Dear Pottermore

[mothwing]

Elizabeth I is perfectly capable of making her own decisions regaring matrimony. 

Without magic of any sort, thank you ever so much. 

Comments

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I either missed this or scrubbed it from memory. What was it?

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

This happens at the very beginning of PoA when Harry is doing his History of Magic homework at Florean Fortescue's. JKR didn't go into explicit detail, but she did say that for wizarding world witches and wizards who could fireproof themselves it was not too bad to get burned at the stake, and that one witch in particular developed quite a taste for being burnt and therefore had herself be burned at the stake several times.

Which, considering the RL effects of witch hunts especially in continental Europe does not really make this the best joke she ever made.

[krakelwok.livejournal.com]

And a not too well researched one, too. Witch burnings took primarily place in Scotland, the standard practice in most of the rest of Europe at that time was hanging. (Although I'm sure there was some kind of noose-loosening charm or whatever that made hanging a quite agreeable experience, too. Hm, Potter-humour is easy!)

I've never bothered looking at Pottermore which to me seems like just a means to keep the fans' interest in the franchise up with new material now that the books and movies are done and over. Does Rowling really contribute to the site or is it maintained by an army of faceless WB/Bloomsbury writing drones?

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Maybe Wendolyn's a medieval expat residing in central Europe, who knows. Or maybe she moved to satisfy her strange urges? This is actually quite interesting.

JKR's contributions are text snippets hidden throughout the site and can be "discovered" through flipping through the point-and-click, content of the website.

There is a comment section underneath each bit which allows fans of the series to share their impressions to their heart's content, as long as they don't use arabic numerals, the word "mod", name-sounding things, swearwords, obvious sexual terms, places, verbs denoting origin or age description. And probably a couple more. This, being the internet, has obviously resulted in people writing creative porn avoiding verbal clichés in the comment sections until the mods catch them at it and delete those segments.

[krakelwok.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity I signed up. Is there an HTML-only version of that site? I abhor websites which hide their content under layers of cross-links, banners, slow-loading Flash animation and hotspots one has to tediously search for all over the screen. Sure, it's for kids but there should be a version for people who don't fancy playing unlock-the-boring-footnote just so that a website can generate clicks ...

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Not as far as I know, no, you really do have to click through everything. I still enjoyed it for the graphics, though.