Article on HP fandom and its future

[wasureneba]

What do y'all think of this article on HP fandom? It's not exactly new -- it was published in November -- but I'm just running across it and I definitely have some of the feelings described in here, though perhaps not all.

Comments

[bergeronprocess]

I feel like the only person in the world who actually enjoyed Cursed Child lol. I'd love to see it on stage someday--maybe eventually it'll come to Atlanta with a touring cast. (I haven't seen Fantastic Beasts yet--I'll hit it up once it gets on Netflix or Amazon.) The Ilvermorny stuff I've mostly ignored, mainly due to the Native appropriation issues and partially due to the fact that for some reason I just could not follow the ins and outs of the Ilvermorny backstory when it was released! Plus, with a country as large as America, I feel like there's no way there is only one school of magic to serve the whole country anyway. (Even with swift methods of transport, it's still quite a long trip from, say, California to Massachusetts.) There would probably be smaller, more regional ones with more regional flair but Ilvermorny might be seen as a sort of Harvard-like school in terms of prestige. But that's just my headcanon lol.

It's fun to enjoy rereading the books and rewatching the movies. I've liked how Pottermore fleshes out how Hufflepuff's common room works and provides more backstory on people like McGonagall. JKR's tweets I'm not as bothered by as some folks on my TL...recently a bunch of people tweeted outraged reactions to a totally misleading headline on a story about how there was 'another Harry Potter' (it was about a totally different person who was like his great-grandfather and was named Henry but went by Harry) but you could tell none of them actually read the story with the misleading headline (you can usually blame editors, not writers, for those btw), they just wanted to get another tally mark in the "See! I don't like Twitter JKR" book. Like they just wanted to score cool points. I wasn't about it.

I guess you could call it cafeteria fandom, like cafeteria Catholicism. Take what you like, enjoy your food and leave the rest. :)

[ellisbell]

Regional schools would have been a great idea! America is much larger than the UK. The tenor of the universities here vary greatly depending on where they are (Texas A&M vs. Mizzou, for example). The canon schools other than Hogwarts are really specialized with very specific 'personalities'; stands to reason there should be the same here in the US, esp. when you take square miles/population into account.

[bergeronprocess]

Exactly! I don't know how many UKs would fit inside the US if you were to do that exercise, but I feel like it's uh MORE THAN A FEW haha. As a result, surely (I know, don't call me Shirley) groups of magical people in various places would congregate to found a school with a regional flavor. Like I'm imagining ones in the South (Spanish moss-laden trees!), ones in the Southwest (desert magic!), the Pacific Northwest (MOUNTAINS), the Midwest...Some might focus on one specific kind of magic, maybe, something like that...it's fun to think about, anyway!

[wasureneba]

^^All of this. There's so much ripe and interesting stuff there -- if she had made numerous regional schools, imagine the fanficcing that would happen with them!

[wasureneba]

I'd like to see the play if it tours, for sure; you can tell from the script that there's clear visual wow-factor to be had. I'm not sure I'd love it the way some people have, if only because I'm not a big fan of a lot of the plot points, but it'd be fun to actually *see* it still.

The Ilvermorny stuff was just... no thank you. I totally agree about the regional schools, that makes far, far more sense. How does the US have *one school* and yet the UK, France, and greater Scandinavia have at least three between them?

There's some really cool information on Pottermore. I love McGonagall's backstory, for example. And I generally enjoy JKR's twitter.

So much of fandom really needs to be cafeteria fandom, oh my....

[bergeronprocess]

Definitely! It's kind of like reading Shakespearean plays in school. That might be why my favorite teacher supplemented our reading of Hamlet with watching a few different versions of it, so people can see the visuals and make a deeper emotional connection to the source material.

Great point about Europe having so many schools (I feel like there are more regional ones there too btw haha) as compared to America! The Harry Potter wiki refers to the known magical schools as The Eleven Schools, which could maybe be a bit like what if the Ivy League was international. They're not the only places to go, but maybe the most prestigious of their field, if that makes sense.

Oh yeah McGonagall's backstory likes to break your heart, doesn't it? I'm glad she wrote that out for us because it was probably not gonna come up in Harry's presence during canon.

The best part of cafeteria fandom is that you can always go back for another plate ;) hahaha

[wasureneba]

I like your version of the known schools -- it's just the super prestigious ones, and there's plenty of others (great and not-so-great) all around.

Yes, that was a bit of backstory I really, really adored. McGonagall ♥