Are you there, Creator?

I think the real difference is between a world that is still written and a world that has been abandoned. It doesn’t really matter whether the author is still alive. JKR has stated quite clearly that Harry Potter’s story is finished and she doesn’t intend to write more of it. Well, I’m still dreaming of Hermione Granger and the Interspecies Treaty (Harry doesn’t feature, he is too busy rounding up the last Death Eaters), but that’s just a delusion. We occasionally get some breadcrumbs on Pottermore, like we may still get new breadcrumbs from Tolkiens unpublished notes, but if we paid attention to the novels there shouldn’t be any big surprises.

(On the other hand, Isaac Asimov suddenly wrote new books connecting Foundation to the Robot-novels when the Foundation-universe apparently had been abandoned for decades. Nah, this won’t happen.)

Anyway, the potterverse felt much differently when we still waited for the next book, and everything seemed possible, and then a lot of fanfiction became outdated when the new book was published. Of course, everything has never been possible. The problems of an incomplete canon and what may or may not plausibly be possible are a major theme in "The Hogwarts Fanfiction Academy".

I’ll stop rambling here.

HG