15 Favorite Memories from My 20 (Well, Actually, A Little Less than 18) Years of Harry Potter

Twenty years ago today, June 26, 1997, the very first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in the United Kingdom, thus beginning a fantasy phenomenon that has not only changed the book industry forever, but also one that defined our family for years, and which has lived in my imagination in a way no other geek property--not Tolkien, not Star Trek, not comic books, nothing--ever has, and almost certainly ever will. So, on this occasion, 20 memories and moments of fun to commemorate:

1) Actually, it's not 20 years; more like 17 years and 10 months. The first Harry Potter famously did not make a big splash in the UK--except among a few thankfully well-placed book-sellers and reviewers who championed it, and made sure Joanne Rowling's vision didn't die a premature death. The re-titled first book didn't make it to America until September 1998, and I certainly knew nothing about it. It wasn't until the summer of 1999, which our young family spent in Germany while I worked on my Ph.D., that we first heard the name "Harry Potter"; some Canadian grad-school friends of ours wrote us, telling my book-loving wife about this new children's book series they'd discovered. Returning to the states, attending a book club at a local children's bookstore in Alexandria, VA, my wife discovered the excitement which those in the know were feeling about the third Harry Potter book, which had come out in the UK at the beginning of the summer (Rowling cranked out a book a year from 1997 through 2000), and had developed enough of a following in America for Scholastic to manage to publish it just a few months later. And that was our start.

2) Though, again, actually MY start came even later. Through 1999 and 2000, Melissa read the first three books: Sorcerer's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, and Prisoner of Azkaban. I didn't. But Pottermania was building; references were showing up in all sorts of media, and there was all sorts of buzz about a film adaptation of the series in the works. Melissa wanted the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was published in July of that year--the series by then having become a big enough deal that a trans-Atlantic release date were coordinated--for her September birthday, so I bought it for her...but then read it before wrapping it and giving it to her. So I read the fourth book first, more than three years after the rest of the world had started to figure out what amazing thing Rowling had released on the world.

3) Finally Reading the First Three Books, and Truly Catching the Potter Bug. If we didn't have such a bookworm first daughter, I don't know when I would have gotten around to reading them, or if I ever would have. Maybe I would have continued to let time go by, and I would have become one of those grumpy folks who proudly insists they don't have time for all that Harry Potter crap. But fortunately, Megan demanded, and we responded, and the Fox household descended into a Pottermania that, in some senses, we've never recovered from (thankfully!). 

4) - 11) Less History, More Internet! The Harry Potter phenomenon was, and still is, inextricable from the way in which the internet absolutely transformed all our lives, how we shared information, how fan theories were assembled, we associated with fellow geeks, and more. The number of websites, blogs, e-mail lists, e-zines, and more dedicated to Harry Potter is probably incalculable. I certainly never perused anything like a 100th of them, even at the height of my fan addiction. Still, even just reading or watching or laughing or being thrown into nostalgic thought only 1% of this stuff is more than enough to allow judgments to form. So herewith, some favorites, many of which I suspect a fair number of anyone who actually reads this will already be familiar with:

Fan Fiction: "Interlude." Have I read a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction? Indeed I have. Did I ever actually write any? No comment. But seriously, read "Interlude," which is the best Rowling-compliant, tone-appropriate, world-building contribution to the huge "what happened to Harry, Ron, and Hermione next?!?" genre that I've ever read. (Also very good: "Roger and Lisa: A Romance," a wonderfully imaginative story created out of two barely-even-there characters from the Harry Potter canon; and "The Test of Time," a fic written back during the three-year gap between Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I didn't read until years after the series was completed and found to be a cool look into what the real hard-core fans were imagining long before Rowling let her biggest secrets out of the bag. Plus, anything written by little0bird and Northrumbrian is worth checking out.)


Fan Film: "The Battle of Hogwarts" (Documentary). Be sure to watch all five episodes!



Fan Reading: "Wizard People, Dear Reader." Yeah, I really don't know any other way to describe this.





Fan Puppetry: "The Mysterious Ticking Noise." The first, the best.



Fan Music: "Cold, Wild Yonder." I never got into Wizard Rock as much as some, but Oliver Boyd and the Remembralls were really quite good.

Fan Musical: "A Very Potter Musical." All three of Starkid's Harry Potter parodies are worth watching, but there was an innocence, a hilarious "can-we-get-away-with-this?" joy to this first production, before these college kids all graduated and became YouTube sensations and went to Hollywood (or tried).



Fan Music Video: "Dark Lord Funk." Really good, but as my old online friend David Salmanson commented, "needs more Hermione."



Fan Feminist Criticism: "Hermione Granger and the Goddamn Patriarchy." Speaking of Hermione, there was this.

12) Reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I picked up my copy of Half-Blood Prince at a midnight release event in Jonesboro, AR, where we lived at the time, and by the following afternoon, I was stoked. I had back through the previous two novels in preparation, and I was sure that this book was going to be where Rowling really kicked out the jams and let this fantasy adventure she'd been developing take flight. I thought that her way of keeping her story in the realm of children's literature was just a delaying tactic; that something in the stories of Harry, Ron, and Hermione just had to explode, sooner or later. I went through most of Half-Blood Prince therefore slightly frustrated...until: BOOM! The Horcurxes! The death of Dumbledore! The betrayal of Snape! It was, and remains to this day, one of my great reading memories; I was just so excited by what was on the page!

13) Getting into the Fandom. As the link above shows, my response to Half-Blood Prince touched a nerve with some, and suddenly I was part of a broad--actually world-wide, if you look at my blog's stats--argument about Rowling's agenda, about Harry, about Snape, about the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. The two years between Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was really the closest I ever came, in all my years of blogging, of breaking away from the great anonymous pack of online scribblers and becoming someone who was known and read. I put up a bunch of predictions I worked out in my own head for the final book, and it unleashed a torrent. And it was great fun....even though it turned out I was basically wrong about pretty much everything.

14) Getting to the Ending. But who cares about bring wrong? When I finished Deathly Hallows, around 10am after having read straight through since picking up the book at another midnight release party, as much as there was stuff I felt Rowling hadn't done as well as she could have, or hadn't done at all, I was nonetheless exhausted and delighted. I rode the story all the way to its conclusion, arguing all the way, and that was a memory to treasure.

 15) Making it Part of the Family. Through all these years, and in the years since, through the movies and a trip to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, I read the books to our daughters: to Megan (whose passion for Harry Potter has continued all the way up through her Honors graduation at KU--her thesis title: "Reading a Gender Binary into the Magic of Harry Potter: The Case of Neville Longbottom"), to Caitlyn (though less to her than the others), to Alison, and most recently to Kristen. It became something we all shared, a language, a way of thinking and laughing, and in that way became more than a series of novels. It because part of our collective consciousness--and what more can you say about a work of literature than that? So thank you, Jo Rowling: you've given our family something we can never repay. 20 years is just the start of it, I think.

The Ron and Hermione Problem

[Fan art by keerakeera]

Okay, I didn't plan on writing anything about this, and there's no point in explaining anything to anyone who doesn't already know everything that's going on, so let me sum up. Over the weekend, in a leaked snippet of an upcoming interview between J.K. Rowling and Emma Watson, Rowling said this (ignore the headline; it's inaccurate--just stick with the actual words):

"I wrote the Hermione-Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment. That's how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron....I know, I'm sorry, I can hear the rage and fury it might cause some fans, but if I'm absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility."

