The Room of Requirement

My essay on fan culture, politics and the Potterverse for the British Library's Fantasy Exhibit.

This essay appears in ‘Realms of the Imagination’, the companion book to the British Library’s wonderful Fantasy exhibition, which closed yesterday. Harry Potter fandom is in the news today, as it happens, and since the exhibition is over, I thought I’d make this one free for everyone to read.

***

Not far from the British Library, if you turn into King’s Cross station and walk along the concourse, past the chain coffee stands and the little trinket shops, you will see something very strange. You will see what looks like half of a luggage trolley sticking out of the brickwork, looking like a lazy attempt at modern art, except for the line of tourists waiting for their turn to take a picture holding the handles, for all the world as if they were about to vanish through the wall. In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, this is, of course, how a young magic user gets to Platform 9 3/4 to board the Hogwarts Express to wizard school. This is where the portal is supposed to open for anyone special enough to see it, and there’s a bit of you that wants to try it and see, because while it isn’t real, it might still be true. This is why, legend has it, the people who run King’s Cross station had to set up the fake trolley in the first place: to stop children drunk on enchantment, and a good few adults drunk on alcohol, from braining themselves trying to run through solid brick. 

Now, there’s a whole Harry Potter themed gift shop next door, partly because the queue for the photo op is long enough that fans can be tempted by an overpriced owl plushie. I walk past it every week. I’ve seen friendships forming in that queue, the instant shared rhetoric of people who don’t speak the same language grinning at each other because they’re wearing the same colour scarf. Unless they’re Ravenclaws, of course, who are above that sort of thing. 

Not long ago, on a train through London, I asked a visiting American if she wanted to go down to see Platform 9 3/4 and she gave me a look. It’s a look you’ll see if you ask many people under forty how they feel about the Harry Potter books these days. A brief grimace of embarrassment at having, until quite recently, been a person who would have wanted very much to get their photo taken in a Hogwarts scarf, and isn’t sure how to feel about that now. For so many reasons, the waking world has moved on, and the Wizarding World has not, and there’s a strong feeling among much of the fanbase that that train is not going anywhere good anymore.

What if I told you that there was a world not far from here where you could finally be understood? A world very much like our own but a little more magic? What if, for example, you could step through a door you’d never noticed before into a secret street full of arcane curiosities and enchanted shopfronts where for the first time, on every corner, you could meet strange people who you somehow recognised, because there’s something in them that’s instantly familiar, some alchemy of knowledge and earnest yearning that makes you kin, and if you know the code words, you never have to go back to your ordinary life – at least, not forever? Well, it’s real, and I can tell you how to get there. It’s called fandom. It’s strong magic. And as Terry Pratchett tells us, it doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it’s done.

When we speak about fantasy fiction, about the lovely unreal countries we conjure in prose and pictures, we are speaking about a territory that is shared – perhaps more truly than any physically existing nation ever could be – because it exists purely in the collective imagination, and has no borders. Collective is the key word there. When you first crack open J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) or rewatch Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King (2003), you know that millions of strangers have stepped onto this road before. The deeper you go, the harder you believe, the more it hurts to return, and the more you may find yourself overtaken by the same urge that takes over every returning traveller – to share the stories with someone else who’s been there too. To have the fantasy confirmed in the sharing. Maybe you’ll decide between yourselves not to talk about the dangers and discomforts of the journey, or how long it took you to find each other. And that’s the essence of fandom, what it’s always been – not mere critical appreciation, but the instinct to share – and the collective grief when the sharing is done.

When I talk about fandom, I’m not talking about the phenomenon of a story being popular. What makes fandom different from simply liking a book is not the degree of passion. It’s not the number of fans or the intensity of their interest. It’s the urge to share it with other people. It’s about community. It’s the drive to create a consensus reality which is no less true for the fact that it is not, strictly speaking, literally, actually, true. It is the same instinct that makes children play make-believe with strange kids they met five minutes ago – it’s a rehearsal of the sort of agreement on reality-making that is so vital for the one thing humans have always done best, which is to live in collaboration. Adults do this too, and the more alienated they become from one another, the more the play and practical sharing of fandom becomes a connective glue. And, crucially, it’s done almost entirely for free.

Being part of a fandom is sometimes a little like supporting a football team. Not long ago, an exasperated colleague in my TV writers’ room asked why on earth I was still watching Doctor Who if I was going to come into the office every single week complaining about how disappointing the episode was. I stared at him for a moment, and then I explained. I do not watch Doctor Who because it is the greatest television show ever made. I watch it because it’s my show, the way you support a team because they are your team, and so, by extension, are the rest of the fans. I can despair of the tactics and argue with the line-up but at the end of the day, I also wear the scarf. And the novelty t-shirt’s a way of signalling in public that you love something enough to look stupid for it.

