With Regards to the Potterverse Collection:

We are totally off the clock.

And off the map as well.

Rowling’s version of the story is officially complete. (Pay no mind to the woman behind the curtain who is attempting to retcon the series online, and gleefully butchering canon in a slew of film spin-offs.)

I say Rowling’s version, because by this time it ought to be obvious to everyone that the Harry Potter phenomenon has grown to encompass any number of rival versions that Rowling may have served as a starting point for, but has had little or no direct input upon. Fandom is like that. It’s taken Potter fandom longer to reach this point than your typical media-based fandom would have, but it has definitely reached it.

As an example; after first spending a good year and a half drafting out ever more intricate methods by which Professor Snape might have managed to survive being bitten by Nagini, it is now largely accepted that — should a fanfic author need him to show up in the course of his or her story — then, of course, he survived. And one is now less fascinated by how he did so, than in what happens next.

And, as for what Rowling has to say about who ended up paired off together; it is to laugh! That, dear reader, has devolved into a mere suggestion.

Nor is any of it likely to stop on a dime any time soon. After 15 years and counting, Potter fandom is still chugging along.

The last major General Update to the Essay Collection was whenever I last had to do another rebuild of the site. Currently that was in 2021. This latest re-org has not generated a general update, although I may have swapped out some older typos for new ones.

There probably isn’t going to be another general update any time soon. There may be additions and updates to individual essays. But the whole collection probably won’t get a full go-through.

At any rate, with the closing of the official canon, most of my game was finished. I was primarily a theorist. We no longer have a free hand to try to figure out what is going to happen in the “official” version of this series.

We still have a reasonably broad scope for trying to figure out what already has happened. As anticipated, there were a lot of loose ends dangling in the breeze at the end of the final volume of the official Harry Potter series.

We also have as wide a scope as we ever did to try to extrapolate what may have happened in the past, or what could have happened. Or how it might have happend if something had happened a little differently.

As a theorist, I was primarily concerned with attempting to sort out the patterns which appeared to be embedded in the text, as we were given it, with a view toward getting either a broader, or a more focused picture than what was immediately evident upon a casual reading (or through the eyes of Harry Potter). Most of the theories which I built in pursuit of this goal have either been exploded, or confirmed, or partially confirmed, or have been shown to have been irrelevant to the story as Rowling chose to tell it.

This does not necessarily mean that I am finished with the Potterverse. Only that any theories which I might continue to explore will probably have even less to do with those areas with which JK Rowling has concerned herself.

And it certainly does not mean that I have abandoned producing publication projects of Potter-based fanfic. Those Publication projects are what this site is all about. And there will undoubtedly be more Potter-themed graphics added as well. Those collections are definitely still active.

In the meantime, however, it seemed appropriate to reorganize the material in view of the fact that there will almost certainly be no further professionally published novels concerning the life and times of Harry Potter.

JK Rowling claims to have learned to never say never, so it is unknown whether we may or may not eventually get additional novels from her set in the Potterverse.

But it would be a bad idea to count on it..