You're A Muggle, Harry

How Potter took the magic out of everything nerdy. For better and for worse.

I always hated Harry Potter. I never read the books. I never saw the movies. But I hated the IP anyway, and I hated its fans. I was a hater all around, tbf. But my HP hate wasn’t entirely unfounded, I had my reasons.

A quarter century later, I’ve got a beautiful elven-build daughter who is my spitting image, and my little bookworm devoured my wife’s copies of the whole book series, and she pleaded with me to watch my wife’s boxed set of the movies for several weekends in a row. Back while I was dating her mother, we had forced each other to watch many of the movies that formed us, neither of us being impressed that much by the other’s (lol) but at least being open for the most part to hear them out and try to understand each other. But HP was a big commitment. I came into that proposal with extreme prejudice against it, and it was a LONG commitment. The trade was that I would suffer the entirety of Harry Potter, if she would sit through the entirety of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Embarrassingly enough, I will admit that she was the better person and made it through 26 episodes and a movie of NG:E (and a drunken exegesis from me afterward), but I only made it through 3 HP movies (drunk) before I was like “ok I’ll clean your toilets for a month to get me out of this.” But a decade and a half into marriage, now that it was our daughter batting her little Top Shelf eyes at me, I was more open to giving it a real chance.

I’ll concede, it’s actually pretty decent. Hell, the final 30 minutes of the last movie (7.2) really make the whole damn thing worth it and it reaches “good” level. In which case, maybe that does make it like Neon Genesis (the 90’s original), which likewise really pulled shit together in episodes 25 & 26 and the End of Eva movie (if you ever commit to this series, skip the first movie “Death and Rebirth,” it’s a bullshit clipfest recapping the series, literally no value). But for whatever reason, NG:E kept me on the edge of my seat from episode 1 and blew my mind in the end, while Harry Pooter just… was mid, enjoyable but mid, all the way until near the end. I will say though, with an open mind, even the long mid part was just a good old magical adventure flick, there wasn’t a lot to complain about.

So, why the hate?

I was in college when the book series was just getting super popular, I guess it was up to the 2nd or 3rd book out. When I first heard of it, it was like, some kids’ book, about a wizard kid. Whatever. I blew it off, I don’t read kids’ books. Hell, I don’t read at all. But for whatever reason, a fuckton of adults I knew were reading this Harry Potter crap. It was fun to call them gay for liking fictional stories about wizards and shit.

Especially because I wasn’t on the other end of it this time.

To understand what happened to nerds, you need to understand who nerds WERE. (Who would’ve expected Brian, of all people, to become the based wigga he is today, huh?)

If you were born after 2000, you have no clue what life was like in the pre-Harry Potter world. I don’t think you even know what it means to be “a nerd,” or to be into “nerdy things.” No, Stranger Things is not remotely accurate to what life was like in the 80’s for a D&D player. It was a different world.

When I was a kid in the 80’s and 90’s, Nintendo, Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, that shit was social leprosy. If anyone ever caught you playing that shit in public, people called you names, and talked about you as being a complete outcast from society. Yes even Nintendo, if you played too much of it, especially if you talked about it too much in public. You might get away with having a Mario lunchbox, but a Mario backpack? Dude, grow up, you’re in 4th grade now, kindergartners play that gay ass video game shit. Real men play 2-hand touch football.

And it wasn’t just dudes that picked on you, in fact, they were the easy part. It was the chicks that rolled their eyes and looked down their noses at you for liking Mario. NO girls played video games back then, and they thought you were a gigantic toxic loser for liking them. That shit hurt. I mean, I was one of two kids in my neighborhood who had gotten to the negative world in Mario, I felt like I had some clout among my peers, but… I’m serious, back then, if you were going to talk about video games at school, you had to stop, raise your head, look left and look right, then lower your head and whisper as if you were telling a racist rape joke, “dude I beat Ninja Gaiden last night without any continues.” Hell, I remember that if you thought Lord of the Rings was cool, you were a social outcast. Like a basement-dwelling incel, just, banned from society. And if you were into D&D? Congratulations 20th level elf wizard, IRL you will be the last of your clan, forever alone, turn in your scrotum now because it won’t be paying dividends in this lifetime.

