Avengers: Mickey Mouse Rising

So let's do a math problem.

Let's say you have 12 dogs, but only enough food to feed 8 of them long term. You then go ahead and kill 6 of your dogs so that the remainder of them can eat happily and enjoy a life of plenty. "Perfectly balanced" you say while wiping a bit of mustard off your chin, but unfortunately you don't bother to spay or neuter any of them and immediately throw away the shotgun you used to do the deed.

Approximately how many years would it take to realize that you're a fucking idiot?

I thought about writing a review of Infinity War when it came out, but found that the sheer weight of stupidity at play in that movie was too much for me. I'll attempt it now that I've seen two of the damn things, but I can only do so much.

Still. Let's try to go through the key points.


There's more ...

Lethal White

So Lethal White, the latest crime thriller by Robert Galbraith aka JK Rowling, is the harrowing tale of the grizzled Detective Comoran Strike and his gorgeous assistant Robin's eternal struggle to come up with more reasons why they shouldn't sleep together even though they both would very much like to.

The Strike books have thus far been on the 'pretty good' side of things, but I am sorry to say that this one only manages to reach the level of 'it was alright I guess'.

One of the reasons for this is that the sexual tension between Strike and Robin is so damn thick so as to be distracting. That has been an ever-present part of these novels since the get-go but it's getting to the point where it's been milked for all it's worth. It's just painfully obvious that that's where that arc is going and having page after page of Robin contemplating whether she loves her boss or not while Strike broods about how he hates the fact Robin is married now is just plain dull after a while.

Another reason for this is that the murder plot at work in this thing is so utterly and ridiculously elaborate that it is just plain cartoonish and needlessly complicated. I mean, it gets to the point where I was ask myself at the end: "Is killing someone like this really less efficient than just leaving a banana peel on the stairs or dropping a toaster in the bath?"

And the fact that witnesses openly withhold critical information from Strike for no damn reason for the bulk of the book and Strike just sort of nods and plays along. There's a blackmail plot and no one wants to say what the damn guy is being blackmailed about. At a certain point, one would have expected our hero to just say: "Look, do you want this shit solved or what?" but that moment just never came.

The thing is still well-written and I like these characters. When another of these things, I'll read it. But the prime emotion I associate with the text is still irritation. Either I was feeling irritated at the two protagonists' love problems or at irritated at the frustrating way that the investigation was artificially handicapped from the get-go.

Lethal White is thus a fairly unremarkable offering, typical of this era of mediocrity that we are currently suffering through.

Anyway, let's talk some book specifics.


There's more ...

Persona 5

I bought a PS4 just so I could play this and feel it was worth the price of admission.

Persona 5 is a game that achieves a special kind of perfection. It takes the foundations that were laid down in Persona 4 (and Persona Q too) and takes them to a level of perfection beyond what even the most ardent fans were expecting.

Storywise, the game is thematically distinct from Persona 4 in that there is no murder mystery to solve, but rather a larger conspiracy of adults to oppose. P5 is a game whose central theme is outcasts conducting a rebellion against our shitty modern society. The result is our protagonists are much more active this time around, with all of the Phantom Thieves' heists into cognitive dungeons feeling more than just typical RPG romps where you bust down the door and kill everything until the problem is solved. Since you are Phantom Thieves there to steal the hearts of your victims, the game has the 'dungeon' portion consist of sneaking through guards until you've got your entry route, at which point you leave and send a calling card announcing your intention to come for the target. As your guys come together for the final blow, the game gives you all the feeling and satisfaction you might feel when a good plan comes together.

For gameplay, the game has taken all the niggling annoyances of the first game and removed them while enhancing what P4 already did right. Instead of a fairly basic 'see enemy and fight enemy', you've got a (admittedly very simple) stealth system that gives the player an advantage for initiating a battle out of stealth. Instead of the randomly generated dungeons, you've got dungeons that are meticulously designed to give you a perfect feel for what you're doing (with some pretty good puzzles to boot).

