As with any continuation of a beloved series, the impossibility of anything new living up to the lightning in a bottle that was the original hangs in the air. But there are also the growing pains that come with a fandom that has, by and large, become adults — and taken the series' values on that ride with them. They have come to adopt the idea that, to quote another of the undead, “with great power comes great responsibility” — even in art. That has a way of complicating things when the new additions to the wizarding narrative don’t match up with the ideals the original Potter books helped teach the fandom to explore: not only tolerance and love, but also social progress and social justice, among other things.

Davis, originally from Oakland but currently living in Chicago, is feeling pressed over the issues of representation and appropriation that are living, breathing problems the modern Potter fandom is trying to navigate. “It’s been really interesting trying to juggle all this,” she said. “Especially when I’m re-reading the books and still getting so much out of those.” Fans' worries crop up not only with major new additions like the play and the movies, but also with every new addition to Pottermore. They are concerned that Rowling has the power to, for example, wipe out their hopes that Remus Lupin could still be canonically queer, with one tweet or Pottermore entry. Or that they’ll never be able to see the wizarding world grow to be more inclusive on the big screen, where it’s seen by the most people and is still centered on white characters. Davis is like many in the community right now: watching, waiting, and deliberating.

Take, for example, this past March, when those behind Pottermore published Rowling’s writings on the history of the magical community in North America as part of the lead-in to Fantastic Beasts’ New York setting. The fictional history weaved in many elements taken from the real-life traditions of Native American cultures, homogenizing the history of a host of different communities and assigning wizarding world “explanations” to things like skin walkers — in her version, they’re Animagi whom nonmagical people slandered with rumors of evildoing. Across social media, the response was overwhelmingly negative. “It’s not ‘your’ world,” Adrienne Keene — the Cherokee scholar, writer, and activist behind the site Native Appropriations — tweeted at Rowling at the time. “It’s our (real) Native world. And skin walker stories have context, roots, and reality.” Soon after, she tweeted at Rowling again: “You can’t just claim and take a living tradition of a marginalized people. That’s straight-up colonialism/appropriation.”

Rowling never responded directly to the backlash.