Harry Potter and Fandomability

Happy Harry Potter Day!

A few weeks back, my husband and I toured a traveling Harry Potter exhibit that featured props and costumes from the movies. They recreated iconic sets, like Hagrid’s hut (complete with a dragon egg in the fire) and Harry’s closet bedroom. One exhibit housed the three deathly hallows and scammed us by putting the “invisibility cloak” on display. I saw the actual invisibility cloak Daniel Radcliffe wore on exhibit in England back in 2018. It fascinated me that they lined the inside with green fabric so they could green screen him out of the picture. The UK is well aware that the Harry Potter franchise is one of their iconic exports. King’s Cross station even has a spot set up where tourists can take photos of a trolley stuck to the wall. Because platforms nine and ten aren’t actually next to each other in real life, the photo op station is located outside of the boarding areas for either of those platforms.

At the beginning of my tour of the traveling Harry Potter exhibit, I was given an electronic wristband that allowed me to interact with pieces of Harry’s world. I potted a mandrake, brewed a potion, summoned a boggart, and watched my name appear on the Marauder’s Map. Adult Erica thought it was a novelty, but ten-year-old Erica who stood in line at Barnes and Noble until two a.m. to get the seventh book on release day would’ve been dazzled beyond compare.

Touring this exhibit got me thinking about how some fantasy worlds are easier to play in than others. When I was in second grade, my school had a themed day where everyone was supposed to come to school dressed up like their favorite book characters. I’d recently read The Spiderwick Chronicles and wanted to dress like the main girl character, Mallory. The Spiderwick Chronicles is a fantasy novel full of fairies and hobgoblins, but the setting is real-world contemporary, so the characters wore normal clothes. I came to class with my hair in a ponytail (Mallory was described as wearing her hair pulled back, which I didn’t usually do) and sneakers (Mallory wore sneakers, I favored boots or sandals). In my mind, this meant I was dressed up. But when I got to class, my friends dressed in Hogwarts robes or princess dresses asked why I didn’t have a costume.

The same thing happened in high school when I tried to be Katniss for Halloween. I couldn’t carry a bow to school, so I braided my hair, wore a mockingjay pin, and dressed in the kind of outdoorsy boots and green-and-brown earth tones that Katniss might wear while hunting in the forest. Once again, people asked why I wasn’t dressed up.

I think the ability of certain popular book series to become franchises and develop entire fandoms is predicated, in part, on how easy it is to create costumes and merchandise around the worldbuilding. My first-ever exposure to the Harry Potter franchise didn’t come from me reading the books, it came from my elementary school principal dressing up as Dumbledore for an assembly where he sorted all the teachers into Hogwarts houses. Later that same school year, my friends began bringing plush owls and golden snitches to school for show-and-tell day. We could play inside Harry’s world, and our toys and costumes created more publicity for Harry Potter. Merchandise and dress-up parties function as advertisements for a popular book series and provide a way for fans to engage with the story long after they’re done reading it.

I’ve fallen in love with a great many stories that are impossible to play in. The characters wear boring clothes and live in boring houses while they do interesting things. The stories are fun in and of themselves, but as soon as you read the final page, your involvement in the world of the book is done. Few books have the ability to spawn interactive exhibits, children’s birthday party kits, and theme parks. J.K. Rowling once said, “whether you come back by page or the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.” The enduring popularity of Harry Potter is still going strong so many years after the books’ initial release, not because of the stories themselves, but because the world of Hogwarts was built to be a playground.