I think I'm going to have to accept the fact that, while I'm still revelling in the world of Harry Potter, many other people have now moved on to other stories, other interests.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, my sister-in-law and her three kinds came out to visit. I was excited at the thought of talking Harry Potter with my 12-year-old nephew and nine-year-old niece. Unlike so many other people in my world, I thought, they'd still have Potter fever.
"Harry Potter sucks," my nephew told me when I first raised the subject. He then mentioned three other writers and their series of novels and told me that each of them is "way better than Harry Potter."
My niece, while more polite, seemed to be of the same opinion: Harry Potter is now old news and there are a lot of other, more exciting books out there for them to read.
My heart sank. Is this what the world is coming to? I myself have also started to read other books (I'm delving into adult science fiction at this point) but, even so, I haven't turned my back on the wonderful works of J.K. I still have at least one HP book on the go at any given time and watch the movies from time to time.
I try to keep an open mind. I read The Hunger Games trilogy a couple of times, for example, but it just didn't grip me, it didn't have the breadth and depth of Harry Potter to keep me interested. I'm having to accept that the passage of time tends to distill just about anything down to its basic elements and that goes for Harry Potter fandom too. As long as new books and movies were coming out from time to time, casual fans stayed tuned. But once the stream of new material came to an end, those fans slowly faded away, finding other things to interest them.
Until only the truly hard-core people were left. Like you and me.
It's sad, I guess, but predictable too. I can't say I like it when former Potter fans who have found something new feel they have to declare that "Harry Potter sucks" but I understand that some people will drift away over the years.
Not me, of course. I'm dyed in the wool. I'll keep reading, watching and writing about Harry Potter until I have to make the ultimate decision: stay on earth as a ghost or "move on".
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