Harry Potter After 2020

JC:  "How cool would it have been to be one of the teachers in that school, to be sitting in that game and to watch Harry Potter shoot off a fully formed Patronus?  Everybody else knows what Harry's Patronus looks like now, except for Harry. Lupin knows. Lupin is the only person in that space who knows what that stag means." For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support th...

You can't tell Harry Potter, "Don't continue to integrate your memories. Don't continue to uncover who you are and to be yourself." These are his memories; they belong to him. These are his parents that were taken from him, but he can't remember them without this agony. Okay, Lupin is here to try to give whatever advice Lupin can about how to strengthen yourself so that you can go in and be reunit...

Why is there this broom? Why is it so suspicious, even though it turns out to be fine? What passions have all come together in this wildly ostentatious, inappropriate, mysterious, dangerous gift replacing a gift that was already in itself inappropriate and ostentatious from two years ago? This child of destiny with the only two people in the world he can trust, and now one of them has just turned...

"Harry gets to ask Lupin, somebody who knows what this is like, "Why is this happening to me?" and Lupin gets to tell him straight out, "There are horrors in your past that the others don't have." This is a really good thing that Dumbledore did, to bring Lupin in. The larger theme of this book being time travel and being haunted by the past, this is not only Lupin being good for Harry the characte...

What we're seeing is the origin of Harry's 'saving people thing'; this is what Voldemort did to him to change him from being a baby to somebody who is scarred for life. This tiny baby felt he had to help his mother. And yet, Harry having this flashback… it's also restoring some of his own story and his own mother to him -- which makes it so conflicted and so bittersweet. For full show notes, trans...

For Snape to walk in, look at this kid and Lupin, be wary, deposit this tricky potion and then back out… We're not imagining that the author wrote secrets into that scene -- secrets in history and suspicion, and everybody having agendas that nobody else knows about. Also, how very wrong every character is about something in the end, and they don't all learn that about each other, either. For full...

JC:  If you think about Neville in this chapter… We get two lessons in a row on how to bully people. Snape has just given a masterclass on how to be cruel to a person who is powerless, and then Lupin gives a class on how to respond to that with more bullying. The kids are learning that here's how adults do it. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and mor...

"These divination methods are real subjects. There are things that you and I as Muggles know about, like scrying and tea reading and tarot cards. These are things with a human history and meaning, and even learning what they are and what they have meant to people over the ages, that is a thing that is worth studying; she can provide that even if she doesn't have the Sight most of the time." For fu...

We know what it is, how draining it is because of dementors, to be reminded of the worst memories of your life, and that, I think, does give kid readers a boost in understanding what trauma flashbacks are: that the memory you relive during a flashback is experienced by your body and mind as happening again for real in real time.  full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support t...

JC: "There's also an interesting moment when Harry comes back to the Leaky Cauldron after spending a day out in Diagon Alley where he can both hear people talking in Diagon Alley and hear the traffic on Charing Cross Road at the same time from his room." For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and more, visit  hpafter2020.com .

JC:  "Even if he can't go back to Hogwarts, even if he can't really be part of the Wizarding world, he still has this magic and he knows how to use it and he can use it in his life. It makes me think about maybe queer folks, or people who've been rejected by their family for a variety of reasons. Your family can reject you, society can reject you, but they cannot take away who you are on the insid...

LK:  "This may be the most intensely fatphobic chapter of the series. It's also full of scapegoating, corporal punishment, eugenics, dehumanization: themes that get darker in the series starting with Book Three." JC:  "Wow, what does it take for me to feel sorry for Petunia? Yeah." For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and more, visit hpafter2020.com .

MinaLima are the graphic design house that made all of the props for all of the movies. Eduardo Lima is gay, and they have extremely not-subtle Pride decorations in the House of MinaLima flagship store every June. And they also have these buttons, and they show an owl -- a barn owl, not a particular character in any fantasy series about a small wizard or anything like that. Just a barn owl flying...

"I love that idea that it's the choices that we make that are the most important rather than the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Just because -- under the circumstances you were born -- you were assigned a particular gender, doesn't mean that that's how you have to stay. You can make a choice to live your life the way that's going to be fulfilling to you."  -JC For full show notes, trans...

Now he knows, "there's somebody that was at least as powerful as me. I have to meet this person." The diary he originally wrote -- with the stated intention of just trying to kill the people he despises -- now has changed to a deeper yearning for somebody to talk to that might understand him so that he might not be alone.  For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the...

The conditions do not have to be reproduced. It does not have to be a snake in front of you. What has to be reproduced is the person's magical state of mind. That's what's real. That's why, when you read a book of fiction, it changes you, even though you haven't been through the adventures that you've read about. This is why visualizations work.   For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact...

"At Malfoy's last words, Ron had leapt off the stool, and in the scramble to collect bags and books, his attempts to reach Malfoy went unnoticed." This is, I think, the only time in history that Snape ever doesn't notice a Gryffindor trying to hit a Slytherin. And yet, Draco has said this very loud, audible thing and then Ron is trying to hit him, and somehow Snape's attention is accidentally else...

The scapegoating:  the timing of Rowling's anti-trans campaign when it really hit full speed -- when she published the manifesto about gender on her website -- was during June 2020, during the time of the COVID pandemic and also the global Black Lives Matter protest movement against police violence that's racially motivated. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support th...

LK:  "Harry cannot resist the diary. This is our first sign of two horcruxes wanting to join each other because bits of soul, by nature, want to re-merge." JC: "Expelliarmus is used to take a weapon away, so the implication that the book is a weapon and no one really realizes it yet is very interesting, too." -Ep. 2.13 For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show...

"Harry comes out of the bathroom stall and he looks at himself in the cracked mirror. This is the difficulty with which you look at your enemy. What would it be like to look in the mirror and see this person instead from that different perspective? This is the same cracked mirror that Harry and Draco see each other in in Sectumsempra. Same bathroom, same cracked mirror." - Ep. 2.12 For full show n...

Now that Snape has Harry and Draco practice Expelliarmus against each other -- the people that they hate the most -- those boys are going to eventually go on to use this spell to bring down, each of them, one of the most powerful wizards of the century. In both cases, it's going to be Draco's wand against the Elder Wand. Both Harry and Draco have been taught by the same person, and the wands consi...

"There's this madman… this madman's coming at me!" His arm is shattered, it's hanging by his side. He's been drenched, he's got this intense look on his face. That must have scared the crap out of Draco. - JC, Ep. 2.10 For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and more, visit  hpafter2020.com .

"During the time of the Four Founders, there was an overriding real danger, which is that non-magical people were killing witches and wizards. That's what you want to be fighting, but Slytherin took it to in-fighting, had a blow-up with his three partners, took it out against them and decided that he was going to focus on killing Muggle-born students who are in Hogwarts. Is that really going to do...

"You have to go to school and sit next to a kid whose family is trying to make sure that something really, really bad happens to your family; if you get hurt or killed in that process, they like it. That's their aim, because they somehow think that if people know that bad things like that can happen, then they'll just go away." - Ep. 2.8 For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts...

"We've seen multiple teachers having to deal with Lockhart. They've all just gritted their teeth and sucked it up and they've maybe said something subtle, but no one has confronted him, which says something about who he's being protected by." -JC, Ep. 2.7 For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and more, visit  hpafter2020.com .