Always
Quarantine has given me the opportunity get back to reading my current book series obsession (Game of Thrones), but since I’m nowhere near done with those books, this is a post about my first series love: the one and only Harry Potter.
(^^Accurate representation of my actions during quarantine)
Harry Potter is a series I was raised on. This is about to be a fangirl post, so buckle up. I LOVE Harry Potter. Like, love Harry Potter. I’ve read all the books, seen all the movies, been to Harry Potter World in Universal, read and seen the spinoffs, seen the Very Potter Musical comedy, and played the whole Wizarding World (the artist formerly known as Pottermore) online experience.
The thing about Harry Potter is that I saw the characters and the series grow up as I was growing up reading it. Technically speaking, the Harry Potter series is categorized as a children’s book. That makes sense for the first few books in the series as they deal with 11 and 12 year olds going on magical adventures fighting the obvious evil wizard.
But as the series progresses, so does the gravity of the content. I love that as the Harry Potter books go on, the story gets complicated. As the plot thickens, the books introduce heavy topics including false imprisonment, death, betrayal, and the gray area between good and bad. The reader is groomed to hate Sirius Black as a criminal, but later realizes his innocence despite the groupthink that ruined his reputation and life. The reader gets to see the double/triple agent side of Severus Snape where he honorably protects Harry while still being a very mean and bitter person. The reader grows up with Draco Malfoy, who is exposed and pressured to turn to evil so early in his life and is given little sympathy to guide him in the right direction. There are a plethora of characters making choices that may seem to serve good or evil, but deeper than that, the choices are often actually self-serving or made to help those they love.
The most striking thing of the series to me is the way the concept of evil is presented. Dolores Umbridge is one of the most hated characters in the series, perhaps even more than the famed Dark Lord Voldemort. Umbridge is a government placed school administrator who begins to whittle away at the free lives of students and wise professors at the school. It is definitely infuriating to watch someone with a “holier than thou” attitude come in and ruin genuine characters I loved. Then it hit me why Umbridge is so hated: she is the type of evil that regular people face every day. She is the authority figure that cuts down your confidence or the presumed resource who refuses to help you in your time of need. Voldemort is a murderous evil wizard that is obviously the enemy, but not the kind that I encounter in my life (hopefully…fingers crossed.) But Umbridge; she is the enemy that I have faced hundreds of times.
Recently, I started listening to the Potter-less Podcast every time I’m in the car or doing things around my house. It’s a nostalgia thing for me. Listening to Mike Schubert read and break down Harry Potter with a snarky adult angle is the last installment in a years long journey of investment in the series. This series entertained me as a kid and provided countless hours of entertainment online and in theme parks. Most importantly, the Harry Potter series taught me a lot about good, evil and gray areas in a way that I could easily understand growing up.