Special mention goes out to how they've changed Social Links to make it so that non-combatants give you assorted benefits for maxing them. That gave the acts of getting bonds feel less like pissing away your time between the real stuff and more like being an active revolutionary who is gathering backers and resources for the cause.

Persona 5 oozes style out of every orifice, effortlessly achieving what other RPGs can only wish to have a fraction of. It's worth playing.

Now let's talk about some specifics...


There's more ...

Star Wars Rogue One - Milking that Cow

So I liked Star Wars: Rogue One, but I sort of don't like the fact that I did.

I can start by saying with certainly that it's better than the Force Awakens. It's pretty clear from watching it that Gareth Edwards gives much more of a shit about being true to the setting than Franchise Necromancer J.J. Abrams ever did. In this film, the X-Wings (fighters) cover Y-Wings (bombers) and no Tie Fighters are arbitrarily given a life support system when one of the named characters steps inside. So that's great. It's nice to see someone giving a fuck about things like that, even if you're going to fuck the continuity in the process (see end of this post).

But still, ultimately this is as much of a cash-in as our last Star Wars outing. Disney's clear intention with these things is to milk the series dry, and it's clear that there's quite a lot of milk to be had. Say what you will about the prequel trilogy (and there is quite a lot to say), but I never got the impression that Mr. Lucas was primarily concerned with making money. In a sad sort of way, it really felt like the stupid hack thought that these were stories that somehow needed to be told. Even though those three movies are utter cinematic vomit, there's a certain earnestness to the movie spinning the line 'this is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause' as if it was some kind of poignant political commentary.

These Disney films though, with all of their fan service and nostalgia injections, have the reek of money about them. It seems that behind (almost) every creative decision is someone saying: "We paid 4 fucking billion dollars for this fucking franchise and we're going to squeeze every fucking dollar out of it." The movies ultimately are doing their earnest best to please, to placate and never to challenge. The creators are just saying to give the viewer their nostalgia trip, along with a few more figurines and bits of merchandise to add to their collection, and then call it a day.

Bringing it back to Rogue One, we get a movie that is essentially "what we want", where 'we' is essentially the adult male ex-Star Wars fan. This is prole-feed that's explicitly directed at people like me, who can tell a Tie Fighter from a Tie Interceptor by their silhouette. and I think that's an important thing to recognize.

In any case, with that now done, let's talk about the film in some detail.

1) Star Wars: Rogue One is a superfluous film. 

The whole thing tells the story of the epic struggle that took place before Episode 4 to get a copy of the Death Star's plans to the Rebel Alliance. But the thing is, we pretty much already know how much of a struggle that was. Take a look:

This is a simple and effective way to tell the viewer a story. Rebel ship - small and scrappy . Imperial ship - big and authoritative. From this one image we can already gleam what happened before the movie begins and just how tough it must have been to get those Death Star plans. An extensive flashback to explain it is thus completely unnecessary and adds nothing to the overall story.

(Huh what do you know, that's just like the other prequels)

Still, this is Star Wars and Star Wars fans love nothing more than going through things in excruciating detail. Previous to Necromancer Abrams resurrecting this dead franchise, there was quite the burgeoning novel industry surrounding it with the whole "Extended Universe" deal, which gave us entire novels and books of short stories dedicated to subjects like the identities and backstories of those other four Bounty Hunters who lined up with Boba Fett in the Empire Strikes Back.  Do we need to know who those guys are? No. Does knowing about it make the original story better? Not at all. But are people going to want to spend money finding out about it anyway? Hell yes.

And that's essentially what this movie is. It's clear now that, even though the first thing Necromancer Abrams did when he got this thing was scrap the Extended Universe's place in the canon, Disney's intention with these Star Wars films is to essentially apply the Extended Universe's logic to the films and just start churning these fuckers out and letting that money flow on in.

So we're going to get a film in 2018 about Han Solo and how he became such a scoundrel and met Chewbacca or whatever. I imagine by 2022 we'll start getting ones about Wedge Antilles, Lando and Mon Mothma.

