My first exposure to Harry Potter was through a meme. Call it a meme, call it one of the most influential viral videos of the late 2000s, call it whatever you please. No Harry Potter parody media will ever top Potter Puppet Pal's rendition of The Mysterious Ticking Noise. What could be more fun and simple than Harry Potter characters repeating their names to the catchy rhythm of a metronome? “Snape, Snape, Severus Snape DUMBLEDORE” is still stuck in my head after all these years. The fact that…

The future of Harry Potter movies is unclear, as the Wizarding World's biggest spinoff series has been nixed. This week, it was reported that the rest of the Fantastic Beasts series is being quietly canceled due to the lackluster financial performance of the last film and Ezra Miller and J.K. Rowling's respective scandals. In all honesty, I'm not that mad about this. Fantastic Beasts was a weird series, and I somehow got through it without caring about a single one of the characters. I feel lik…

It never fails to boggle my mind how many people are fans of Harry Potter because they just want to date Draco . I've personally never wanted to be in a relationship with any of the characters in the Wizarding World, but I'm not a hater of those who do. If you started reading or watching the series when you were a teenager, it makes sense if your first crushes were Tom Felton or Daniel Radcliffe. However, nothing could have prepared me for stumbling upon the Harry Potter side of TikTok to find…

Well, it's Halloween, and if you're a Harry Potter fan , you know what that means. On this very night in 1981, James and Lily Potter were murdered by Lord Voldemort, and Harry Potter became the boy who lived. Halloween changed the entire trajectory of Harry's life and set up the entire series. Halloween in the Harry Potter universe is not all doom and gloom. It was also the night that Harry, Ron, and Hermione confronted a troll in the bathroom. During their second year, the gang attended Sir Ni…

Something I don't think we talk about enough is just how rad of a guy Daniel Radcliffe truly is. Here is a dude who is proud of his past work shaping millions of people's childhoods through the Harry Potter movies. He's never embarrassed to talk about his role as the most famous fictional wizard during interviews. At the same time, he has been able to move on from the franchise and star in a slew of really cool and weird movies. He has done action movies, a romantic comedy, and a movie where he…

This has been a rough week for Harry Potter fans, to say the least. Our beloved Robbie Coltrane, the man who brought Hagrid to life as only he could, died this past Friday. It is always sad to see one of the great actors that shaped Harry Potter pass on. Far too many cast members of the Harry Potter movies have gone far too soon in the 21 years since the first film came out. It was always surprising to fans that out of all of Harry's father figures, Hagrid was one of the ones to survive the ser…

Yer a wizard Harry

Gilderoy Lockhart is one of the funniest characters in the entire Wizarding World. He's one of those goofy, incompetent, largely unimportant fake-out villains that could've only come out of the first couple of books. It is such a wonder how this man even got hired at this school. Professor Quirrell, I get it. He's a socially awkward guy who happens to have Voldemort on the back of his head, but at least he knows the basic tenants of magic! Lockhart is worse at magic than 12-year-old kids who ha…

One of the best things about the Harry Potter books is you can imagine yourself living in them. You might think that many children's series provide escapism and character identification. While that's true, the Wizarding World allows you to imagine yourself as just a regular person within the world. You don't need to be a heroic and brave Gryffindor to want to go to Hogwarts. Even though I'm not likely to be leading any revolutions, I still would like to attend that school. Many of Potterhead's…

If you ask any Harry Potter fan what they think of Severus Snape , chances are you will get a strong opinion. However, get 100 Potterheads in a room, and there's a chance none of them will share the exact same take on Snape. Over the years, fan opinions have slowly but surely turned against Snape. While some still view him as a hero, it's a lot more common for people to see him as no more than a common villain who was needlessly cruel to an abused child because he still has a crush on his dead…

I know it has been said hundreds of thousands of times by Harry Potter fans everywhere, but the Mauraders deserved better. Imagine being Lupin and watching your entire friend group die before they reach 40, only to die before you turn 40. One of his friends was killed by Voldemort, one was falsely imprisoned and villainized by the media, and the other turned over to the side of the Death Eaters. The trauma, drama, and absolute conflama of the Maurader's lives can sometimes be too much for me to…

Ronald Weasley is a horrifyingly underrated character in the Harry Potter franchise. According to some sources, before the first Harry Potter movie came out, Ron was a much more popular character among fans than Hermione. Unfortunately, that changed quickly when the Harry Potter films turned Ron into a goofy comic relief sidekick with fewer heroic moments. Hermione was the smart friend, Harry was the hero, and Ron was just there. The Ron depicted in the movies was definitely not the Ron in the…

There's something about Dolores Umbridge , Harry's Defense Against The Dark Arts professor from his 5th year, that continues grinding readers' gears years after reading Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix for the first time . Many Potterheads even cite her as their most hated villain, superseding the series' ultimate villain, Voldemort . Why is that? I believe it's because Voldemort represents a type of evil that is terrifying but not relatable: I'm guessing you didn't have many red-eyed…

So many people think they'd want a 6-hour-long Harry Potter movie that covers every single of the details of the books with no variation whatsoever. Not to be contrarian, but I believe this is a delusional take. Film and literature are two completely different mediums. Nobody really wants the exact details of Harry Potter played back at them onscreen like nobody would want a 129-part BBC “miniseries” of War and Peace. There are some plot points of the Harry Potter books that I wish they'd inclu…

Being sorted into your Harry Potter house is one of the most important moments of a young Potterhead's life. There are so many ways to do it. If you're one of the lucky ones, you can do it in person, like my friend who was sorted into Hufflepuff at a bookstore the night of the Deathly Hallows book release. Imagine how much fun it is to have a real sorting hat plopped on your head as an eight-year-old? Lucky dog. If you were sorted in the pre-Pottermore era, you likely had to fill out a question…

One of the greatest mysteries of my life has been a question I'm sure all of us have asked: “what does butterbeer taste like?” This is. That is why I recently marched myself down to the Harry Potter store and spent 12 whole American dollars on a foamy butterbeer. Nobody had ever described what it tasted like to me, so I went in cold.