On that note, I never watched Stranger Things until this year either, and I’m backlogging the entire series. (I was curious about it when the 1st season came out, but my wife watched the 1st or 2nd episode and I think when Nancy was considering getting drunk and having a fling with Steve, the whole sexual pressure of high school drama was too close to home for her and she chickened out, Progressive “rape culture” panic triggers ensued and we had to drop the series.) I’m only just now getting into the 3rd or 4th episode of season 5. I am liking it, I am a sucker for nostalgia, but I gotta say, they def overplay the whole “the kids who play D&D are the cool ones” angle. Actually, once you get to season 4 and the preppy guys start beating the shit out of our heroes just for being into fantasy shit, especially their gloves-off prejudice against Eddie, THAT shit is real. That was definitely how it was. Also if people found out you were gay, for the most part you got the axe too. Stranger Things does play up the gay characters (Will and Robyn—I love Robyn’s character, btw, she’s hilarious and plucky, stupid and cute) as being cool, but there is a plausible explanation here that the series doesn’t directly elaborate. That is, as I mentioned, that if Will is a D&D player, and all of his friends are too, they’re all outcasts at the same level. So his being gay doesn’t hurt his or his friends’ reputation any worse, they’re already at the bottom of the social ladder. Even the black friend is “like, whatever” about his homo shit.

I say “even the black friend” because by the 80’s—the 80’s, I promise you— racism was almost dead. Pretty much every white dude back then knew that black dudes come in two flavors: Questionable thug, and potential friend. And you can kinda tell the difference based on how they dress, the look on their face, and how clearly you can understand their speech. Lucas, even with his occasional hot-headedness, clearly codes as “a nigga I could trust” from the first scene. In which case, Lucas probably put up with similar social pressures from his peers of all colors, but you KNOW that if there were any other black people in Hawkins, they were judging him by a harsher metric because he’s representing their clan to the white outsiders. So it’s particularly important to them that he is good at sports, and not a fucking weirdo. But, here he is playing an EXTREMELY white-coded NERDY AF D&D campaign, with 3 other white dudes societal rejects, one of which is gay. And yet, Lucas is like “fuck it, I like critting on some undead shit, judge me,” up until season 4 when he gets some tail, and clout on the basketball team. That’s when he starts quasi-selling out his friends in favor of the jocks. I don’t blame him.

Like, do ANY of these social dynamics even play out in Gen Z today? Do they have these social classes and relations at the group level? I’m really not sure. If it happens at all, it is at a WAY lower power level than what I dealt with as a kid, and it’s likely more down political lines than hobbies and interests.

Truth is “Stranger” Than Fiction

Before I get back to Harry Potter, there’s one more dimension to cover that Stranger Things also shares with it, and that’s the religious moral panic angle. In the 80’s, and into the 90’s, there wasn’t just a social status stigma against D&D, rooted in the idea that you’re spending your time “advancing” an imaginary character in an imaginary world getting jack shit done and building zero IRL talents in the process. There was a religious stigma against it, too. When it first hit the scene, some parents warned that hey, this D&D game involves occult characters, and the players can even be these magic using, occult practitioners. That, in and of itself, makes the game questionable to dip your toes into, because it can normalize some very serious, evil metaphysical shit, that your players can participate in and not understand the gravity of the things they’re acting out. It’s one thing to act it out at the table in a fictitious story, but it’s a matter of time before they take that out into the real world, and that is letting Satan into their lives as a friend. This is not good for anyone, and especially not good at the large group level, meaning we can NOT let this become commonplace in society as a whole.

Yes, in Current Year, that sounds like something between superstition and retardation. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t, though. It didn’t help that eventually a real life scenario with some fucked up shit actually happened and made national headlines, validating all these moral panickers’ warnings. After that, the culture at large REALLY doubled down on being like “bro if you’re a basement dwelling D&D player freak, you do not deserve to reproduce, because you’re a boil on the ass of society and probably working on summoning demons to satisfy your rapist pedophile fantasies,” and now they had the ammo (or so they felt) to back that up.

