Reflections of a Girl

I have been trying to be less of a perfectionist with writing. Someday I want to devote more time to other creative pursuits and it would apply to those endeavors as well, but for now a bit of writing is all that I have time for. Outstanding writing is an iterative process. Diagramming out the plot, world/scene building, free-writing, rewriting, revising, getting feedback from others, revising, and editing are essential steps in producing a writer’s best work. Life has been so hard and so complicated for a decade now that the closest thing to a creative act I have done in years is the newsletter for my office! I have a career. Most people that do anything creative don’t use it to pay the bills. After so long, with so little outlet for any creativity, my focus for now is to just write and have fun. The writing I am doing right now is low stakes fan fiction. I am forcing myself to do a quick look over for major errors and posting it. This is my hobby after all. I have a tendency to be a perfectionist. It isn’t my job! If it was my job then it would probably start to feel like work very quickly, if my experience as a pilot is any indicator. I like flying, but its my job. It is so hard for me to put anything out there with out revising it to death, but the alternative is another decade of doing nothing creative.

Miriam Margolyes made news among the Harry Potter fandom recently. In her opinion its a kids story and everyone needs to move on. I have been thinking about why this fandom is so persistent and devoted for a while now. As far as Miriam goes, I think this is just another Boomer who is out of touch and benefited from an institution mostly due to being born at the right time and place.

Harry Potter is not that well written. I recently reread the series, along with the Golden Compass and Percy Jackson. Riordan and Pullman are significantly better writers from a technical standpoint and when it comes to things like world building as well. Not only are many of JKR’s viewpoints regressive, but the books don’t age well in a lot of regards. She is a fundamentally shallow person. Her character’s physical appearance mirrors their interior life and character. This is such a juvenile view of the world. It leads her stories to have fat phobia and racism woven throughout. Misogyny is rampant throughout the series. She is an outspoken transphobe. She is uncritical of the world she lives in. Why is her fan base still so attached to her works?

Had Harry Potter been written a decade earlier or later most of us would never have heard his name. Those of us that grew up before the internet was prevalent didn’t have many ways to build community. If you were queer, neurodivergent, different or overlooked you at best, maybe, found a few other misfits to commiserate with. Harry Potter spoke to a lot of people who felt like they didn’t fit in. Unfortunately, many queer millennials felt that he was an allegory for their own upbringing and were then disappointed by the author’s bigotry. The accessibility of the internet allowed us oddballs to network with other people like ourselves, with whom we shared common interests for the first time. This franchise benefited from a great deal happenstance. The first fandoms that started to form in the early internet era were composed largely of millennials who were adolescents and young twenties at the time. Harry was an adolescent and growing up about the same time we were. It became a vehicle that we could express ourselves through. The writing and world building was poor, but it was a fun world and there weren’t very many things like it on the market at the time.

I love that there is such a diversity of communities, interests and subcultures available now. You are able to find your people and tribe in way that wasn’t possible for most of human history, especially if you were creative, odd, imaginative, bookish or gay. Harry Potter would not be a cultural phenomenon now though. There are too many options on the market. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have so many niche options and communities. There was a perfect alignment of new networking tools to build communities but also a perfect vacuum waiting to be filled. World of Warcraft by Blizzard benefited from that same phenomenon. Now the market is crowded and arrayed before a much more fractured and niche consumer base.

For those of us that passed through that liminal boundary into a more connected world, most of us have moved beyond the series itself in many ways, but it is still a language and framework for how we interact with one another. It doesn’t hurt that it was the first time a lot of us felt seen and could imagine ourselves in a world where our differences made us valuable; where perpetual outsiders could become insiders of a secret community with its own language, history and foundational texts. We also came of age during the expansion of late stage capitalism into every nook and corner of our lives. Community is hard to find, families are spread across the globe, most of us do meaningless alienating labor with no hope of material advancement. Most of our faith communities harmed, failed or disappointed us. Any media that offers us community, nostalgia, and a world that we would chose to live in is going to continue to resonate with the generation that saw hope and progress disappear in the real world. I have always felt a kinship with Gen Z and Gen Alphas when it comes to values and worldview. These stories don’t resonate with them though. They have a larger breadth of and more niche communities available. They also were born into a broken world and never had hope to lose!

Ash and I being Harry Potter dorks.