Harry Potter and the Sad, Empty Feeling
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| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Harry Potter and the Sad, Empty Feeling |
| Commentator: | Rebecca Dube |
| Date(s): | July 12, 2007 |
| Venue: | Online in The Globe and Mail |
| Fandom: | Harry Potter |
| External Links: | Globe and Mail article, Archive version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Harry Potter and the Sad, Empty Feeling is an article from Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, discussing potential reactions of fans to the conclusion of the Harry Potter book series. The article portrays fans respectfully and touches on a broad number of subjects, including:
- Attachment to fiction and post-Harry Potter depression
- Fanworks and fandom
- Acafans and fan scholarship
- Comparisons to the Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes fandoms
Excerpts
"'Sometimes I'm like if I had a dementor by my side, so sad 'cause it's all ending,' one fan wrote on the Mugglenet.com forums, referring to the soul-sucking, happiness-stealing monsters that inhabit Ms. Rowling's fictional world."
"'The attachment has been so long, and each release has been its own cycle of anticipation and then grief when it's over,' says Heather Servaty-Seib, an assistant professor at Purdue University in Indiana and an expert in childhood grief. Mourning the end of a beloved book or series is a normal rite of passage, she notes, although in this case the literary loss is shared by an unusually large number of people.
Dr. Servaty-Seib knows whereof she speaks: She isn't just a counsellor, she's a Harry Potter fan with mixed feelings."
"Of course, Potterheads have something Sherlock Holmes fans lacked: the Internet. A thriving fan community has spawned reams of fan fiction, art, poetry, even music devoted to creatively expanding upon Ms. Rowling's creation."
"'Harry Potter fans, as a rule, are very productive,' says Heather Mitchell, a PhD candidate in late medieval literature at Duke University and one of a growing number of academics who study Harry Potter. Once fans re-read the books and start to recover from their grief, she expects they'll return to message boards and fan-fiction forums to hash over every detail and pick up where Ms. Rowling left off. For some, the series will never really be over."
"Ms. Mitchell... didn't know what to expect when she presented her paper, Challenging Morality: Fanfiction as Community Dialectic, at a Harry Potter conference two years ago. Five people dressed like Severus Snape sat in the front row, and in the back row three witches in black pointy hats nodded in unison every time she made a point they liked. She was hooked."