It’s true, most of this panic was overblown and just… well, panic. But there was a certain kernel of it that was true, which was that game-ifying all this dimension hopping, reality warping, and praying to strange gods to obliterate armies of undead stuff (srsly my boner for Turn Undead is unyielding) can make you take for granted that all these metaphysical or supernatural things ARE real, and are NOT to be fucked with, and IRL, are out of your reach, and rightly so. The game makes you think these unseen things are just fun and games, and not real. That laissez-faire attitude lets your guard down, and allows these sorts of very real demons into your soul, because you underestimate their reality. They slowly make you less concerned with your fate in an afterlife, because that’s as much a story— a tabletop campaign setting— as any other. It makes the concept of your afterlife destiny a game, rather than something serious and real. Or worse, makes you feel like you’re capable, even deserve, as much influence over reality as God. Back then, more people felt—nay, knew— that the unseen spirits were real things, and to make them into inconsequential cartoons or worse, controllable game elements, was not giving them enough credit for their real influence in the real world. And by “real world,” I include “the supernatural element of the universe” as well.

Am I one of these panickers? Fuck no, I love RP’ing a cleric that can dangle his little idol god symbol and blast a small army of skeletons with a jig step, it’s fucking rad. Because to me, as a well-catechized Catholic, I know that these sorts of demons are very real, and at the same time, I know that us portly pasty dudes around a basement table are just fucking around playing make-believe with some autistic rules to make it fair. I think most basement dwellers are aware of that. But it is true, the less IRL-grounded, touched-less-grass types, do devolve into escapism there. Like, dangerous escapism. Delusion.

Out of Otiluke’s Resilient Sphere and Into the Friend Zone

Anyway, by 7th grade I realized that if I wanted any female’s positive attention, I had to strongly resist my temptation to talk about Mario, the X-Men, Megaman and the like. I was just getting into Magic: The Gathering, and I realized that when I was caught playing it at lunch time, the teachers would tsk-tsk me, but the chicks in class would “ick” me, and that was much worse. So I limited my Magic time to outside school hours, over at friends’ houses.

But in college I made the mistake of “living my authentic self” or whatever nambly-pambly shit they call it, and I did play Pokémon and D&D and what not in the open. I made some friends, I scared off some cuties, and I managed not to an hero before graduation.

And then I had my epiphany about girls, although in reality, it was more like realizing that I was so desperate to be accepted by women that I basically forced all my situations to play out against me, because desperation is a stinky cologne. Regardless, when I tried to rebuild myself to be more appealing to women generally, I ditched any reference to all that nerdy kiddie shit I liked. I don’t care that Neil Patrick Harris the actor might be gay, the Barney Stinson character WAS MY LIFE.

And I was quite successful in this new life. I went from getting 3 dates my entire 4-year college career, to getting 2 dates a week once I regularly showered, dressed with collared shirts, and never mentioned nerdy shit in public, it was practically an overnight success!

I was just hitting this stride when Harry Potter came out, or at least, started getting huge with… adult women… and my gut instinct was to be Jason the Jock, as much as possible. That didn’t mean picking up athletic prowess necessarily, just to be the sort of guy cool enough that Jason would’ve been friends with me. I was okay with Bravo Male status, as long as I wasn’t this nerdy ass pariah.

The safest social reaction to Harry Potter’s release was to be that last guy on the right, I figured.

This served me well in the general social sphere at least as far out as 2008. By then, the first few Harry Potter movies had come out, and paved the way for a few Lord of the Rings movies. But that still didn’t make nerd shit socially acceptable just yet. I specifically remember a scene from my own life, circa 2008, where I was just starting a relationship with one of the hottest girls I ever dated, a based right-wing girlboss (contradiction, I know — worse, I was a die-hard lefty Bernie Bro then, but in my defense she was 6’2” and a DDD with curly blonde hair and blue eyes), and while I was waiting for her to show up at my apartment for a dinner date, I got into a heated argument with my roommate and his friend over D&D’s new 4th Edition release. Specifically, I was vehemently opposed to this idea of “Eladrin.” I was like, You already have elves in the game, these unreal creatures that fill the niche of magic-native, physically weaker whatever, and also it’s rooted in IRL Germanic and Nordic folklore. Taking it to this other layer of “eldritch” horseshit is just autistic min/maxing, bruh. And homeboy’s like Yeah but it’s a game, so why not have more options, and isn’t magic shit cool? And I’m all No, because Gary Gygax based this whole game on Lord of the Rings and IRL foreign culture/religion/mythology, so you’re just fapping to further out, unnecessary made up lore, as an excuse to introduce sweet game rules and explicitly do the min/max thing, which Gygax EXPRESSLY forbid because it takes away from the story-focused play!

