Harry Potter and a whole lot of hype?

I finished Cursed Child the other night.  I know a lot of people hated it, but as I’ve been avoiding every article and blog post about it to keep from spoilers, I have no actual idea why people hated it?  I did not hate it, for the record.

So my thoughts under the cut thingie … EVERYTHING IS SPOILERS!  I EVEN SPOIL SOMETHING FROM THE HUNGER GAMES BOOKS! BE AWARE!

1. It’s not amazing.  Like, the plot is kinda overdone (see below), and some of the lines left me feeling sorry for the actors who were going to have to make them work out loud, and Ron deserves better than to be just comic relief.  That said, though, it’s a script and scripts get tweaked; considering the fact that this had to be published and that requires lead time, and its pub date was the day the show opened, I’m reasonably sure this is not a finished/frozen script (it even says “rehearsal script” on the cover).  And on top of that, it’s a script, so I feel like some of the stuff that didn’t read well might work perfectly well on a stage.
2. Sooo many fandom theories/desires made canon!  Bellatrix was pregnant!  Harry got to tell Dumbledore off for being a terrible father-figure!  Being a Slytherin does not equate to being evil!
3. Also, where the books do this whole “awful guardians are awful” gloss thing that a lot of English children’s books do, the play just flat shows you that the Dursleys were abusive.
4. HOW MUCH DO I LOVE SCORPIUS MALFOY, THE BOY WITH A QUIP FOR EVERYTHING?  Like, a lot.
5. Awww, Ron and Hermione are everyone’s OTP!
6. Alternate-Universe-actually-kind-of-pleasant Snape, what?  (No idea how I feel about that.)
7. Okay, so.  The title.  There are a lot of people who could be the “cursed child,” and I think that’s good.  But what I thought was super interesting was that Albus’ actions are spurred by Harry’s (angrily and idiotically, which are completely in-character; get a therapist, Harry) telling him “Sometimes I wish you weren’t my kid.”  And later on, Harry calls that unforgivable.  You know, like some curses.  Hm.
8. I want to see that last Godric’s Hollow scene, with Voldemort walking down and off the stage, live.
9. I want to know how they do, like, the entire thing on a stage.
10. So, yeah.  Not amazing.  I thought immediately of my reaction to Catching Fire–“Wait, we’re doing this over again?”–but where I felt like Suzanne Collins made going back into the arena work, I’m not sure the Triwizard Tournament/Godric’s Hollow revisits were really needed?  Plus, how often have we seen the ‘one change in time to make things better actually makes things worse’?  Off the top of my head, I can name a Buffy episode, a Ray Bradbury story, half of a Dean Koontz novel, an entire Stephen King novel, “City On the Edge of Forever” in Star Trek TOS, and multiple Doctor Who episodes.  But that said, once I got done rolling my eyes at the concept, I found a lot to like, and some stuff I did not, but nothing I absolutely hated.  Well, aside from Ron marrying Padma Patil, but that was how they wanted me to feel, so.