If it's on Twitter, it's True

A few weeks ago while I was scrolling through twitter, I came across this YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKxpwlKRQ2U) and thought it was absolutely hilarious. Obviously it’s poking fun at all of Rowling’s tweets attempting to “expand the Harry Potter universe”, but when we were discussing on Thursday if Rowling’s tweets should be considered canon, my head immediately went to this video.

I absolutely love JK Rowling, don’t get me wrong. She’s a brilliant author and (clearly) I’m obsessed with her work, but sometimes it can seem that her tweets are just attempting to make the wizarding world more inclusive even when it wasn’t exactly written that way.

She wrote Harry Potter in the 90s and society was way different back then. While it wasn’t right, very few minority groups were given representation in pop culture. Very few films, television shows, and books had a main character representing a minority group. LGBTQ characters were basically nonexistent. Harry Potter was written during this time and Rowling still had more representation than most. There are several black characters in the series as well as an Asian character. And while that still is not nearly as much representation as these groups deserve, it is still much more than what was given in other popular works at the time.

However, now that were in the age of inclusivity where representation is much more readily found, it can sometimes feel like Rowling is attempting to hop on the bandwagon and expand her characters in ways that were never evident in the books. Again, I’m not saying this in a negative way; I’m not against Rowling trying to increase representation in the series. It’s just that some of the “facts” she gives about her characters twenty years later have absolutely no evidence backing up the claims within the original books.

For example, if Rowling had thought Dumbledore to be gay all along like she claims, why wouldn’t she have made him explicitly gay in the story? I love the idea of gay Dumbledore. I completely see it being plausible through his relationship with Grindelwald. I also understand her backup response of  “gay people look just like… people” when critiqued that some people just don’t see Dumbledore as gay. But if she always saw Dumbledore as gay, why couldn’t she just have at least slipped it in there so young teenagers questioning their sexuality would have looked up to Dumbledore and seen themselves in this powerful character?

There’s also the controversy (which shouldn’t be a controversy) of Hermione being black. Rowling says that she never explicitly said Hermione was white, but… she did. In Prisoner of Azkaban it straight up says, “Hermione’s white face was sticking out from behind a tree.” Hermione is white and while that literally doesn’t matter, she could’ve as easily been black and the story still would’ve been fantastic, Rowling trying to backtrack and say that Hermione could’ve been black is just untrue. Hermione’s race has no effect on the story and therefore it doesn’t matter that in Cursed Child the actress playing her was African American, but if Hermione was black, why wasn’t she described in the same way that Kingsley Shacklebolt, Blaise Zabini, and other black characters were explicitly described?

Overall, I feel that if you want to take what Rowling says and tweets as canon, go for it. If you don’t and want to stick to the original books as canon and nothing else, go for it. The world of Harry Potter is so magical and we should let it stay as that and whatever we want it to be, it can be. However, if Rowling ever comes out and says that Voldemort is completely based off of Donald Trump, it’s definitely canon.