This has, predictably, spawned a huge range of reactions from the many and rival Ron-Hermione and Harry-Hermione fans out there amongst the millions of lovers of the Harry Potter books and films. (Those of you who delighted in Rowling's world solely because Harry's adventure was funny and thrilling and moving, and skipped all the subplots, can move along now.) As one who has been fairly obsessed with HP over the years, I have my own opinions. They are, in short: A) I'm a big fan of the Ron-Hermione pairing, and actually think it makes, in the context of the wizarding world Rowling created, good--if, admittedly, also somewhat complicated--psychological, romantic, and even moral sense; B) still, as it is legitimate to take seriously authorial intent and opinion, we should wait until the full interview is released so we can understand the context of the quoted comments and give it our full consideration; C) in the meantime, it's just a reality that all authors' understanding of their own works change over time, and this is obviously especially the case for those who, like Rowling, have invested years in seeing their stories adapted and transformed into film and media other media; D) to the extent that those of us who liked the Ron-Hermione subplot have to accept B) and C), we have some recourse in remembering that Steven Kloves, the screenwriter of seven of the eight Harry Potter movies, always tended to make Hermione out to be a super-woman, rather than the flawed individual of the books who needed her friends just as much as they needed her; and finally E), let's keep in mind the wise words of Nerd Fighter, geek book god, and YouTube sensation John Green, who simply tweeted in response to the leaked interview: "Books belong to their readers."

If you need more, you can read this thoughtful reflection on how Rowling implicitly treated love throughout her whole story (and why the pairing of Ron and Hermione is a persuasive reflection of that treatment). If you find the whole thing just funny (and maybe have a small Harry-Hermione hankering within you), well, enjoy Stephen Colbert's take:



And finally, if after all that you want more, may I suggest you do what I do: trust the best and most thoughtful and consistent fan fic writers, because who really exhausts the canon of a story better than they? St. Margarets, a great writer (and, perhaps not coincidentally, the one writer who made Harry-Ginny seem persuasive to me), finds Rowling's comment about Ron-Hermione being "wish fulfillment" rather bizarre: after all, what else are we doing when we write stories that actually have a conclusion, to say nothing of a "happy ending," then engaging in one kind of wish fulfillment or another? She then tartly imagines what other authors might have had to say about their perhaps "non-credible" pairings:

LM Montgomery regrets shipping Anne and Gilbert since she first wrote them during her long engagement to Ewen Macdonald when she was hopeful that she was marrying her intellectual equal to whom she was also physically attracted. (That had been an issue from her broken engagement to Edwin Simpson– she writes in her journal that she was repulsed by his “affections.” ) Ewen and LM were apart for most of their engagement, so LM did a lot of projecting. Anne and Gilbert were her ideals – friends who could talk non-stop for hours and then hop into bed – just what she hoped for during her five-year engagement. Unfortunately, LM Montgomery’s marriage/subsequent life was marred by her husband’s mental illness, her health problems, her money problems and her disappointment in her wild-oat-sowing son. Now that she knows just how difficult marriage would be, she wouldn’t pair Anne up with someone that unrealistically nice.

Louisa May Alcott regrets shipping Jo with Fritz Bhaer and having them run a boys home where everyone learned at their own pace and all lived in communal harmony. This idea was based on her father’s short-lived commune. The wish fulfillment part was that Jo and Fritz were equal partners in their relationship and they had food (unlike the grinding poverty of the commune). Louisa never married and she had to put up with her father’s tyrannical nature until he died. So Jo and her well-fed boys were totally unrealistic. (She does not regret, however, giving Amy a drama llama for a husband, mediocre artistic talent and a sickly daughter since Amy burned Jo’s manuscript.)

Charlotte Bronte regrets shipping Jane with Rochester – one, because it’s highly unlikely that the lord of the manor would take notice of a mousey governess (Charlotte, a one time governess, eventually married her father’s curate) and two, tragically, few in her world would live long enough to suddenly come into a family legacy and wait out Rochester disposing of his first wife for the happy ending. (She lost three immediate family members in the 8 months after Jane Eyre was published.) Charlotte died at 38 from pregnancy complications.

Stephenie Meyer regrets shipping Edward with Bella and having Jacob obsess over her – Wait. Stephenie Meyer regrets nothing! She’s laughing all the way to the bank.

Well said!

Lupin, James, or Dumbledore?

So, this is making the rounds on Facebook today:



It's a wonderful occasion for geeky Myers-Briggs conversations, but it's flawed. Presumably it's a silly thing to take seriously, but still, I have to register my sincere doubt that the person who put this together really tried to create, through closely examining the HP canon, the sort of test questions which would line up the characters with various MB scores. True, I won't deny that some of the descriptions are absolute genius. Neville as ISFJ, Lupin as INFJ, Luna as INFP, and Sirius as ENTP all seem particularly truthful. But let's focus on the Trio. Hermione as INTP? Sorry, that last indicator is completely unsubstantiated by the canon; Hermione likes structure, and likes everyone to know she likes structure. If any one of the main characters is a true INTJ "strategist," it's surely Hermione, not Malfoy (and really, sticking him in there is probably more fan-wank than anything else). Harry as an ISTP "craftsman"? Some of that works, but again, the issue of structure comes up: Harry's resolute determination to do things as he has figured out on his own to do them, the consequences or the opinions of others be damned, actually makes him rather more an ISTJ Snape-type figure (which, I suppose, means that we could use MB testing to explain the psychological mechanics which led them, as characters, to hate each other so much). Ron's description as an ENFP actually works, I think, though arguably he's more like his Weasley brothers and his sister in being more oriented to sense (S) than intuition (N); yes, Ron is sometimes a big picture person, but just as often he gets hung up (like Harry) on the trees rather than the forest--and don't forget Ron's frequent bottom-line pragmatism, which constantly gets on Hermione's nerves. So, yeah: a fun bit of random geek-bait to argue over, but flawed.

And me? I tend to score as an ENFJ, but sometimes the INFJ comes out, and occasionally an ENTJ. So supposedly I'm mostly an Albus Dumbledore (which is good for university teachers, I suppose), and sometimes a Remus Lupin (also good), but then sometimes a James Potter smart-ass. Hopefully I can keep that last one under wraps while advising students, and only let him out during faculty meetings.

Because You Can Never Get Enough of the Trio

Or, I can't at least, as the dog days of summer settles in, and I find myself thinking about old friends.



Props to whomever applied their internet skills to the films; I never caught the fact that Harry was hearing his names screamed in his memories in Prisoner of Azkaban, even though that's pretty explicit in the books. Also, bonus points for including "Won-Won." (Plus, there is this version for completists.)

St. Hogwart's Fire (or, Hogwarts 90210)

Jacob Levy linked me to this old cartoon by Lucy Knisley over the weekend, guessing that I'd be pretty much it's perfect target audience:

He's not wrong: between my general HP madness and my fondness for 80s pop culture, surely this is the sort of thing I'd drool over. The problem, however, is Knisley's casting: she gets some basic roles wrong, which I argued with Jacob and others, including Melissa, over the weekend. So let's set things straight here and now. If Jo Rowling had been American, and been hit by inspiration roughly 15 years earlier, the resulting movies would have looked like this:

Michael J. Fox as Harry Potter (short, enormously decent, with obsessive undercurrents)













Eric Stoltz as Ron Weasley (tall, red-headed, and constantly being upstaged by Harry (see the Back to the Future saga for proof))






Sarah Jessica Parker as Hermione Granger (the cartoon suggests Brooke Shields, I suspect primarily on the basis of the hair, but SJP is no slouch in that regard)











Mary Stuart Masterson as Luna Lovegood (blonde, spooky eyes, and sweetly and innocently insane)







John Cusack as Neville Longbottom (nebbishy and put-upon when young, but grows up to become a dorky, nerdy, kick-ass superman)











Molly Ringwald as Ginny Weasley (red-haired, mouthy, a complete romantic, yet doesn't take crap from anyone)












Billy Zabka as Draco Malfoy (in this version, obviously, Draco would have no need of Crabbe or Goyle, but we can make it work)









James Sikking as Arthur Weasley (if he can parent Doogie Howswer, then you know he could handle the Weasley clan)














Edie McClurg as Molly Weasley (just picture her saying, with that prim, sweet smile, "Not my daughter, you bitch!")









