User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-4152128-20110715200849

J.K. Rowling's creation of the wonderful world of Harry Potter brought light to my world. The mere fact that such a world almost went to waste when her first book was sent for review, rejected as a joke and told that it wouldn't be a seller whatsoever did not stop J.K. Rowling from trying again, this time, with success. From this book came many more books, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fans and lovers of the books and books turned movies. In 1998, the first book was published in the United States. At this time I was only seven years old. I am now nineteen, and have been with the story through and through. It took over my entire prepubescent life, my teen-hood, and now, nearly an adult, I am still with the story, the characters, and the moral to the very end. The end of the Harry Potter movies, marking an end to an era, the finality of it all, stings greatly. There will not be any more midnight previews to attend, no more looking forward to the next book, or wondering what Rowling could have next for the characters in stock. We are left with all the possibilities for what could be left of the wizarding world. And although Harry Potter was a fictional story, literally speaking, it is one of the greatest sagas of all time. This set of books has as much merit and credit as any other book or parchment in its way. Never before have I found a more charismatic writer than J.K. Rowling. These are the stories that you will not only remember for the next year, but for the next fifty years or more. These are the stories I will share with my children, the stories that I will read over and over again, the movies I will watch countless times, enough to make the disc wear thin. It teaches us the greatest moral of life, in the words of Dumbledore, "Dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose what is easy and what is right", but even in spite of that, "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." How could this be more true, especially with the economic and social pressures of our current society? Many of us struggle, no matter what class, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation we have, but the one thing that can bind us all together, whether it be across the state or across the world, are these books, this epic story of the survival of what is good, what is right, and what is just, no matter how outstanding the odds. This in and of itself is what matters the most, and what Harry Potter means to me. It will stay with me forever.