...
By Anna Menta
Senior Writer
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
It's every Muggle's dream come true: The arrival of a new Harry Potter adventure! Well, sort of.
Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash is a new short story starring our favorite Boy Who Lived and his fellow wielders of magic. But here's the catch: It's written entirely by predictive keyboard. While not exactly as compelling (or rational) as J.K. Rowling's original text, these four new pages have the best-selling author beat when it comes to absurdist humor.
Here's how it works: Botnik Studios, a company that teams up creative people with machines, fed all seven Harry Potter books into a predictive text keyboard. The tool analyzes the text, then "predicts" words based on the grammar and vocabulary patterns.
Read More on Entertainment
Using the suggestions from that keyboard, a team of 12 Botnik contributors put together a downright bonkers but ultimately narratively satisfying new Harry Potter story.
There's just one chapter—"The Handsome One"— and in it Harry, Ron and Hermione once again save the day from Voldemort and the Death Eaters. And a surprising amount of hot sauce is involved.
Stand-out lines include:
- "Magic: it was something that Harry Potter thought was very good."
- "[Ron] saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione's family."
- "Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself."
- "To Harry, Ron was a loud, slow, and soft bird. Harry did not like to think about birds."
- "'If you two can't clump happily, I'm going to get aggressive,' confessed the reasonable Hermione."
- "'Not so handsome now,' thought Harry as he dipped Hermione in hot sauce."
- "'I'm Harry Potter,' Harry began yelling. "The dark arts better be worried, oh boy!"
- "They looked at the door, screaming about how closed it was and asking it to be replaced with a small orb. The password was 'BEEF WOMEN,' Hermione cried."
The Harry Potter fandom quickly adopted this new story. The original tweet went viral with more than 42,000 retweets in two days. In fact, fans love the new story so much they're already making art inspired by the text.
This just might be the biggest Harry Potter meme since Potter Puppet Pals did "The Mysterious Ticking Noise."
Perhaps J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. should just forget about that Fantastic Beasts and the Crimes of Grindelwald controversy and adapt this masterpiece into a five-movie franchise instead.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines