The Increasingly Bizarre World of Harry Potter
Without a child at your side, you probably wouldn’t be hanging around a kid’s playground—it’s just weird and feels wrong. While it’s not a criminal offence to tap into your inner child, there are a few things that just become a little cringey as we become adults. Being a diehard fan of Harry Potter is one of those things.
Don’t get me wrong, I grew up with Harry Potter, too. I read the books upon release and watched the midnight premieres of every single movie following the Prisoner of Azkaban. Growing up alongside the characters in Harry Potter, as well as the actors who portrayed them, was a real coming-of-age experience in which many millennials share a kinship. However, it turns out that not everyone left the theater after the final film release in 2011 with any intention of leaving the wizarding world behind them.
In fact, many fans—these self-proclaimed “Potterheads”—took the conclusion of the series as a launch pad into new realms of Potter lore. It’s not bad to latch onto a fanbase or acknowledge fandom for any particular piece of media, but a line has been crossed with Harry Potter.
Kurtis Conner, a Youtuber and ex-Harry Potter fan, describes Potter fandom as a spectrum. Casual enjoyers of the universe are vaguely aware that the orange-haired characters are all Weasley’s and the nose-less snakeman is bad. However, the fandom gets increasingly more deranged as you approach the truly obsessive Snapewives (a community of fans who created a functional religion around the spirit of their beloved Hogwarts potion master.) Conner points out that while it’s heartwarming to be deeply impacted by a piece of art, such as the Harry Potter stories, there is a point of roleplay and obsession that turns make-believe into full-blown delusion. “[At a certain point] Harry Potter exists in every aspect of their life,” Conner says. “They genuinely believe that Harry Potter is real, they name their children after a Harry Potter character, and they call people ‘muggles’ unironically.” As the obsession amplifies, suddenly we’re not talking about a beloved children’s book series anymore, we’re looking at a full-blown communal delusion.
Via u/Kurtis Conner
Like the Disney adults who are 40-something-years-old and dream of having illicit guerrilla weddings in front of Disneyland’s Cinderella’s Castle, Potterheads have spiraled out of control. As they cling to childhood memories, their adult perspective gets skewed and regressed, stunting their mental progression past that of a tweenaged boarding school student.
Via u/harrypottering
Wingardium Regressiosa
According to the inside cover, Harry Potter is a story meant for “children ages 8+.” Despite the intended audience being 4th and 5th graders, oftentimes, Harry Potter’s biggest fans are magically-inclined, nostalgia-seeking, bookish millennials. With over 52% of Harry Potter fans being millennials, it’s clear that most of that generation grew up alongside the book saga. First released in 1997, millennials would have been the same age as the bleakly heroic, orphaned protagonist, Harry Potter. Since then, they’ve aged alongside their favorite fantasy characters.
As charming and magical as this was when they were young, Harry Potter’s story in the books and in the movies effectively ends when he turns 18-years-old. Potterheads who have matured alongside Harry Potter for the bulk of their adolescence suddenly had no hero on whom to project their personal evolution. According to child development and human psychology expert, Lisa Firestone, Ph.D., “As human beings, we are shaped by our environment. This is most true when we are young and our brain is rapidly developing.” Dr. Firestone argues that as a child develops, they mirror the role models in their lives, creating defense mechanisms around them and building their entire psyche around that model’s influence. In the case of Potterheads, perhaps developmentally, they were too close to Harry Potter, a series that effectively raised them. Dr. Firestone says, “We create a ‘Fantasy Bond,’ an illusion of connection that aligns us with those who raise us and causes us to identify with them in ways that are negative as well as positive.”
Poisoned Polyjuice Potion
There’s a difference between fandom and overwhelming obsession, and the Harry Potter fandom is an intriguing example of the sliding scale of media mania. While there are many fans who wholeheartedly just enjoy the stories and the lore of Harry Potter, there is also a large populace of overexuberant fans who have become insufferable in their love for the series. Twisting the tales with reckless theorizing and snowballing their personal connection with Harry Potter into something more akin to worship than reverence, Potterheads have ruined casual enjoyment of the story.
Snapewives, Dracotok, Shifters, as well as the Manacled and Mauraders fan fiction communities (to name a few obsessive groups) have taken their fandom way too far, crossing the line from whimsical nostalgia, to asylum-level, name-on-a-list, type of mania. Because if you genuinely think that the wizarding world of Harry Potter is real and we’re all just muggles whose memory was wiped by the Ministry of Magic, you’re the type of Potterhead that needs a straightjacket. So while there may still be the benign Potter fans with their Deathly Hallows tattoos and their Ravenclaw banner on the wall, it’s the delusional ones who ultimately ruined the reputation of Harry Potter for the rest of us Muggles.
Via u/raeray_1987 and u/macysnape
It Was Never Meant to be “Always”
As Potterheads imprinted themselves on Harry Potter and all wizarding related fantasies, they’ve simultaneously brought their maturation to a halt. And although growing up is a universally traumatizing experience, at a certain point, every adult must accept that they’re not secretly a wizard, they’ll never catch a Golden Snitch or get scolded by their potions master.
It may be scary to let go of the familiarity of a beloved childhood story, but once you do, you can bear witness to the real-life magic all around us. And while the real world may seem like it falls short of the fantasy, at least it’s constantly evolving, changing, and growing. So instead of getting stuck reliving a witchy groundhog day through the same eight movies and seven books you enjoyed as a child, branch out and enjoy a new movie or book series.
Have you ever heard of The Lord of the Rings?
