I’m sure most of you can relate to me when I say that the last few days of my life and the next few days of my life have been and will be entirely devoted to Harry Potter. I’ve been watching one of the films every day, building up to when I see the last one at midnight on Thursday. I’ve been re-reading Deathly Hallows. And when I’m not doing those things, I’ve been re-blogging anything Harry Potter related on Tumblr, watching Harry Potter tribute videos, and baking pumpkin pasties. And in doing all of this preparation for what, whether it truly is or isn’t, has been deemed the end of Harry Potter, I of course can’t help but reflect on my experience over the years I’ve spent with the Boy Who Lived. So I’ve been looking for any excuse to just talk about Harry Potter, and I did not have to look far. My dear friend PJ made a video talking about the story of how he found the world of Harry Potter and encouraged people to tell theirs. So while mine is going to be a lot less profound and beautiful, and a lot more stupid and anecdotal and cheesy, I’m gonna go for it.
When I was in second grade, I got a cold, as second graders do. At the time my older sister was reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and in a last ditch effort to soothe her sick daughter, my mom read the first chapter to me. I’ll be honest…I wasn’t feelin’ it. I just remember falling asleep thinking, “Why is this cat turning into a woman? This is stupid.” Needles to say, this phase didn’t last long. A little while later, my dad gave it another go. I have my dad to thank for a lot of things in my life, and one of them is my love of reading. He read to my sister and I at bedtime for years, and I cannot thank him enough for doing it. So while, until the movies came out, I was convinced that Hermione was pronounced "Her-my-one" because that was the way my dad pronounced it, I am nothing but grateful. It wasn’t until the sixth book came out that I realized that I hadn’t actually read any of the first five myself. I knew the stories like the back of my hand, though, because they were a part of my childhood.
I suppose it must have been around this time when I started to discover the phenomenon of Harry Potter music videos on YouTube. By this I mean people taking torrents of the movies and editing them to fit the story of a specific song. I was really into Harry Potter music videos. I even made a few of them myself. If anything, I got a lot of good practice with editing videos, a skill I had no idea would come in so handy in my future. I’m going to link to the channel where, after lots of shuffling about, I ended up posting most of my Harry Potter music videos, though I warn you that the content is definitely violating copyright rules, so it might be shut down by the time you get to it. Please watch, mock, and enjoy my humiliation while you can! www.youtube.com/fromthebasilisk Also, most of my favorites on that channel are other Potter music videos, so check those out too. The name I finally ended up using for my Harry Potter music video channel was “from the basilisk,” taken from the phrase made popular by Harry and the Potters in their song “Save Ginny Weasley”...
Which, of course, leads me to wizard rock. If there was ever a doubt in my mind that I was destined to be a part of this fandom, it was crushed by the clandestine nature of my discovery of wizard rock. So, it’s 2006. I have heard nothing of wizard rock. My family goes to Paris for two weeks and while we’re there, I see a girl wearing a shirt that says “Harry and the Potters” on it. At the time, I just kind of giggled to myself, assigning it to what I would now describe as a tragically hipster band name. I occasionally remembered the Parisian girl with her weird t-shirt, but it was months after we’d returned from the trip that I was near a computer when one of these nostalgic moments struck me. When those two criteria aligned themselves harmoniously, and I Googled "Harry and the Potters," it was nothing short of cosmic intervention. All of the factors that went against me ever running that Google search—the fact that I had to go to PARIS, FRANCE to even hear about Harry and the Potters, my initial underwhelming reception of the name, the months that had past over which my already mild curiosity had only decreased, the possibility that I might not have been bored enough at that moment to Google something I was sure would be pointless—all of that working against me, and yet I Googled anyway…well, that, to me, sealed the deal. I might not have realized it at the time, as I was distracted by the hilarious tracks blaring from a MySpace profile, and by the seemingly endless amount of other bands that sang about a book as I scrolled through Top Friends list after Top Friends list—but that was the moment when I became a part of the fandom, and my heart has never and will never leave it.
By this time I’m in high school. If my Harry Potter story wasn’t weird enough already, it definitely gets weirder in high school. A lot of Harry Potter fans talk about how they felt alienated in high school for being such huge fans of a book, and that they found friendship in the books and the fandom and the online community. But for me the story was different. I don’t what they put in the water in my hometown, but the people in my high school were never cruel to me for loving Harry Potter. Sure, there were people who thought I was odd in my enthusiasm, but as long as I didn’t shove it in their face, they were fine with accepting it as part of my personality that they just didn’t understand. But for most people, my enthusiasm for Harry Potter wasn’t something that they had to get used to despite themselves. For the most part, people were interested. I actually have friends that I met in high school, introduced to the Harry Potter fandom, and who are now bigger fans that I am. This probably did more harm than good because while I’m proud that I played a role in bringing this revolution into other people’s lives, it inflated my ego past the already high bounds of a know-it-all high schooler.
Enter video blogging. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: video bloggers are all a bit narcissistic. The fact that we think a perfect stranger would want to listen to the story of how we found Harry Potter proves this. While I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing (I mean, it’s not a good thing, but y' know), my inflated ego at that time in my life definitely explains why I took a sudden interest in video blogging. I doubt I need to explain the way that becoming a video blogger and becoming one who watches video blogs corresponds to my Harry Potter story, but here’s a brief summary: Wizard rock, The Parselmouths, Kristina Horner, italktosnakes, video mentioning Nerdfighters, discovering the vlogbrothers, becoming a Nerdfighter, fiveawesomegirls, hayleyghoover, video about fandom, discovering podcasts, Leaky is my homepage on Firefox, MuggleCast transcriber, naming my first pair of Converse after Andrew Sims, vlogging about Harry Potter, vlogging about other things, and finally, vlogging about Harry Potter again. I made friends with people, both IRL and internet, over our mutual status as Nerdfighters, and some pre-existing friendships were only strengthened.
If it wasn’t for the strength of these friendships, I wouldn’t be able to boast having watched the first five Harry Potter movies in one day…twice. That’s what two of my best friends and I did for our friend Ann on her birthday one year: we planned a twelve hour party in which we followed Harry all the way to his angstiest moments in Order of the Phoenix. There are some things that you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and watching twelve hours of Harry Potter is one of them. I put myself through this again for the release of the Half-Blood Prince movie, and I’m not ashamed to say that that party was one of my proudest moments.
And now, here I am, days from what the media would have us believe is the end of Harry Potter. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is not the end. After this movie comes out, people are still going to get me things like a Hogwarts Express sign for my birthday. I’m still going to post Dumbledore quotes in clever places and pretend that I didn’t steal that idea from Tumblr. Harry Potter has changed my life. And a movie can’t take that away. Guys, it’s not over. We’ll always have the friends we’ve made through this remarkable fandom. We’ll always have the lessons we learned from the Boy Who Lived. And we can always come back to these books. JK said it best when she said that Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.
