1. Introduction
[1.1] On July 13, 2017, less than a month before my writing this, Tumblr user aberorca posted a photo of a drawing they had done of Harry and Albus Potter, except with cacti where their usual wizard bodies would have been. The inspiration for the sketch had come from another Tumblr user, torestoreamends, whose #Prickly Cactus Child tag emerged after a 17,000-word recap of the two Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016) shows performed on June 24. Having revisited the show about three weeks after the second cast had taken up their roles, torestoreamends used the tag to reflect on the performance of the new Albus (Theo Ancient) compared to the performance of the first actor in the role (Sam Clemmett). Ancient was considered standoffish, a less open and forthcoming Albus than his predecessor—hence the "prickly" characterization.
[1.2] The image of Cactus Harry and Cactus Albus was done with pen on lined paper, very clearly a rough sketch, but shared with a caption explaining that it had also been passed to another Tumblr user, the-eighth-story, in the hope that they would "do a polished version of it" and "post in a reblog."
[1.3] None of these fan behaviors, nor their inspirations or goals, will be new or unusual for fan scholars who are well versed in the kind of participatory culture that drives and is driven by online fan communities. Discovering this post as a new PhD researcher, however, investigating outsider theater criticism and the people who produce it, I must admit to sitting back in my chair, looking off into the middle distance, and, for a brief moment at least, experiencing some significant feels. This was fan art not of the canonical source material but of another fan's show recap. You don't get that in the broadsheets, or even on the blogs.
2. Tumblr as community, Tumblr as content management system
[2.1] At this stage in my research I can only really speak of hunches, but one of the strongest hunches I have about traditional theater criticism is that it only really becomes discursive when there are disagreements to air. Even before we all moved online, very few people took the time to write into newspapers to register their wholehearted agreement with a critic's verdict on a show. And since the internet has facilitated a community of theater critics working outside of mainstream publications, on blogs and volunteer-run magazine sites, the posts that frame their criticism as a response to earlier reviews generally do so in order to right a perceived wrong.
[2.2] To find this example of a creative response to a detail in a long-form piece of fan theater criticism felt like a significant moment: praise and generosity displayed from one user to another, something I find regularly in fan communities but rarely in other critical cultures. It confirmed something I'd known since I started following the Cursed Child responses on Tumblr, back when the show opened in June 2016: that this relatively small group of young theater fans, visiting and documenting their favorite performance over and over and over again, were making for themselves the absolute best, most wonderful part of our theater discourse, if not of the entire internet. This wasn't a disgruntled spectator taking to their keyboard to set the record straight regarding a show; it was a fan celebrating the criticism of another using their own skill and creativity.
[2.3] I have my own history with Tumblr, starting in 2009 when I shifted my old Blogger content over to the platform. At the time it was fairly new and seemed fairly cool, founded by the kind of hipster nerds I imagined would be my peers, were I to live in Brooklyn rather than rainy northern England. I had been a music blogger on MySpace and was still mourning its recent demise, so I filled my Tumblr dash with all the cool Brooklyn start-up guys who would recommend Pitchfork indie bands in between digital scans from their latest medium-format photography shoots. Gradually, though, I left my dash behind; as I got more and more into theater, my Tumblr simply became a place to log in and post quickly about shows. It became my content management system; as soon as I pressed Publish, I'd copy the link and take it straight over to my social network of choice, Twitter. And although I became aware that it was there, I never really found, nor sought, the kind of collaborative and conversational Tumblr community I have since seen in action on the Cursed Child tags.
3. It's just like a bad fan fic
[3.1] I found it fascinating to read Louisa Stein's Millennial Fandom (2015) recently, in which she considers Tumblr's reblogging culture via an old post from the Harry Potter fandom: "Reblog if you are a wizard or a witch." The proliferation of this post (1.4 million reblogs as of May 2013) is taken by some users to signify the total domination of the fandom on Tumblr, even as some of its rebloggers explain that they will "always reblog" every time they encounter the post. There's something inherently joyful about this quest to secure the fandom's visibility, as expressed by the celebratory animated GIFs that were added to the post as its numbers stacked up, but there is also something a bit fighty about those sentiments too. Of course, I do not naively believe that fandoms are some kind of utopia in which everyone just drinks in one another's joy and enthusiasm all day long. "This fandom, Tumblr, is ours," one of the tags accompanying the reblogged post, could be seen as distastefully proprietorial, even if its tongue is firmly in its cheek.
