Painting of Kasey Smith by CASA student Olivia Austin.
A woman sat on a bench in a Manchester train station, waiting for a train that wouldn’t arrive for several hours.
Suddenly, a strange idea came to her, an idea so bizarre it seemed real. She sat on her bench seemingly for ages, turning this idea over and over in her mind. She saw only a little boy with black hair, green eyes and round glasses at first, but sitting there and thinking about him produced more ideas. Who was he, what was he like? Who were his friends? His enemies? What made him special? After four hours of waiting and thinking, her train finally arrived, but she firmly fixed the little boy inside her head, not allowing herself to forget him. One day, everyone would know his name, and the name of his creator: Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling.
All of us have, at one point, heard something about Harry Potter. From the get-go, the phenomenon has been infectious. According to Time magazine, what started as a 500-copy first print of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” has expanded to six additional volumes, the entire saga totaling 450 million print copies, translated into 73 languages.
Ever since that first installment hit British bookstores and libraries on June 30, 1997 (the date happens to be one day before both the author’s and the main character’s birthday), everyone wanted to read them—children, parents, friends of anyone who’d read it already. Eventually, the acclaimed book series produced movies, collectible merchandise, Pottermore (a website where users can experience Harry’s journey first-hand through interactive illustrations), a theme park, spinoff books based on the series (“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”; “Quidditch through the Ages”; and “The Tales of Beedle the Bard”), and a spinoff movie series based on “Fantastic Beasts,” the screenplay of which will be written by Rowling herself.
But just what made these books so enticing and popular? What about them made them deserve their own amusement park, website and spinoffs?
Perhaps the characters themselves. More than 300 actors combined helped create the movie adaptations (according to “Harry Potter: Film Wizardry”), offering something for every fan.
“I love Hermione,” said Zarqua Ansari, an eighth grader and fellow fan of Harry Potter who attends Crestwood Middle School, Mountain Top, Pa. “She is just perfect. I think it’s probably her ingeniousness and the fact that she is a bookish person just like me.”
Having read each volume several times, I understand her: these books have given me best friends, sworn archenemies and the wisest mentors I have ever known. Through seven volumes, readers can watch these characters grow, change and develop, learning the characters’ lessons along with them. We have the ability to explore and understand a character’s motivations, and sometimes we preserve that understanding and take it with us into real-life situations. We relate to and learn from characters and their actions and mistakes, and that’s some of what makes these characters timeless. They become precious to us, and we love them like real people.
“I actually cried when the characters that I loved died because I felt like I knew them and they were important to me,” said Ansari.
Take Draco Malfoy, for example. When we are introduced to him, we see him as a manipulative, condescending, racist bully. Doesn’t sound very nice, does it? He keeps up this unappealing façade until the sixth book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” where we finally see what he has to deal with and why he acts the way he does towards his peers. We see that he is truly a confused child forced to fill his father’s shoes way too early, once glad for the opportunity, but now aware of just how heavy the burden. When we learn why he is the way he is, we’re sorry for him, and we learn the image a person chooses to display often hides both the worst and the best of him — a lesson for everyone.
Audiences have always been fascinated by underdogs—just take a look at movies like “I, Robot,” “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings.” The main characters have all been thrust into a strange, new environment (in one way or another) and must overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles for the greater good. You can even go back to Shakespeare—everyone always roots for the star-crossed lovers because we feel sympathy for them. We want them to win. We want any character stuck in an impossible situation to triumph.
When we first meet Harry Potter, he’s living in a closet under the stairs! But through an epic, seven-year journey, we watch him transform from the loneliest child in Surrey to the greatest hero of the wizarding world, defeating monsters, bravely facing enemies when others would turn and run, and always standing up for what’s right. We love his journey because we want to make one like his. We all dream of rising from the ashes and building a better world — and Harry Potter did that. He showed us how to overcome impossible odds.
People can argue about the quality of the books, but no one can deny that they create a sense of belonging. In “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” Harry begins as a scrawny little boy who fits in nowhere, singled out because of his cousin’s tyranny, to a student at a school with child wizards, others like him, where he has an opportunity to make friends. Every school year, the new class of wizarding students separates into four “houses,” each of which has its own dormitory and common room and competes against other houses for the House Cup through the year. This way, every student enters into a close-knit group on which they can depend.
Having a family that likes you because you fit their personality appeals to many. Sometimes, fans want a different type of family; sometimes, they just want a family in the first place. Sometimes, the books strengthen the bonds between existing families: Kelli Cunningham, a Potter-loving 11th grader from Mountain Top, said, “I decided to read [the Harry Potter books] because my sister had told me I should…my sister and I have a tradition of going to see each [new movie] together.”
Islands of Adventure, the sister park of Universal Studios in Orlando, Fla., welcomed a new addition in 2010: the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The park offers the chance to taste butterbeer and Chocolate Frogs; ride the legendary Buckbeak the hippogriff; and explore Hogwarts castle, fighting dark creatures along the way. The theme park serves as a permanent reminder of the thrilling franchise that Rowling created that day in the train station in Manchester.
Fans are confident that the Harry Potter will stand the test of time. “Of course, the phenomenon will continue,” said Cunningham. “[Harry Potter] isn’t just some phase, it really sticks with you.”
Kasey Smith is a junior at Capital Area School for the Arts (CASA).