Jeffery Jones as Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (the jokes write themselves, obviously)












And finally, Christopher Lloyd as Albus Dumbledore (here there I can be no questions, I presume)

Pötterdämmerung (or, It Ends, Again)

[Art by RLKarnes, here.]

Well, we're back from vacation. And just in time for the Twilight of the Gods, Potter-style--or in other words, a midnight showing of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2", which finished up about seven hours ago. Don't look for much of a review of the film here; I'll say something about it, but I've more to say about the whole HP thing, and the mixed joy and sadness I felt as the movie came to close. No Friday Morning Video this morning, folks; throwing up some old pop music video today would seem almost...disrespectful.

Take a peak around the web, and it's obvious: us fans are melancholy, exhilarated, and wistful. An odd mixture, that--but then, this has been an odd journey. It comes to an end--or at least, some sort of "end", even if the passion doesn't fade (though it almost surely will)--with a movie that contained almost no surprises; we just wanted to see it, with these actors, on the big screen. The story almost wasn't the point--we've known how it ends for four years now, and have had all that time to deal with it, reflect upon it, and even amend it (if we're inclined towards fan fiction, as I am). Moreover, we've known that Rowling's story wasn't a grand epic, though it often read like and affected us like one. It wasn't the sort of story that invited emotional revolutions or world-historical analogies: it was just the story of a boy, however much Rowling (and the script-writers who followed in her wake) arguably struggled with the very different, heavier, stranger, darker, more mature story within the bildungsroman which she, until the very last word, insisted (perhaps most crucially to herself) that she really was writing. We know all that. And we know that these films we love are, well, just adaptations: just riffs on the essential tale. So why were we--and here I mean the hundreds people who, like me and my oldest daughter, watched the midnight showing of Deathly Hallows Part 2 at our local theater earlier tonight (one of whom stood up a few minutes before the movie began, loudly called for everyone's attention, and then proposed to his girlfriend in front a cheering, costumed crowd), and I mean the millions more across the world who did the same early this morning--so caught up in it all? Caught up to, dare I say it, a Wagnerian degree?

I would suggest this partial explanation: because in a world where a relatively small amount of disposable income, a smattering of education, and the presence of some sort of mass media environment makes possible the emergence a participatory fan culture--of a fandom, in other words--the objects of fan affection don't take on the character of gods...but they do take on the character of a shared and venerated set of referents; they become something that, in however small way, we orient ourselves towards and around. In a sense, I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been said by social psychologists and cultural historians about kings and Hollywood actors and athletic stars for generations: geeking out over a person, to say nothing of a story or practice or art, is a particular part of human nature (maybe not every human's nature, but more than a few of us). The fact that this particular obsession takes the form of following through on a narrative that's already been enacted for us already, on page, doesn't necessarily change the way it works. At least not for me; as a member of this community of fans, I needed too see this film, to be part of it and all the joys and controversies and debates which surrounded it, perhaps even more because I knew how it ends.

Okay, this makes it all sound entirely performative and ritualistic, and of course it wasn't. I really did want to see how they handled Harry and Professor McGonagall and Neville and the Order of the Phoenix and the whole of Dumbledore's Army confronting Snape and organizing Hogwarts against Voldemort's attack (absolutely my favorite part of the movie, crammed with all sorts of wonderful character moments and visuals and dialogue, as was the battle itself, though I must register a strong dissent at killing off Lavender.) I really did want to see how they handled the Chamber of Secrets scene with Ron and Hermione (not what it could have been--I would have liked a little more dialogue, and by the way, why did we get the whole room exploding in water and drenching them, instead of, for example, that water attacking Hermione, as the Horcrux-locket fought back against Ron?--but it was wonderful that it was on screen at all). I really did want to see Ciarán Hinds as Aberforth Dumbledore (very nice, but his scenes were compromised by the fact that, throughout both parts of "Deathly Hallows", Kloves and Yates never did figure out how--or perhaps never even seriously attempted--to explain why Dumbledore's backstory or family were important to Harry's choices at all). And I really did want to see how they handled the revelation of Snape's ultimate loyalty and tragedy (to which I have to disagree with the emerging critical consensus: while Snape's final moments with Voldemort and Harry were dramatic and powerful, I found the pensieve scene rushed and not a little incoherent--seriously filmmakers, would it have killed you to give the single most important sequence in the entire story of Snape from all seven books five additional freaking minutes of screen time?). So no: it wasn't all ritual and performance; I really was curious about, excited and anxious about this final movie, and I really did cheer as the all the work which went into it came to an end. But let me be honest: there's almost no way I could have disliked the movie last night, and definitely no way I would have missed it (though the midnight showing was perhaps a little much). I'm too much a fan, too caught up in the exultation and sorrow and reflections of this concluding moment, for it to have been otherwise.

And now? Well, it was nice seeing the Epilogue from the book on screen, but I really kind of wish the film had ended with that wonderful scene of the trio standing on the broken down bridge to Hogwarts castle, Harry having broken and thrown the Elder wand into the abyss, leaving our heroes with no magical ties left to the curse of Voldemort, and simply standing, holding hands, and staring into their future. Like the somber artwork at the beginning of this post, that's the moment I think the movie should have ended upon--since, after all, that's where all us fans are standing as well. Having gone through it all, we wonder what comes next (Pottermore, perhaps!).

Not that everything about the fan experience has been, or ever will be, somber: one of the great joys of Rowling's works, and the whole fandom her work inspired, has been the humor, the whimsy, the silliness, the defiance, the delight of it all. I'm talking about The Mysterious Ticking Noise (which another group of fans before the showing last night started chanting out for all of us); I'm talking about Wizard People (beware--not child appropriate); I'm talking about A Very Potter Musical; I'm talking about thousands of gags and stunts and parodies online. But for now, I'm thinking of the more somber stuff out there--the expressions of devotion that take the deepness lurking about Rowling's story, and turn it into something that captures both the sadness and the fulfillment us true fans feel. (Start with the "documentary," The Battle of Hogwarts, easily the best fan film I've yet seen, and go from there.) And if you want to try to understand how we feel, staring out into a future in which we've done pretty much everything any Harry Potter fan could offer their Gods, you could given this video a listen:



And, since we live in the age of the mash-up, this one as well:



It's nearly 11am CST, the day after my own personal Pötterdämmerung; I've survived, and I'm happy I went through it all. And if Rowling writes another book...I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

What Happens When a Fandom Ends?

[Artwork by Ninny Treetrops, probably my favorite of all the thousands of HP fan artists out there]

So, it appears the cat is out of the bag insofar as "Pottermore", the website that J.K. Rowling has teased us with for the past week or so, and has promised to announce tomorrow. An online wizarding treasure hunt? Perhaps encyclopedia entries, an interactive Harry Potter game, selected readings by Stephen Fry, more? I'm game--I'll definitely check it out. But nothing, not even the new book that one supposed fan (but not a terribly informed one, as fans like myself explained to him a great length in the comments) proposed for Rowling to pursue in Slate, is enough to shake me out of a mood, when it comes to Harry Potter, that wavers between giddy nostalgia and outright melancholy. (Besides, I'd much rather hear more about Dean Thomas than Teddy Lupin.) The fact is, in less than a month's time, a strange obsessive community I've found myself enjoying and participating in for the past four years will, if not come to an end, then at least be permanently changed.