2) Star Wars: Rogue One is a (relatively) dark film.

Never before have the films tilted in this direction of moral nuance. What I mean by that is that in every other Star Wars film you're going to be a morally upstanding Rebellion/Republic dude, a bad Sith/Empire guy, a Smuggler or some kind of ultimately-irrelevant alien. And I guess you could also be someone in the process of transitioning from one category to other.

In this though you had Saw Gerrera, an insane rebel whose ethics were clearly quite questionable. You also had the rebels conducting daylight raids against Imperial soldiers that are shown to result in civilian casualties. This all is forgotten by the third act, but it's new ground for the Star Wars films certainly.

The big battle at the end is a thrillingly filmed affair, with named characters dying left and right. Normally in Star Wars a named Rebel character is only allowed to die in order to be part of someone else's character development, but here the director clearly went out of his way to apply some grittiness and even perhaps realism to Star Wars.

Going back to my primary thesis though: This is what a segment of Star Wars fans have always wanted. I can name about a dozen video games that put the player in the role of  the 'ordinary Rebel trooper' trying to overcome the odds against the Empire, and there are plenty of stories in those games (and the old EU novels) about Rebels who go too far.

It would thus be incorrect to say that this is a bold new direction for Star Wars. I characterize it more as tapping into an audience that had already been cultivated.

3) There's a weird pro-Jihad vibe in the film. 

So the first shot of the Death Star is at a 'holy city' called Jedha, pronounced 'Jed-ha'. That name is clearly taken from the city of Jedda, which is an ancient city in Arabia. Inside Jedha you also apparently have 'Kyber crystals', with Kyber being pronounced exactly like one says 'Khyber Pass', which is the Afghan/Pakistan border. And to drill the point home, the city and indeed many of the rebels have an Arab/Ottoman motif.

The director of the film apparently said:

"If you believe in the Jedi and you believe in the Force, it feels like Jedha is somewhere you should visit in your lifetime."

... meaning that it's apparently Jedi Mecca or something?

So you've got yourself a holy place that the Director explicitly wants to attach to Islamic holy places. Said holy place is under attack by an outside Empire that massacres the population. The surviving warriors then band together to bring down said Empire and liberate the lands from the invading infidel.

Do you see where there might be uh... certain parallels?

So uhhh... real world analogies and Star Wars usually don't work very well. I think Colbert said it best when he said that every side thinks they're the Rebellion. But the movie's racialization of that group of rebels is making an explicit connection between the Rebel Alliance with Jihadist Radicals and the Empire with Americans.

Now uh I don't necessarily disagree with that last bit, but why the fuck is a profit-hungry Star Wars movie doing that?

If anyone wants to explain it to me then go ahead. My best theory is that this is an inadvertent consequence of the effort to give the Rebellion shades of grey. "Not all Rebels are good, some Rebels can even be ARABS" is perhaps what the Director was saying without fully considering the consequences of that assertion.

Though of course the other possibility that Gareth Edwards has secretly given his bayat to Baghdadi.

I report you decide.

4) I felt more for the humanity of the Storm Troopers in this than I ever did in Force Awakens. 

How many of these fuckers die just trying to ask people for their papers? It's not their job to set the rules about ID card protocol, you know. And shouldn't spies carry forged documents before they infiltrate enemy cities? What kind of spy doesn't have that?

Just once I'd like to see this:

Storm Trooper: Hey, let's see some identification.
Person: Here you are.
Storm Trooper: Thanks for your cooperation.
Person: Have a good day.
Storm Trooper: Stay safe.

5) The ending scene with Vader shits all over continuity. 

Let's just look at it:

Princess Leia Organa: Darth Vader. Only you could be so bold. The Imperial Senate will not sit still for this. When they hear you've attacked a diplomatic...
Darth Vader: Don't act so surprised, Your Highness. You weren't on any mercy mission this time. Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebel spies. I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.
Princess Leia Organa: I don't know what you're talking about. I am a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan...
Darth Vader: You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor! Take her away!

