I love Harry Potter as much as Melissa Anelli,

and so do most Potter fans. Melissa (the webmistress of The Leaky Cauldron, author of Harry, a History, and all-around Potter fandom star) is arguably one of the biggest Potter fans ever, as far as her work within the fandom goes. She undeniably really freaking loves Harry Potter. And yet I feel that many Potter fans around the world, ranging in age by probably eighty years, can all accurately claim to love the book as much as the key player in Pottercast, LeakyCon, and God knows what else. Most of us love the books second only to JK Rowling herself, who must harbor a love for the books akin to her own child. That's one of the incredibly awesome things about Harry Potter: when you love it, you really love it. I'm not alone in saying that I have never read or experienced anything that has been so thoroughly inviting, believable, heart-wrenching, enviable, beautiful, and real as the Harry Potter books. From the ten year olds who are well on their way to becoming full-fledged Potterheads to the most prominent members of the fandom, I really don't think anyone can truthfully claim to love Harry Potter more than any other fan.

With that love explosion out of the way, let's get down to business.* As I'm the one of us who happens to be blogging on the official North American (?) release date of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2", I feel that I owe it to you to discuss the movie and Harry Potter in general. Plus it's the only thought occupying my brain right now. So here we go.

If you're interested in my initial/insane reaction to the movie, you can find it here. There are spoilers (as there will be in this post)! I still feel the same way although perhaps in a slightly more calm, less sleep deprived frame of mind.

To sum it up, the final movie disappointed me. It was a fine Harry Potter movie and was there an eighth book or part 3 or something I probably would have been satisfied if not overly enthusiastic. However, given that it's the last ever Harry Potter film (save a remake in 50 years), it fell flat for me. There was no cathartic moment, no real feeling that Voldemort -- the overarching link of the whole movie and book series -- had finally come to an end. Instead of putting more emotion into the final minutes of the film, they went for overdone special effects. I get that it's a blockbuster and a bigger fight scene is more cinematically appealing or whatever, but takes away so much for Voldemort to be jumping off cliffs and chasing around Harry instead of that quick end that he deserves. I suppose the death of Voldemort disappointed me so much because it implied that Voldemort was still more than a mortal: mortal men don't disintegrate into disgusting flecks of human grist when they get AK'd; they simply die. The whole point is that no longer hiding behind his Horcruxes, Voldemort is a mortal man, driven not by far superior talent or superhuman powers but by his own evil, selfish ambition to control life and death -- something that no one can truly master. I would have liked to see the directors go for the simple and deliberate route of death rather than the drawn-out, convoluted duel. Followed by the (annoyingly lacking in the actual film) cheers and screams and cries of the watching crowd, I honestly think that moment of Voldemort's final downfall would have been much more poignant, and I don't just say that as a book-devoted Harry Potter fan.

...And then, as I rushed out of the theater at two thirty in the morning so that my sister's friend could speed home and get a whisper of sleep before her 9 a.m. job, half-laughing and half-shouting with two of my friends, my sister, and her friend about the ridiculous flaws in the movie, I realized that I'm not too sad about this last movie coming out after all because it's finally set in that it's not really ending.

That's one of the benefits, I suppose, of centering my whole love-of-the-boy-wizard around the books. It's always been about the books. Not about the movies, not about the Harry Potter themed events, just about the books. The book Harry Potter is the real Harry Potter. Since I haven't been heavily involved in the fandom, when I rushed out of the theater last night, I wasn't leaving behind the end of anything. Sure, I'll miss the few wrock concerts I've been to and the opportunity to go to more, and yes, it'll be sad to see some of my favorite internet personalities move on from publicly ravishing Harry Potter and Dumbledore, but with the release of this last movie, I'm not really leaving behind an era of my life. I'm not marking the end of Harry Potter themed events with my friends like many people who have been heavily involved in the fandom. I have lots of friends who love Harry Potter just as much as I do, of course, but they're my friends independently of Harry Potter, by which I mean I would be friends with them regardless.

Most of the sadness I feel from the "end of Harry Potter" (heavy quotation marks; note indication of skepticism) comes from the people within the fandom itself, this resolute chant that their "childhood is ending." For me, though, not much is ending at all. My love for Harry Potter is centered solely around these seven books that already reside at my house any time I want to revisit them. I've enjoyed the movies but they're not what I love about Harry Potter:

I realize now that the end of Deathly Hallows is so tremendously moving because of every single little nuance leading up to the battle and during the battle and, yes, even after the battle. I didn't cry during the book because Harry talks to his family (both the blood related and friend created kind) and walks through the forest to his death; I cried because of how JK Rowling wrote that scene, how much more depth it gives to this already wonderfully complex character, and that simply couldn't translate to the big screen for me. The highs of the movie -- namely, the downfall of Voldemort -- simply weren't high enough for me and the lows -- Harry dying, the Prince's Tale -- could never hope to capture the emotions I feel towards the real characters. I like the movie trio a lot, but they've always, always, always been the movie trio, not the real trio, to me.

In my mind, Harry Potter: the Movies and Harry Potter: the Books fall into two distinct, only superficially overlapping, circles. The events of both are almost the same. Some of the characters overlap: if I were to offer anybody serious evidence that Hogwarts is real and the books are simply an elaborate cover story, I would direct them to Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman to prove that nobody can act that convincingly and perfectly. A sort of guilt settled on me yesterday morning for not loving this last movie, because I know how much everyone has worked to make it perfect. It's the "end of an era," everyone says! Surely, to validate my existence as a Harry Potter fan, I should have walked out of the theater in tears! Nay, I should have broken down during the opening title sequence! I shouldn't have been able to roll my tear-free eyes at my friend during the movie final battle itself! Now, though, I am guilt free and infected with only the slightest bit of remorse that I didn't cry and I don't feel depressed. Slight masochist that I am, I would like to be able to have a sort of "mine is bigger than yours" comparison/duel with other fans about how many buckets of tears I shed during the movie. Feeling less love for the movie makes me feel a bit like the grumpy stick in the mud.

But you know what? I am a book girl, through and through. I enjoy the Harry Potter movies, but they're not really Harry Potter. And I can't control when I cry: the (spoiler!) cat dying in "Ramona and Beezus" unexpectedly got me sniffling and fighting to keep my tears within my tear ducts. The (double spoiler!) death of an adorable character in "The Princess and the Frog" had me battling to keep my crying silent in a theater full of four year olds and their moms. But the death of movie Fred just made me quite calmly think, "Well, this is depressing." Do you know, I believe that the expectation that I would cry actually kept me from feeling really cut up over this movie. So I like my tragedy to be unexpected and free from pressure. Sue me.

I'll likely even appreciate this film once I lower my expectations and realize that I should never again expect the movie to be the book -- which I haven't done for previous movies but as this is the last ever I really expected to feel and love it more. My favorite Potter movies are by far the first two even after all this time because they're the ones that capture the spirit of Harry Potter the best, if not every single detail -- they're the ones about friendship and a young, brave boy proving himself against evil -- they're the ones that balance dark and light -- and I think they're able to do so because those two books aren't as complex but it's still an impressive feat that I appreciate so much. At any rate, I'm looking forward to many future 20+ hour complete Potter marathons -- supplemented, I'm sure, by a hearty conclusion that the books are better.

* To defeat... well, you know who. (See what I did there?!)