User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-4161873-20110718000152

What does harry Potter mean to me? That question can be taken in any number of ways. What does Harry Potter the person mean to me? What does Harry Potter’s story mean to me? What do the Harry Potter books mean to me? All of these important questions shape mine and I’m sure, millions of other’s reactions to what seems to be the literary phenomenon of not just my generation, but my parent’s generation, their parent’s generation, and I hope, my children’s generation. At the midnight premier of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 movie, I saw a lone elderly woman in her late 50’s dressed up in Gryffindor attire: robes with the house patch on them, a wand, and yellow and red socks pulled up to her knees. While we were both waiting in line, I couldn’t help but think the very question that I am trying to answer. How can this series, this character, and this icon mean so much to her? It was then that I realized that Harry Potter allows any one person to get out of themselves in the times and age of today to a world that brings them closer to others and in circumstances that allows the good to ultimately triumph over evil. We are in the middle of a recession, with jobs lost and a war overseas and where let’s face it; the bad guy’s greed allows him to get ahead. So it’s nice to escape to a magical world where things make sense in a more interesting setting. The bad guy is Voldemort. The good guy is Harry. The world is plunged into an era of hopelessness, but in the back of our mind’s everything is going to end well. And to our grandmother’s dressed in Gryffindor robes, to our peers waiting in line for hours, and to our children whom we hope will take as much interest in this series as we have, this world is absolutely necessary. It is a means for generations of people to connect across barriers of time, to escape to a world where although just a hopeless, everything is exponentially more promising. The relationships emulate those we wish existed in our own lives. The magic depicts the power we wish we had in ourselves. And the ending shows the future we want to hope for. For the young who think they’ve accomplished nothing, the old who didn’t accomplish as much as they thought they would, and those who are now trying to accomplish as much as they can, Harry Potter gives everything.