What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [10:00-13:16]

or moral panic, because often that is what it was. So maybe we need a Joanne's castle to fall for us to be able to have this conversation. So we actually do have a death of the author problem on our hands here, theoretically, learning that your favourite childhood author isn't who they seemed to be, needn't change the way you feel about their books. However, over here in reality, it absolutely does, and it doesn't help that Potter just so happens to be the best-selling book series of all time. For those who weren't around during Potter Mania, I'm not sure I can express just how massive it was. Potter was everywhere. Families camped outside bookshops on launch night. The New York Times had to make a separate bestseller list for children's literature. It helped bring fantasy into the mainstream. It revitalized the young adult genre, and now it's become embedded in our culture. Everyone knows what a hufflepuff or a muggle is. It's not so easy to just put all that back in its bottle and throw that bottle back in the sea. Sooner or later, we are going to have to confront what Potter means to us now. It's a difficult conversation because it's connected to issues people quite rightly feel very strongly about. And I fully expect Joanne to get worse, so it's only going to get more difficult. The lives of trans people are more important than some fantasy book series from 20 years ago. Maybe the sensible thing would be to just avoid the subject. However, my view is best summed up by academic Cecilia Concha Farr. In response to the MLA withdrawing support for her Potter essay anthology, presumably as a result of the Joanne controversy, Farr called their decision a mistake, arguing that it's the role of literary scholars to help readers negotiate the complex relationship between authors and texts. So that's what I want to do. Or I'm going to try anyway, because I'm surely not the only one who had a strong relationship to these books which they feel conflicted about now. And I think it might help to talk about that. I spent the last six odd months reading stuff people have written about Potter across the years. And now I'm going to put it all on the table and we're going to talk about it. Which means I'm going to talk a lot of s*** about Potter. If you're a super fan, you're going to have to brace yourself for that. But I'm also going to talk about criticism that is inaccurate or unfair. And I will defend Potter where I think it's warranted. So be prepared for that too. And I'm going to talk about criticism that is complicated. Sometimes I will make arguments for the sake of argument. Which means I might say something that I disagree with. Or I might say something that is not untrue, but isn't the whole story. I'm just saying this is a conversation. And it's by having the conversation that I hope to make some sense out of this. To see if I can figure out what Potter means and whether that's changed. So let's start with the most pressing question.