Harry Potter (Kavanaugh)

Harry Potter
The internet has dramatically changed the relationship between authors and readers in recent years. Authors now have much more contact with their readers which can influence how and what they write. Some people see the growing dependence on the internet as detrimental to society. The National Endowment for the Arts believes that as people spend more time online they are reading less literature and that this is not beneficial. Nicholas Carr believes that as we become more dependent on the internet our brains are changing and it is becoming harder to focus. He says

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do." He blames this lack of concentration on his use of the internet because it is a fast paced environment in which a reader can quickly scroll through an argument or switch to another open tab and look at something else. However, just because the way we read and interact with each other is changing, does not mean that it is detrimental change. Before the internet, people had to use encyclopedias to do much of their research. The resources on the internet allow you to find information about many more subjects than an encyclopedia could and the information can be updated faster than in book form. The internet can also be helpful to writers because it can give them a wider fan base and allows them to communicate with fans. Douglas Rushkoff says that through his blog he is able to communicate with his fans and establish relationships with them. He also says, contrary to the beliefs of many, that the internet can actually help the publishing business. The more people who know about an author online, the more book sales there are of his or her work.

The internet has also allowed fans to have a much more personal relationship with literature and with other fans. The term Web 2.0 describes how people are now using the internet to communicate, collaborate, and create. For example, a person can create a website for their favorite band in which other people visit the site and it becomes an interactive online community. These online communities form around TV shows, movies, books, video games, singers, and just about anything else people are interested in. One of the main uses of these communities is to share information and they are called knowledge communities. An extreme example of this is the community that has arisen around the TV show “Survivor.” Fans of this show used the internet to gather all the information they had about the show so that they could figure out what the outcome is. Without the internet this would have been impossible. Many people know many little things, which apart from each other aren’t very helpful, but when you put all the knowledge together it is like pieces of a puzzle and they can guess who is going to be voted off when and who is going to win.

Remediation is another way that print is changing. Remediation is when a technology replaces another technology and the information is displayed in a new media. Books are being made into movies, print is being moved online and fans are re-imaging stories. Fans can remediate their favorite stories. People can write fan fiction about any book, movie, TV show, or person. They can continue where the author left off or they can re-imagine the story how they would have liked it to go. Instead of just being a passive reader of a book or watcher of show, the fan can become an active participant and write fan fiction for the fan community at large.

The internet has allowed Harry Potter fans to keep the discussions alive even though the last book was released almost five years ago. Harry Potter is an active presence online and there are many fan sites, forums, tumblrs, and other websites that are dedicated to Harry Potter. Most of the people who participate in the online Harry Potter community are people in their teens and twenties. Many of the fans were roughly the same age as Harry and his friends as they were reading the books and literally grew up with the characters. This factor and the fact that this is the internet generation makes for a very active online community. In this project I will look at the disputes that arise from different interpretations of the text and from predictions that people made before all the books were released. I will also look at the remediation that fans produce such as musicals and fan fiction. Lastly, I will look how the magical sport of Quidditch has influenced people. The online presence shows that even though Harry Potter is over in the sense that there will be no more books or movies, the fervor surrounding the books has not diminished.

Time Travel
Time Travel was introduced in the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, when Hermione uses the time turner to take extra classes. At the end of the book Dumbledore tells Hermione and Harry use it to save Buckbeak and Sirius Black. This has led to many disputes, and even disagreements, within the Harry Potter community as to how time travel works within the universe and why people don't use time travel to change thepast more often. Below are some memes about peoples opinions on time travel.



Many fans think that the time turner should have been used either to save people or to kill Voldemort, however the general consensus online is that you cannot use the time turner to change the past, this is called a closed timeline theory or a fixed time theory. You can only use the time turner to do things that you have already done. This is a concept that confuses many people. Here is one thing that happened in the thirs book to explain this concept. Harry 1 will be from the original timeline and Harry 2 is timetraveling Harry. Harry 1 and Sirius are about to be kissed by dementors which means the dementor will suck out their soul. Harry sees a figure across the lake produce a patronus which scares off the dementors. Harry 1 thinks that person was his dead father. When Harry 2 travels back and sees that happening, he is waiting for his father to appear and produce the patronus. When he doesn't see him he realizes it wasn't his father but himself. Harry 2 emerges from the bushes and produces a patronus. He can do this because he has already done it. There is only one timeline, traveling into the past does not create two separate timelines. There are those that disagree with the closed timeline theory, such as the video to the right. The fan in the video explains his theory that in the book, we do not actually see the original timline. He thinks Harry going into the past and casting the patronus actually did change the past and that's the timeline that we are seeing.

