J.K. Rowling’s endless tinkering with the canon of her brain-bustingly successful Harry Potter franchise has run the gamut over the years, from the benignly irritating (Ron Weasley’s Patronus is a Jack Russell terrier, in case anyone actually cared) to feeling like a somewhat cowardly attempt to have her cake and eat it, too, in regards to the series’ often invisible approaches to representation—i.e., anything to do with the fact that Dumbledore is gay, a fact you’d never know simply from reading the books (or even watching movies that are actively about his brewing conflict with his Johnny Depp-played ex).
Still, there’s a pretty massive gap between “Hey, here’s Neville Longbottom’s birthday, fans!” and the revelation that Rowling’s Pottermore site made today, when it decided, for reasons unknown to either man or magic, to announce that wizards used to just shit on the floor, like dogs.
And okay: If we really try, we can kind of see Rowling’s point here. After all, if all of humanity had had the ability to use literal magic to make anything they didn’t want disappear, then the whole elaborate story of human waste disposal—from the outdoor commodes of Pakistan, 2800 BC, to the pig toilets of ancient China, to the garderobes and thunderboxes of early British sanitation, all the way to the modern, humble crapper—might have been very different. But it still doesn’t make it any less insane that a) our beloved characters’ great-grandparents were running around making horse apples in the Room of Requirement, or b) that Rowling decided this was something that everybody in her fanbase needed to know.
But hey, given how much the author likes to go digging around in the backstory of her franchise, scooping out ever-more ancient wizards and witches on which to base implausibly successful movie franchises upon, we still can’t wait to get to these riveting scenes from Fantastic Beasts And What They Stepped In:
Dumbledore’s Dad, Probably: But you see, Bingles, if we don’t obtain all four Emeritus Orbs, it seems inevitable that *hrrrrrrrrrrrrnng* Murdorthrax the Dark Magus will destroy all of Wizarding England!
Bingles McHoobastank: But what of the Minotaur Convention? Won’t they *ahhhhh* protest once they realize we intend to break the sanctions on *ahh* gremlin smuggling amongst the doogins?
Grubbins Chumsteak, Gnome Warlock: Uhh, little help down here, guys?
Dumbledore’s Dad, Probably: Oh, sorry, Grubbins. Shittus Reductus!
Bingles McHoobastank: Pisso Mojado!
Grubbins Chumsteak, Gnome Warlock: Whoo, thanks, guys! I can finally breath again. *splat*
Riveting, canonical stuff.
179 Comments
…witches and wizards simply relieved
themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence
That’s also why there’s no MeToo movement in their world.
Fetus Abortus is a 3rd year spell
In lieu of sex ed.
It’s Fetus DeLEEtus, not Fetus DeleTUS.
I thought the Chamber of Secrets was where they kept their poop.
The Room of Requirements wasn’t used for people’s stuff initially.
Then I’m glad they set it on fire.
Only cause you couldn’t smell it.
Actually when Harry’s great-great uncle forgot the poop-disappearing spell, his poop just sat there, eventually becoming known affectionately as the Philosopher’s Stone (or Sorcerer’s Stone, in the USA.)
Nah, you’re thinking of the Chamber Pot of Secrets.
At least no one pooped in the Sorting Hat
That’s the Chamber of Secretions.
No, that’s where the ghosts go to smoke.
It reads more like they don’t even do that, they simply stop and either pee or poo right in their clothes and magic the pee/poo away and magic their clothes clean
Meanwhile Rowling continues the tradition of shitting over her own franchises.
Alas, she cannot magic this shit away like her wizards did.
The real question now is how did the Ministry of Magic convene before they had toilets that lead to the government buildings.
Duh medieval phone booths obviously.
Compared to majestic, open-air Hogwarts, the actual civic capital of the Wizarding World being a giant basement under London was such a letdown. As with much of Year 5, it augured the franchise’s swift and steep decline.
Have you ever been in a bureaucratic building before tho
Disapparating up their own arseholes, one assumes.
I’m counting two “fucks” and two “shits” in today’s AV Club headlines. That’s either a little too much or not nearly enough.
On the one hand… but on the other hand.
– A.V. Club
I mean, it worked for Versailles.
