“Hogwarts Will Always Be There to Welcome You Home”

I grew up in the clutches of the Harry Potter phenomenon, my childhood stood side-by-side with the release of the books and movies. It was my very first experience of a fictional world having such an adverse narrative outside the boundaries of its pages. At 12 I felt, first hand, the gut wrenching, world consuming need to receive my acceptance letter to Hogwarts. It was almost as though my psyche was attempting to will Rowling’s wizarding world into existence… and in some ways it did. I mean, I didn’t get my letter (it must have gotten lost in the mail, Australia Post is notorious with these sorts of things) but I engaged in the world because everyone else wanted what I wanted. We lived in a Harry Potter community which drew the wizarding world out of a 7 book series and turned it into the global phenomenon it is known as today. This is the first fandom I was ever a part of.

J.K. Rowling at Deathly Hallows Pt2 Premiere – Dave Hogan

Everyone varies with their level of dedication in a fandom, they also vary in their interests and obsessions. The world means something different to everyone which really punctuates the place of the audience within narrative and art in general. It shows us that stories are not simply defined by the relationship between the audience and the work but also the interrelationships within the audience themselves. Harry Potter didn’t end when you closed a book, or when the credits rolled, it continued on because we had developed entire communities to harbour the world we all adored.

I am struck by one particular thing that Rowling said at the premiere of the Deathly Hallows Pt 2 in Trafalgar Square back in 2011. At the end of her emotional speech Rowling addressed the crowd to assure them that “Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home”. At the definitive (it seemed) end of this years-long narrative she assured that whilst she wouldn’t write another book, this did not spell the end of the Harry Potter universe. Whilst all of us went to different schools in different countries, we had all been to Hogwarts too. We were classmates of Harry, Ron, and Hermione and that brought an unimaginable number of people across the globe together. Hogwarts felt like home to us and because of these communities we did not need to open a book to go home. This home was bred between us all, we created relationships within which these places, people and events were woven, and in turn, realised.

As audiences have become more dynamic in these ways we have seen a shift of media creators to accommodate this. Harry Potter was unprecedented in the social ramifications, support, and mass emersion it garnered. Fandoms like Harry Potter destroy theories of passive audiences as there has arguably been no audience so active as the Harry Potter fandom. The rise of sequels, ‘easter eggs’ and fan service can all be attributed to Harry Potter’s success as a franchise. Media practitioners are starting to realise that narratives can expand past their own boundaries through audience participation.

San Diego Comic-Con 2013 – Courtesy of Dorkly

The internet has allowed for fandoms to be put under the microscope as observable communities that are now actively grown by franchises. As audiences we are encouraged to engage entirely within the worlds we are shown, which is also likely the reason why ‘world building’ has become as prominent as it is now in Hollywood. The Avengers universe, easily the current most profitable and far reaching franchise, in an interconnected web of different narratives that seek to create a single marvel universe that has garnered an equally as complex and diverse fandom. Fandoms have been mainstreamed because they have been realised as the best way to maintain a profit in a world that is taking readily to streaming and torrenting as a method of procuring media. As media enters into every day life, media producers are beginning to encourage us to bring their narratives along with it.

It is important to note that Harry Potter is not the first large scale fandom: Star Trek, Star Wars, and multiple other pop culture phenomenons came before it but their fanbases were far more alternative to the mainstream. They were largely seen as obsessive and strange but the Harry Potter fandom (as a whole) was widely considered to be a mainstream community within which ‘normal’ people resided. Harry Potter marked a shift in what it meant to be a fan, and what it meant to engage with media. The shift in media participation is bringing a new culture of engaged audiences to the media industry and the media industry is starting to change because of it. Narratives are becoming more dynamic and interactive as we are letting go of antiquated linear models of broadcasting and entering into a new age of post-broadcasting. An age that acknowledges the diverse relationship between audience and art-form and that the narrative of any given media creation lies somewhere in between the two.

I am looking forward to what this new age will bring in the way of narrative as it will no doubt shape my career as a media creator. It seems rather obvious to me that I belong to a generation of creators that fall far closer to their audiences, and will create narratives that are indicative of that. Fans and audience members are being humanised and their communities seen as complicated hubs of media engagement. The growing acknowledgement of this will likely signal the media’s new great leap forward as a mode of communication and narrative distribution. Because Hogwarts didn’t belong just to Harry Potter, nor did it to J. K. Rowling. Hogwarts belonged to all of us and, as Rowling herself claimed, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome us home.