The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

“Design encourages and rewards exploration of and further immersion in a story world. Purchase of an interactive wand includes a map to different locations where you can cast spells, but visitors can choose in which order they proceed and choose whether to skip or to revisit any locations. They also choose whether to compete or to cooperate with any companions. With no corporate-generated framing device, visitors can create their own narratives around why they cast each spell. They create their own performance and define their own participation.” (Godwin)

Despite the exploratory nature of the theme park, there’s still a limit to what fans can do. In the Escape from Gringotts ride, for example, riders are referred to as “muggles” and guided through a scripted journey through Gringotts, a wizard bank. While these adventures don’t happen in the original novels and rides “expand existing narratives,” riders still don’t have a say as to whether or not they’re wizards in this ride (Godwin). Further, to even go to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, one must buy expensive tickets. As with many other theme parks, “corporate creation and control of the parks intersects with and complicates fan tourism” (Godwin). The theme parks gave fans an opportunity to eat, shop, and play their way through the magic world, but made sure fans couldn’t break anything.

Pottermore

“You see, for Potter fans, the Houses are, aside from the whole magic thing, one of the most defining and constant aspects of Hogwarts. The Harry Potter generation who grew up with these books, myself included, had found themselves identifying with a particular house of their choosing long before the incursion of J.K Rowling’s Sorting Hat test on Pottermore. For me, that house was Slytherin, from the very moment I first fell in love with the wizarding world at age 11. I identified with the Slytherin mentality of the cunning and capable mind, the desire to thwart adversaries, and the aspirations of greatness. I always wanted to be something more than what I was in middle school: an awkward, loner of a girl who felt frequently misunderstood among her peers.

Eleven-year-old me wanted to have the satisfaction that I had been right about being a Slytherin, that it was okay for me to identify with them because I understood them. Eleven-year-old me wanted wish-fulfillment. But 11-year-old me didn’t get that. When I first saw the scarlet banner pop up on my screen, it was like discovering that I had been adopted. My heart sank and I felt… well, empty.” (Tompkins)

Moreover, fanfiction could not be uploaded to the site. There was a logic to this. As a kids website, J.K. Rowling would have opened herself up to lawsuits if certain types of fanfiction were uploaded to the website. Still, however, Pottermore didn’t allow for the same sort of freedom that earlier non-authorized sites had (Jones). I remember the buzz that it generated during the beta testing and release, but eventually, I stopped hearing about it outside of an occasional reference to a person’s “official” house with a twinge of disdain. The site closed and moved to wizardingworld.com in October of 2019 (Gianfranco), where the sorting ceremony and other content can still be found.

There’s no doubt that these and other authorized extensions of the Harry Potter world are popular. They’re also fun. As skeptical as I may be of the “pay to play” nature of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, I did go and I enjoyed it. There’s something, dare I say, magical, about walking into a world that you never thought you’d be able to explore in person. At what point does it end, however? Unlike in my professorial glory days of Neopets, I can’t write lesson plans in Pottermore, nor can I speculate about the sexualities or races of characters. As fan scholar Henry Jenkins explains, “Transmedia practices tend to privilege some kinds of fans over others, constructing model fans and thus seeking to set the terms of how fans relate to the material,” (2011). With the abundance of information now available of any character you can conceive of in the novels, what happens to the exciting possibilities explored in fanfiction? On the flip side, more information can also open more opportunities for exploration outside of the website, giving importance to once-overlooked characters as well as more context for fans to write about. As Henry Jenkins puts aptly, “Could Rowling's "gift" to her fans turn out to be a Trojan Horse? Hell yes, but it may also open the door for some other creative opportunities'' (2011). 

When it comes to Pottermore and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the generative aspects of fan practices are absent. The spaces made for creativity are mitigated through web or theme park design. Fans can perform within the world, but never write their own script.