Why didn’t they just magically get rid of the waste before it exited the body? Why did they have to make a mess in their pants or on the floor first?
Now you know why you never see anyone on Star Trek go to the bathroom: they just beam the contents of their bowels and bladders directly into space.
I don’t remember who, but someone proposed that idea for an ep of TOS where Scotty uses the transporter to cheat in a pie eating contest. It uhh… doesn’t end well for him.
It was an episode of Breaking Bad, and it was Badger’s spec script and it was hilarious. https://youtu.be/GSmbOBh9PEY
And that’s why you can’t just be beaming the contents of people’s innards around all willy-nilly!
YESSSSSSSSS! THANK YOU!!!
Well….that explains the Klingons…..
Okay, but why did no one on Dragnet ever go to the bathroom?
Okay, but why did no one on Dragnet ever go to the bathroom?
I remember once, about the time “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” came out, somebody interviewing some of the cast members mentioned that the “official” blueprints of the Enterprise showed no toilets, and someone, I think Shatner, (appropriately enough) said “We just go in the corner and use the phasers on it”.
Nah… that’s matter that can be un-replicated and replicated back into other things… like food!
But what if it lands on a pre-warp civilization? Would it violate the Prime Directive?
Not if Capt. Kirk does it.Also, there’s no need to reconstitute it. Just send it out as energy, whizzing (heh) through space at the speed of light.It’s also a fun prank to play on other starships:“Captain, I’ve detected a transporter signal of unknown origin.”“Transporter Room, can you intercept that signal?”“Aye, sir, it’s coming in now, and… aw, not again!”
What if that’s the origins of Horta? I mean transporter malfunctions have been known to do some strange things after all.
For fun.
It’s a power move. There’s no greater way to indicate to someone how monumentally bored you are by them then to shit on the floor right in front of them while they’re talking, then casually magic it away.
I do the same, minus the magic. I’m a boss.
That’s literally what higher ups would do in feudal Japan. Take a shit anywhere, and a peasant would clean it up.
Because taking a big dump is one of life’s pleasures.
Why didthey have to make… Bragging, as usual. But of course, getting rid of the explosive diarrhea all over the place, and the smell would require some advanced magic. So they would go, “wow, see that shit!?”, and “yo, da-daa, all gone!”What I’m curious about is how do they get rid of the brown marks. Does magically wiping one’s ass feel more like paper or bidet?
The mess is taken care of by the pets. “Wipe, Scabbers, wipe!”
And how do the wizards eat and breathe and other science facts?!?!?!
Unsurprisingly, a few years ago when Rowling first revealed this nonsense it became the subject of one of the most quotable Tumblr threads of all time. It may have actually marked the moment when Tumblr as a whole decided they were fucking done with Harry Potter.
Highlight:
Just imagine you’re taking a test for potions with Snape and the guy
sitting next to you just fucking shits himself the nastiest, slimiest
shit of his life out of stress. And you literally have to sit there with
a straight face while fuckin Todd JingleJangles cleans himself up in
the dead quiet room with some stupid ass line like “vanish me poopum”
and you just gotta live with the knowledge that some kid just shit
himself beside you during a fucking test.
This whole thing is beyond hilarious, but I am losing my mind over the tidbit about group masturbation sessions in lieu of sex ed classes. What the actual fuck JK!
It was parody on Collegehumor. Rowling debunked that particular one a while ago. https://www.bustle.com/p/college-humors-fake-jk-rowling-tweet-accidentally-made-it-into-one-of-the-new-philosophers-stone-books-6746150
Honestly that’s a relief, but it’s still just too plausible considering all the other nonsense that JK insists on making canon.
I am going to believe those tweets were Photoshopped, and I will defiantly believe this in the face of any evidence to the contrary that anyone can show me.
The group masturbation tweet. The Goldstein is a Jew tweet. The Flitwick + Sprout tweet. They were all fakes.
The goldstein one is real, actually https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/544946669448867841?lang=en
The Goldstein tweet is real, sorry.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/544946669448867841?lang=en
This is great
It’s a fake tweet from a CollegeHumor article:http://www.collegehumor.com/post/7020700/jk-rowling-knows-way-too-much-about-her-characters
it’s just to troll websites and social media in general
Thanks to JK Rowling we are seeing live the George Lucas 1983-1999 transformation
What what what??? When did she say this? WTF? Ha ha ha ha ha
+1 Minerva McGonagall presenting nipples
You beat me to this. I’m not even a Harry Potter fan and I’ve seen this post I don’t know how many times on my Tumblr feed.
