This morning I heard you were writing something in the Harry Potter universe, and I spilled the milk I was supposed to be pouring over my cereal. I was so excited I kept pouring it on the floor until my roommate told me to stop wasting good milk. How do I emphasize how much I love Harry? Can I tell you about the time I lived in San Francisco when I was six, and my mother and I walked past a book signing at a big book store? Do I tell you about how I asked for the book, because it was fantasy and for kids and in first grade at the time and already in love with books? We couldn’t afford a new hardcover, but my mother, after a thirty hour shift at the hospital, took me over to the public library and we found a new copy of Harry Potter on the front shelf.
I could tell you about how in grammar school Harry was one of my best friends, sometimes my only friend. I could tell you about the life-long, real-life relationships I’ve made bonding over these books. I could tell you about the hours my family spent curled up on the carpet, listening as my mother read your words into our life. I could tell you about going to Scotland to see where the series was born, and witnessing the wall of hundreds of other people all trying to say the same thing–thank you, thank you, thank you.
Photo by Sonia Belviso via Flickr
Okay, so you get that I love Harry and Hogwarts and the Wizarding World, so let’s move on to this morning, when my friend told me you were writing a screenplay based on “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”
There are stages of hearing your wish come true. Did you know that? The first stage is utter disbelief, and involves, apparently, spilling milk onto the counter. It also involves a couple of Google searches to see if Facebook is telling the truth.
The second stage is gushing elation, whereupon my roommate and I started bubbling over with how we were just talking about needing more Harry Potter and I can’t believe this is happening and When does it come out, does anyone even know?
The third stage is after you’ve mopped up the milk and take a deep breath and make a cup of tea and take a step back and think that maybe your wish wasn’t entirely answered after all. I was halfway through my tea, thinking on this, when my roommate said, carefully, “I kind of wish it had been the Mauraders, though.”
“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”
The problem with having fans like me, I have to think, is that we don’t want to let a good thing go. So it’s not enough that there’s a new Wizarding World movie slated to begin production. What we really want is more of the same. We want the nineteen year gap. We want James and Sirius and Remus and even that backstabbing rat’s adventures at Hogwarts (what would it be like to go to Hogwarts while Voldemort was in the height of his power? what would it be like to be best friends with a werewolf? what would you do if your home was filled with Death Eaters and you’d been sorted into Gryffindor?) We want a story about Neville, or Draco Malfoy, or Snape or Hagrid or a hundred other people. We want our old friends back again.
And part of that, I think, was your splendid timing. I was six when my mother read us The Sorcerer’s Stone, and I was seventeen when the last movie came out. This series glued a generation together. It made us want to read, and write, and create things. We embraced Harry Potter, let it define us, and never truly wanted to believe it was over. Now I’m twenty, and at a start of a new semester at an out-of-state school I pull out Harry Potter again, and try not to feel overwhelmed.
By the time I’d finished my cup of tea, we were talking about what we remembered about “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” the copies we’d bought years ago and had loved almost as dearly as those seven series books. We talked about the graffiti by Harry and Ron, about Acromantulas and unicorns and dragons and boggarts. And we came to the conclusion that, maybe, Harry was best left to those days of childhood, and we could embrace a new film series about the wild things that roam the Wizarding World.
Just when we said that of course we were going to see the movies, and we’d reserve our judgement for later, and settled back into being happy that there was more to this series again, I spoke up. “I think I had a dream about this the other night, but in my dream it was a new series of books.”
“Well,” my roommate said, “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
So, if the opinion of one small fan matters, I say write on (or, I guess, screenplay on.) Maybe Harry is best left to the past, but that doesn’t mean these creative minds who grew up dreaming of going to Hogwarts don’t want another hero to fall in love with. My best to Newt Scamander on his adventures. And my deepest thanks and eternal gratitude to you, Ms J.K. Rowling, for everything.
Always,
A friend
P.S: A thought–Harry Potter helped to define my generation, but there’s a new one just behind us that would be just perfect for the adventures of James Potter & co.