What role does shame play in this dynamic between fan and fallen artist?
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Thats an easy way of saying something more poetic, more difficult, stranger.
I was the parent of one such child.
I accompanied my child to midnight drops of new HP titles.
I attended Harry Potter conventions.
Also addictive were the books two systems for ordering people.
First you divide the muggles from the wizards, then you divide the wizards into houses.
Everyone has a special identity.
It wasnt quite telepathy, but it was the dream of telepathy.
They wrote endless fan fiction, reams and reams of it.
They created their own art in response to Rowlings work.
This was all done with silliness but also great seriousness.
I happened to lock eyes with the singer at one point.
There was nothing adorable about itit was serious stuff.
Something useful and real and powerful was happening theresomething that was helping these kids.
They reached each other box to glowing box throughout the night.
This is a common story for us all, of course.
Were doing our best to practice telepathy, living up to the legacy of Alexander Graham Bell.
She argued: I want trans women to be safe.
At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe.
The backlash across the internet was a great fury.
Many of the former Potter kids were trans and they were rightly very angry.
But underneath the fury was a deep sadness; the sadness of the staining of something beloved.
Rowlings tale of a place where otherness was accepted didnt in the end include them.
Some of these children grew up to be adults whose dreamscape was taken away from them.
Did they lose an imagined landscape where great swathes of their childhoods had been spent?
Im picturing a hillside, strip-mined.
I wondered, too, about shame.
The threat of being shamed lurks at the edges of all of internet life.
What role does shame play in this dynamic between fan and fallen artist?
Maybe shame is the ultimate expression of the parasocial relationship.
No wonder we dont know how to behave in this new landscape, or even how to feel.
Reprinted by permission of Knopf.