Creating a show that everyone likes is not the same as creating a fandom. In fact, until Harry Potter, the whole point of fantasy and science fiction fandom was that most people didn’t get it, but that was okay, because you didn’t need to hang out with most people. I have often found myself explaining to television executives, in the time since I began to write for Hollywood shows, that you can’t expect a fandom to self-generate just because you created something popular, or even something good. In fact, some of the most perfect pieces of fiction in recent years have failed to create long-term obsessive fan followings precisely because they feel like a complete thought. There is, for example, surprisingly little fanfic aboutSuccession (2018–) because nothing feels unserved in that filthy, perfect jewel of a show, even though it has all the other ingredients of uncut fandom: wish-fulfilment escapism fiction. It is, like so many other hit shows and films in this low, dishonest decade, about the lives and loves of the ludicrously wealthy. But those lives are so far removed from those of most fans, the stakes so arcane and absurd, that it may as well be a story about wizards. If magic is a way of talking about power, then the fannish approach to fandom has an aspect of yearning.

Sharing a made-up world you love is, very often, practically easier than sharing the real one, and the more that human beings living in the acute crisis phase of late-stage capitalism become more isolated, alienated and exhausted, the more it feels like the canon of our common social reality is disputed, the more important fandom becomes. Immersing oneself in a participatory fiction at times like these is not simply escapism, although it would be enough for any writer to think they’d provided simple escape.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the most significant fantasy fandom of the modern age, if not of all time. The fandom so enormous that it transfigured the machinery of fandom into possibly the last true artefact of mass culture. The fandom that ate the world like a teenage witch eats chocolate frogs. I’m talking about what Alan Moore calls the Cult of the Child Mage. I’m talking about the behemoth that is – or, that was – Harry Potter.

The first Harry Potter novel was pushed into my almost-eleven-year-old hands by a canny bookseller at my local children’s bookshop, Bags of Books, which – thankfully – still exists. Those books, and the fandom that sprouted around them, didn’t just track my generation’s childhood and adolescence. They tracked almost perfectly what felt like a charmed decade in the West and particularly in the UK – the years between 1997 and 2007. Years of growth and possibility after the End of History but before the financial crash. When the worst and most hurtful things in the world felt far away, in foreign countries, or in the future. When the internet was new and the adult lives we were about to embark on seemed exciting, even through the miasma of post-pubescent angst seeping out of Livejournal. For the many millions of people whose childhood and adolescence spanned those years, this was our escape portal. For the first time, Fandom was constantly and consistently accessible – you didn’t have to go to a convention or find a meetup to spend all evening with people who also wanted to trade recipes for butterbeer or speculate about spoilers. Fansites like Mugglenet and the Leaky Cauldron proliferated to keep readers engaged in a self-perpetuating loop of engagement.

Rowling herself maintained an approving distance from the leviathan she had created. Warner Bros briefly tried to gain control over the fandom, and lost, setting a precedent for future creators’ engagement with fans: if people want to spend time keeping the buzz going around any intellectual property you happen to own, it’s best to let them. 

Fandom itself has always, by necessity, operated a little outside the traditional mechanics of capitalism: if nobody is allowed to profit from someone else’s intellectual property, gift economies bubble up in the gaps. Stories are written, conventions organised and live events staged with enormous expenditure of time and energy. The energy that brought Potterheads together expanded beyond fandom. In 2006, the Harry Potter Alliance formed to convert that energy into social and political organising – an Oort Cloud of kitsch campaigning on everything from trans rights and local environmental initiatives to American electoral politics, in the spirit of doing good that animates the Potterverse.

The children who grew up reading Harry Potter became teenagers who used the Potterverse as a way to connect with each other and interact with politics. That’s a good story. But it’s not the end of the story. Because what happened next was that we became adults, many of whom questioned what our most beloved stories had taught us about what it meant to be good – and what it meant to have power, or to misuse it.

