Scholastic

Even though it’s been nearly 10 years since the last Harry Potter book was published, there are still people who’re discovering the story about The Boy Who Lived every single day. Take this fellow, for example, who was shocked to discover that he’d been mistakenly reading Potter fan fiction instead of J.K. Rowling.

In a very funny exchange she shared on Twitter, Shelley Zhang received a number of odd texts from a friend whom she initially believed was reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the very first time. But he had a surprising question: did Dudley Dursley, Harry’s abusive, spoiled cousin, die in the books?

When Zhang asked her friend whether he wanted Dudley to die, he responded that he didn’t, but he was asking because he’d gotten to the part of the book where Dudley’s “killed, but Julia doesn’t remember” and he wanted to “make sure he’s not reading some weird fan fiction.”


A fan of the books herself, Zhang was confused and asked her friend to elaborate, which he did, reminding her of that devastating scene where Dudley’s put under the Imperius curse and made to jump off a building to his death.


As Zhang broke it to her friend that she believed he was reading fan fiction, he attempted to jog her memory about a series of other events in the text he was reading that he was certain she’d merely forgotten. You know, like when Harry and Hermione get intimate, or when Draco and Ginny Weasley “fake a rape scene” for some reason.

Thankfully, Zhang seems to have caught her friend at just the right time, before he got into the habit of telling less understanding Potterheads about how he felt about the dark turn in Order of the Phoenix. Moral of the story, folks: always, always consult multiple Wikipedia pages if you ever get the sneaking suspicion that you’ve accidentally mistaken some dark fan fiction for the real deal.