#1 - If her Correlean Corvette was literally launched as an escape pod out of a fleet battle with the Imperial fleet with a floppy disc as Vader watched, then he should not be saying 'several transmissions were beamed to this ship'. He should be saying 'I saw that asshole with the floppy disc get on this ship, where is it now?'
#2  - Leia's cover mission also makes no sense. You were on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan? Really? After they literally just saw this ship escaping a giant fleet confrontation?

But well I guess you'd have to be a nerd to care about shit like that. 

There's more ...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

So this takes me back.

(I last blogged about Cursed Child a few months back when the decision to cast Hermione as a black lady was announced. Let me quickly address that: My objection to that was that no script was being released and switching mediums like this was breaking my mental image of who Hermione was because there was no script being released and so the play was the only authoritative version being presented. A week after I wrote that up, it was announced that the script was actually being released, and so I ended up with egg on my face. But oh well, that closed off that discussion as far as I'm concerned.)

Anyway, let's talk about this then. First without spoilers:

1) The plot and characters are good.

I actually came into this prepared to not like it. Expectations are high for an 8th Harry Potter book and one never knows what an author is going to produce after taking a break from a text for a good decade. But it is a perfectly good Harry Potter text that is a completely valid entry into the canon. It skirts the edges at times, often getting its plot tied into knots with unexpected twists leading to more and more twists. And the fan service element does get a bit extreme after a time and there are moments when Harry's son Albus is irritating and whiny. But while it touches those edges, it doesn't jump right off.

Again, it's good. Often, it's even great. So no worries there.

2) The play would really be better off as a novel.

That's for a pretty basic reason... When new characters step onto the stage, how was I supposed to know what they were supposed to look like? At first I thought that it'd be a good idea to just google image search so I could see what the actor/actress they had cast for that part. But that of course resulted in a plot point being spoiled for me. Fuck.

So you know... a simple cursory description of what a character might look like could have been good, you know?

3) The play really reads more like a movie script.

It's got a frickin' montage for crying out loud. What play has a montage? Do you know how hard it would be to do a montage on stage? Reading through it, I have to say that I think this is probably the most high-budget and staggeringly expensive/difficult to produce plays in human history. I can get how you can do certain parts, but the amount of back-and-forth scene switching, special effects and pyrotechnics this thing would require... well, it'd be staggering.

I'm sure they're managing that over in London of course. If there's ever been a play with a bottomless budget, it's this one. But you won't be seeing productions of this at the local community theatre.

I feel that it's inevitable that this thing is going to be a movie (perhaps even two movies). I'd give it two or three years perhaps. I honestly can't help but feel that it being a play is some sort of grandiose gesture on JK Rowling's part. Her way of trying to breathe some life into an increasingly niche medium perhaps? And you know, that strikes me as a tad bourgeoisie.  As Jim Hacker once argued, the reason the common man in the streets isn't going to see plays is because they're inaccessible and bloody expensive. Charging 500+ dollars per seat isn't going to do much to change that.

But well, we can't really change that sort of decision, can we? So for now I'll just say I look forward to the movie version.

Anyhow, let's proceed now with the nitty-gritty.

Spoilers ahead!

While I did enjoy it, I do feel that the 8th Harry Potter story is the weakest entry of the eight Harry Potter stories.

Let's talk about why that is.

1) Time Turners.

Patrick Rothfuss once remarked that the problem with introducing Time Turners into a fictional world was that one would have to examine the consequences of their existence beyond Hermione being able to take some extra classes. And you know, Mr. Rothfuss sort of has Rowling there. If you can travel back in time reliably, then why don't you do that? Why didn't someone just hit the Time Turner the moment Snape killed Dumbledore or what have you? And if there are big anti-time travel laws in place by the Ministry, why the hell did they make an exception for a 14 year old girl?

I always had Time Turners down as a Prisoner of Azkaban-only gimmick. Something cute for that book only that you weren't meant to think about too much. So it was much to my surprise to find them featuring centrally in Cursed Child. And let's be honest here: Time Turners cause way too many plot holes.