The most seductive fantasies are sometimes those that are most familiar. The Wizarding World was, apart from all the kitschery and magic snacks, rather like our own. At least, it looked like it, if you were growing up in Britain at the time. What Rowling managed to create, and what the producers of the film franchise perfected, was a simulacrum of early 21^st-century Britain the way it wanted to think of itself, the way it wanted the rest of the world to think about it. It was Britain itself as a fandom. It was, specifically, the Britain of New Labour in the late 90s, with the small-state liberal values of the age layered over the folksy traditions and twee tropes with all of the ugly parts shaved off: prosperous and proud, so the horrors and hazards were all individual, not structural. This was a Britain that studiously wasn’t thinking about species level annihilation events or global disasters. 

The Potterverse was a bounded space where it all made sense. A Britain where everyone gets what they deserve: both goodies and baddies. If you were born with a little talent and tried your very best to do the right thing, you would be rewarded with power and pride and a place among people who understood you. Your life could be magical. Rowling’s world was safe enough for everyone. The moral mechanics were simple and digestible enough for an eleven-year-old. The central laws of the Wizarding World are about what constitutes an abuse of power. Magic – which is just a way of thinking about power – must not be used for three things: to violate someone’s consent, to torture or to kill. There was darkness, and there was danger, but there was no question about who was good and evil, and cruelty always came with a cost.

This is a simple, beautiful lie. But it was a convincing lie back when the premise of neoliberal worldbuilding seemed to be delivering, before the fundamental plot holes opened up and swallowed the future. The Wizarding World is a fantasy about the British class system in the late 20th century translated into a magic aesthetic, with none of the savagery and bigotry and sexism that kept the machinery of power working in the real world. The self-insert fan-fiction of Britain, and specifically of England, is utterly important to the history of fantasy fandom. In a way, England is its own Mary Sue.

Reading the first book in one sitting on my 11th birthday, I remember feeling heartbroken – as a lonely, troubled preteen – that I was already too late to get my Owl.

But in a way, I did get it. A few months later, my parents finally persuaded me to take the scholarship exams to get into the local private school, a Victorian building in a seaside city, where I and the rest of the misfits at a school for training the privileged saw ourselves in the Potterverse’s child protagonists. We read the rest of the books as they came out, and Harry grew up at the same time as we did. And inevitably, the stories we love as children shape our values and choices. Again, it doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it’s done.

When you set out to create a fantasy universe, you impart your fundamental assumptions about how power works and what good and evil look like, even if you’re writing a children’s book about wizards – and those are the base assumptions that the fandom carries with it. And the Potterverse is fundamentally a fantasy about the world working as it should. Crucially, it existed within – hidden inside – the ordinary, everyday world without questioning its basic structure.

But that world was not working for everyone – not even in fantasy. And the growing fandom – fanfiction in particular – was about the lives we were building in the margins of the main story even then. Those of us who were queer, or poor, or brown-skinned, or neurodivergent, which was much of the fandom; and those of us who were unbelievably horny at all times, which was almost everyone, given that the fandom skewed heavily towards teenagers who didn’t get invited to many parties. 

Fandom is what happens when people who were only supposed to visit a particular territory of the imagination set up camp there, form communities and start building janky, elaborate playgrounds and wild, strange gardens in the unoccupied spaces the creators never bothered to fill. There were gaps in this story we loved. Gaps where representation felt like it should have been; where sex and sexuality should have been, since the Harry Potter books seemed among their many qualities, desperately heteronormative. Weeks after the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), Rowling broke her customary silence to reveal that she had always imagined Dumbledore as a gay man. But for legions of her fans, that felt like too little, too late. 

The relationship between fans and ‘the powers that be’ is often remarkably tense. Rowling herself quickly discovered that fandom has a volatile energy all its own which cannot be controlled, much less managed. For most of the Potter years, Rowling guarded her private life and gave few interviews, only rarely weighing in on the universe of excited fan theories. Who can blame her? What could possibly have prepared anyone for becoming J. K. Rowling – for becoming the creator of something so phenomenally important to so many people that her every public utterance became a cultural event? 

***

Most fandoms fizzle and fade, especially those so invested with the fervour of adolescence: the worlds we loved to visit when we were looking for somewhere safe to construct a self become scattered and abandoned, icy playgrounds in midwinter, with only a few diehard enthusiasts keeping the flame alive until the next cultural moment brings a fresh generation of converts. Not so the golden age of the Potterverse. That ended not with a whimper, but a bang. 

No story can last forever. No matter how much you love it. This one ended the same way Ernest Hemingway once said he’d gone bankrupt – gradually, and then suddenly. The ‘suddenly’ took place in July 2020, when J. K. Rowling posted a 3,200-word essay on her personal blog explaining why she was and remains ‘worried about the new trans activism’. Over the next three years, Rowling appeared to double and triple down on that stance, to the extent that her name is now strongly associated with the type of activism that calls itself ‘gender critical feminism’, although its detractors call it transphobia. J. K. Rowling has denied being transphobic.

