J.K. Rowling reveals that wizards used to just shit on the floor, like dogs

J.K. Rowling’s endless tinkering with the canon of her brain-bustingly successful Harry Potter franchise has run the gamut over the years, from the benignly irritating (Ron Weasley’s Patronus is a Jack Russell terrier, in case anyone actually cared) to feeling like a somewhat cowardly attempt to have her cake and eat it, too, in regards to the series’ often invisible approaches to representation—i.e., anything to do with the fact that Dumbledore is gay, a fact you’d never know simply from reading the books (or even watching movies that are actively about his brewing conflict with his Johnny Depp-played ex).

Still, there’s a pretty massive gap between “Hey, here’s Neville Longbottom’s birthday, fans!” and the revelation that Rowling’s Pottermore site made today, when it decided, for reasons unknown to either man or magic, to announce that wizards used to just shit on the floor, like dogs.

And okay: If we really try, we can kind of see Rowling’s point here. After all, if all of humanity had had the ability to use literal magic to make anything they didn’t want disappear, then the whole elaborate story of human waste disposal—from the outdoor commodes of Pakistan, 2800 BC, to the pig toilets of ancient China, to the garderobes and thunderboxes of early British sanitation, all the way to the modern, humble crapper—might have been very different. But it still doesn’t make it any less insane that a) our beloved characters’ great-grandparents were running around making horse apples in the Room of Requirement, or b) that Rowling decided this was something that everybody in her fanbase needed to know.