The heck is a Tumblr??
Evanesco stercorum!With the aid of a Harry Potter spell wiki and an English/Latin translator, that, as far as I can tell, is the literal spell to vanish shit.
Worst. Italian. Evanescence. Cover. Band. Ever.
Autocorrect wand to wang, and it is a slightly different magical story indeed.
JK rowling is single-handedly killing HP with her over-sharing, and I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not.
That is hilarious. I’m not a Potter fan, but my wife is, so I’ve seen all the movies. This makes them more entertaining to me.
https://www.clickhole.com/big-step-backward-j-k-rowling-has-revealed-that-demen-1825334988Yeah, that’s gross, but this one was the last straw for me.
You do know that’s satire right? It’s not good but it’s comedy.
Satire or not, she shouldn’t say that about Italians.
I still maintain that this nonsense is Rowling’s way of getting everyone to read Roland Barthes.
The Forbidden Forest is where all the poop ended up at Hogwarts
It has to go somewhere. Shit can neither be created nor destroyed. We are all made of shitdust. It’s science!
How drunk are you, Lahey?
Explains how pissed the centaurs are.
hey it’s almost like she’s a shitty kid’s writer from the 90s who pulled a bunch of crap out of her ass and got INSANELY lucky. You think she’d realize this and exhibit a shred of humility once in a while?
I love that Rowling keeps shitting on her franchise. This material is as good as the Hogwarts masturbation clubs.
The masturbation club thing was fake though. It was a college humor photoshop joke
I’ll be back in those olden days, the D students were employed as janitors who’s only job was to clean up everyone elses poop. It’s probably the only spells they could cast.
I figured it was the Huffelpuffs job…most of the cool stuff seems to be done by a Gryffindor or a Slytherine with an occasional Ravenclaw.
Fucking wizards, man. They’re the hobos of fantasy literature.
When I heard they were going to have Radagast in the films, as a fan of the books I thought to myself, “He better look like he smells like a wet sock with a turd inside”.
Nailed it.
My guess is that she probably knows that fandoms come up with weird stuff like this anyway so she might as well get ahead of it and do it herself.
Puts a new spin on the Ravenclaw common room entrance question: “where do vanish objects go?”“Into nonbeing, which is to say, everything. And into a cloud of centuries old piss and shit.”
Well, at least I have something in common with wizards.
Wherever they stood.WHEREVER THEY STOOD.She can’t even imagine that they’d at least have designated corners, or little nooks for a modicum of privacy. Nah, wherever is fine. It’s family friendly!
I’m impressed they do it standing up. Generally you at least need to squat
Curb and the already much-missed Marty Funkhouser have already considered the possibility:
Oh don’t get that Squatty Potty guy started! He creeps me out and I can’t think of soft serve ice cream with thinking “unicorn feces”!
Wouldn’t it be simpler to simply magic away the waste before expelling it? Teleport it out of your bladder/colon into the Sun, or whatever.
Ummmmm, Ron’s Jack Russell is straight up in the books, squib.
It’s like she spends her vast resources coming up with increasingly dumber things to say about her books.There’s a thing called quitting while you’re ahead, Jo.
It’s actually a genius scheme to get fans to leave her the fuck alone, and stop listening to her about Potter.
If that’s her plan she should probably stop making movies.
Every once in a while, I put on my tin foil hat and am convinced she is intentionally trolling the fanbase because she hates how much Potter has defined her life.
Why wait til the poop came out?
I assume they have to wait for it to come out due to biology. If you don’t use a muscle, it will atrophy. Can you imagine your bowels not being strong enough to push through a poop? Backed up for daaaaayyyyys! Plus it’s probably painful.
You can’t make this stuff up. Oh, wait…I guess you can.
I think she needs a hobby.
dogs don’t do that if you raise them properly.
STFU, JK Rowling.
It’s like George Lucas moved to Scotland and put on a dress!
