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there are many things i love about harry potter. the changeling narrative (there’s an unseen and enchanted world folded around the visible, and it’s been waiting for you to step over that threshold and take up the place that was always yours), wonderful characters, intricate plotting, the breadth and depth of detail, the twists and wit and imagination, its abiding belief in love and hope and sacrifice.

(and one of the best allegories for depression i’ve ever read—a tattered hungry ghoul with no face, only a mouth that feeds on every good thing you can feel or remember until you’re cold and hollow and despairing.)

but after seven books showing how the complacency and secrecy and prejudice and schisms and stagnation and corruption and ignorance of the wizarding world allowed Voldemort to rise to power not once but twice, the idea that the bereaved and war-scarred children who bore the burden of another generation’s mistakes and hatreds would want a return to the status quo seemed like a betrayal. i hated that ending. i’m still bitter about it.  

it’s strange—i can’t think of another fictional universe so at odds with itself. the world JKR shows us is insular, isolated; it looks down upon and shuns those who are different or “inferior” (Muggles, squibs, goblins); it never experiments or innovates or interrogates its own magic; it asks so few questions of the world. and yet in this story the best thing you can be is a seeker: the narrative is full of puzzles and puns and secrets and codes and mazes and dreams and unseen doorways and passages; hidden things running alongside or underneath; arcana and riddles in the margins, wonders to be found by the reach of your mind. 

it’s a world that’s pathologically traditional and leery of change: it lacks diversity, reveres ancient things and old ways, uses antiquated technology and spells in Latin, and is steeped in nostalgia for a bygone postwar Britain that was no utopia. and yet the books themselves are about the process of growing up and questioning received wisdom: learning that adults are fallible, adults can be cruel and hateful and manipulative and weak, authority is often malevolent and deceitful, paternalism and “the greater good” are corrupt, the old ways should be overthrown. it promised so much; then seemed to surrender, back down.

harry potter has, on the one hand, a love of wonder and curiosity and knowledge and stories hidden within stories; and on the other, a streak of weird and anarchic humour, of unpredictability and absurdism and surprise. all that i love about it comes from that. so i still feel deep fondness toward the books—but i’m more interested in how its readers can take what it offers and dream in the gaps and redraw its geographies and invent other magics and cut out what’s rotten and mend what’s broken and give voice to the things that were voiceless, and find better, braver conclusions.