A Wand is Better Than a Wish

What makes a great franchise? A great book series. And what makes a great book turn into a great series? The world that the author creates and the depth of how much the reader is invested into the story. Fantasy is sometimes laughed at as a genre and in life, ridiculed for not being real enough so why bother becoming invested in something that cannot be true? But that's the point, fantasy is an escape. It let's us dive into a completely made-up world with none of the same rules, ramifications, consequences or limitations of our reality, in order to escape our reality, even for an hour of reading or 120 minutes of screen-time.

So far we've had some of the greats become absolute hits and stayed on as cultural mainstays-Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Hunger Games, the list goes on. At this point there is a fantasy world for everyone and every interest-pirates, cats, witches, wizards, magicians, steampunk fans, mermaids, and every version of vampires that could possibly exist. It's hard to pinpoint which is best given that “to each their own '' really applies to stories, but I can definitely bet that the Harry Potter series is probably the best in my book.

Now to be clear, my initial instinct was to define the definition of “best” by best movie adaptation vs actual written works, but as I delved into what makes this series so compelling I resigned that regardless if the films had been successful, it was ultimately the world and characters themselves that made this series so special.

As a kid, I had a natural enjoyment of reading, and that meant that during the summer in lieu of being heavily involved in camps and sports, my family went to the library every single week to stock up on books. I grew up in the early 2000s, meaning we had a computer but it was dial-up and iPads, smartphones and anything beyond daytime cable shows were non-existent to occupy my time, it’s like I actually had to read. So, to avoid the chance of running out of things to do, I always came home with no less than a huge stack of books to read through, finishing most of the stack by the end of each week and exchanging for a new stack. Out of all the hundreds of books I ever checked out of that library, only a few stand out, and the Potter books were definitely part of that list. I would argue that part of J.K. Rowling’s genius is that she wrote each book with an increased reading level, so by the time the next one came out every couple of years or so, we would still be interested in reading it, to put it simply.

But J.K. Rowling’s genius was more in her content. We all know the now famous premise of a young boy who lives with his verbally and emotionally abusive aunt and uncle, who one day on his 11th birthday is visited by a big bushy-bearded man claiming that he is a wizard, and his deceased parents were too! And there’s a special school called Hogwarts that is for wizards like him. And so our young hero is whisked away and we go on a 6 year journey with him. Now I could say that I relate to Harry as adolescence is hard enough dealing with mean-spirited teachers, new friendships, dating, and bullies, though I can’t say I would ever want to deal with an army of giant spiders or a giant snake in a tunnel that I would willingly go into. Truth be told, the excitement of “what does this mean” or “what could possibly fix this?” coupled with monsters and endless potion and spell possibilities on top of the ever-present threat of a homicidal Manson-like cult trying to resurrect their former leader back to his glory. That’s a lot to handle for a kid, so in all honesty half the fun in reading along was wondering what I would have done in that situation, or how I would have handled it [honestly I would have just put on the invisibility cloak 80% of the time and spied on the bad guys that way, or found a spell to make me a fly on the wall, duh]. I can still remember gasping after reading that Snape killed Voldemort in the 6th book, sitting on my bed, jumping up and waking my snoozing cat next to me. No other book has ever really made me on my edge like that.

Harry Potter may on the surface level be easily compared to any other fantasy series, but the difference is that an entire generation literally grew up with him, and every Christmas my dad and I sit down and watch the whole series together, and it reminds me of how I felt reading each page of the books to waiting for the movies to come out and go see them in the theater, and in today’s world I’m glad that I actually saw them in the theater as opposed to on an app.

The best fantasy worlds are the ones that allow us to vicariously live through the characters and their worlds, the ones that can be made limitless because unlike other genres with the exception of sci-fi, they don’t have to make sense, just seem more fun. Of course, as we join our characters on the train to a mystical school and watch their lives unfold, and wish for a wand to take care of any problems we have, we can also be thankful that at least in our world the dragons are manageable.