[3.2] This potential for confrontation seems to have come to fruition with The Cursed Child, which, in its script form at least, has created a rift in the Harry Potter fandom. Citing its multiple authors (note 1) or bad fan fic plot, many existing Potterheads have refused to acknowledge it as part of the canon. Some who read the script but were not familiar with the conventions of playwriting complained that it felt "rushed and sloppy" (hi-i-love-you-bitch2017, in a Tumbr post dated July 10) or only created "a watered-down version" (Badz2016, in a Tumblr post dated August 1) of the Potterverse, with angry user comments on the book's Amazon page inspiring numerous online articles mocking young fans. The publishers were even moved to include, in a later edition of the play's text, a special dialogue between writer Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany (2017), discussing the peculiarities of reading stage directions rather than prosaic description.
[3.3] While bad feeling toward the play still regularly appears on Tumblr and shows little sign of disappearing completely, it has arguably galvanized those who had seen the show. From very early in its run, fans would emerge from the Palace Theatre auditorium, log into Tumblr, and fervently defend the live experience and the team behind the show. Here's one Tumblr user, in a post dated August 8, with just one example of many:
[3.4] Look, I get it. If all you've done is read the script, you aren't witnessing that magic. On paper some of that story even reads as silly but when you're watching it? Oh how it all makes sense, and you are as absorbed in that world as you were when you read the series the first time. So I get it, I do. But…you're hating something because you've not got the complete version before you yet. But when you do, and if I know JK Rowling eventually she'll find a way that you can, oh how you'll be there again, in the Wizarding World. (zombieonavespa2016)
4. Cultural capital and cultural tribalism
[4.1] There are similarities here with what I'm finding from my research into the UK's theater blogging community, meaning those who self-identify as theater bloggers and who consider theater criticism to be one of their primary contributions to online discourse. This particular community lives on Twitter, not Tumblr, although we might host our blogs there (or on Blogger, WordPress, Medium, and the like). I say "we" because this is my practice too: going to see shows, thinking about them, then sharing my thoughts for an online community of like-minded enthusiasts and theater industry workers. This group of bloggers cannot really be considered as one community; while we are mutually supportive, reading and sharing one another's work, and entering into conversation about it on Twitter, we are also divided by lines of taste, style, and the social and regional groups that mean some bloggers have greater access to shows, and some friendships develop IRL while others don't.
[4.2] Regular theater attendance—whether by fans or bloggers—is a privilege and one that can lead to significant disparity in the (sub)cultural capital of groups that might emerge around a certain show or venue or theater scene. Those who can afford to buy many tickets and who live within easy traveling distance can demonstrate their fandom and/or develop their critical thinking in ways inaccessible to those for whom the theater is too expensive or too far away. In the Harry Potter fandom, we have seen this distinction clearly, with fans who read the published text without seeing the show reporting a very different experience of the work to those who had seen it live. Likewise, those who have only been able to see the show once are effectively excluded from the small group of hard-core fans who have enough income and flexibility to take advantage of the last-minute day ticket queue and the weekly Friday Forty ticket draw. It is through repeat engagement that these fans develop their critical engagement with the show, and it is through their Tumblr show recaps that those unable to attend—or unable to attend so often—glimpse the real detail of the production. It is certainly true that theater's inaccessibility has exacerbated a somewhat problematic fan hierarchy.
[4.3] Questions of access and payment have been central to the blogosphere too, as some professionalizing critics have attempted to belittle amateur practices and demonstrate that they critique theater more ethically than do others (Trueman 2011). Questions of expertise and quality of critical engagement have been raised; for example, theater blogger Andrew Haydon notes in a post dated February 14, 2011, that we should recognize the "qualitative difference between marketing yourself as a person…and marketing yourself as an opinion on theater," describing those who post only about theater in more recognizably reviewlike formats. Many bloggers strive to distinguish themselves from others, even as they appear to share practices in common, and few who receive free tickets and invites to press night performances openly acknowledge these privileges.
[4.4] I recognize a lot from Stacy Wolf's (2011) writing about the fans who populated Wicked forums from 2004 to 2006. Wolf notes that while most fan interactions were as supportive as they were creative and educational, lines were drawn when some fans signaled their own cultural capital by opposing those who they perceived to be (in Wolf's words) "fake" or "wrong" or "inappropriately boastful" (232). Professing to be better informed about a favored show than you really were was a crime worthy of exposure and ridicule on the fan forums, even as names and identities were obscured, not dissimilar to the way theater bloggers perform their own cultural capital by setting themselves apart from others. I began my research on Tumblr looking for evidence of criticism within theater fandoms, but I now find myself equally interested in locating the fan behavior within the UK's theater blogosphere. The tribalism of the two groups seems to have a lot in common.
[4.5] I use Tumblr differently now to how I did when I was using it as my regular blogging platform. My original theater blog has moved again, to a Medium publication, but I continue to lurk on the Cursed Child tags, reblogging all the show reports and thoughts I find in readiness for the next phase of my PhD project (https://cursedchildtheatre.tumblr.com/). Right now I'm watching the-eighth-story particularly closely; they could post that polished version of Cactus Albus any day now.