And then my hot ass, tall drink of water lets herself into the apartment and says “Hey boys, what are ya’ll arguing about?” and I said “Brian over here (the younger douchebag brother of Gloss btw, shit you not) says that elves can be whatever the new gen faggots at Wizards of the Coast think they can be, when D&D was based on Tolkien’s interpretations of REAL elven lore, which is rooted in Nordic—” and my eyes locked with my blinking, deer in the headlights, beautiful and successful adult woman, and I pivoted to “Nevermind! Let’s go get our Frisco Melts from Steak ‘n Shake. Toodaloo, losers.” And I ditched that autistic argument. Because in order to acquire a woman of her stature, I had to leave that nerdy shit to the kids.

The Reunion

Alas, that relationship was not meant to be, God had better plans for me, it turned out. But I noticed a change in the winds in the broader culture pretty soon after that event. I went to a Christmas party at a best friend’s house, where he invited a lot of our old high school class (I was fortunate in that in our small town, the majority of our classmates more or less got along, especially after graduation, buried our hatchets, and had great nostalgia/brother/sisterhood parties afterward, and continue to do so annually). I ran into a former high school baseball jock who used to pick on me, and he was married to the fairly attractive and very popular girl whose mom was a well-beloved elementary school teacher. He was warm and cordial at this Christmas party, so I put on my game face and pretended all that shit between us was water under the bridge. It was quite validating when his pretty wife gave me a hug like I was an old friend of hers, when she wouldn’t give me the time of day in middle or high school. While we were catching up, I learned they now live just a few blocks away from me in another neighborhood. In particular, one of their major pride and joys of accomplishments as parents is every Halloween, they decorate their house and yard with a Harry Potter theme. Yep, the preppy over-achieving chick and the asshole jock, are currently celebrating their inner nerds, by having full on labyrinths of Hogwarts bullshit in and around their house! The same sorts of things they would have CRUCIFIED me over back in the 90’s.

Tall, Dark, and Nerdy

Around this same time, I had recently developed a very close friendship with a dude at work, and we had become best friends, being the same age, and having kids about the same age. I’d have him over for vintage video games over beers for several weeks to months in a row. Eventually I would share some of my old war stories from my PUA days with him, recounting the ridiculous shit I got away with, the most obvious lies that some chicks bought to let me into their homes, pools, bedrooms, and the unreasonable amount of new bare breasts that I saw and fondled over six or eight years, including some of our fellow co-workers that I had bedded in the few years before I met and settled down with my wife. He was impressed and bewildered, he never had those wild 20’s, since he indeed got married by the time he was 21 to his high school sweetheart, so he had no idea what that life might have been like. It felt good to me to be the experienced one, a silver lining to not being able to get married until I was over 30, while this handsome buck married his high school sweetheart, a story I was exceedingly jealous of. I worked hard for that shit, to get any attention from women, I had to basically re-train my entire personality to pull the tail that I did. But this guy? Could’ve been a contender, had playing the field actually been a competition worth winning.

After some years, unfortunately his wife had an episode and she decided they had gotten married too young, and she up and left him to go sow some wild oats. Strange I know, usually the shoe’s on the other foot with that story, but that was how it was. I comforted him, gave him an escape, he dealt with a lot of the same shit I did, wondering where she got off saying motherhood was so hard, while he did 90% of the everyday household tasks, but, y’know, millennial women.

So now he had to hit the field with no experience (though he did have baseline good looks going for him) and I felt bad for him. I especially felt bad because I felt like the shoe was on the other foot. He got married young and had a stable life, which was what I wanted, and I fell back on a debaucherous party guy life as a consolation prize to mask my sour grapes. There I was all those years of our friendship, bragging about how my consolation prize was ackshually decent. Then his marriage falls through, and he’s going back to have the life I used to have thrust upon him, and now I was the one with the stable family life. I almost felt guilty talking about how much I rely on my wife for this and that, and I still have someone to go to sleep with every night. Go figure.