Slytherin probably rejects such muggle innovations. I’ll bet that’s why Hogwarts located their dorms where it did.
My tilting at windmills thing: trying to correct the prevailing sentiment on the Internet that Rowling randomly revealed Dumbledore was gay as an attempt to get attention or plaudits. She was directly ASKED during a Q&A publicity tour for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. There was nothing random about it.
Most of the other representational things that she’s accused of only doing by Tweet seem equally silly to me. I’ve seen her Tweet supporting Noma Dumezweni get claimed to be her retroactively trying to claim Hermione was intended to be PoC. Her Tweets confirming that fans of all ethnicities can imagine themselves in Hogwarts without breaking canon gets similarly twisted as her looking for brownie points, even though the books really do contain students from a whole range of ethnic backgrounds.
Yeah she’s a paragon and a genius.
Yeah. I think some of her innocuous comments have gotten mixed up with the ongoing pointlessness of Pottermore. Unless she’s said more in the intervening years, I distinctly remember her statement about Hermione and it was far less “Hermione is black,” and more “the character isn’t described as white, so she can be whatever you want.” I don’t see a problem there.
The Dumbledore issue though… I can understand her answering a question about it, though maybe it would have been best to leave the issue open rather than providing a definitive answer (since the books and movies will apparently never address it except in the most subliminal ways). However, it does feel in the years since that she’s doubled and tripled down on that as an official and canonical part of his character, which is annoying.
looking for brownie pointsErm, phrasing…
When the Dumbledore thing came out, I did remember reading his obituary in book seven and feeling like his “old friend” who wrote it wasn’t telling us something fairly important about precisely how close they were.
I really thought that vanishing and other standard transfiguration spells would ordinarily only last a limited amount of time – like, a few hours to a few days. That makes the logistics of this revelation even more odd; everyone would just be constantly vanishing ever-larger mountains of poop so they wouldn’t have to smell their own turds for a little while longer.
However, I can’t find an official source saying transfiguration is temporary, so in retrospect I think this might just be something I convinced myself of while reading the books as a child, to reassure myself they weren’t essentially killing animals in their Transfiguration classes. Like I remember being really worried about them spending half their year in one book learning how to vanish mice and kittens and shit. I’d sorta figured that the other animals they turned into inanimate objects got changed back after, but this really threw a wrench in that – you can’t change back something that no longer exists.
Never, ever consider the logical implications of anything you learn about the Wizarding World(TM), or the whole thing falls to pieces.
This is good advice that I should’ve learned as soon as I found out how many points catching the snitch was worth.
You put a modicum of thought to it.Thats more than Rowling has ever done.
But what about the smell! You haven’t though about the smell, you bitch!
Yeah, I feel like the smell of an ever-growing turd mountain would be even worse than the smell of a collection of skin luggage.
Wormtail stayed in rat form for a good decade, though.
The way I had it figured was that transfiguration could be maintained, but that if you just changed a match into a needle, wandered off, and never thought about it again it’d switch back to a match eventually. Since Animagi were transforming themselves and they didn’t even need a wand to do it, I just thought they were able to maintain the transfiguration the same way.Apparently this was totally wrong, although I’m actually now more confused. If transfiguration is permanent, why do people bother buying things? Like you’d think at least plain non-magical items could be transfigured out of sticks and pebbles and whatever else might be lying around.
Remember, in British English an elevator is a lift, a truck is a lorry, and George Lucas is J.K. Rowling.
That woman is an idiot. If you can make shit disappear in the snap of a finger, you would never, ever adopt plumbing of any sort for that purpose. They’d still be taking a dump on the floor.On a side note, just imagine how many times someone said, “Hang on, I have shit to do.” Or, “I’ll be in the corner, I need to take a leak.”
Good lord, JK Rowling is speed running George Lucas’ career. Lucas at least had the good sense to allow his work to age into the public consciousness as a cult classic, before destroying his own legacy.Rowling seems to just be willing to add this minutiae to just about anything despite there being absolutely no reason for anyone to know this.
The first Harry Potter book is now 22 years old, the same timespan between A New Hope and Phantom Menace.
And Lucas began with the 20th anniversary editions.
Well, so then she’s not speedrunning, she’s just reenacting.
