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…

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…

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…

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.