Many of the discussions about time travel start in forums when people ask questions about how it works. Even though there may be disagreements they are not very heated, but are respectful. However, there are people who write comments that aren't constructive and could be called trolls. An example of this is the user Rohan who comments "it's because the book is badly written . Its [sic] for children after all. Theres [sic] no other reason, dudes." Another user, Gabrielle, responds

"I also oppose the insinuation that all children's books are badly written, they may have less complex storylines and language, but this is done consciously so that the target audience can understand it better not because the author can't write well." Even though Gabrielle and presumably other users were offended by Rohan's comment, they did not attack him back. Gabrielle simply tried to explain to him that just becuase it's a children's book does not mean that it's bad. Some of the forum posts question J.K. Rowling and think she should have been more explicit about the rules of using the time turner such as saying if there was a time limit of how far in the past you could go. One person even suggests that Rowling doesn't like the time turners and if she had to start over she wouldn't have used them. This assumption has no basis in anything that Rowling has said. The rest of the poster don't agree with him but they are not argumentative about it. They just try to explain their side. The Leaky Lounge is one of the more widely used Harry Potter forums and from what I have read, the discussions are pretty civil and the posters and very helpful. In addition to people just being nice, this could be because there are admins on the site who will delete posts or lock topics if they get too hostile.

People also write blogs and articles trying to explain time travel. An article by Sebastian Redl approaches time travel from a very scientific and methodical standpoint. He uses everything from Einstein to Back to the Future to the X Files to attempt to explain how time travel works in Harry Potter. The amount of thought that goes into the explanation is probably more than even Rowling gave when she wrote it and Redl admits this. He says

"She loves to play with us, placing clues and red herrings into the text, but she isn't very thorough when it comes to details such as these. They are of no importance to her or her story. We as the fans are left to struggle with them." This shows how dedicated the fans are to the story and how they try to make the Harry Potter universe make sense.

Is Snape Good or Evil?
At the end of the sixth book Severus Snape, a professor at Hogwarts who Harry didn't like, killed the headmaster Albus Dumbledore. This sparked enormous debate within the Harry Potter community as to whether Snape was good or evil. The argument for him being good was that he was a double agent and had to kill Dumbledore so that he would keep Voldemorts trust. The argument for him being evil was that he was finally showing his true colors and Dumbledore had been mistaken in trusting him. In the two years between the release of the sixth and seventh book there was enormous debate about this issue.

One of the most popular explanations for why people thought Snape killed Dumbledore was that Dumbledore had told Snape he had to kill him if the time came so that Snape could keep his credibility within the Death Eaters and be a double agent for the Order of the Pheonix (the people that fight Voldemort). The main reason that people think Snape is good is because they trust Dumbledore and Dumbledore trusts Snape so they think they should trust Snape as well. People who believe he is evil said that he was always a Death Eater, and Dumbledore is only human and could have been wrong about him. The only evidence the forum posters had was what was in the books. J.K. Rowling and the publishers wanted to keep the suspense going until the seventh book was released. This led to a lot of speculation and guessing from the fan community. In the sixth book there was a scene in which Harry heard Dumbledore and Snape arguing and Harry did not hear why. Many fans guessed that they were arguing becuase Dumbledore had told Snape that if it came down to it, Snape would have to kill Dumbledore in order to keep up his appearance as a Death Eater. People who thought Snape was evil thought that in this scene Dumbledore was trying to convince Snape to stay on the good side.

Without the internet the discussions that went on surrounding this issue would have been very different. The various theories spread very quickly on the internet and polls were conducted asking if people thought he was good or evil. Without the internet, people would have been discussing it in groups and the theories probably wouldn't have spread as fast.

Fanfiction
Many of the fanfiction centers around relationships that are not in the books. This is a way for the fans to change the story to how they would have liked it to be. Some of the more peculiar popular couple pairings are Draco/Hermione and Draco/Harry since these characters hate each other in the book and never showed any feelings towards each other. These two couples have no basis at all in the books, yet people write many stories about them and create paintings and drawings of the couples. This could stem from the fact that some fans beleive that Draco is misunderstood by many fans. They say that he couldn't help becoming who he did because of who his parents were. By pairing him with Hermione or Harry they are humanizing him and showing that they do no believe him to be bad. Many of the stories also are not appropriate for children which is a little odd considering the books were originally written for children. For example, on Harry Potter fanfiction many of the stories I clicked I then had to click OK to verify that I was over 17 becuase many of the stories were rated mature. Here is some fan art of the various couple pairings from fanficiton:





Other stories deal with things that happen after the end of the books are what happened before the books. They write about Harry's parents when they were at Hogwarts and about Harry's kids at Hogwarts. This is a way for fans to continue the story. The writers have more freedom writing about what happened before or after the books since we don't know what really happened. Some of these stories deal in the realm of possibility in the Harry Potter universe. That means that the writers try to follow the story in the first seven books and what J.K. Rowling has said and imagine what would happen. Others write in the past or future of the books but change the past and future from what is mentioned in the books or my Rowling.

