These days, there’s a lot of hate towards Harry Potter on social media, and also somewhat in real life. Apart from being a Harry Potter fan, I am also a cosplayer. And that has of course resultet in a few Harry Potter costumes that I have worn at conventions.
One of the great things about conventions and the cosplay community in general it that it’s so open-minded and welcoming to all people – despite their sexual orientation or various mental disorders, physical or mental handicaps etc etc.
Sadly, a lot of those people also feel targeted by JK Rowling’s tweets. I’m not here to voice my opinion on that. I’m here to talk about Harry Potter – I separate the art from the artist, and it makes me sad when people tell me that I shouldn’t support her by buying her books and reading them etc. Or when my cosplays turn into a political debate. Because I don’t buy or read her books to support her. I do it, because those books mean a lot to me. When I was 11 years old, I wasn’t doing too good. I didn’t really fit in with my classmates, I had few friends and I was bullied.
I grew up in a fairly stable home, but my dad travelled a lot for work, and other things were going on that meant I felt like I was left a lot to myself. I spent most of my time in my room alone.
When I discovered the Harry Potter universe, it made me feel less alone. At first, because I was absorbed in the books. I saw the first movie at the premiere in the cinema (my sister was going, and I made her take me – not because I thought I’d like the movie, but because she was older and “cool”.). It blew me away. I was instantly hooked. The day after, we got the PS1 game, which I played until 4 days later, when I got the first book for my birthday. I don’t remember anything else from that day, except reading that book and finishing it within a day. I spent the next few days begging to go to a store where I could get the rest of the books (at that time, the first 4 had been released).
I bought the next 2 and they were gone as fast as the first. My parents made me wait until christmas for the 4th book. Apparently they needed a Christmas present idea, and since my birthday is at the end of november, it was only a few weeks, but it felt like a long time. I think I re-read the first 3 in the meantime.
It wasn’t long until Harry Potter had taken over my life. I started buying anything I could get my hands on about Harry Potter. It was the early days of the internet, and we only had dial-up at home. I remember spending a lot of time at the library computer on roleplay forums where I made friends who were also into Harry Potter. For many years, I was “that Harry Potter girl”. I was probably bullied about that too, but I didn’t care – they were all too dumb to read books and know what it was about. When I was around maybe 13, I made a webpage about Harry Potter for Danish fans. It was just one of those web builder-pages that were popular in the early 2010’s, and it was called “simonesharrypotterside.k-nettet.dk” (it doesn’t exist anymore), and it was very ugly. But a few years after that – 2005, for my birthday – I got this domain – HPkegle.dk. And I started making a proper webpage. I learned to code HTML/CSS only for the purpose of making this webpage.
I remember in 10th grade, I got to skip a day of school so I could go on a course with a bunch of old dudes and learn to code with divs instead of tables (which probably doesn’t make sense to most people, but back then it was a big deal).
My career now is being a webdesigner, and I have since learned a lot more about it. But Harry Potter was even what made me find out what I wanted to do for a living.
To this day, I still read the Harry Potter books once in a while – either just for nostalgia or because I’m going through a hard time and I find it comforting to disappear into that universe for a while.
So I will keep on reading those books.
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