Harry Potter

forget the birth of independence in our dump of a nation-- july is an important month because it is the month of the chosen one, the boy who lived, the master of death. happy birthday,

harry potter! the 20 th anniversary of the greatest series of all time is here and shit is about to get real nerdy real fast. like so many other people who grew up in the 90s, the harry potter books are such a special part of my childhood. my mother was a single mom of three kids and severely mentally ill. my sisters and i were often lonely outsiders without friends or community. it is not a shocker then that a tale about an abused orphan with a heart of gold who finds out he is actually a god damn wizard and gets to leave his miserable life behind to save the world would appeal to our sad little hearts. magic saved us from our harsh reality.

reading the HP books from the library saved our asses. we preferred to check out the paperback editions because holding the hardcover copies above our heads under covers at night would destroy our wrists. we had that shit down and we knew how to HP. the only book i ever saw my stepdad read was harry potter and the goblet of fire and for a minute it was the only book in our house until my mom got jealous of him reading and threw it away. my elementary school would have an end of the year festival and currency was determined by the number of books you had logged that year. you had to fill our slip with a bookworm on it during library class (library was its own class... yay public school!) and my sisters and i had the foresight to log as many books as possible without making it too apparent that we were lying our asses off. by the end of the year, we would be rolling in cash and had by far the most tickets of any kid in the school. i bought a complete hard copy set of the books from the festival and still have them, the margins covered in notes and doodles because i wanted to be cool like the half-blood prince. i am a book purist. of course, i have seen all the movies and watch them with regularity, but shit is not even close to being the same. this is a super heartbreak but i did not get to attend any of the book releases as a young one. my mom would not take us to the midnight parties at barnes & noble because we didn’t have money to drop on a brand-new copy of the books as they rolled out. we’d have to put our name on the list at the library and wait our turn to read. in my heart i got to drink butterbeer with poorly crimped hair dressed as hermione, but life is not fair!

waiting for the books to become available at the library meant everyone at school had already finished reading by the time i had gotten my hands on a copy. in case you are reading this, ian from yearbook class, thanks for shouting that dumbledore dies while i was reading the half- blood prince in the hallway outside of the cafeteria. fuck you forever and i hope you die/are dead. dumbledore death spoilers right after the book release would have been punishable by death, if i ruled the kingdom.

even as an adult, i remain obsessed with harry potter. i wanted a harry potter-themed wedding but first husbands are for regret, not for fulfilling lifelong dreams. every summer i read the series in full and even have a tattoo of the deathly hallows. strangers often mistake the tattoo for the AA symbol, which is fine, but i then have to explain that it actually symbolizes three highly magical artifacts, a wand a stone and a cloak, that were created by Death and that legend has whoever possesses all three will essentially evade mortality.

hello stranger i am not an alcoholic but let me regale you with the mythology of a fantastical young adult series about witches and wizards! derp i’m cool. the sorting hat situation: ugh.

much to my chagrin, TIME magazine tells me that i am a gryffindor with h u f f l e p u f f tendencies. the wand chooses the wizard, or something, because i sure as shit would not choose ‘hufflepuff tendencies.’ in my youth, i would describe myself as a slytherin with ravenclaw tendencies and the ego of a gryffindor. hufflepuff is just okay. ravenclaw is cool but sadly underdeveloped. slytherin has that sex appeal of i am bad and i like the bad boys but in reality, slytherin is the alt-right of hogwarts. do not come at me with #notallslytherins because you know richard spencer’s ass would be head boy if he wasn’t a pathetic muggle. we must all face the choice between what is right, and what is easy. sing it, dumbledore. it is not easy to admit that i have bad taste in men, but i have bad taste in men. this also applied to my harry potter crushes. they change and vary with time, always the elders because daddy issues, but a sizeable portion of my young adult lust was accio severus snape... to my pants. what girl doesn’t fantasize marrying a greasy, brooding, emotionally withholding, mean man? wizard mr darcy! there was nothing more romantic to me than snape’s patonus being a fucking deer. like are you kidding me, after all that time! such wow. much romance. courage. bravery. or so my young boner would have argued. but i am woke now and cannot deny that snape is trash. i would cry if anything ever happened to my alan rickman snape hot topic t-shirt, but im about to do young diddle a true fright.

listicle as to why severus snape is the ultimate diaperbaby of the harry potter universe

1. he had a shot with lily but he ruined the chance at a relationship with her by calling her the worst racial slur in the wizarding world. i would never call the love of my life a m*dblood. no respectable person would.

2. he is a white supremacist! “half-blood prince,” get the fuck out of here.

3. the reason lily potter is dead is because snape is a dumbass selfish dick who wanted power and was chill with killing off her family to have her for himself.

4. this professor regularly abuses his power as an educator by unfairly targeting students not in his house. 10 points from gryffindor, my ass!

5. one student is so terrified of him that a physical representation of his greatest fear is... professor snape.

6. as a child, he invented a spell to slash a person’s guts open. columbine much? ffs.

7. uses way too much pomade in his hair. i am all for grunge but let’s keep it civilized.

8. as a grown ass man, snape cannot let go of teenage romance rejection to the point of emotionally abusing a child for years. what. is. wrong. with. this. petty. ass. man.

9. this motherfucker has several opportunities to make up for the death of lily by mentoring harry, but his boner is too hurt to see beyond harry’s resemblance to his father. snape is the best occlumens the world has ever seen and he just barely helps harry combat voldemort. wtf, dude?

10. let me spell this out for you: f-r-a-g-i-l-e m-a-s-c-u-l-i-n-i-t-y a few good deeds does not a hero make.

i am excited to pass on my love and magic of this franchise with my own child. he is three and has the emotional range of a teaspoon, but when the time comes, this little prince will get to experience the trauma of tonks AND remus dying and leaving behind their newborn child and i simply cannot wait.

long live dobby! fuck all TERFS, including jk rowling.