Harry Potter: J.K. Rowling’s ever-expanding wizarding world

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald continues the Harry Potter prequel saga introduced in the first Fantastic Beasts movie, and if you’ve seen the film, you already know that it’s a pretty intense installment. The keeper of the keys to the wizarding kingdom, J.K. Rowling, has not only ramped up the threat from evil Aryan wizard Gellert Grindelwald, but she’s thrown longtime fans of the series for a loop by suggesting a brand-new fact about one of the world’s most well-known characters, Albus Dumbledore.

Is it true? And if so, what does it mean, if anything, for the three planned films that remain in the Fantastic Beasts series? We’ve got answers and more below — but be warned, spoilers follow.

For the generation who grew up with Harry Potter, part of the joy of J.K. Rowling’s seven-book saga was getting to age with the characters.

I was 8 when Sorcerer’s Stone came out in the US 20 years ago, and I was in college when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in 2007. Rowling’s characters were with me for every milestone of my childhood and adolescence — so when Rowling began to publish novels for adults in 2012, when I was 23, I was delighted. I could experience adulthood with Rowling’s characters the way I had experienced adolescence. It felt like fate.

When I was 9 years old, the greatest day of the school year was the day of the Scholastic Book Fair.

Scholastic would set up shop in the school library, piling stack after stack of shiny new books on the tables. They gleamed against the library’s familiar collection of shabby older books, and I would wade into the feast and glut myself.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, on September 1, 1998, Scholastic published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first US edition of the UK’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Harry Potter has since became such an all-encompassing phenomenon that from this vantage point, it’s hard to see the full scope what it accomplished: It feels as though publishing and fandom and children’s literature and all of pop culture have always been the way we know them today. But Harry Potter changed the world.

When Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone came out in the United States 20 years ago, it changed the way we thought about children’s books. Under Harry’s influence, kids’ books got longer. They got more prestigious. They became culturally inescapable. And for a generation of writers, the Harry Potter books became foundational texts, ones to refer to again and again to figure out what their next book should look like.

Vox spoke to seven writers via email about their memories of growing up on Harry Potter, and how the books influenced their own writing. In their own words, here’s how Harry Potter changed the next generation of writers.

So what if you didn’t grow up immersed in the wizarding world of Harry Potter?

For plenty of Americans — especially millennials, who were children when the books first came to the US — that’s an almost unimaginable hypothetical. The books shaped the imagination of millions of children, who flocked to midnight release parties, dressed as Harry and Hermione and Ron for Halloween, watched the movies, and even now frame their understanding of real-world political events in terms of Hogwarts and He Who Must Not Be Named.

My 7-year-old daughter went to Hogwarts a few weeks ago. Not, of course, the fictional school for witches and wizards located in some remote corner of Scotland. Not even one of the dedicated theme parks found in Florida, California, and Japan. Her Hogwarts was just down the street from her house, in the basement of a church hosting a week-long Harry Potter-themed theater camp.

The week culminated in the staging of an original play set in the world of Harry Potter, created and acted by campers ages 7 to 12. It was hard to miss the animating spirit of the play: These kids, given a spectrum of more recent fan choices ranging from Hamilton to superhero-themed camps, chose to step into the Harry Potter universe for a week.

For Harry Potter fans, identifying yourself as part of a specific Hogwarts house is a debate that never ends, such is everyone’s loyalty to Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, or Ravenclaw. J.K. Rowling did her level best to help settle matters by writing an in-depth Sorting personality quiz for Pottermore, her official Harry Potter website where she drops sporadic updates to her perpetually unfurling wizarding world.

But the far less contentious version of the Sorting has always been the question of one’s Patronus, or the phosphorescent creature that springs out of a wand when a witch is fighting off a Dementor, a hooded ghoul that’s basically misery incarnate.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has an impossible task.

A continuation of J.K. Rowling’s best-selling seven-volume saga about a boy wizard, Cursed Child doesn’t even have the luxury of being a full book, let alone a 700-page doorstopper like the later volumes in the series.