That fucked up my brain
Well, at least you can live under a rock and read her books unchanged from their original form and without any knowledge of what she’s said. Good luck trying to get blu-rays of the original Star Wars trilogy without dumb Special Edition stuff added into them.
Someone needs to pull her aside and explain how every time she opens her mouth regarding the Harry Potter franchise, she’s simply adding more fuel to the “she stole the work of others when she was employed as an abysmal excuse for an editor and published it as her own” as she constantly demonstrates she is by no means intelligent enough to have written one successful book, let alone a whole series.
Seriously, JK Rowling, stop constantly bringing up stupid background details for your made-up universe. When it comes to pointless tinkering for something which is good enough as it is, you’re getting into George Lucas territory.
I feel we’ve gone full-on into George Lucas levels of creator ownership and tinkering. I can totally see the special editions starting up in 2021 to celebrate the 20th anniversary, complete with new special defects.
Everything she says is a joke.Se even hides the truth in plain sight.“Dunkledoor is gay – jk”“Herminone is black – jk”“Wizards shit themselves – jk”
My white trash neighbor’s kids shit on the floor, too. They must be wizards, right?
Wizards think…they’re pretty smart…
Shit on the ground…see in the dark…They wander around like a crazy dog
Make a mistake in the parking lot
Always bumping into things
Always let you down down down down…
+1 helluvaname
+20 points to Dinja-House
Did wizards shit their pants or did they not wear anything under their robes? Also did they have a special shit room or would a wizard continue a conversation and not break eye contact while they shit on the floor? I have so many questions now that I honestly don’t want answers to. Why JK did you have to throw this one out into the either? You have to be trolling Potter fans at this point…right…right? I mean she isn’t really sitting around working on the logistics of how wizards shit before plumbing right? Is that really important to canon?
They just put these out to troll websites right?
At this point I fervently believe she’s just doing this to get people to stop asking her so many questions.
That’s why they came to riding brooms. Clean it up without thinking about it.
Wait, so Dirty Potter is canon now?
That is friggin child pornography and it’s vile.
J.K. Rowling just needs to stop.
Hey, the topic probably came up at a drinking party one night at Rowling’s house, and she decided, “What the fuck, I might as well post about it.”
Who gives a literal shit about their shit? I want to read more about their masturbating habits: Where does the cum go? What is the preferred spell to get rid of cumstains from the curtains? Do they use their actual hands, or do they summon a doll or a farm animal or how do they usually prefer to proceed with their fetishes? J.K.R, enlighten me and them millions of teenagers, please!I think it is needless to say that whichever direction J.K.R is taking her magical world, Emmanuelle-the-novels will feel seriously out-dated in comparison. SPANKASSIMUS!
That’s some “fact”. What’s next? How to count the rings in unicorn horns? How to calculate the top speed of the starship Enterprise?
This doesn’t make sense canonically, doesn’t Dumbledore talk about walking into a secret room full of bedpans when he was wandering around Hogwarts and had to go to the bathroom? That was the room of requirement and why would the room of requirement know how to make a thing for muggles? To be fair I could be making this up in my head.
Makes sense that she’d be OK with the idea of shitting all over everything, because that’s exactly what she’s done to the franchise with Fantastic Beasts.
Ok, I’m gonna call BS on this. So when Hogwarts was built, one of the founders hide a monster underground. To access this monster, a student who could speak parseltongue had to talk to a sink in the girl’s bathroom. He could then send the monster through the plumbing and kill students. That is the entire plot device of an entire book/movie.This trivia doesn’t conflict with some minor detail that is in a movie and not in the books. It conflicts with an entire book.A better one would be that wizards invented plumbing 400+ years before muggles because not all the poopus disappearance spells worked properly by new wizards (and some students had interesting uses for the spell that was distracting in class). The inventor was Sylthern, who had a secondary purpose for toilets and plumbing. The monster in the chamber of secrets is still the reason why all kids, including muggle ones, are afraid of a monster coming out of the can.
So… Getting schwifty originated with Wizards?
I love that the first paragraph is entirely the product of someone who didn’t read the books.
Ron’s patronus is described in the books. If you missed it, that doesn’t mean Rowling “tinkered” with canon. Dumbledore’s sexuality was also blindingly obvious by the end of Deathly Hallows, but prior to that book, there was literally a website dedicated to explaining why he was clearly gay. So if you missed that, again, it’s not an instance of “retconning.”