I never expected to become a Potterholic. Though I was aware of the books, and Melissa was reading them, from the beginning, it took the fascination of my oldest daughter, years later in the summer of 2004, and beyond, to turn me into a fan. And then Half-Blood Prince made me a little crazy, and the rush of predictions in the lead-up to Deathly Hallows made me even more so. But still, I wasn't on the Harry Potter websites and boards; I wasn't reading or writing fan fiction, I wasn't dressing up--it was a delightfully obsessive pastime, but it didn't have any roots in my interior life. But then came the finale, in July of 2007, four years ago...and somehow, the thrill, joy, frustration, and exhaustion of that moment--of reading the final chapter, of seeing it all finished and whole, with everything Rowling gave us and all she failed (or, as I have since argued, perhaps unconsciously chose!) not to tell--all combined. Rowling is by no means a great author--but she was at least good enough create a world, a funny and strange and violent and yet almost innocently moral world, inhabited by characters that were worth loving and hating and hoping for. And it was done; Harry, Ron, and Hermione we're...no more. That's hard to grasp, as more than a few fellow obsessives had foreseen. No doubt there were many millions of readers--the great majority, I'm sure--who closed the last book with satisfaction (or disappointment) and went on with their lives. But not me--not quite. And that, my eight faithful readers, is what began a four-year (so far) long sojourn through my first true fandom.

Wait: aren't I a Star Trek fan? Of course--a serious one! I had whole episodes of the original series all but memorized when I was in junior high. But I never got into the Trekkie world; I'm not sure I've ever even read a single Star Trek novel all the way through. (My brother is a different case.) How about Tolkien? Didn't I read LOTR repeatedly, incorporate much of it into Dungeons and Dragons games? Absolutely. But still, while I'm happy to browse through the History of Middle Earth and debate fiercely whether balrogs had wings (of course they did, you idiot!), I never really saw myself, well, in all those arguments. But when it comes to arguing out Rowling's world and reading HP fan fiction...well, I was sunk. And, in sinking into that, I found myself surrounded by millions of others that had been delightfully engaging in HP fandom since the first book came out, and I had a lot of catching up to do.



Watching the movies was, of course, an essential part of keeping alive the whimsy, the delight, the faux-seriousness of being one of hundreds of thousands who loved and, in a weird way, "believed in" the details of this fantastic world--but so was thinking about the art, the ideas, the stories, the icons, the in-jokes that existed almost solely in an online world. Old-time geeks might snort derisively at the gushing claims made by many fans, the claim that there has "never been a fandom" like Harry Potter--they could tell us stories of Star Wars flik conventions at crummy motels, of thousands of purple-smudged pages of mimeographed Star Trek stories. Since what we're all talking about here is something that was mostly--insofar as the mainstream media and corporate powers were concerned at any rate--marginal and invisible for decades, I'm not sure how anyone could accurate measure the size of fandoms. And for that matter, just what fandoms there are. How big to they have to be to count? When did Led Zeppelin-listening hippies who fell into Tolkien's world in the 60s and 70s, or aspiring tech geeks who found their own mythology in Star Trek in the 70s and 80s, first realize they were a subculture of their own? Perhaps that's the only real difference with Harry Potter--thanks to the advent of the internet, potentially everyone playing around with Rowling's creation could always follow, and engage with, and most importantly be known (by each other, as well as by advertisers) to be being engaged with, everyone else, from day one until...well, until everyone stops, I guess.

It's been a weird, wonderful, often seriously time-wasting four years. "Time-wasting": do I believe that? Sort of; there have definitely been days when turning the world of Harry Potter over and over in my mind has got in the way of me getting essential work done. But then again, if I hadn't taken it as seriously as I have, then I wouldn't have the relationship I have with my daughters--with Megan, who grew up into the world of imagination through Rowling's books, and with Caitlyn, who partook of that world through following the same path at her own pace, and now with Alison, who is turning into every bit the fan that Megan ever was. (And someday, my last daughter, Kristen, as well? Perhaps. Who knows?) I guess I'm not embarrassed by being a Potterholic at all--dissatisfied at some of my time choices, and maybe even with some less than admirable habits I've picked up along the way...but do I wish I hadn't had geeked out on the story at all? No, not in the least.

Anyway, we've got our tickets and our Gryffindor scarves for the midnight showing, three weeks from tomorrow. Who knows what it'll happen after that? Maybe the whole thing--for me personally, or for everyone else--will just wind down. Or maybe the ideas and enchantment and silliness and soulful beauty of the stories will just, one way or another, keep marching on, carrying all us obsessives, happily, along with them.



Update, 6/23,2011, 8:01am, CST: here's the Pottermore announcement from Rowling. An interactive--perhaps Wiki?--encyclopedia/backstory archive? Hopefully, one that in time will allow for additional "licensed" fan writings as well? I'll be signing up, that's for sure:

Because I'm an Enormous Dork, That's Why

You can name all of the featured actors and their characters, can't you? What, you can't? Oh, so I guess you're one of those people with balance and focus in your life.

[Update, 5/27/2011, 12:04pm: And still more...

As If Anything Could Keep Me Away

If there is any justice, Alan Rickman will be allowed--playing as he does, in the context of a film which is plainly intending to tell a story far more "adult" than the books did, the most interesting character in the whole tale--to walk away with the movie. We can only hope. And watch, of course.

What I Saw in Deathly Hallows, Part 1

In one sentence: this movie gives us, quite successfully, the first half of an adaptation of the story which Deathly Hallows, the novel, wasn't quite willing to be.

(From here on out, Harry Potter-obsessive geekery rules. You've been warned.)

I had my Gryffindor scarf, I had my popcorn and soda, and I was settled into my chair all of four rows back from the screen. I was reading to enjoy myself--and I did, far more than I expected to way back when I first heard that they were going to be splitting the adaptation into two movies. My fear back then was that the push to expand the final book's film treatment into something like five hours, spread out over two movies, was driven by a desire to film every bit of the book, to not leave anything out...and of all the books, DH is one of the last you would want to take such an approach to. There was a similar dynamic at work with the adaption of the most cumbersome and unfocused of the Harry Potter books: Order of the Phoenix. With a good screenwriter in place, that book was honed down into a smart, solid, entirely self-contained and self-sustaining bit of genre filmmaking; it's really the best film of the lot, so far (this one included). But with this final set of adaptations, Steve Kloves, the screenwriter for every other one of the films, would be back on board, and on the basis of his track record, I just couldn't see how going big with the final novel would really add anything, at least not cinematically speaking. I just anticipated a fun time, but a fun time watching a whole bunch of pedestrian filming of handsome scenes, one after another. Two films would just be twice as much of the same.

I wasn't entirely wrong: truth is, there is a lot of by the numbers filmmaking in this adaptation. But there was something more to. You see, to my mind, thinking big when you're adapting a story to the screen requires approaching the story in a "big" way too--it means going comprehensive, going epic. And that means developing a cinematic language, a way of moving the characters around and putting words into their mouths, that will pull things together in a big way. And Deathly Hallows, the novel, ultimately doesn't provide that language; it is, as I said in my review of the book, "a children's story after all." That's not a criticism; that's just what Rowling chose to write. And yet...there are so many hints in that novel, hints of things grand and deep and mature and complicated, conveyed through violence, sexual tension, moral confusion, that point in the direction of telling a "big" story, not just the story of The Boy Who Lived. And, to my amazement, Kloves and director David Yates, and all the other people who worked on this adaptation, not the least the trio of actors at the center of it, actually grabbed a hold of some of it. This movie works far better than I expected, on the basis of the previous six adaptations, any possible "Deathly Hallows, Part 1" to possibly work. The reason for that is, to put it plainly, for better or worse, the movie isn't really telling the story in that novel. It's gone bigger. It's telling the story which that novel didn't turn out to be.

