EDITORIAL: Being a “Muggle” in a Fake Wizards World

Being a “Muggle” in a fake wizards world

An Editorial by KC

I never really got the hype behind Harry Potter.  To me it seemed like a children’s book that I wasn’t really interested in reading.  Maybe if I was from a different generation I would be able to get behind them, but as it is I didn’t really care about the boy who went to wizard school and played flying broom related sports. 

This weekend I have never felt like more of an outsider than ever.  With all the hype and hoopla for the new and “final” Harry Potter movie my social networking feeds have been filled with people excited to see the climax of the story.  It’s interesting to me also that the book series has been out so people should pretty much know how it ends, but I guess that’s beside the point.  It seems the important thing about this series is how closely they stay to the book or something like that.  As you can tell, I really haven’t been paying attention.

Which is why the whole Harry Potter phenomenon seems so strange to me, it wouldn’t be so bad if the people who support this franchise weren’t so gung ho about it.  I don’t want to throw around words like cult, but there really is a language and culture built around it that seems to really be aggressive and exclusionary against people that don’t partake in the Potter. 

I saw the first three films and they were ok.  They weren’t completely terrible, but they also didn’t really wow me either.  It seems that the author of the series basically took every wizard, witch, and haunted house convention, put them in a blender and sold them to kids.  The sport they play involves flying on brooms.  The pictures move and stare at people, etc.

Again, this is harmless stuff, and I can see how people who were kids when the first few Potter movies came out would be into it, the way I was into Star Wars and Transformers when I was kid.  And yes I understand the concept that the characters age and the story becomes darker, but that still doesn't erase the memory of the game of “human chess” that turned me off in the first film.  In fact, it seems more insidious that the movies would start off as magic and wonderful and then suddenly they start killing characters who fans grew up loving.  Is the new movie appropriate for children?  That’s up to the parents to decide.

I’m hoping that after this new film, people can finally relax and accept the films for what they are.  Well made movies that may not appeal to everyone in the world.  This is just my opinion so there’s no need to cast spells on me.