Jk Rowling has been forced to clarify a joke she made on Twitter about Harambe the gorilla appearing as a Patronus on the Harry Potter fan site Pottermore.

Potter fans were sent into a frenzy of excitement when the website launched its ‘Patronus Quiz’ on Thursday (September 22nd) which allows users to discover their inner spirit animal. That anticipation heightened when Rowling re-tweeted an altered image from a comedy Twitter account of Harambe that made it look as if the animal would be one of the possible quiz results.

Harambe, of course, is the gorilla whose death sparked public outrage after a child fell into the animal’s enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo in May this year. He has been the subject of many internet memes since, and Rowling’s re-tweet drew mixed reactions.

“Too soon,” the account tweeted back at Rowling along with the image. Many of Rowling’s followers also re-posted the image, commenting with things like “wands out for Harambe”.

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“I’ve been asked to make it clear that Harambe is not a Patronus you can actually get on @pottermore. The previous RT is a joke. As you were,” Rowling wrote to her fans soon afterwards, adding she thought the re-tweet was “very funny”.

Potter fans have been sharing the various results they’ve been getting on the quiz, and it seems as though there’s a vast galaxy of various real-life and magical animals that turn up as results – but, sadly, not Harambe.

In Harry Potter mythology, according to Pottermore, a Patronus is a spell to ward off Dementors, or “a guardian which acts as a shield between you and the Dementor.”

“It’s also a kind of positive force, a projection of the very things that the Dementor feeds upon – hope, happiness, the desire to survive – but it cannot feel despair, as real humans can, so the Dementors can’t hurt it.”

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