I love that the people who bitch about the random trivia she occasionally drops on Twitter are the same social outcasts reposting all their virtual friends’ shitty fan-fic on Tumblr.
In 2001 I would have loved learning this trivia, and today’s 10 year old fans of HP might too. But are 2019’s kids a major part of the fanbase? The majority of her readers might have just moved on.
Witches and wizards don’t get wands until age 11…did they just wear diapers until then? Or were the diapers bewitched to vanish the poo wandlessly? And if poo-vanishing undergarments were readily available, why stop wearing them as an adult?
She frankly shouldn’t have mentioned dumbledore being gay after the fact because it came across as an effort to shoehorn in something to fit an agenda. If he was written that way organically it would have been fine, but mentioning it after the fact was weird. Let people decide for themselves if he’s gay.
So what on earth did squibs do?
Yet another reason not to regret stopping some thirty pages into the first book and never looking back.
In order to be the alpha warlock, you gotta let that shit linger there and mark your territory.
We all know how that turned out.
Its time to get schwifty in here.
So do Muggleborns just have to un-toilet train themselves? Actually, even kids from magical families, because they must have had plumbing. Unless magic parents whose kids are going to go to Hogwarts just toilet train them differently.
Didn’t read article.Just stared at cute doggie.
She truly is a tinkering, borish hack.
So like….do they carry around toilet paper or is there a wipe your ass spell?
J.K. Rowling has almost reached her final form:
What’s worse is this dumbass idea actually contradicts her canon. Chamber pots have been mentioned in the books on several occasions.
Pottymore.
This important information comes at a propitious time, as I have just started reading the first book to my son. Never read them before, never seen any of the movies, don’t know who any of these people are or what all the made-up words mean, but at least I know they used to just crap everywhere.
Hmm, reconsidering here. Mudblood is better than mudbutt…
Dogs don’t poop on the floor, they poop outside unless you’re cruel enough to not let them outside.Also, real people used to poop on the floor too (and okay, babies still do it). Versailles smells pretty gross and the guide said it’s because fancy people just used to pee and poop in the corners and then servants cleaned it up. With all the hoop skirts etc, I guess it wasn’t that noticeable or people just didn’t care.
So they just….shit on the floor. Is the cleanup spell “Schwiftus”?
When are people going to catch on that Rowling is awful?
Old wizards got Schwifty? daaaaaaaaaamn.
Why not just have magic underwear that automatically deals with piss, shit and other discharge?
I think the spell “pisso mojado” would have the opposite effect.
She really needs to shut up.
Glad I decided was over Harry Potter years ago.
It is, however, true that originally the palace of Versailles had only one toilet and everyone but the king and queen had to just crap on the floor.
I love the intricate world building JKR presents us with! So many questions we are left pondering — since this is a series about a SCHOOL where children LEARN magic, are we to suppose that in the days before toilets, children who had not yet learned this spell (which is like third or fourth year, isn’t it?) just wore diapers all the goddamn time? Or are we to believe that teachers just cleaned up after their leavings?I can see why muggleborns are modern problem, though. They absolutely said “fuck this”, left the WW behind, and went back to shitting in chamber pots (like civilized people) when they realized what a horrorshow they’d walked in on.
Hey, if you could do it at Versailles, you can do it at Hogwarts
Is there any piece of irrelevant fluff immaterial to the plot that Rowling won’t reveal?
“hey everyone remember me? i wrote harry potter. i made up something new im adding to the books story…”
Is that “McHoobastank” a reference to Hello From the Magic Tavern?
I mean, who cares, but it makes sense.
Back in the era of metal underskirts, giant puffy dresses, man-tights and heels, that’s exactly how they used to do it. Except you replace the magic bit by slaves/servants, but yeah.
Next time you visit Versailles, you’ll now know that every corner you see has been shat on by a human.
You all realize this is the way it was done around Europe at the time, esp in France.Royals and nobels would piss and poop in any convenient corner on any available floor, without even the benefit of magic spells to get rid of the poop.It was fucking disgusting, is what i’m saying, before the advent of indoor plumbing.