
So, there's your reason. No, I don't mean she actually had been holding onto it for that long. I mean, the purpose of its inclusion was so that Rowling could have that Twitter exchange.

As a child, I wasn't allowed to watch/read harry potter because I was taught it was "demonic" and "evil." As I grew older, I realized that was true, but not for the reasons my pastor thought.

voldemort having a daughter was legit an idea i had in 4th grade (where of course the daughter was a self-insert of me). i should invoice jkr & the playwright dude for my share of the profits, since they clearly used my idea

The Voldemort floating away into ash thing at the end still makes me LOL… I will give JKR that ONE thing. I think him slumping to the ground like he was always just a normal man really made the entire plot of his vendetta in the book more poignant. Like he was a sad man who just spent his last 17 years of life being thwarted by children and failed in every aspect. He even failed at immortality or extended life AS A WIZARD… most of the most seasoned wizards in the book live well past 100. And he couldn’t even do that. The movie choice to make it more CGI or like visibly cool was just hilarious.

Listened to this during work, and I really appreciate you bringing up the Amber Heard trial, because it honestly shines a far darker light on something you bring up later on:

How Queenie acted when called out on using that love spell on Jacob was literally textbook abuser tactics. She violated his consent by using a love spell on him, refused to answer how long she was going to keep it going, invaded his privacy AGAIN by reading his mind, then ran off in a huff.

It’s basically just a fantasy version of DARVO.

I think wizards not understanding muggle clothing would be much more bearable if they invertedly were excellent at fashion in a counter-culture way

Wizards wearing muggle clothes could have worked as a visual shorthand for how open towards muggle integration certain characters were. My main issue with the way this change was implemented was that I didn't buy for one second that Draco should be wearing muggle clothing. Can you imagine Lucius Malfoy wanting his son to dress like a muggle, particularly given the way his character was styled? There could have been some interesting show not tell moments with the Slytherins wearing more traditional wizard attire and some interesting combinations of the two among other houses rather than having everyone just throw on a jacket and jeans when they're not in robes. Also, having grown up in the 2000s, there is no way that they would all dress in the same drab, unexciting, generic way. Where are the goths, the alt kids, the fashion victims, the preppy/sporty types? They existed in British schools too then; they're not just American stereotypes. Clothes are such a fundamental way of expressing oneself that they could have been used in a far more innovative way than they were in order to add character depth without resorting to vomiting exposition or adding to an already bloated runtime with most of the films.

the fact voldemort knew his big snake was named nagini implies that either proper nouns can be translated through hissing noises, or nagini had a scene where she had to spell out her name to voldemort somehow. possibly pointing at letters voldemort has written out for her with a big stick in her mouth

Here to memorialise the late dignity of Rupert Grint.

I thought that maybe in the first book Voldemort may have remembered that last time he tried to kill Harry with a killing curse, he ended up as a whisp of smoke, so I guess he wanted Quirrell to do it the old fashioned way

16:05 I saw one Ukrainian film critic point out that Fred & George's shop is strangely safe from Death eaters, and he then cut to the animated sketch of Death eaters pranking each other with those

If I were Charlie Weasley I wouldn’t want to be in the films either.

This is exactly what I need for background noise while I heal from my spine surgery. Thank

About the dialogue in the cursed child... you're right. For an actor its pure cruelty :D
I actually auditioned for it, way back when I was a fresh graduate.
The text they gave me... it was bad.
I don't ever want to see the recording of that casting, lol

I like to imagine Delphi going to a doctor's office and filling out paperwork, and under "Family History" she just writes, "Evil"

The stuff from the end of the video about headcannons is actually really funny. Namely, the person who said magic makes you stupid and the person who said the wizarding world is boring due to their lack of creative outlets combine to form the idea that magic literally kills creativity. Lockhart, as the only "great" author telling "stories" in the universe (most books written by wizards are academic in nature in some capacity, from the actually scholastic to the biographical), is noted to be a very bad wizard. The wizard who is bad at magic, is the wizarding world's biggest author. His books present themselves as things he's actually done (see:biographical non-fiction) but we all know these are just things he makes up off the top of his head.

Even the paintings in the wizarding world arent done for fiction. Its always of real life vistas or people, immortalizing people into portraits or bringing portraits to life. Nobody sat down and painted something that didnt exist.

I will say that the thing on cooking may not be true. Rowling is very keen to point out how lavish the meals at hogwarts are, this is of course mostly to contrast Harry's miserable muggle homelife, but, it does show that whoever is casting the spells that make the meals has the imagination to make delicious and visually appealing food that is, actually, different. Hell, "Every-Flavored Beans" as whimsical and dumb as it is, is in-fact, an example of a wizard employing magic to "enhance" their confectionery medium -- but then, you might argue this is because food is a HIGHLY marketable and translatable commodity. As in, you can write the words "butter beer" in a book, then charge 30~USD in a real life store for that product. So, it is the easiest thing in the wizarding world to make a reality, therefore, it is the single bit of creative outletting that can appear in the universe.

What's interesting of course though, is that in a world of magic, inventing new magic would, presumably, be the apex of creative culture. But we not only rarely delve into this, but, when we do, it's almost always in the negative. Snape invents a spell that makes your organs explode. Seamus tries to make a spell to turn water into rum, and it backfires spectacularly. We're told that many teachers weave special enchantments on things, but wizards arent making NEW magic. Nicholas Flammel is the last person we know of who did something "new", in that, he made the philosopher's stone, literally, allowing him to live forever if he so chose, and he was like, 1000 years old or something when he passed?

The only things that seem to be innovated on, regularly, is brooms. Brooms get 'new models' every year, sporting higher speeds and specs than previous years -- but by how much we never know. Is this is a situation where the "technology" is actually improving year by year, or, is this already a "solved" field and each incremental increase in performance is entirely by design? Further, WHY on EARTH are wizards NOT trying to do tricks on their brooms? In the course of human creative expression, we discovered a long time ago that if we can have something under our feet that moves, while we stand still, we can leverage our weight and the inherent motion of the object to preform actions that excite and impress ourselves and our peers. "Landboarding" and surfboarding has roots across the globe in ancient cultures, and you're telling me no wizard said "I wonder if i can jump on my broom, have it spin, then land back on my broom."

In fact, the only counter-example I can think of, is Fred and George. Who have always been producing their own magical pranks. Sure they have some "from the can" tricks and gags, but theyre always coming up with new, wacky ideas on how to use magic to entertain -- and SUDDENLY the wild success of their business isnt a huge shock. Fred and George are the closest thing in the universe to an amusement part... which is also funny, because they not only sell, but wholly endorse, rape cocktails.



It's honestly kinda funny, if you do accept this reality, then, HP becomes even more damningly colored by Rowling as a person, in that, it's a universe made by a superficially creative person who actually, when pressed, lacks any creativity, but is wildly successful nonetheless, writing exactly what she knows. Nothing more than what she knows, that level of imagination is beyond her, so then, it is beyond the characters in her world. No wizard thinks about CREATING. Only DESTROYING or PRESERVING. Wizards not only make great attempts to never think for themselves but actively dissuade and ostracize others who do so, they manipulate, demean, and villify people who don't align with their respective ideologies, and, those ideologies are very malleable, when a sufficiently insistent or impassioned person is present.

The lack of genuinely constructively creative wizards, is because Joanne lacks all constructive creativity. When characters "create" something "new" it's always either really terrible (as in morally and/or ethically), or, simply doesnt work.