What is it, exactly, about J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series that seems to have ensnared millions upon millions of readers (myself most definitely included), making them stand in line for hours to receive a $22 hard-cover copy, at midnight, of the last installment of the series (myself again included)? It's a question still being asked since the series' release all the way back in 1997.
Well, perhaps our friends over at Moist Cupcake comedy group can help us understand a little better:
Clearly, it is not just myself who harbors some sort of freakish obsession with young Harry and his Hogwarts cohorts.
So, this begs the question of why, exactly, is this series so unbelievably addicting?
Personally, I have been hooked on HP since 6th grade when the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, came out. It's difficult to explain what exactly drew me to the series; perhaps it was the realism of Rowling's characters, from the endearlingly doomed Harry to the loyal Ron to the brainy Hermione...or perhaps it was the tragic love triangle that was revealed in Deathly Hallows, between Lily Evans, James Potter, and Severus Snape. Maybe it was the realism with with Rowling presented her series, making children (and not-so-young people) desperately want to visti London so they could inspect for themselves whether or not Platform 9 3/4 in King's Cross really exists, or desperately search their mail on a daily basis to discern for themselves whether or not Dumbledore was going to send them their letter to Hogwarts (because if they didn't look themselves, it was a distinct possibility that their parents hated magic and would make every attempt to throw these letters out, a Dursleyish thing to do).
Then again, perhaps the masses became enamored with the series because of the ease with which one can parody it. For example, Saturday Night Live did a fantastic Harry Potter parody, casting Hermione as an extremely busty Lindsay Lohan, as well as Robot Chicken, which had the trio fighting the monster "Pubertus" (due to copyright infringement and such, I've been unable to find both of these videos, as they've been removed from the interwebs, but I can't say I didn't try!). Perhaps the most famous parody of Harry Potter, however, would probably be the "Potter Puppet Pals." An example can be seen here:
(credit to Neil Cicierega and co. for this brilliant material)
However, I think the ultimate reason why J.K. Rowling's idea (that was created upon napkins, by the way) has infected the masses is as such:The pages are laced with crack-cocaine.
Yes, I said it - the publishers at Scholastic in the United States and Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom sprinkle each page with an ever-so-slight amount of crack. However, with insanely long works such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (734 pages, U.S.) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (870 pages, U.S.) that amounts to quite a large amount of crack. Rowling, of course, planned it like such: the first few books had fewer amounts of pages, and therefore a lesser amount of crack. It was entry-level, just enough to get the reader hooked. However, once readers had gotten to the fourth and fifth books, the levels grew to a major-addict level, causing readers to wait insanely long lines and pre-order books months in advance in order to get their fix. Rowling started to taper the pages off in the sixth installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in order to truly build up for the last book in the series. This, of course, caused all of the strung-out crack addicts to do insane things to obtain their copies, which had a satisfactory amount of pages at 759 when it was finally released, counting that miserable hunk of words that she refers to as an "Epilogue," a.k.a. the "Nineteen Years Later" chapter. What is left to be seen is how said addicts will cope without their doses of new grams - er, books.
So, there you have it: reading the Potter books leads to crack addictions.
That is all.
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