Let's take a point from the end. There's the whole thing with Albus and Scorpius being stuck in the past while Harry and company have a Time Turner but don't know what date to point it to. Everyone's tense and trying to figure something out, until we get the nice sentimental moment where Harry finds the secret message from Albus on Lily's pillow... the whole audience is in tears as the message from son to father carries through the legacy of a dead mother, until one stray thought comes into your mind...

Why don't they go back in time to the hour before Albus and Scorpius broke into the Ministry to steal the first Time Turner and beat the everloving shit out of both the goddamn brats?

Yep. I know. It stings.

Look, I get it. I've seen those episodes of Star Trek too and know you're just supposed to ignore that kind of reasoning. But Time Turners are more than just a gimmick to save the day in this story, as they were in Prisoner of Azkaban. You didn't need to care about Time Turners in PoA until after the great scenes with Sirius were already done. But in this, well... the spotlight is on these things throughout. And when you have such a damn silly thing driving your plot, you're bound to hit that wall.

2) Ass pulling.

There are two elements in the ending that felt both rushed and awkward.

First, you've got the aforementioned mommy's blanket with its secret message. If a tincture of demiguise reacts with a love potion, it will burn. Burn in such a way as to not start a fire, but rather form perfectly neat letters. And some of said tincture just so happens to be in the house over here. Also the demiguise will keep for forty years and Harry will never think to wash the blanket or accidentally spill mustard all over it.

Harry Potter is a series with literal magic solutions to everything, but with the umpteen million ways that you can send secret messages in this world, THAT is what Rowling came up with? Come on, Ms. Rowling, you can watch better Star Trek episodes than that.

Second, there's Draco's second Time Turner.

We now know that Lucius Malfoy had a perfect time travel device in his back pocket. So when Dobby was freed, he could have just gone back in time and... no wait, let's not go down that road again.

What we do know now is that Draco apparently had a game changing magical item in his possession that he chose to simply leave in a trunk somewhere until the most dramatically appropriate moment. If there were at least a hint that Draco had one of those before that moment, I would be alright with it. But there wasn't. The plot required him to have it at that moment and so he had it.

3) Delphi.

It's strange that the most fascinating thing about the play is also the aspect I found to be most disappointing.

The daughter of Voldemort plays a really cool role in the first two thirds of the play. A manipulator/instigator who never gets her hands dirty... she's presented as a love interest for Albus, or even as the Hermione to Albus and Severus' Harry and Ron. But she came across as being perfectly likable and her mysteriously being kept away from Hogwarts gave her a certain foreign and intense quality.

And so when at the end she just started flying around being evil, I couldn't help but feel let down. The fact that she is presented as acting out of a weird form of love for her absent father is not really well examined and as she gets beaten up and sent off to Azkaban, her potential feel thoroughly squandered.

As a villain, her biggest play is trying to bring back the last big bad, an action that thoroughly consigns her to a tier 2 position. As a character, her arc seems to just sort of sputter out at the end there as the good characters beat her down. Albus' attraction to her gets laughed off and that's that. Maybe JKR will make another of these things and she'll come back for a second go at it, but as it stands Delphi leaves the play looking like a weak character that tried to resurrect a dead idea and got the shit kicked out of her for doing it.

Now, does all this mean that the play was bad? By all means no. It had faults certainly, but I enjoyed reading it and reflecting upon it. But ultimately, the play does not measure up to the first seven books.

There's more ...

Star Wars: Episode 7: The Force Awakens

I don't even know if I should bother writing about this, but well... may as well I guess?

Star Wars: Episode 7: the Force Awakens has the distinction of being better than 50% of the previous films. And while it deserves a hearty congratulations for having achieved that much, I do think that it needed to be a bit better than that.

Don't get me wrong. It's a passable film. The action clips along at an acceptable pace, the characters are distinct enough for me to remember most of their names and there wasn't anything offensively bad about it. But that's about it. It gets a passing grade, but nothing beyond that. Honestly, I don't think I'll remember anything beyond the major plot points one week from today.

