Matthew's Journal

Those who know me can tell you that I have a borderline unhealthy obsession with Harry Potter. "Why Harry Potter?" you might ask. Let me tell you.

I fell into the Harry Potter universe in December of 2002 around final exam time. Our campus movie station had shown the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone movie several times and I had found that I was entertained against my will. For whatever reason, I had avoided the Harry Potter series mostly due to the fact that younger children, around my brother's age, seemed to be enveloped in the books to a fanatical degree. Thus, to go against the grain, I just never took an interest and wrote the stories off as silly children's books. However, the first movie had peaked my interest so I decided to bite the bullet and borrow my brother's copies of the first four books. Less than a week later, I was hooked. Actually, hooked might be an understatement. I knew I was really enjoying the series when I had crawled into bed one night picking up Goblet of Fire to start on the second or third chapter. I had only intended to stay awake long enough to read a chapter or two. The next thing I knew was that my mother had poked her head into my bedroom and remarked that I was up early. As it turned out, it had been 8:00am and I was still awake reading.

Today, I am an avid Harry Potter fan and scholar. Sometime near the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I discovered fan fiction. Fan fiction is stories set in the Harry Potter universe written by some of the fans of the series. The result is varied tales of adventure that explore sides of Harry’s world that we just might not see in J. K. Rowling’s books. The largest joy that I derive from reading fan-fiction is that it provides such a wonderful medium to explore the future of the series and the development of potential plotlines. We can create all the theories that we want about how the story is going to progress, but nothing really demonstrates how valid and realistic an idea might be than by trying to write it into a story and thus, exploring how everything plays out.