In my review of the book, I was pretty clear on how surprised I was at the story which DH told. As I reflected upon it, I realized that I'd talked myself into believing, over the years, that the tale Rowling was telling was far more epic, more psychological, more mythological than it actually turned out to be: namely, a giant, 5000+ page "penny dreadful," a work of "boys' literature," as Alan Jacobs put it in the single best review of DH and the whole HP phenomenon. (Now included in Alan's newest book; buy it!) But in conversations with him (see the comments following my review), even Alan admits that the books "do all sorts of things that children's books just don't do," and that as a result, perhaps Rowling's work is "sui generis." I'm strongly persuaded by Alan's thoughts...about the books, particularly DH, as we finally received them. But over the past few years, in re-reading and thinking about the books more and more, I've come up with an additional explanation: that the books, and DH in particular, really were sending us in that "epic," "psychological," "mythological" direction, a direction in which really would end with our young heroes entirely on their own, confronting violence and sex and betrayal and longing and self-discovery and heroism as adults. But Rowling, when it came to it, just didn't want to write that book, and so pulled back.

I think the "Deathly Hallows" themselves are the tip-off here. By the end of Half-Blood Prince (with Dumbledore, Harry's last remaining father figure, dead and gone), Rowling had truly written her characters and her plot to a point which simply demanded that Harry, Ron, and Hermione progress fully into adulthood; that they confront each other, their enemies, their allies, their feelings, and the search for the Horcruxes as ultimately independent actors, and fail or succeed as such. Just about everyone agreed with that feeling as we digested HBP. Who knows how or when Rowling herself reneged on (or, to be more charitable, revised) that point? I doubt we'll ever know; maybe she herself isn't conscious of it. But I think Rowling, looking at what she wanted to accomplish by the end of DH, simply didn't want to get to that predetermined end-point through the sort of drama, passion, horror, and sacrifice that her characters seemed ready for. So she had to come up with some new twist, something to slow things down, something that would bring out on the pages the sort of growing up and puzzling and dealing with temptation and doubts that she still really wanted. Enter stage left: the Deathly Hallows. Legendary magic which we'd never heard of before, whose mechanics were never really clear, whose operating principles made a hash of most of what we'd learned about wand lore thus far in the series. It's all a rather convoluted way for Rowling to continue along with Harry's bildungsroman--even though it, in many ways, had actually, whether Rowling meant for it to be so or not, come to an end with HBP. But it worked; it enabled her to write the story she was comfortable writing.

And now we have "Deathly Hallows, Part 1," the movie...and it isn't telling this sort of story. Perhaps that will change; perhaps in Part 2 Kloves and Yates will take us straight back to Rowling's text. I wouldn't mind that; I'd be happy with it. But this film, as inconsistent and plodding as it sometimes is, is actually occasionally telling the story under, or behind, the story which DH ended up giving us. In the corners of DH's text you can see the rudiments of that adult adventure story: hysterical witches and wizards, raging about their missing children; members of the Order of the Phoenix, falling apart through distrust and terror; Harry and Hermione alone in a tent for weeks, for heaven's sake. Surely this is a dark, creepy, disturbing story, a story of desperation, temptation, and doubt. Well, the movie tells that story. Not entirely, and not entirely well. But some of the invented scenes really drive it home. Harry, threatening to run off on his own, filled with fear and guilt over the damage and death he is bringing upon his friends? Doesn't happen in the novel--but it's far truer to the story on DH's pages than what Rowling actually has Harry say and do while he stays at the Burrow, waiting for Bill and Fleur's wedding. The same thing can be said for Ron wanting to kill the Dolohov in the cafe after Hermione stupefies him (which is a tremendous scene, by the way; Rupert Grint absolutely steps up)--not in the book, but very true to what is going on all around them in that same book. And the same thing can definitely be said for Harry and Hermione dancing in the tent one lonely night after Ron has abandoned them. They are desperate teen-agers, confused and scared; how could they not be vaguely tempted to fall into some kind of intimacy with each other, if only to ease their pain? Not in the book, but if Rowling hadn't decided to tell a story where Harry's pondering over the Hallows preternaturally takes up pretty much their entire waking hours, maybe it would have been.

Sure, maybe I think this way because I've filled my mind over the years with all sorts of ways in which to expand, elaborate upon, and explore Rowling's world; maybe I've just continued to distract myself from the core simplicity and morality of Rowling's tale as Alan, among others, has identified it. Maybe as I result I'm looking at an adventurous film adaptation, and doing something similar to what Alexandra DuPont, probably the best writer of all the reviewers on Ain't It Cool News, once admitted to be her feelings about the cult film "Buckaroo Banzai": for her, delighting so much in the ideas and possibilities of the story which the film told, in the end the movie itself became "a partially successful adaptation of its own novelization." I don't want it to be the case that my appreciation of what Rowling could have written, and what other fan authors have written in response to what she left unsaid, actually overshadows what she put on the page. But then, it's not as though these ideas came out of nowhere: blame Yates and Kloves. If DH is, at its core, a fantastic but straightforward morality tale--and it is certainly that--then there's very little chance such a tale would be well served by turning it into two movies. Better to stick with one (and hope that Kloves improves as an adapter!). But they, I think, saw the epic possibilities in DH as well, and they put together a movie which occasionally really delivers on that, with marvelous and haunting landscapes which our heroes trudge through, followed by the frightening monotone of a radio broadcast, listing the names of the dead in the struggle against Voldemort. They put romance, sexual tension, bitterness, and a couple of moments of horrific violence on the screen. They've put a lot of stuff which doesn't work on the screen as well (is there any reason why Wormtail is in the film at all? I mean, seriously, why?), but they definitely did more than just say "were going to film it all!" No, they obviously decided to film it "big": big emotions, big terrors, big temptations, big tragedies. Rowling herself is telling people that she loves the movie. Maybe she has to say that. Or then again, maybe she, while watching these actors play loving, failing, and striving young adults on the screen, is seeing in "Deathly Hallows, Part 1" the story which she didn't write, but could have, as well.

Just Try To Keep Me Away. Just Try.

Exactly one month from today, I'm there.

What Kind of Geek Should I Be?

So, I have a free pass to an opening night show at our local Warren Theatre megaplex. That means no crossing town to catch some obscure foreign flick at the only theater in Wichita that reliably shows the few that come our way. And since Melissa and I watch practically everything on Netflix these days anyway, that means it simply won't do to use this pass for chick flicks or to catch up on all the Oscar contenders we've missed or various and sundry other middlebrow fair; no, this pass is fated to take me to the movies to see some big Geek Event Film, the only sort really made for the the big screen these days. The question is: which one?

1) The Watchmen, opening this Friday?

2) Star Trek, opening May 8th?

3) Or hold out until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is released (eight freaking months late!) on July 17th?

I'll see all of them, eventually. But which should I be most determined to hang out with my fellow obsessive fans at on opening night? Half-Blood Prince is probably the obvious choice that longtime readers might make; my Harry Potter geekcred is thoroughly established. But my Star Trek fascination is pretty darn healthy too. And as for comic books and their film adaptations...well, let's just recall that Alan Moore's The Watchmen was key to helping me realize where I'd gone wrong in supporting, however tentatively, Bush's invasion of Iraq, and let it go at that.

In truth, this decision is mostly up to Melissa, as I hardly ever go out to films on my own, and the odds for convincing her to go along with me to one of these three films on their respective opening nights are probably: The Watchmen, extremely unlikely; Star Trek, about fifty-fifty; Half-Blood Prince, pretty good. But still, give me your sage advice, my dozen or so faithful readers. If I need to change her mind, I can tell her the Teaming Masses of the Internets told us what to do.

Adapting Harry Potter

Yes, it's another HP post. What can I say? I'm a nerd.

