Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald - Has J.K. Rowling Become George Lucas?
4. Expanding The Lore And Tinkering With The Product
While Star Wars and Harry Potter are quite different, they do share some common threads. Both have Chosen One narratives, for instance, and political undertones (or overtones, in places) but the biggest and most important is that each have created a world that's so much bigger than what's on the screen or page.
Whether it's a galaxy far, far away or the Wizarding World, George Lucas and J.K. Rowling created universes that both felt lived-in, and that fans wanted to live in. There were wonders to behold, and mysteries to unravel. And then they kept expanding it, and expanding it, and expanding it, until just about every single character had a backstory and nothing was left unanswered, no element not tinkered with.
For Lucas, this really became a problem with the Special Editions of the Original Trilogy. The Expanded Universe had already started by this point, but this was him exerting full creative control and making changes that were unnecessary, often made things worse in places, and he himself would almost never be fully satisfied with. That continued with the EU building, which took some, er, interesting turns, and then into the prequels, where he became obsessed with the stories he wanted to tell rather than those people wanted to hear.
Rowling has done this too, starting almost immediately after the books ended. It was way back in 2007, after the release of Deathly Hallows, that she revealed Albus Dumbledore was gay - a fact that had not made it into any of the seven books. She's only expanded her rewriting since then, launching the website Pottermore in order to give backstories, flesh people out, and try to make her world more diverse after the fact. Some are major, some minor, but all add to the idea of a creator who feels the constant need to keep on meddling with the thing they've created, which is very much what Lucas did too.
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