Harry Potter and Millennials

Why do Millennials like Harry Potter?  Maybe because if you give J.K. Rowling the boy, she will give you the man.  Whatever the higher merits of the books, they initially got popular because middle-schoolers liked The Sorcerer’s Stone.  In what any fantasy aficionado recognizes as a considerable feat, Rowling then managed to maintain a steady, coherent output throughout our formative years.  And then the movies.  If the well has gone a bit dry since The Deathly Hallows Part II — things could be a lot worse.

This line of thought has some allure, and no small amount of explanatory power.  But it’s also survivorship bias.  Why not The Edge Chronicles, or His Dark Materials?

Because Harry Potter has Relevance — it reflects the actual world seen in a way that other fantasy works did not. Specifically, Harry Potter presents an idealization of an inward-looking, academically-focused technocratic bureaucracy.  This reflected the world of middle-class Millennial children, and continues to describe the ideal world of older fans.

I don’t keep up with Harry Potter Theory, but a quick search finds mainstream writing ascribing the series’ success to escapism/power fantasy (example), or discussing its influence on political views (example).  These miss the mark.  While Harry Potter does contain escapist elements, I’d argue that it partly owes its resonance to avoiding certain aspects of escapism common to fantasy, by not departing drastically from reality.  After all, power fantasies are a dime a dozen in fiction.

The Harry Potter universe revolves around School (Hogwarts).  Yes, a larger world exists, but it was and continues to be rather poorly defined.  Selection to and training by School constitutes the sole narratively-relevant route to membership in the empowered elite society of wizardry.  Even renegades like Voldemort receive instruction at Hogwarts rather than as apprentices to dark masters in brooding towers or through demonology.

What do you mean the job market’s bad?  I’ve got a degree!

The knowledge imparted by Hogwarts has total value.  Hogwarts magic (i.e. formal education) solves any problem, equipping the initiated equally as well for warfare, business, wilderness adventuring, government, and engineering.  There is no Wizard West Point or Magical Institute of Technology.  When the series acknowledges the existence of other schools, they remain distant with occasional benign competition.  Durmstrang doesn’t support Voldemort to check a rival or revenge past wrongs, nor does Voldy attempt to seek foreign assistance for his insurgency.  Even prosaically, snobbish noble families like Malfoy send their children to the same school as middle-class civil servants like Weasley.

The school authorities themselves represent the height of benevolence, power, and legitimacy.  The Chosen One doesn’t ache under the strictures of boarding school; he embraces them.  The Wizard Government functions better or worse depending on how heavily it relies on the advice and staffing of school teachers; we know the Ministry of Magic has truly gone down the tubes when Dumbledore loses his position as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

He rocked gold stripes, but not a beard?  And don’t tell me he doesn’t want a hat. 

The worthiness of the Hogwarts mandarinate sketched above results, within the context of the books, in support of a technocratic government, i.e. rule by experts.  Sure, elected officials of varying merits exist, but the good or evil they do is a function of their alignment with the professors and vice versa.  After all, a Death Eater vote counts just the same as Dumbledore’s!  Still, whatever the election results, the government operates bureaucratically via a plethora of pompously-named Departments.  We know Arthur Weasley, previously of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, has made it when he ascends to head of the Office for the Detection and Confiscation of Counterfeit Defensive Spells and Protective Objects.  The Ministry of Magic looks and acts like an homage to Ankh-Morpork but it’s delivered — and taken — straight.

The Chosen One’s fate is even more illustrative.  Harry Potter himself — the Boy Who Lived, the Man Who Defeated Voldemort, the Hero of Hogwarts — aspires to join the Wizard FBI, an organization explicitly stated to require high exam scores.  Presumably after a few decades he will rise to become the Director of the Auror Office, or even the Minister for Magical Law Enforcement.

After defeating the Great Evil, the Chosen One ascends to his reward.

Law enforcement constitutes the last measure of force available to the government, of course.  Harry Potter’s world, like the post-Cold War West, has no identifiable external threats.  Wizard Britain maintains perfectly cordial relationships with Wizard France, Wizard Russia, and presumably Wizard China and Wizard Amazonia as well.  No identifiable magical military exists, has existed, or needs to exist.  Harry Potter’s threat — Voldemort — comes from within the wizarding society, and he recapitulates a previous conflict.

“Wild” places do exist in Harry Potter, but they represent locations to go adventuring.  They’re Mount Kilimanjaro, not The East.  Nobody’s putting together a horde in there; out there doesn’t exist.

The Relation to the Millennial Experience

Harry Potter doesn’t hold a monopoly on the above tropes — which actually makes comparisons the more illuminating.  Discworld’s authoritarian bureaucratic government (including its magic school) exists largely as a joke and partly as a parable.  In The Wheel of Time, the Aes Sedai academic wizards — with a practical monopoly on magic — are practically and philosophically degenerate, and more than a bit clueless in spite of their hauteur.  Frodo Baggins, like Harry, returns to live a more or less normal life in the Shire but finds he can’t really go back, and Aragorn — the man who, like Harry, fulfills a triumphant prophecy — becomes king.

The “crossing worlds” aspect of Harry Potter is particularly old; for some modern examples: Narnia, John Carter, The Wizard of Oz.  However, the new world in these works usually represents a wild departure from reality, not simply an “improved” version of the everyday world.  The Wizarding World coexists quite closely with the Muggles, by contrast.

I don’t think Rowling set out to do this.  She simply wrote what she knew as an unmarried welfare mother in post-industrial England.  Hence the vagueness about the upper class, for instance.  And I don’t want to underplay the role her execution played in the franchise’s popularity; that’s simply a given.

But this all mirrored the middle-class young Millennial experience very closely.  Getting good grades in school — “an education” — would unlock anything.  The System — as personified to children by school — knew best.  The most educated and expert governed best, as long as they were allowed to do so (passive voice).  External threats didn’t exist — the Cold War was over, we never experienced it although we heard all about it — but, we knew, there were still Bad People trying to resurrect the evils of the past.  The Wizarding World was a better version of Muggledom, not an escape to a wholly different sort of existence.

The inward-focused, technocratic universe of Harry Potter didn’t hold all of us when we grew up.  I lost most interest in it myself before Rowling finished writing, but given the franchise’s continuing popularity with a certain subset of my peers we didn’t all grow out of it.  The “better version” aspect of the crossover took on a new precedence, I think, as Millennials got older.  The utopian aspects of the world eclipsed the fairy tale aspects.   I submit that older Harry Potter fans have a certain penchant for credentialism and expert opinion in the same way that Star Trek fans have a certain penchant for space exploration and naval warfare.