Ilvermorny is the latest magical school of witchcraft and wizardry to be revealed as part of J.K. Rowling’s ever-growing Harry Potter universe. The existence of a new school was first announced earlier this year, when Rowling expanded her sprawling wizarding world to North America in preparation for the upcoming New York–set Harry Potter spinoff film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Now, in her latest Pottermore write-up, Rowling released new details about the school’s history — including its official location — and unveiled the names and characteristics of its four houses.

A children’s hospital in Bristol found itself faced with a magical mystery that had an unexpectedly bittersweet solution. And it just might be your feel-good moment of the week.

The BBC reports that in November of 2014, a plaque mysteriously appeared outside of a children’s hospital in Bristol, with the following legend:

At Sunday’s MTV Movie Awards, Harry Potter fans were treated to the second trailer for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, due out November 18. The new trailer unveils the magic of the film’s CGI’d vintage Manhattan, and the magic of Potter author — and now screenplay writer — J.K. Rowling. Rowling, who advised on but never wrote any of the previous screen adaptations of her wizarding universe, is penning the planned film trilogy alongside longtime Potter director David Yates.

A prequel series set in 1920s New York City, Fantastic Beasts is starting to feel like a world we’d like to spend more than a few hours in — much like our hero Newt Scamander, who finds himself stuck in the city on a madcap adventure. (In case you missed it, you can watch the first trailer here.)

Almost 10 years after the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling’s seminal series, the author is still building out her expansive world of witches, wizards, and Muggles — or, as nonmagical people are apparently known in the United States, “No-Majs.” (The less said about that clunky term, the better.)

On March 8, Rowling released yet another update on Pottermore — her official Harry Potter website — that opens up her wizarding world to North America. In fact, Rowling will publish a new installment of her History of Magic in North America each day for the rest of this week, at 9 am Eastern.

Now that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has a new teaser trailer, it is officially no longer a Harry Potter fandom-induced fever dream. This thing is real, it stars Eddie Redmayne and Colin Farrell, and it’s coming to a theater near you in November 2016.

The latest entry in the Harry Potter movie universe is neither a spinoff nor a prequel, really. As fans are well aware, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was the title of one of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts textbooks, written by warlock and famous animal enthusiast Newt Scamander. J.K. Rowling later wrote the book for real, populating it with the many magical beasts she had already created within the Harry Potter world; she released it in 2001 to raise money for British charity Comic Relief.

This year’s 18-year-old college freshmen have never known a world without color photos on the front page of the New York Times, The Lion King on Broadway, or “super glue” in surgical operating rooms.

If you think these are fascinating, illuminating facts that suddenly make young people understandable, the Beloit College Mindset List is for you. If you think this is a weird way to define a generation, let alone explain young adults to their elders, you’re right.

A lot comes to mind when you think of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: Harvard Law School professor, possible future candidate for US president, champion for accountability in the financial industry. And now, Moaning Myrtle from the Harry Potter book series by J. K. Rowling:

Rowling revealed on Monday that her ghostly character Myrtle has a middle name: Elizabeth. Her full name is Myrtle Elizabeth Warren. Rowling wrote that Elizabeth is a “good middle name of the period” and has no explicit connection to the senator:

Look. Draco Malfoy is a Slytherin. He just is.

You know that. I know that. Everybody does. He’s a Slytherin.

JK Rowling, writer of the ever-popular, beloved fantasy series Harry Potter, took to Twitter Tuesday night seemingly unprompted to answer some questions from her fans. There was no formal announcement that Rowling would take questions or any explanation as to how she chose them.

Here are some of the best things she said:

“There are celebrities,” the story begins, “and then there are celebrities.” The story takes place at the Quidditch World Cup (which is conveniently timed with the real World Cup in Brazil) where the three most famous wizards—Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley—have arrived “no longer the fresh-faced teenagers they were in their heyday.”

Harry, we learn, is still called “the Chosen One” by the wizarding world because of his dual encounters with the dark lord Voldemort: the first as a baby, and the last in the final battle of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He is 34, starting to go gray, and still wearing the same rounded glasses of his youth. He brings his two sons, James and Albus, to visit the players and their mother, who is reporting on the matches.