The Harry Potter Phenomenon:
It will never end ` Muggles, quidditch, mudbloods, Hogwarts, Azkaban: words that weren’t part of our vocabularies more than a decade ago; words that didn’t even exist before. Then, Harry Potter happened. And so the magic began. Honestly speaking, I was not there when Harry Potter first came out. I was introduced to him when I was in elementary, and it was not love at first sight. I had this friend who was always popping out random Harry Potter trivia and I was like, “Harry what?” He kept on bugging me to read the books but I just ignored him. I was too young and grade-conscious then; I’d rather read science and other non-fiction books. LOL.
But when I watched the third Harry potter film - I was mind blown and later, amazed. The third film is still my favourite until now because for me, it has the most precise and accurate representation of its corresponding book. I tried to read the already-published books after that. Since then, I always made reservations in bookstores before the new books’ release dates. Since then, I was always at the movie house on the first day of every film’s release. Luckily, most
of the films and books came out on the month of my birthday so I asked my parents to buy these things for me as gifts. And when I reached high school, I found Harry Potter fanatics like myself. Every single day was a role-playing game. We were all eleven year olds then so t’was perfect. We make-believed we just received our letters from Hogwarts and we’re off to school on the first day of September. We lived in a different world and luckily, everyone in the class understood us. Haha. During fourth year high school, there came into our school this group from a religious organization. They talked about back masking on songs and other forms of “Satanism promotion” in our media. I was not a believer of back masking from the start so I just sat there with my mind lurking on other things. But when they mentioned that Harry Potter also promotes witchcraft and somehow, Satanism, my blood rose, and my friends and I ranted our way back to our classrooms at the end of their lecture. The Harry Potter Series, for me, is a children’s series which “matures” with the readers as time goes by. It promotes values that are important and appropriate to its target age bracket, like how the importance of friendship, bravery and knowledge were the central themes of book one and the sense of responsibility that book seven taught its readers. But I know there a lot of witches and wizards out there that are purer – more hardcore fans of the series - than me. That’s why when Em asked me to write this article, I was like, “I don’t deserve this.” Just this month, we joined the Triwizard Cup at UP Diliman. It’s a Harry Potter quiz bee with cash prizes and movie tickets for the first prize. We all had our Harry Potter tickets by then