Starkid
Starkid is a student musical theatre group that formed at University of Michigan in 2009. They became popular through their musical “A Very Potter Musical" which encompasses books 1, 4, and 7. The show pokes fun and makes light of some things in the books that are not supposed to be funny but it is obvious they are fans of the books so it is not in a mean spirited way. For example the Voldemort/Quirrel relationship is configured as sort of an “Odd Couple” relationship and Malfoy has a huge crush on Hermione. It also bring up things from the books that do not entirely make sense. For example, during the Yule Ball in the book Hermione, who has never really cared about looks, suddenly spends hours straigthening her hair and getting ready for the dance. In "A Very Potter Musical" when Harry comments on how beautiful Hermione looks she says, "I used to think looks weren't important and now I think they're more important than anything." This elicits laughs from the audience and fans of the book becuase they understand that what happened in the book was entirely ou of character for Hermione.They also incorporate random elements just to be funny (such as having various people having an obsession with Zac Efron and a poster of him being a horcrux). A year later they followed the musical up with “A Very Potter Sequel” which uses books 1, 3, and 5 as its basis. The members of Starkid have gained fame throughout the Harry Potter community for their musicals. In a way, they are similar to fanfiction in that they introduce relationships that do not have a basis in the books. I think the difference is that Starkid uses the relationships for humor while the authors of fanfiction write about relationships that they support and would like to see happen.

Quidditch
Quidditch is a magical sport from the Harry Potter books. In 2005 a group of students at Middlebury College decided to play quidditch and thus muggle quidditch was born. It has grown rapidly with hundreds of teams, an annual World Cup, and an International Quidditch Association. The rules of muggle quidditch can be found here



The teams are an interesting mix of nerds and jocks but nearly everyone is there because of their love of Harry Potter. The tournaments put on by various schools are athletic events but also a place for fans of Harry Potter to meet. Players from teams that play against each stay in contact with each other after games and tumblr is a very popular place for "quidkids" to stay in touch. This is a tumblr that collects different posts from many quidditch players. Facebook is also a popular place for quidditch players from different teams to interact. There are quidditch groups for the different regions (Mid-Atlatnic, Southwest etc...) in which players from different schools in those regions stay in touch and talk about Harry Potter and quidditch. On tumblr there are many posts of admiration for other teams and players. The Golden Snitchy has many posts talking about the good aspects of various teams and players.For example in one post he assigns superlatives to different teams such as most improved and most likely to place in the world cup. Friendships are formed between players from different teams and sometimes players that usually play on different teams play together either in scrimmages or in actual tournament games. During school breaks, players often organize scrimmages for any players that are in the area. For example, over winter break there was a quidditch meet up organized in New York City. There were many posts and pictures on tumblr and facebook about it as many quidkids were there as well as people who don't regularly play quidditch. The people there ranged from young kids to 30-something adults. This shows that even though athletes play competitively against each other in games, they can still get together for fun.

I put it in the lifestyle category because if you are on a quidditch team it becomes a major part of your life. For example, the University of Maryland Quidditch team has practice 4 times a week and conditioning twice a week in addition to other team events. Online players often talk about how much their team means to them. For example, a post by a player from a Denver teams said on tumblr, "No matter what, the team is family...the bonds we've formed through Quidditch are stronger than anything."

It can also be seen as a form on remediation in which a sport from a book is adapted to a real life sport. Many elements had to be changed from the book to a real life sport. In the book the athletes fly around on broomsticks which is obviously not possible so instead players run around with brooms between their legs and cannot dismount. Also in the book there is a ball called the snitch which flies around and the seeker tries to catch it. In muggle quidditch the snitch is an impartial person, who usually has experience in wrestling or cross country runner, who runs around with a tennis ball inside of a sock tucked inside the back of his or her pants. The seeker has to chase the human snitch and grab the sock.

Other Resources
International Quidditch Association

University of Maryland Quidditch

Youtube Channel of Starkid

Harry Potter Wikipedia Page

Harry Potter at Universal Studios

The Leaky Cauldron