I have a very serious and, at times, a life-consuming problem: I am obsessed with Harry Potter.
No, really. I am the type of girl who would spend three hours debating with you over why Bellatrix Lestrange is the best villain ever, why Slytherin house isn’t all that bad and how Steve Kloves (the writer of the Harry Potter films) is a Harry/Hermione worshipper who couldn’t understand foreshadowing if it bit him in the nose.
Most people don’t understand my addiction though. As the number of days nearing the release of the final film grew smaller and smaller, for every excited person I saw, I met an equal number of exasperated and annoyed people who just couldn’t didn’t understand what the hell was so great about Harry freaking Potter. It was just a movie—a book—and not even a very well-written one. What was the big deal?
If you, dear reader, are among the ranks of people who roll their eyes at the mention of He-Who-Is-So-Overrated, what you’re missing isn’t just sixteen hours of screenplay or five thousand pages of contrived dialogue. It’s the experience, the expectation: it’s the enchantment that surrounds Harry Potter that’s such a big deal.
Let me explain: I have been a Potterhead since I was about nine years old (that was back in 2000). If you were a hardcore Harry Potter fan, you’d remember that this was the time when the first four books had been released and that there was a three year gap between the release of the fourth book and the fifth. Back then, Harry Potter was only as famous as The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings—a lot of people had heard of it and it was certainly a big deal in any discussion of books, but Potterverse didn’t stretch very far beyond its beehive of bookworms. Nevertheless, I fell in love with Harry Potter back then because of the sheer brilliance of the idea: an ordinary, unremarkable boy who found out he had his own special destiny? A secret world of witches and wizards hidden between our own? How awesome! Perhaps now, there are a lot of similar and better written stories that can compare, but back when I was ten, there wasn’t.
Ten was also the age when the movies first came out, and I will 120% agree that the movies probably had the biggest contribution in making Harry Potter the worldwide phenomenon that it has become today. For those of you who aren’t Harry Potter fans, you were terribly unlucky to be caught in a generation that was on-par with the movies. When I was ten, Harry was ten. When I was thirteen, Harry was thirteen. And once the movies started rolling out, there was always something Harry Potter to look forward to each year: it would either be the movie, or the last four instalments of the highly anticipated books; more likely than not, there would be months and weeks of anticipation leading up to these movies. It was like Christmas, but cooler because you knew—and wanted—exactly what you were getting.
But I will confess one thing: you will never find such a group of Harry Potter-crazed adults or kids beyond our generation. For those of us who were old enough to savour the books and wait for them as they came out and old enough to grow up with the actors and actresses—that’s a sort of connection that no other generation can have. Some of my closest friends that I have met have bonded over our love for Harry Potter. The fact is, all of my younger cousins who have read the books, watched the movies and have admitted they liked it will never like it as much as I will.
So, the next time you see us—a group of kids who desperately wished Quidditch and Butterbeer and spells were real—remember: we aren’t crazy. We were just a group of young and impressionable kids who turned into optimistic and dreamy adults. To us, the magic isn’t in the books—it’s in the atmosphere, in the anticipation and in the knowledge that yes, there are people like us out there who are just as passionate and just as entranced with an idea as we are. So, forgive us, if we were a bit too hysterical over this last installation of the Potter films but, as my friend Maddie (who is also a fellow Potter fan) said, “What do I do now that Harry Potter’s over? I might just have to grow up.”
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