Tonight, a 10-year love affair (if you’re willing to admit it, Socialites) ends. The waiting is over. There’s no new material. No more midnight releases. No more wondering what’s next for the characters that we’ve grown to love and know. Tonight, the Harry Potter series will finally end after the 10-year-in-the-making movie adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s massively popular seven-part series premieres for audiences around the globe on the big screen.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the long awaited finale starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, has already made $32 million at the box office in ticket pre-sales. Midnight showings are already sold out with college-aged fans even dressing up in their favorite HP gear and drawing lightning bolts on their foreheads.
But as I get ready for my last Harry Potter midnight activity tonight, I got myself thinking about what everybody who’s NOT a Potter fan thinks. Is it inappropriate and really weird to be 23-years-old and still totally in love with the Harry Potter series?
Yes is what people who haven’t read the series will say. Uh, dude—you’re out of college, why are you so obsessed with a children’s book? Well, for starters, the series may have started out as children’s books but i has evolved into something much more.
Harry Potter has never dealt with light themes (I mean the book starts off with a child’s parents being murdered) and has always respected the intelligence of young people. Reading page after page wasn’t like flipping though “Twilight” where the theme is how you can’t live without a boyfriend. Harry Potter is a story about inner strength, the power of friendship, and what it’s like to do the right thing, no matter how hard it is.
That’s why I love Harry Potter. And as a college graduate, I am not afraid in the least to admit it. It’s taught me how powerful reading can be and made me want to read more. Before Harry Potter, it wasn’t the norm for 13-year-olds or college students in their spare time to read 700+ page books. J.K. Rowling made reading fun and cool again, and that alone is an accomplishment worth writing about.
So if you’re like me, and you’ve followed Harry from the beginning, you understand that you don’t need anyone’s approval. It’s more that people who aren’t Potterheads “don’t get it.” There is a huge majority of long-time fans and readers who started reading the books when they were in middle school and are now in college. We have literally grown up with Harry, Ron, and Hermione.
Harry Potter has been something that has been a constant in my life for the past 10 years when nothing else has. It’s given me something to look forward to, something to fall back on, and something to take respite in when everything else is going wrong.
So for all you Socialites who aren’t afraid to admit you’ve stuck with Harry until the end, I hope you got advance tickets to the midnight show and maybe even made a special batch of brownies to take with you.