So, as anybody whose obsessive about this stuff (what, obsessive, me?) has heard by now, The Powers That Be are going to split the film adaptation of The Deathly Hallows into two movies. Fan reaction, from what I can tell, has been mostly positive. And why not? It's more Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter! More Emma Watson as Hermione Granger! More (hearts flutter, palms grow sweaty) Alan Rickman as Severus Snape! Well, put me down for a dissenting vote. The movies have, generally speaking, gotten better over the years--though there continue to be low points and high points spread unevenly throughout--and while the folks behind this franchise (for a variety of reasons) don't have the comprehensive drive of a Peter Jackson moving them forward, a somewhat consistent cinematic language and fantasy vision has nonetheless emerged. I sincerely doubt turning DH into two films will serve that accomplishment very well. Why?

1. I simply don't believe the reasons for the split being given. Sure, DH is the final book, with lots of loose ends to tie up. And yes, there are some fairly extensive subplots and side notes which are both essential to the books plot and completely exclusive to DH (the whole Dumbledore-Grindelward thing, for example); finding the space to fit them into the film is surely important. But is there really so much going on that it resists a concise adaptation? You're going film Bill and Fleur's wedding (even though, thus far, we've no indication that either of them will even appear in the sixth movie, which presumably ought to be setting up their whole relationship)? You're going film all of the Trio camping, all of the events at Shell Cottage, all of the encounter with Xenophilius Lovegood? I'll believe it when I see it.

2. Which leads to an additional concern: if they really do film it all--if they really do give us a combined five (or more?) hours of DH adaptation--then I can't imagine the results will be good. I imagine a replay of what made the first movie such a slog: a mess of hasty exposition and clipped, context-less scenes as they scrambled to fit in everything. Maybe I should give them the benefit of the doubt, or at least wait to see what the film adaptation of The Half-Blood Prince brings us this winter, with the final team of David Yates (director) and Steve Kloves (screenwriter) working together. (My wife has long insisted that the real problem with adaptation has been the screenwriter; I know Kloves has written and shot some good films, but so much of his work on the HP films has just come off as obvious and insistent, whereas a different screenwriter shaped, under Yates's direction, Order of the Phoenix--the longest and most cumbersome of the HP novels--into the leanest and most effective movie to date.) But I'm not confident. Going for two movies, striving to "fit it all in," is going to require some thinking outside the box, and we haven't seen much of that so far.

3. What sort of outside the box thinking am I talking about? Look at it this way: as many of us discovered somewhat surprisingly by the end of DH, Rowling really was writing a children's book (or, as Alan Jacobs's put it in the single best review of DH I read, "boys' literature," a "penny dreadful"). The puts certain constraints upon adaptation--going for the "shoot everything" approach, however, puts different expectations in place. If the goal is really to catch each and every detail of DH on film (which, again, I doubt is what will happen or is even a good idea), then what you need to do is think expansively, think epic-style...and that means reshaping the books so that we have a multiplicity of viewpoints and concurrent events. The books do this, sometimes, but mostly Rowling managed to make everything significant--including exposition--happen in Harry's real-time (he reads something, he overhears something, etc.). The films have actually been pretty faithful to this, though often clumsily (it may be true to Hermione's know-it-all character, but giving Emma Watson constant exposition and explanation duties has mainly resulted in her having to perfect sighing and raising her eyebrows, rather than really delve into her character). If you want to break away from the one-film limit, then Yates, Kloves & Co. really should be looking at ways to break away from all that as well...and that means, fill in the gaps, give all the co-stars and secondary characters something to do! Write and film Ron's angry departure from Harry and Hermione, his escape from the Snatchers, and his return to his friends from his point of view. (C'mon, you just know Rupert Grint has the action-hero chops to handle it.) Moreover, definitely shoot Ron and Hermione's escapades in the Chamber of Secrets (what do you mean, Rowling didn't write exactly what happened? well then, make something up!). How about Neville, Luna and Ginny--and others?--trying to keep hope alive at Hogwarts, recruiting for Dumbledore's Army, trying to steal the Sword of Gryffindor? Or Dean on the run? Or Remus's return to and reunion with Tonks? I really think this kind of comprehensive attitude towards the story--rather than a niggling, "this time we won't have to leave anything on the cutting room floor!" approach--is the only approach that would make splitting the story in two worth it. Otherwise, we Potter geeks may just end up with the promise of something more than another fun, affecting film waved before our eyes, before it collapses in a mess.

I think I'll forward this post to Warner Brothers. No doubt, they'll be so bowled over by my reasoning that they'll take my every criticism and suggestion to heart.

Why I've Been So Slow, Part 3: Harry Has Sucked Me In

Well, of the two reasons I've considered thus far to account for my blogging slowdown, the first was entirely beyond my control (mysterious ear ailments usually are), while the second, though not entirely beyond my control, really made it truly difficult for me to adequately focus on the actual work I'm supposed to be doing, much less on hobbies like blogging. But the third major cause...well, it's not as though I've been so physically out of it and so buried under that I haven't had anytime to devote to the funner uses a computer can be put to. On the contrary, I've been able to find the occasional hour here and there regularly enough. And what I have been spending those hours on? Oh, lots of different things, to be sure. But honesty demands that I 'fess up to a relatively new and, in recent months, quite significant additional obsession of mine.

I've been reading fan fiction. Specifically, Harry Potter fan fiction.

Let's be plain here: I'm a geek. Not an absolute, stereotypical, completely-useless-for-real-life geek, but I do have my obsessions. Long ago it was comic books, though I haven't followed any titles for many years now. Dungeons and Dragons has also played a big role in my life, though now it's mostly a once-a-year thing. And there have been others. Mostly, these days, I get into various types of world-creation literature: science fiction, fantasy, horror, and so forth, but even there I'm not the obsessive reader that I once was. (Though I have flashbacks: a few years ago, a friend of mine pointed out to me that somebody, in defiance of who knows how many trademark laws, had posted the entire collected works of H.P. Lovecraft online, and for about three weeks between every class I would run back to my office, close the door, and consume another tale about the Elder Gods.) But Harry Potter though...well, anyone who has hung around this blog at all over the past few years knows all about my preoccupation with Rowling's oeuvre. I honestly thought after Deathly Hallows I'd be able to walk away from it all. But, even as Alan and Tim and Ross and I and others were conducting our postmortems on the series, ideas started creeping into my brain, ideas I couldn't shake. I've never before--honestly, never!--been the sort of person interested in rewriting or extending extent works of fiction; the most my imagination ever seemed comfortable doing was putting me--the actual, unadapted, ordinary me--into stories and movies and books as a kind of sardonic, all-knowing narrator. But this was different: I needed to read what other people were doing and saying about these plot holes and loose ends that I seemed to feel all around me, begging for elaboration and resolution. So I started checking out The Sugar Quill and Checkmated and other Harry Potter fan fiction sites. And I started reading. And reading. And reading. And...

