Even in friendlier times, being a loud-and-proud adult fan of the Harry Potter franchise – a Harry Potter Adult, in modern parlance – has never exactly been chic. There are degrees to it: maybe you happen to own a Hogwarts scarf; maybe you fill your Hinge profile with claims that you are a Hufflepuff, that your Patronus is an emu and that your wand would be made of pistachio. (To a Potterphobic muggle like me, there’s always been something profoundly, gauchely unsexy about all of it.) But it turns out there’s another level of superfan still: have you ever been so outraged over a fictional elf’s grave you’ve re-organised a multimillion-pound infrastructure development?
The dispute involved the £430m Greenlink interconnector, an undersea power cable linking the National Grid to Ireland. Plans had been made to install the 200km-long cable on a route that went through Freshwater West, a beach on the Pembrokeshire coast. Why does anyone care? Well, this was the beach that was briefly used as a filming location on the seventh and eighth Harry Potter films, on which there now sits a pile of rocks that serves as a memorial to a character called Dobby the elf. Project manager Simon Ludlam told the Energy Revolution podcast last week that they received “hundreds” of calls protesting the plans. “I said: ‘He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?’” After eventually realising the intensity of the objections, the project was re-mapped. (Construction started in 2022, and it became operational last year.) “We went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby’s grave,” Ludlam said, letting the preposterous irony speak for itself.
This isn’t going to be a rant about how it’s wrong for adults to engage with Harry Potter (though JK Rowling’s social media activity has made this an increasingly popular stance among people who care about things like trans rights). Nor is it going to be a discussion about why it is juvenile and myopic – and on a practical level, quite bewildering – to throw a tantrum about the desecration of a non-existent grave for a non-existent elf; this really ought to be self-evident. (To put it bluntly: these people need to get a life.) But if nothing else, the incident has thrown into focus the problems with adult fandoms of things like Harry Potter, and how they’re fundamentally incompatible with the practicalities of the real adult world.
What makes the whole Dobby debacle so egregious is that, in the broader scheme of things, Harry Potter Adults have already won. We live in a world that caters for the whims of the Harry Potter Adult with unctuous thoroughness. If you want to indulge your love of Harry Potter, there are video games, film franchises, theme parks; entire brick-and-mortar shops selling Harry Potter merchandise to Harry Potter fans. This Christmas will see the release of a new Harry Potter TV series, an endeavour that already feels redundant after the eight comprehensive film adaptations, but that nonetheless looks set to become one of the most-watched TV series ever (if the trailer is anything to go by, having pulled in an unprecedented 277 million views in its first 48 hours). It has been speculatively reported that each episode of HBO’s Harry Potter will cost £75m to make, pushing the overall budget for the series into the billions.
Really, Harry Potter adults are no different to Disney adults, or Pokemon adults. These lines are also porous: to some extent, nearly all of us consume media aimed at children. It is the stuff that fills multiplexes, that dominates bestseller lists. Across the board, our media is infantilised, a result, in part, of the mainstreaming of Nerd Culture that took place over the past several decades. It’s important to be able to acknowledge this neutrally, and to recognise that it might not be a good thing – that it might in fact be problematic to build your personality around art written for people not yet old enough to sit GCSEs. Where does it lead? To a pile of garishly stacked rocks, being treated like hallowed ground – a hogwash fantasy made real.