So before I inevitably forget about this thing, let's talk about it.

The perspective I'm writing from is that of a former fan. In my middle school years, I was all about Star Wars and I read every single Extended Universe book I could get my hands on, even the ones by Kevin J. Anderson. That enthusiasm was beaten to the ground by the Prequels. I liked Knights of the Old Republic 1, but generally speaking I haven't cared about Star Wars in some time, even though I still happen to know a fuckload of stuff about that universe.

So why didn't this movie win me back into the fold? Let's see...

Spoilers ahead, I guess.

1) Shoddy writing.

I think this is the first JJ Abrams product I've actually watched so I can't really compare this to his other works, but I had trouble swallowing the motivations and actions of some of the characters. I'm going to focus mainly on the Storm Trooper deserter, Finn.

Finn here deserts the First Order because he realizes that the Empire is cartoonishly evil and decides that Killing Is Wrong. In order to escape from the Empire, he proceeds to shoot up a hangar bay full of his former comrades, seemingly killing about 30 or 40. So errr... this individual in the military got upset about the direction his government was taking and decided to go ahead and murder a bunch of his colleagues. So... does that mean our main protagonist is basically the Empire's equivalent to the Fort Hood Shooter then?

 This wouldn't be so bad if the issue were raised or acknowledged somehow, but it's not. Bad guys called Finn a traitor later on, but he is all too happy to just go ahead and shoot or stab them. Never once is the idea that one of these other Storm Troopers might also be closet dissenters or other people who were conscripted away from their families at a young age just like he was. Finn just kills them.

Why make him a Storm Trooper in the first place if these issues weren't going to be dealt with? Why give him that back story if it wasn't going to affect his character development at all? I think this Abrams guy just liked the visual of the Storm Trooper deserter, but really just did not adequately think it through.

2) Shoddy dialogue.

If I were to describe the dialogue in this film it would probably be something along the lines of "Badly Written Joss Whedon". Everyone is trying to be snappy and clever, but no one is saying anything worth remembering. While sometimes a line hit home ("That's not how the Force works"), the movie is filled with awkward garbage lines about boyfriends and fixing compressors.


At one point in the film, Finn is watching an X-Wing blowing up TIE Fighters from the ground (ignoring the fight all around him) and gasps: "Wow, what a great pilot!" on behalf of the audience. The fact that the guy is blowing away six TIEs in 5 seconds already is showing that, but I guess Captain Obvious needed to make sure the audience was making the right conclusions here.

3) Not giving a fuck.

There are certain details about this universe that I could tell you, even though I haven't really thought about it for a solid decade.

For instance, there's a scene where Finn and the pilot guy escape in a TIE fighter. While in said TIE, they don't wear space helmets and are able to breathe. But TIE Fighters aren't supposed to have life support. That's why their pilots wear those bulky black outfits. Because they'd suffocate without them.

"Well maybe they got air after twenty years," you say. Except that the other TIE pilots we see in the movie are still wearing the black fighter outfit that they were wearing in the original films. Why are they still in bulky space helmets with very distinct oxygen tubes if they've got atmosphere inside of their fighters? Wouldn't they wear the grey uniforms, like their colleagues on the Star Destroyers? Why give them atmosphere in the fighter if they aren't going to use it? And no, if it were a special TIE then they should have fucking said it was a special TIE. Or just hijacked a shuttle instead. Shuttles have air.

You may think this is quibbling and nitpicking, but this is the thing: Getting this shit right is a sign of love and care for the setting. It's a sign of attention being paid to detail. If Abrams can't give enough of a shit about the Star Wars universe to offer an explanation as to why that TIE fighter had life support, then why should I give a shit about the Star Wars universe either?

So the conclusion:

What this movie is is a cash-in sequel designed to rake as much money out of its name as possible.

Does that mean it was a bad movie? No. Again, it's passable. But I nevertheless left the movie feeling quite thankful that I've stayed well-clear of whatever the hell this man did to Star Trek. There's more ...