I should note that I have nothing against fan fiction; on the contrary, thanks the terrific and thoughtful comments of professional editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden (particularly here and here; the estimable John Holbo once referred to that first post as having spawned "the greatest thread ever," but really you can find commentary like this all over her and her husband Patrick's wonderful site) I've long recognized that fan fiction is a perfectly organic response to the present-day, commercially and legally convoluted (and often unreasonably so) world of publishing, particularly genre publishing. Actually, I think I kind of knew this already, having grown up reading fantasy magazines and comic books that would frequently play fast-and-loose with popular culture (didn't Chris Claremont once write an X-Men story where Storm and the New Mutants met the cast from Remington Steele on a Greek island somewhere?); but I'd never really gone anywhere with it. I've long had some fiction writing aspirations of my own, which I've kept telling myself I'll get around to after I get tenure somewhere, but those ideas were never derivative, at least not in a fan-ficky sense. (They are, if you must know, a plan for a series of short stories taking place in a kind of Christian fantasy world, but despite having kicked these ideas around for close to 20 years, all I've got there is a main character, some vague plots, and a bunch of titles; and--more prestigiously--a mental outline for a big post-apocalyptic/historical fantasy-type opus that I've been thinking about for 15 years or so (the initial inspiration occurred around the same time as the 1994 midterm elections; one of the main characters is clearly a parody of Newt Gingrich), which has become extremely detailed in my head, but which I'll probably never write, as it's gone in some sort of Lord of the Rings/Canticle for Leibowitz/Thus Sprach Zarathustra-type direction and is becoming more a fantastic philosophy of history then anything that would be, you know, actually fun to read.) But anyway, the point is, once I saw how people were playing with, fixing up, tearing apart, and generally having fun with Rowling's creation, my resistance to letting my own ideas get going melted away. And so, for many weeks now, when I could be producing wonderful works of scholarship, I've been obsessing over how I can get Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood out of that Chinese wizard's dungeon they'd been thrown into.

Yeah, it's mostly about the grown-up Neville and Luna. I'm not sure why. I think, if my genealogy of my own imagination is at all accurate, it began with wondering where Luna might have been during the epilogue scene at King's Cross at the end of DH, all those years later, and somehow I decided she'd probably be in California, maybe at UC-Santa Cruz or the wizarding equivalent, lecturing about various magical beasties. Crazy? Um, yes, but not unreasonably so; I've always kind of envisioned (and reading fan fiction has led me to conclude that I'm not alone here) Luna as a brilliant, creative, but basically self-enclosed and self-taught individual, who was going to end up going the guru-route after Hogwarts: kind of hippie-ish, all flower child and free love and so forth, that is when she isn't off on adventures looking for invisible carnivorous fairies in the jungle or amongst the fjords. She'd be a hit in the Bay Area, I figured. And this fit in with the vibes that Rowling herself sent us about Luna, and the Luna/Neville ship. (Yes, "ship." I've absorbed fandom's jargon, I can't deny it.) First she said they'd never be able to make it as a couple, then she drops some big hints to focus our attention elsewhere, then all of sudden she admits to having thought they'd get together after all while actually writing DH, and then she tells us Neville and Hannah Abbott get married. (No, I'm not going to link to all this; go find it yourself.) In time, my thoughts solidified: clearly, Neville and Luna--already pretty good friends--would have grown very tight during the year they and Ginny managed a guerrilla resistance at Hogwarts, and Luna's interest in magical zoology (confirmed as her likely career choice in a later Rowling interview) would coincide perfectly with his expertise in herbology, and so no doubt any likely future stories for them would have to tell the tale of their joined passions and the--given Luna's headstrong nature--mad situations those plans and expeditions would land them in, not to mention getting some humorous mileage out of the inevitable distaste Neville would feel for Luna's crazy personal hygiene and general lack of modesty when they go tramping across Brazil. But there was a problem. Seeing as how I basically accepted the idea that Neville and Luna just weren't meant for each other, how to keep them from becoming in an even de facto way another post-Hogwarts couple? The difference in their temperaments? No, I felt; in a world in which Rowling can stick such complete opposites as Ron and Hermione together (and in which the fan-fickers have kept them together, in ever position imaginable, I assure you), that excuse wouldn't fly. For a while, I was thinking Neville would be gay, and I thought that would make for some interesting twists and turns, but I confess it sometimes came in my head to seem like some terrible mash-up between Will & Grace and The Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Then fortunately Rowling revealed that Neville turns out to be an ordinary domesticated member of the married wizarding bourgeoisie, which would work even better with what I foresee. (Neville getting religion, among other things.)

Wait a minute...what I foresee? Do I actually plan on writing any of this down, do I imagine that it'll be read and perhaps be absorbed into the Harry Potter fanon (yep, that's more jargon there), do I dream that Rowling will take up the story again and in any sense think the same thoughts that I think? Well, in order: maybe, no, and definitely no. But having spent as much time on it as I have, I can't just write it all off as some weakness of mind; there may be no money, minimal prestige, a lot of potential embarrassment, and a heavy cost in terms of time involved in actually writing a story that takes place in someone else's word, but hey--others may enjoy it, and I'd at least learn something from it, so it's not complete geekery. Or maybe it is, but it's not necessarily bad geekery. Consider it practice to later effectively expand my writing repertoire. That'd be worth doing, assuming I can actually straighten out my life enough to stop letting this most recent obsession of mine interfere with real-world journal articles and book reviews I've committed to writing. And blogging, of course; that's the real world too. Sort of.

It Ends

That's a pretty pretentious title for a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, isn't it? Yes, it is--but then, all of us got at least a little pretentious in regards to the Harry Potter books, didn't we? Sometimes? Alan? Tim? Or maybe it was just me. And maybe all that pretentiousness was generated by my head, never the books themselves. Because I must admit it--I finished Deathly Hallows at about 9:45am Saturday morning (got home from the bookstore at about 1am, read until 4am, tried to sleep for an hour, then got back up and read until I was done), and the very first coherent judgment I could come to was "Huh. A children's story after all."

[From this point on, spoilers abound. You've been warned.]

Please note: I am not saying "children's story" with anything like a sneering or condescending tone; I am not saying that Deathly Hallows reveals the story of Harry Potter to be simplistic or childish or immature. Far from it! But I am saying that, somehow or another, over the last two years--led along, I suppose, by my own outrageously detailed predictions, which of course proved to be almost entirely wrong--I talked myself into seeing these books...differently than I had any right to. I read too much that was epic into them, too much that was mythological and psychological, too much that was adult. I wrote before, both here on my blog and on many comments on many others' posts over the months, that if Deathly Hallows turned out to be a book in which Harry and friends have to run through one more puzzle, figure out one more trick, reveal one more twist in Snape's character, learn one more lesson, all to find Dumbledore proudly waiting for them one more time at the end--in others words, if it turned out to be one more step in a long bildungsroman, a bildungsroman that I was convinced had come to an end in the last book--then I would be immensely disappointed. And...well, it did turn out to be a story with new puzzles for Harry, Ron, and Hermione to solve (figuring out the mysterious gifts left for them by Dumbledore), another trick for them to negotiate (the mystery and temptation posed by the Deathly Hallows), one more surprise revelation about Snape (though admittedly this was the biggest of them all), one more difficult lesson taught (Harry's realization that he had to die), and yes, it even had Dumbledore: not just--as we learn at the end--having orchestrated the recovery of the Sword of Gryffindor and much more via Snape from his half-life in his portrait in the headmaster's office, but even showing up for a heart-to-heart with Harry in the afterlife! And yet...I'm not disappointed at all. In fact, I loved it, and turned the last page aching for more.

Surprisingly enough, I should have let the movies call me to my senses. When Melissa and I went to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" the Friday before last (just last week! how the past day and a half have seemed to stretch time...), we walked out of theater thrilled. No, of course it's not some cinematic masterpiece, but it is a great, exciting, affecting fantasy film, and we delighted in rehearsing our favorite scenes. But then, just as quickly we were talking about all the great scenes they left out, all the ways in which they failed to "properly" advance the story, all the misfires in their adaptation. ("As usual, they aren't providing what the story requires to make sense of Snape!"--that sort of thing.) As I turned it over in my head, I could only see more and more holes. But then I wondered: if it, like the other films, had manifestly failed, why did I like it so much? Low expectations? No...it is genuinely a good film on its own terms. And that's when it struck me. What are its own terms? Why, the story of Harry, of course--the Boy Who Lived, the boy who is blessed and cursed and destined to love and fight and lead. A hero, in other words. A boy hero, who must grow to be a man. "Order of the Phoenix" gave us a rousing, powerful, heroic final (yet we know far from truly final) temptation and battle, with everything resting on Harry; it was fantastic. The filmmakers (under J.K. Rowling's watchful eye, perhaps?) have never forgotten, whatever their other mistakes, that this is Harry's story. Me...well, let's say that I probably sometimes let that slip my mind.

