How I Feel About Harry Potter

I have been hesitant to make this post for about the past month for a couple of reasons. 1) A lot of my best friends (including my roommate) are absolutely obsessed with Harry Potter. 2) I would like to try to submit it to real websites where they'll pay me to write, and often those sites won't accept stuff if it's already been published, and, apparently, putting stuff on my stupid blog that about 4 people sometimes read counts as "published" which makes about as much sense as the things I'm about to make fun of.
I decided to go ahead and "publish" this because I figure if I can get more people to read my blog by posting my best writing, other people will ask me to write more articles for which I will get paid. Hopefully.
Anyway, these two rants were inspired by my midnight viewing of the most recent Harry Potter, my texts to my brother about that viewing, and an article from Sports Illustrated he sent to me later about Quidditch leagues on college campuses. In short, I'm worried about our generation.
DISCLAIMER: I do not hate Harry Potter. The movies are entertaining, and I'm sure the books are great for a lot of people who aren't me. That said, it's still a series for children and teens and no amount of arguing will elevate the stories and writing beyond that plateau, so please stop trying to convince me.

Rant 1:

The Harry Potter showing last night was freaking horrendous. The movie is good, well, as good as it could be. I enjoyed it, but the fans are so pathetic; it's depressing. First of all, Lyndsay made me get in line an hour early, as I told you, and the line stretched around an entire city block. If you already have tickets, which means that you have a seat inside, why the hell are you waiting in line? I understand not wanting to sit in the front row, but come on. And the amount of middle-aged adults that were in line sans children kind of made me want to join those people who always protest the movies with signs that say things like "Harry Potter=Satan." Every time something even marginally entertaining happened, they either applauded (a reaction to movies that has never made the slightest bit of sense to me; do they have that little impulse control that they can't help but clap for people that aren't really there?) or laughed so hard that I couldn't hear the movie, which really annoyed the hell out of me. Several people cried, and it took every bit of my energy not to start laughing hysterically. How are they having such strong reactions to something they already know is going to happen? It's not like the acting is that amazing or the writing that incredible. I honestly don't understand what happened to our generation (and apparently the one that preceded us) that so many people cling so desperately to the story of a bespectacled wizard child, a story of good v. evil that is about as original as a body switch movie. Are people's lives that pathetic that they have to throw themselves so totally into a series of children's books? It actually worries me. A lot. I also realized that by going to the movie last night, I'm part of the problem. Yikes.

Rant 2 (in response to this):
I already knew that there were doofuses playing quidditch on college campuses, but I had never seen pictures before, so it didn't seem real to me until now. As a result, I have many questions.
1. Why do they need the brooms? In the books/movies the brooms are how they fly, but, since we are not in fact in the mind of an old hippie who took too much of the "bad acid" in 1967 staring out a window, brooms do not fly, so they seem to just be a way to actually make the game harder.
2. Since there is no such thing as a "golden snitch" in this non-peyote-fueled world, do they just throw a tiny ball at each other really fast?
3. What happened in their childhoods to make being on a quidditch team seem like something that is not going to make future friends and employers either laugh or back slowly away?
4. Why is Sports Illustrated publishing this? Have they just decided that because print media is becoming outdated that they no longer have to have any sort of credibility and who really gives a shit anymore anyway?
5. Did everyone in the country just get smacked on their little heads with a ball-peen hammer when we were out of the country at some point?
Thanks, Sports Illustrated, for making me want to totally divorce myself from my entire generation. Harry Potter is a wonderfully fanciful children's book that should be read and enjoyed. The movies are entertaining and well made. But when people start taking things they see in movies and books and acting them out in real life we end up with a country full of fat, pale, middle-aged people living in their mothers' basements. It's all yours, China; I'm out.

Also, I am glad that your Potter viewing experience wasn't nearly as horrific as mine. I understand that plot lines are often recycled, and that's perfectly fine, but it's when people take something like Harry Potter, a dumbed-down version of Lord of the Rings as you said, and act like it's freaking Citizen Kane is when I begin having problems.



Again, Harry Potter is a lovely series, but obsession over anything is worrisome to me, especially when that anything is a wizard series aimed at the 9-16 age bracket. I know that I'm not the coolest person on the planet (I'm wearing a Three Keyboard Cat t shirt), and that I've momentarily become obsessed with certain pop culture phenoms (I once spent around 8 hours googling Robert Pattinson. He's good-looking, I'm not made of stone, give me a break), but, like many well-adjusted humans, I let things go after a few days or weeks; I don't adopt a lifestyle so that every aspect of every day reflects some fictional world. In 100 years (if the Mayans were wrong, that is), there will be whole psychological theses published on this specific brand of personality disorder. Rant over. Maybe tomorrow I'll rant about Kanye and Jay-Z, because this new album is insane, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

Photo: Michael J. LeBrecht, Sports Illustrated