User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-4129882-20110709020855

Though this would happen several times with countless musicians, celebrities, and book series alike, Harry Potter represented the first tangible thing that I was obsessed with in my life. In many senses, it is simple enough to say that Harry Potter represents my childhood--but to prescribe the series to something as vague (and corny) as "my childhood" is nearly an insult to Ms. Rowling herself. The series taught me to respect literature--especially one as carefully and intricately woven as this seven-book series--and to embrace a world much larger than my own, with direct themes of acceptance, love, and sacrifice running throughout the series. I was taught things that can't be taught in a class; things that can't be seen nor touched, but are moral tenets nonetheless. It inspired me to explore my own skills and talents as I related to the identity crisis each character goes through and helped me to look outside of myself to see how I can make a better use of my time and the time of others. As the cinema-series comes to a close, I think to myself that old saying that "all good things must come to an end." I think of it like Nicholas Flamel dying after reaching six-hundred and sixty-five years of age and saying that he'd welcome death like a nice long nap. True, there will never again be that anticipation of what's to come, but I'm looking forward to be able to tell generations to come that I was there to watch all the movies when they came out in theaters and I was in the bookstore when every single book came out--that I'm one of the Harry Potter "OG"'s, part of a huge mass of people all around the world that came together and connected and grew over a series of books. I'm also looking forward to seeing how all the actors and members of the set-crew will fare with productions in the future after having left such a huge and pretty much legendary project. It'll be over, and that's sad...but at least we'll be there and have each other and years and years to talk about it.