And Albus and Scorpius do go for it, with all the awkwardness you’d expect from two English lads. To be fair to the fans, Albus and Scorpius’s friendship in this story does seem to have a different inflection this time: they are intensely codependent and their intimacy is at one point compared to the doomed romance between Severus Snape and Lily Potter. When it was published, the script sent fans into a frenzy of discussion online. Daily Dot writer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, rather more bluntly, tweeted an alternative title: Believers have affectionately (or defiantly?) dubbed the couple “Scorbus”, while a piece on Tor.com was rather more cautious: “I’m all for depictions of strong friendships that define people, but Albus and Scorpius don’t read like Harry and Ron,” wrote Emily Asher-Perrin. Harry Potter and the Curse of Heteronomativity- Gavia Baker-Whitelaw August 1, 2016Īs someone who is not part of fan fiction communities myself, it is a little hard to find a way into this argument. But speaking to some in fandom, it seems people are holding Rowling personally accountable for the lack of romance because she has engaged with fan theories in the past. She has even retrospectively confirmed some – including Harry’s son Albus being sorted into Slytherin, and his becoming friends with Scorpius. Since Rowling outed Albus Dumbledore as a gay man – retrospectively, once the books were finished and the character dead – readers have been impatient to see a gay character introduced in Harry Potter’s world.
Some Scorbus got in well ahead of the Cursed Child: there is a cornucopia of Scorbus fan fiction online, with some stories dating back to years before the play was even announced. Because of this, some commentators are suspicious that the appetite for a Scorbus romance was not unknown to those catering to it. “It’s queerbaiting because they knew exactly who they were reeling in and why, but still decided to leave out the main attraction for all the fans they hooked, choosing instead, like so many others, to set up the gay romance, hint at it constantly, make it believable and deep and perfect, and then force it out of the story.” “The writers of the Cursed Child intentionally included this fan theory to draw us in, but decided to change it just enough so that they wouldn’t have to admit that they made two 11-year-olds gay,” Jameson Ortiz, an LGBTQ campaigner and Harry Potter fan, told me.