Ok like I think people are forgetting something very important about JKR.
Namely, she did not make up this stuff after the fact.
Back in the day, JKR was extremely open about the fact that there was tons of lore behind the scenes she could not address in the books.
She couldn’t address it, btw, because it was a known fact in the publishing industry that young adult novels had to top out at like 250, maybe 300 pages because kids didn’t have the attention span for anything longer. And early HP was middle grade, which is the next age category down.
She was only able to start addressing deeper lore halfway through the series because that’s how long it took to convince her publishers it wouldn’t scare readers away.
(I distinctly remember another, long-established children’s fantasy author dedicating a book to JKR because the success of HP was the reason said author was able to negotiate an extra 100 pages into that novel.)
In the mean time, she was in a ton of interviews. She was absolutely the most open author about her worldbuilding. If a fan asked her a question and the answer wasn’t a spoiler, she answered it every time.
JKR was famous for this. She was worshipped for it practically. I remember on the early internet boards, when one fan had the chance to meet her in a Q&A we would all pile together and come up with as many questions as possible. Ask what year Beauxbatons was founded. Ask who the ghost of Hufflepuff is. Ask McGonagall’s age. Ask Lily’s maiden name. Were all the Marauders in Gryffindor? Which of Gilderoy Lockheart’s stories were stolen and which were flat out made up?
We collected these interviews, we held them as canon, we altered our fanfic to accommodate what she revealed.
And then, all of a sudden, that wasn’t what the fans wanted any more.
When she finished HP, she said she was done, that she’d move on to other projects. No one wanted any of her non-HP stuff. No one cared. So she came back to build the Fantastic Beasts verse, with exactly the same policy about answering fans that we had welcomed back in the early 2000s.
So, like, you don’t have to enjoy what she’s doing. The fan community has changed, and that’s fine. But JKR contributed a lot to the children’s fantasy genre and to the way fandom operated, and we should at least acknowledge that.
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