Opinion: Why be a Muggle when you can be a Wizard, Harry?
Fandoms are a strange and sometimes frightening world to the wary outsider, and certainly they can seem quite hard to elbow your way into when you’re more than a little fashionably late in handing in your application.
My own tardiness to Hogwarts came as a direct result of one of my oldest friends being so utterly in love with the books that she would never allow me to buy her a fresh copy of one, despite hers falling apart. If fandoms are scary to outsiders, they are even more daunting to those of us with friends already fully immersed because how could you possibly care as much as they do at this late stage?
Despite these worries, I recently found myself picking up the Harry Potter books and am elbowing my way into the fandom. This leads me to wonder what continues to draw us Muggles to Hogwarts so many years later?
I assumed that reading the series in my twenties would reduce some of the magic. I soon realised while having a rant about how awful the Dursleys are that this would not be the case. Sure, I had to accept my 
Muggle status. I am unlikely to get a letter from Hogwarts at this point, but that hasn’t stopped me and countless other ‘grown-ups’ from checking which house we belong to, wondering what wand would choose us and what Professor Snape might smell like…but that’s a tale for another day. Newcomers to the series can even be thought of as being lucky as Pottermore gives us easier access to these answers and a fully immersive Harry Potter experience.
There is just something about the world of Harry Potter that continues to draw Muggles in. The most marked difference between this series and others in the genre is that it has never really fallen into the guilty pleasure zone. Being a long-time lover of all things YA, I am used to the simplification inherent with younger fiction. What I fee
l draws people into this world is that, although simplified in parts for the younger audience it doesn’t really conform to the norms of the age group. Rowling doesn’t teach us that the world is all roses, rather she shows the dark parts of life and offers her readers a way of coping alongside Harry. When Dumbledore tells him that “to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.” Rowling subtly offers both Harry and her readers a way of coping with the tougher realities of life. The Harry Potter world might be a fantasy one, but what keeps drawing us in is that it feels real. Bad things will happen to good people and good and evil are not as black and white as we may assume.
One of the most important factors that attract us to the world of Harry Potter is, I think, the same as with any fandom. That over-arching sense of inclusion in something bigger. 
The idea that there’s a world beyond than our own. This is not a closed-door fandom, but one that is seemingly ready to welcome new members at any time, provided you’ve figured out what house you belong to. Ravenclaw all the way.
Hogwarts is a world that seemingly just keeps giving with Rowling consistently offering hints about the world going on without the books and penning books that exist in the same universe. Rowling has not only succeeded in creating a readable and very real universe in which children, teens and adults alike can happily co-exist, but she insists on it growing with its fans.
There are many reasons why people continue to return to the series and why people who missed the train the first time choose to try. Harry Potter does what all great literature does; it gives us somewhere to escape to. In this case it doesn’t disappear and leave us in existential crisis when we finish reading. As Rowling herself has said “Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.” Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
[Words, Ciara Lianne O’Brien]
Editor-in-Chief, part-time super villain and hoarder of cats. If you can’t find me writing, I’m probably in the kitchen!