And so, of course Harry would live; of course he would go beyond but then come right back again. He's the young hero, the one who by being willing to accept his own death, by growing up, surprisingly (or is it, really?) undoes the last sure magic keeping Voldemort, the enemy of all life, himself alive! No tragic, overarching, transhistorical doom here--Harry is not Frodo, a man who must unknowingly ruin himself for the sake of something larger than himself. Neither is Dumbledore Gandalf, an awesomely powerful agent of those larger things, who is nonetheless himself also in the thick of the battle. No, Dumbledore is the father figure who plans and hopes and risks the best way he knows how, the teacher who must plot and trick and sacrifice so his students can learn what they may and then teach themselves the rest. But also unlike Gandalf, Dumbledore is like an ordinary father and teacher in other ways: a man whose knowledge is limited, who is haunted by his own past, his own failures, his own pre-occupations, who is, at best, only guessing (though his guesses are usually good!). Gandalf could never have a brother like Aberforth, and why would he need one? J.R.R. Tolkien was charting the passing of an age; such stories do not require wizards with existential dimensions. But Rowling has charted the arc of a boy as he grew to become a prophesied hero. His most proper parallel (and this has been noted by many, though never, I think, to my embarrassment, by me) is Taran, from Lloyd Alexander's classic Prydain stories. A boy in love, a boy who doubts, a boy with confused yet fiery ambitions, a boy destined to be high king....but only if he can grow and learn the lessons and accept the help and show the courage he must. Which he did (of course he did; it's a bildungsroman, after all!)--and so did Harry, thus doing exactly the growing up which the books had intended of him all along.

Does that forgive all? Not at all. The comparison with Alexander's compact, tight Prydain novels is a good one: if we were not, in the end, to be led to an epic clash of the best and worst of the wizarding and Muggle worlds and the resulting transformations (and while that door remains open, there is nothing in the final chapter or the epilogue of Deathly Hallows to suggest that much is fundamentally going to change--twenty years later they're still sorting people into houses and inspiring rivalries at Hogwarts, for heaven's sake!), but rather, to be led to a concluding series of tests and choices in the life of the Chosen One, and the hard-won victory which follows, then Rowling really could have and should have written shorter (dare I say less "pretentious"?) books! Yet I bite my tongue in even saying that...because if Rowling is anything, she's a charmer of Dickensian proportions. Her scenes, her characters...gosh I wanted more! I wanted to see Ron and Hermionie abruptly decide to get married while on the run with Harry (dude, if you're living practically alone in a tent for weeks and weeks...). I wanted Regulus Black himself to pop up, somehow or somewhere. I wanted Harry to twist the Resurrection Stone one more time, and have that final (necessary, I insist, necessary!) face to face with Snape, in the presence of the ghosts of Snape's greatest enemies and his only love. I wanted to see Horace Slughorn lay it on the line to the Slytherin students, shut Pansy Parkinson up, and demonstrate (as Phineas Nigellus insisted) that there's a real reason for Slytherin House after all. So, ultimately, Rowling the author puts my thinking at cross-purposes: she has given me a work of fiction that in its themes and intentions are really much simpler (though no less worthy and powerful on their own terms for all that) than all the plots and points of view she has loaded her books up with implied, with imbalanced results...and yet contained within all that pretentiousness was stuff and more stuff, not one bit of which I'd want to lose.

Okay, enough with all my ruminations on the big themes. How about my predictions? Well, I was totally wrong about Harry and Snape and Luna and Viktor Krum and Azkaban and the Order of the Phoenix and the Malfoys and Hogwarts, 99% wrong about Percy and Peter Pettigrew and Slughorn and pretty much everything else. I suppose I could claim a few small, small accuracies here and there, but let's face it: I completely blew it. Oh well, no future in teaching Divination for me. How about the good bits in the book? Well, there are no less than three truly spectacular set pieces: the infiltration of the Ministry of Magic, the gloriously wild break-in to (and break-out of) Gringotts, and of course the Battle of Hogwarts--which blew every previous battle in the book away, and intentionally so, as this was Rowling's big chance to bring everyone on for a final bow. (Yes! Percy and Charlie Weasley! The old Quidditch crowd, Angelina Johnson and Oliver Wood! Neville's grandmother! Sir Cadagon! Bane! Buckbeak! Firenze! Kreacher leading an army of house elves! The Molly Weasley-Bellatrix Lestrange showdown, complete with a hat-tip to Sigourney Weaver in Aliens! And Colin Creevy....damn, why did poor Colin's death hit me like fist to the stomach? To say nothing of Fred, Remus, and Tonks!) And that leaves out the escapes from Malfoy Manor (Dobby! You were a free elf, indeed!) and from Nagini at Godric's Hollow. And if battles aren't your thing...well, the departure and return of Ron in chapters 15 and 19, climaxing with Ron's emotionally shattering confrontation with the Horcrux (the only time in reading Deathly Hallows when I did not merely sniffle and tear up, but truly wept), not only provided a payoff to all those who had speculated that, before the end, the one member of the Big Three to whom Rowling had given truly ordinary fears and weaknesses would be forced by Voldemort to face them openly, but also proved to me that if she ever decides to try her hand at adult dramatic or romantic fiction, she definitely has the chops. And how about the comedy? Not much in the middle and latter parts of the book, but the wedding, before everything went to hell, was as witty as all get out (I loved George's suggestion that he teach their new veela cousins "English customs"). And as for quiet pathos, only the hardest heart could fail to be moved, I think, by Rowling's description of the meeting of Harry and Neville before Harry left Hogwarts to meet Voldemort and his death. ("We're all going to keep fighting, Harry. You know that?") So yes--leaving aside what kind of book it was, and whether it should have been or could have been a different book, what it was, was...well, not perfect. But very, very, very fine.

And what next for all of us who gulped down Deathly Hallows madly, desperate to find out how it ends, and now find ourselves satisfied yet sad, wondering about what might have been and making our peace with a story now done? I wandered a bit around the house Saturday morning, exhausted and elated and a little empty--and then into my head popped the final lines of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, a youth fiction classic that reflects upon deep truths as powerfully as...well, as Alexander's Prydain and now Rowling's Potter books do, too. Milo, the book's young hero, having had a wonderful, dangerous adventure just the day before, rushes home from school to take another trip through the Tollbooth which had mysterious appeared in his bedroom--but instead finds:

[I]n its place was [a] bright blue envelope, which was addressed simply: "FOR MILO, WHO NOW KNOWS THE WAY."
He opened it quickly and read:

Dear Milo,
You have now completed your trip, courtesy of the Phantom Tollbooth. We trust that everything was satisfactory, and hope you understand why we had to come and collect it. You see, there are so many other boys and girls waiting to use it, too.
It's true that there are many lands you've still to visit (some of which are not even on the map) and wonderful things to see (that no one has yet imagined), but we're quite sure that if you really want to, you'll find a way to reach them all by yourself.
Yours truly,

The signature was blurred and couldn't be read.

Thank you, J.K. Rowling, for showing us the way to, if not the best place ever, then at least a very, very good place indeed. And now that you've taken us all the way to the end, well, we've got seven hardback novels on our shelves (and Megan has a bunch of paperback novels of her own!), to help us get back there on our own--though you know, if you ever decide to come back and add a little more to the world you've made, please don't let this benediction stand in your way!