The Harry Potter stories seemed too scary at first

A long time ago, I hated Harry Potter. I hadn't read any of the books, and the movies hadn't come out yet. But everyone was talking about Harry Potter this, Harry Potter that. I thought that if it was so popular, it had to be really stupid. When I was a kid in school, the 'popular' kids were the ones who made fun of me and my friends. So Harry Potter got lumped into the 'popular' category and I rejected it.

My ex-boyfriend's daughter was having trouble learning how to read. She was a little bit dyslexic, reversing letters and numbers, and she didn't enjoy the boring reading assignments that the school gave her. So every time she visited us, he sat with her and they read Harry Potter together. Because she enjoyed the reading material and couldn't wait to find out what happened next, she was willing to struggle through it in spite of the dyslexia. Over the years she did eventually get better at reading. But in the beginning, Harry Potter was very helpful.

When the first movie came out, I went to see it with them.

My first impressions of the movie are probably still true. I actually had some negative reactions to it. But over time I became a loyal Harry Potter fan, and read all the books and watched all the movies, more than once.

At first I was a little disturbed because the movies are just a bit too scary. The kids are exposed to real danger at a very young age. Even ordinary things are dangerous - for instance when you walk up the stairs, the staircases move underneath you, and you could fall off the edge of the landing. Magical accidents can kill you, and magical creatures are everywhere, and you're always discovering something you've never seen before, and you don't know whether it's safe.

At Hogwarts, they tell the kids that the Forbidden Forest is a very dangerous place and they are never supposed to go there, but then, some of them get detention, and they're required to go into the forest (with Hagrid as their guide) to do a task, as punishment.

I didn't like it that the school would actually risk their lives as a punishment for breaking some rules. Did they think the Forbidden Forest really wasn't dangerous after all, in which case they were lying to the kids about how bad it was? Or did they not mind risking lives in a forest that really was dangerous? Of course, they did have an adult with them - they weren't alone, but it still seemed too dangerous a task for detention.

Another time, Neville falls from a high place when a flying broom carries him too high and throws him off. It seems like nobody really does anything about it and he's lucky to be alive.

So I saw that kind of thing happening a couple times in the movie and that bothered me. There are situations where the school either requires the students to do something dangerous, or allows them to do it, or notices that they're in trouble and doesn't intervene when they should. I just had the feeling that going to Hogwarts was very dangerous.

Gradually, after reading more of the books and seeing the movies, I got used to that feeling and it didn't disturb me as much anymore.

But later on, that same theme was what made the stories so recognizable to me. It relates to things that I myself have experienced. In 'Order of the Phoenix,' the kids realize that the authorities are no longer protecting them, and that if they want to get anything done, they will have to do it themselves. They start a group called 'Dumbledore's Army,' where Harry teaches them what he knows about self-defense.

They did this because the Ministry of Magic takes over the Defense Against the Dark Arts class, by sending them a new teacher who teaches it the way that the Ministry says it must be taught. The new teacher's approach is to show them only the theory, without any practice, at self-defense. She says they will learn in a risk-free environment.

I talked about the kids being exposed to danger at a young age. But I'm not against taking risks. It helps if you have guidance - someone telling you what the risks are, and showing you how to avoid or reduce them, and how to troubleshoot problems. The new teacher wanted them to do nothing but read a book and copy lines of text out of it. They weren't even doing something as safe as role-playing - I've very often thought that a lot of social skills can and should be taught by role-playing, by pretending, deliberately in school.

I could relate to Order of the Phoenix because the idea was 'The authorities have failed us, so we'll confront this problem ourselves.' All of the government was in denial about Voldemort's return. Nobody was teaching the kids how to protect themselves against these real-world dangers. They told everyone that the kids' experiences fighting with Voldemort were all lies and delusions. This is analogous to my own life experiences.

Some other time, I'll have to write about the other things I love about those stories, for instance, the feeling that you're a social reject or outcast and then you go find a community of people 'where everybody knows your name,' where people accept you and understand you.

I'm now a Harry Potter junkie, and like millions of other people, I can't wait to see the next movie.