There’s a brand new Harry Potter story currently ricocheting off the walls of the Internet, and you’ll never guess who – or rather what – wrote it.
As reported by Nerdist, the whip-smart Muggles over at Botnik Studios have produced a new and frankly hilarious chapter in the Potter saga using only predictive keyboards – one for narration, the other for dialogue. And so, after feeding all seven novels through its custom-built keyboard, it churned out a semi-coherent narrative called Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. No, really.
The text itself includes such zingers as “he began to eat Hermione’s family” and tangential thoughts in the vein of “to Harry, Ron was a loud, slow, and soft bird. Harry did not like to think about birds.” Suffice it to say, it’s absolutely worth reading.
Here’s another sample:
Leathery sheets of rain lashed at Harry’s ghost as he walked across the grounds toward the castle. Ron was standing there and doing a kind of frenzied tap dance. He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione’s family.
Described as a “human-machine entertainment studio and writing community,” Botnik was formed by former Clickhole head writer Jamie Brew, and the results of its new tech are, in the words of New Statesman, “faintly recognizable yet completely absurd.”
For good measure, we’ve included another extract in which Potter tears out his own eyes, presumably to distract Lord Voldemort. No, we’re not sure we understand either.
Harry could tell that Voldemort was standing right behind him. He felt a great overreaction. Harry tore his eyes from his head and threw them into the forest. Voldemort raised his eyebrows at Harry, who could not see anything at the moment.
Back in reality, a true-life biopic about the life and times of J.K. Rowling is now on the cards after Anna Klassen’s spec script was named on the 2017 Black List. Entitled When Lightning Strikes, it chronicles Rowling’s life leading up to the birth of Harry Potter.
