Whaaaaaaat?!?!

Well, I'll tell you whaaaaaaat: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park is opening in June. Certain people, reading certain things I've written here on this blog (which they certainly will, and I hope will derive a certain enjoyment from them), might be like, "Whaaaaaat?" I like the Harry Potter books, though it's funny, because whenever they are criticized, I can't bring myself to defend them, unless it's against people accusing them of being satanic or something. Reactionaries. But as far as its literary quality is concerned, I get it: it's certainly not what I would call inferior, but it's got too much deus ex machina (but hey, it's a magical world, right? Magical...stuff...anything can...happen...you know?); the main villain is really not that scary (to me); the causes for which the people fight frankly leave me emotionally blank--the class wars are boring to me, as well as the "I'm fighting for elf-rights" type plot lines; even the main characters often just annoy me, and my favorites, though they are often important for the plot, are usually peripheral: Lupin is my favorite, then Dumbledore, and so on; I don't like Quidditch; and when people get excited, Rowling decides TO WRITE LIKE THIS IN ALL CAPS CUZ SEE THAT'S A CUE FOR BEING UPSEEEEEET! I could go on. I'm not going to write an apologia right now, either. I'm not sure it would be very good, and anyway it's been done (or attempted) enough times to last at least ten years. But I do want to talk about one thing; it's what I think I love most about the books, and that's the settings, especially Hogwarts. To do that, I'm going to talk about something else.

When I was very young, I was a big fan of the X-Men comic book series. It actually had many of the same themes as Harry Potter: good versus evil (of course), children discovering they had unusual powers and being sent to a school to develop and control them, an outside world that distrusted them (much more of an issue in X-Men), failure to control power, lust for more power and its usually destructive consequences, and yes, the most boring but perhaps inevitable: tolerance. The powers that these people had were much more varied and idiosyncratic than those of witches and wizards, who all draw from a common tap of "magic." No, there were telekinetics, teleporters, a person with claws and the ability to heal very quickly, one with the ability to control metal via magnetic fields, another had the ability to blast energy beams out of his eyes, and so on. But they were sought out and brought to the X-mansion, domain of Professor Charles Xavier, the most powerful telepathic mind in the world. This is what I loved. The characters and their stories and conflicts were cool, yes, but there were certain editions when the entire comic was people hanging out at the mansion and learning from the tremendously intelligent and vastly learned Professor X, and these were my favorites. The ultimate X-Men publication for me was a book (I have no idea where it is now) about the mansion itself (even down to its architecture), which had so many mysteries and so many promises of secrets left to be explored. It was my Marauder's Map. I pored over it, over and over. After that, my interest in the comics gradually dwindled, and it was a sad moment when I realized I didn't care any more: once the whole "tolerance" theme became more and more central, with its increasing ties to sexuality and politics, I dropped it altogether, without then knowing or understanding why it had become so tiresome. I've never forgotten the X-mansion, however. It may sound silly, but it was one of the joys of my "pre-teen" years.

I've been thinking about all this because, like I said, they're opening the Wizarding World of Harry Potter this summer in Florida. It's basically Hogwarts Castle and the town of Hogsmeade (with rides, of course). I've seen pictures of Dumbledore's office and Olivander's Wand Shop (which is actually in Diagon Alley, not Hogsmeade, but whatever). Looks great.

I've already talked about how much I love guides. Virgil (and Dante, too), Athenodorus. But Charles Xavier fits in there, as does Remus Lupin and of course Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. These are all good teachers, and the love we bear for them is forever linked to the love we bear for knowing anything lovely. In fact, they are those links. It's one reason we love our mothers, if they're good teachers, as mine was. My own mother read me the Narnia books over and over, and she taught me my letters as well, and I'll always associate wonder with her voice.

This has turned into a long post. I'll only say that the most involved I ever got in the battle with Voldemort (or the Minsitry of Magic) was when they threatened to damage Hogwarts, the place of wonder and learning, to shape it into a thing unlovely. This was intolerable. Frankly, Voldemort could have the Muggles as far as I was concerned. But he tried to take over Hogwarts, and for that, more than any other thing, I knew that fool had to die.