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Jude_Law_1067110610.jpg

JK Rowling Says Wizards Be Doin’ It: The Dumbest Retcon in Recent Pop Culture Memory

By Kate Hudson | Celebrity | March 17, 2019 |

By Kate Hudson | Celebrity | March 17, 2019 |

Jude_Law_1067110610.jpg

Friends, if you haven’t heard the news, JK Rowling unleashed on an unsuspecting and unprepared public that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were, at one point, passionate lovers. Ok, Joanne.

Per Uproxx (although you could probably ask your Harry Potter-obsessed niece or nephew, or your weird neighbor who ships Filch and Snape, although you may want to avoid them for obvious reasons.)

In her commentary track for the Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Blu-ray, she admitted that “there is a sexual dimension to this relationship,” adding that she was “less interested in [it].” […]

“Their relationship was incredibly intense. It was passionate, and it was a love relationship,” she said in the Blu-ray commentary, which was first picked up by the Radio Times. “But as happens in any relationship, gay or straight or whatever label we want to put on it, one never knows really what the other person is feeling. You can’t know, you can believe you know.”

So, we’ll get to this in a second, but Twitter, of course, has some great reactions.

You get the picture.

Y’all this is the dumbest retcon in recent pop culture history. It’s f*cking asinine that Rowling keeps adding in additional information to her characters in order to portray them as more reflective of the larger current cultural narrative when it’s not in the original text. If Dumbledore was always intended to be gay, then guess what? Have the guts to put that in the original text in 1997. Oh, you didn’t do that then? Ok, well, update your text now to reflect the character of who Dumbledore was always meant to be. Pull a George Lucas, it’s your book and your characters!

We all know Rowling won’t, though, because it’s one thing to write or talk about the passionate, sexual relationship of two wizards in the extended features on a Blu-ray (you know, to sell the Blu-ray) it’s another thing to actually include it in the media when you’re afraid it will affect your bottom line.

via GIPHY

(Please note that I’m irritated that I’m writing about a fictional sexual relationship between two wizards when there are real-life sexual relationships between wizards to write about. Joanne, you’re impeding on my me time. Get it together!!!)

This is the dumbest retcon in recent pop culture memory because it assumes we’re f*cking idiots who don’t see what Rowling is doing here. We see you Joanne, and we’d wish you’d stop because it’s wasting valuable brain cells that we could be devoting to wasting on other things, like looking up previous contestants on Rock of Love: Bus, and seeing where they are now (spoilers: jail, and third marriages, people.)

The larger point is, JK Rowling has a lot of money, time, and resources. She could very easily write a story about an openly gay wizard and the love affairs they conduct, but she doesn’t. That makes the entire Grindelwald/Dumbledore paring seem completely disingenuous—done for attention and not in the spirit of inclusivity or adding anything to the existing literary narrative. Also, what does she have against Jude Law? Why would you ever insinuate that he had anything to do with the walking grease smear that is Johnny Depp?

via GIPHY

Friends, that’s probably an investigation unto itself, and I hope you dig deeper but as for me, I’m done wasting any more time on this until Rowling actually tries. This now takes the top place as the dumbest pop culture retcon in recent memory. It’s even dumber than that one Lost episode about Jack’s tattoos. Yeah, I said it, and I stand by it. Get it together JK Rowling.