It would be ludicrous to claim perfect objectivity here. I won’t even try. My own position on this is informed by my trans-inclusive feminism, by being a non-binary person, and finding out what happens when you are involved in a Twitter row with J. K. Rowling. On top of all that, I’m a Gryffindor, and Gryffindors are unbearable, but we do tend to get worked up about injustice, especially when we see cultural icons making what we perceive to be moral mistakes. But my personal opinion is less important than what I’ve observed. And what I’ve observed is glorious and heart-breaking: a core fandom that built itself around a series of stories about tolerance, friendship, fighting for what they believe is right and using power responsibly taking those lessons seriously enough that when the time came, it simply rejected its creator and walked away.

It happened fast. Rowling has many defenders, but – crucially – she seems to have surprisingly few in the fandom that once festooned her every utterance with significance. Plenty of fans who had built their lives and careers around the Potterverse publicly walked away with as much dignity as they could muster. In 2021, the Harry Potter Alliance changed its name to Fandom Forward. And after I agreed to write this essay, almost everyone I spoke to gave me that look. The look that says that something lovely has been damaged, and all we can really do is watch.

The world has changed, and so have we. The Britain that the Potterverse did so much to promote internationally changed, too, becoming darker and more fraught with division. Liberal fantasies of escape through meritocracy were no longer what young adults long for; it was time to move on to new and more complex fantasies. Millennials have not grown up in the way we were expected to – and even the fandoms that were created in opposition to the ‘gaps’ in the Potter books from the very start feel stripped of the relevance that goes beyond reason, the special sauce that makes a story the right escape hatch for the lost boys and girls of a particular time. Perhaps that is why there is, in much of the fandom today, such a feeling of betrayal – that this enormous playground we used to share is not just abandoned but condemned.

There was betrayal, certainly, but it wasn’t the story that was to blame. It was the ordinary, everyday world that broke its promises to a generation that believed in a certain sort of magic. The Wizarding World is built around liberal centrist values, and liberal centrism has failed to protect us. 

The saddest and most compelling fan theory I ever heard is that the entire Wizarding World is a fantasy invented by Harry Potter himself – an abused child who grew up locked in a closet and is still there. The emotional heart of the story is a grieving, abandoned, mistreated child being rescued – or becoming able to rescue himself – because he is special, and talented, and different. The profound, cartoonish ordinariness of Harry’s foster family, the Dursleys, the smallness of their world on Privet Drive, made it clear why you’d want to escape a life like that and why you should. For so many of the children we used to be, that was everything.

Sometimes, a fantasy world has served its purpose – and this has felt true about the Potterverse for a long time. And in a way, their vehement rejection of Rowling's public positions has given her most ardent fans permission to move on. Today, fandom is a different, more powerful phenomenon than it was even a decade ago when we were all hanging out promoting our One True Pairings on Archive of Our Own. Fans can connect faster and more efficiently now by orders of magnitude.

Amongst people I know, the Potterverse is still referenced, but in a guilty way. The Wizarding World itself has not been taken up by the anti-woke army, because they are fundamentally still the sort of people who would have poured orange juice in your backpack at school. The sort of people who think wonder and imagination are for stupid children, even as they scream to return to a fantasy past of their own. Watching new movements spring up across the more radical edges of the political spectrum, you can’t help but recognise the operative qualities of modern fandom, from the frantic participatory rewriting of reality to the meme-factories and in-thread organising, the familiar sense of strangers attempting to believe a new reality into being. 

Nothing will actually cancel Harry Potter. You may as well try to cancel the Beatles. But every fandom has its golden age, its moments of waxing and waning. I became a Beatles fan almost twenty years after John Lennon was shot. That’s a profoundly different experience from the one my mother and her older brothers had, huddled around some record player to listen to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) for the very first time. But putting on that album now feels to me like having the energy of a gone-away world injected directly into my frontal cortex, and maybe, someday soon, the Potterverse will feel the same way. To me it looks like it's over for now – at leastuntil another generation, in a zeitgeist we can’t yet imagine, rediscovers this story and makes it its own – or not. This story is still part of us, for good and ill. J. K. Rowling’s magic, and the fandom that grew around it, have defined our generation’s response to fantasy like nothing else. And the last thing it taught us was how to grieve anything that matters. The pain of losing it now is the price of loving it then.