Weeks after Pottermore laid off most of its writing team, the website has unveiled their next stab at staying hip and relevant: A forum.
The new Pottermore is completely scrapping its current iteration, and will instead rely on the fans to keep J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter website afloat. The new website is called Pottermorum (Pottermore + Forum), and we can already tell its going to be problematic.
Like Pottermore, Pottermorum’s potential is being held up by red tape. As you can see in Hypable’s exclusive first look (above), the forum is only allowing theories, news, listicles, and fan-fiction that J.K. Rowling’s team personally believes to be good for the #franchise’s #brand. Several of the forums are being labeled with an “Officially Sanctioned” preface to remind readers that at the end of the day, your whacky head canon doesn’t mean shit.
Sources tell us topics including Harry/Hermione (the ship), Snape being a good guy, or Dumbledore still being alive will be immediately deleted from the Theories forum. Other no-no’s include writing about what dirty things fans would do to Jude Law’s Dumbledore, and any references to the beloved fan-fiction My Immortal.
The “Officially Sanctioned News” Forum will only have good news about the franchise. And taking a page from BuzzFeed, the “Officially Sanctioned Controversies” Forum will mostly consist of threads about how “People On Twitter Can’t Believe [insert random observation here]”.
Playing off the site’s “Pottermore” (“More Potter”) name, the forum will also welcome fan-fiction to further open up the Wizarding World. However, keeping with guidelines set by The Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts 2, no LGBTQ+ romances will be permitted.
That said, Pottermorum has buckled to fan pressure in at least one regard: Johnny Depp. One area of the forum will be exclusively dedicated to complaining about how ugly and terrible the Grindelwald actor is. Pottermorum will even allow fans to suggest who would be a way better Grindelwald, but fans must acknowledge in the Terms of Service agreement that WB is never, ever replacing Depp.
Elsewhere, a Lavender Brown forum will let fans discuss whether or not she’s dead or alive. The question has floated through fandom ever since Pottermore themselves wrote that she was “presumed dead.” Since Pottermore has been unable to get J.K. Rowling to definitively answer the question for her own website, the managers who got themselves into this mess decided it’d be easier to let fans endlessly argue about it.
Finally, the old Pottermore quizzes have been scrapped. Taking their place is a new forum where Pottermore mods will tell you via Private Message what Hogwarts and Ilvermorny Houses you are in, as well as which Patronus and wand you have. At least one source says that the quiz will be as baseless as the site’s original tests.
Pottermorum doesn’t seem to solve many of the problems that fans had with the various iterations of Pottermore, but no one should be surprised.
April Fools!
Related: The problem with Pottermore: How the platform failed to keep up with fandom