Harry Potter, Medium Swapping and Continuity

So this is sort of bothering me, and so I will sound off on it here.

Today Harry Potter and the Cursed Child had its cast announced. Here they are:

So beyond the Ron with hair that is distinctly not red, you've got yourself a black Hermione who apparently did not magically fix her teeth in her teen years.  My first reaction to this was a definitive: "Huh?" This bothered me a lot more than I thought it would and, after much reflection, I think I've determined the reason why: The stage is a visual medium and JK Rowling is slapping her fan base in the face by insisting on making her sequel on it.

Stick with me and I'll take you through my reasoning. 

First, let me talk about why I think this matters.

For an established character, the image and feel of a character counts. For instance: Jean-Luc Picard is bald. If (God forbid) a 'sequel to the Next Generation' series were pitched featuring Picard with a full head of hair, then I would feel quite justified in screaming bloody murder. Once a character is established to look a certain way in a certain continuity, then you've gotta stick with it. If you put Fabio in Picard's shoes then I don't feel comfortable or respected as a fan in the setting.

Now the question of race and superheroes has been popular in the media lately. I hear a lot about the idea of a black James Bond or Spider Man for instance. And you know, I'm not against either idea. Just make them in their own continuity. I mean, fuck, you're resetting Spider Man every two fucking movies anyhow, so why not give it a try? And hell, don't those kinds of movies shift continuity every time they change their lead actor anyhow? 

But in any case, the point I'm trying to make here is this: I would not care about this issue if the above Hermione were in an alternate universe adaptation of Harry Potter. The distinction I draw is that this is a Hermione who's supposed to be in a direct sequel to the books.

Anyhow, so now let's get the author's position:

This makes sense to me. I actually avoid racial descriptors when I describe a characters too, which I've observed has resulted in arguments in what people think a given character actually looks like. I think some degree of ambiguity in that regard is sort of necessary, particularly in a book where we're expected to relate to and invest in certain characters. I get that.

For me it goes like this though: I open Chamber of Secrets and read: "Hermione snatched the timetable back, flushing intensely." (75) All human beings have the blushing reaction, but for what should be obvious reasons it's not very distinctive on a person with some colour on their face already. You can't tell when a dark skinned person is blushing as easily as you can a pale person. Hence why I always pictured the gal as being white.


"But that's just your perspective and it's subjective," I hear you say. And well yeah, of course it is. The Hermione in my head is indeed a white girl, but if she's black in yours then that's your prerogative. I don't think it would effect our mutual enjoyments of the books.

But that's the thing, isn't it? This isn't a book. It's a play. A horrendously expensive and inaccessible play that a pauper like me can never hope to see on stage, but nevertheless: a visual medium. We aren't in the Theatre of the Mind any more, we're in real space. The "you can picture whatever Hermione you want" argument breaks down because for this play, which is billed as a sequel to the Harry Potter books,  there is now just one Hermione. The one on stage. And the lady they're putting on stage looks absolutely nothing like the Hermione I've imagined.

"Wait a second," I hear you say, "Why should your white Hermione take precedence over my black one?" And you're right, I can't give you an objective reason why that should be. But note: the argument works both ways. Before everyone would read the books and make their own world. When the movies came out, mileage varied. Many people (including me) thought Emma Watson was a bit too pretty to be Hermione for instance. And for me, Kingsley is always going to be a Samuel L. Jackson type figure. But nevertheless: Previously, what was a point of contention like that could always be resolved with the words 'but well, in the books we can make our own sense of it'.

But now there is no book. There's just a play. (And hopefully a script that they'll eventually publish for us poor commoners)

And that brings me to a fundamental conclusion about all of this: Making the sequel to a fabulous series of books into a London-only stage production is a huge disservice to the fans. It's whimsical on the part of the author, it's anti-democratic and it flies in the face of the magic that the Harry Potter books really allowed the reader to do within its pages.

JK Rowling can do whatever she wants, of course. But you can't do a medium swap like this and not expect to irk people like me. There's more ...