The End of An Era

Everybody's saying it..."The End of An Era." I laughed at first, quietly, to myself, shook my head....

But I admit it, it really is the end of an era. The first book came out in 1997...I was 13. I think I read the first one at 15 and then saw the first movie which came out in 2001. There have been a lot of kids series that have come and gone, gained popularity and then fizzled out, but I think what HP had going for it was that the movies are seriously some of the best-made based-on-a-book movies I have ever seen.

I know this, because before every movie came out I reread the book, at least the most recent one, if not the whole series. For the record I do this with a lot of books/movies, not just HP. The director of the original movie (Chris Columbus) also did an excellent job of casting the characters. Never has a person entirely in my mind looked so much like their counterpart on the big screen.

Anyways back to the "era:" by the time the last book was published in 2007 those who had read the book as tweens or teens were well into college or even post-college life. In the amount of time it has taken to the entire series to finally come to an end I have: graduated high school, travelled to many different countries, worked at least 8 jobs, fallen in love, gotten married, bought a house, had two children...and so have, I would point out, the characters in the books/movies. The final scene of the last book shows the main characters grown, married, and with school-aged children of their own. Why wouldn't people my age feel that they had literally grown up and/or come of age with these characters?

I'm not blogging to prove any kind of point, this is just the kind of thing I really do like to write about when I can take a break from adorable twin-pics. I have caught myself from time to time genuinely feeling like I know these people, like how could I not? I've "known" them since 1997- longer than I've known my husband!

It was truly an odd dynamic watching the last movie on Sunday night. Having read the books I was fully aware of what the ending would be, I also knew there were some very abstract scenes and ideas in the last book that would be extremely hard to pull off in a concrete world. I think they did a decent job. There were some things that I could view with a grain of salt that a person who hadn't read the books (Andy, for instance) would say was just plain weird. But there was also a real sense of finality, excitement, even pride, at how far the characters had come and how amazing the relationships and really entire storyline came together.

Well thats it. Call me a super-freak, super-fan, super-dork, but I for one am honestly going to miss these characters and there is a bit of sadness moving forward knowing that we'll never "see" these people again, not in a new movie that is. We'll all have to deal with what will come for our favorite actors, the mistakes they'll make (let's all stay out of rehab guys, that celebrity drug thing is getting kinda old), the bad choices they'll make in future casting calls...

Thankfully I maintain that these books and movies are harmless. I will read them to my kids one day, and show them the movies, when the convincing special effects will be hopelessly out of date. But hopefully they will get caught up in it just like I did, the "magic" of it.

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, it really is the end of an era.