The weird twist was how much the dating landscape had changed once he got there. He would tell me all about his adventures on Tinder and Bumble and what not, apparently OkCupid was long dead by then (mid-2010s?), and how some of his most winning lines with chicks he would meet, involved his prowess at Tetris, Mario Kart, and Call of Duty. I was like “Sir, I am aware of your achievements, but… That is shit you DO NOT talk about around a lady!” But it was working for him. Particularly with even slightly younger ladies.

And the reason was: All of them had been into some level of media that would’ve been considered “nerdy shit” in our generation. Remember, by “nerdy” I mean “socially POISONOUS” shit, in our generation. But whoever girls he was meeting now, if they weren’t raised on Pokémon, they had at least read every Harry Potter book. They were so popular as to be required, baseline pop culture knowledge. So with his vintage video game knowledge, he was like a god to these chicks. I gotta say, I was way jelly, fr. He’d brag about his headshot percentage in CoD and that would turn a girl on, the way I WISHED my Street Fighter II 720-spin piledrivers would’ve impressed chickies.

And that only made me resent Harry Potter more. Because all those years I spent hiding my nerdy interests, and in particular, hiding any talents I had within those interests, just to be ACCEPTABLE to female society, were suddenly SQUANDERED in retrospect, when for no reason the broad normie —nay, Muggle— acceptance of such fictitious faggotry became normal. There just came this sudden societal turn, where last year, admitting you went to Comic Con was embarrassing, and then the next year, you bragged about it. I felt short changed, it was serious horse shit. But at least my buddy was cleaning up on the rewards for that, and good for him, he’s an honest chud. (And then we became Eskimo cousins when he banged an old high school girlfriend of mine, and I def high-fived him over this, because bros before ho’s.)

This cultural turning of the tide really got under my skin though, because while yes, I ultimately married a chick far nerdier than I was —I mean, she was into full-on Vampire: The Masquerade LARPing shit, which I was definitely above— I spent the majority of my late teens and all of my 20’s pretending I wasn’t into this shit. And to this day, my gut reaction is to hold it over her, act like I’m “cooler” than her, because I “only” got into D&D and stopped there, because anything further would be lame AF.

But somehow today, NONE of that shit is socially stigmatic anymore! I blame it all on the popularity of Harry Potter. It gave preppy, popular girls permission to be into weird fictional kiddie magic shit that could never happen. Totally unheard of in the 80’s and 90’s, but here it was, people make references to it all the time, because they assume pretty much everybody’s read the whole series by now. Not this guy (who has two thumbs and authors this Substack)! Not until my sweet sweet Top Shelf angel daughter asked to watch her mom’s boxed set of Blu-Rays in a bingefest!

The Transition

Hilariously, there would be the further twist of fate in history, whence J.K. Rowling would epically counter-signal trans ideology. I loved the irony that a chick who made millions on writing stories about impossible magical shit, held her ground on “Yeah but if you were born a girl, you’re ackshually a girl, tough shit, IRL is IRL.” Based AF. After that, I was more open to hearing, or watching, her stories, since I don’t read.

It was more than satisfying when the next year, at my same old best friend’s annual Christmas party, I ran into that same popular chick with the Harry Potter haunted house or whatever, and she was like “Ackshually I’m not sure I’m going to have it this year, given that the HP author went way off the rails as of late, and I’m not sure I want to be associated with that sort of rhetoric!” She had one of the more popular stops in the most heavily trafficked Halloween houses in the most heavily trafficked neighborhood in my town, but, God forbid the author of her favorite, FICTITIOUS series across the pond in another country, noticed that if you’re born with a vagina, it generally means you are a girl (and not a “vagina-haver” but like, an actual woman, and all that comes with it, cue the Aladdin sequence).

Which is unfortunate, because I was looking forward to my kids having more friends, particularly of the generational follow-up variety from popular stock, but… Yeah, keep my kids untainted from that Proggie shit. Her kids I’m sure have septum piercings and blue hair by 6th grade, possibly questioning their identities and orientation by now, hard pass.

Thomas Sowell Somehow Isn’t Dead Yet

Ultimately this all comes down to the trade-offs. There are no solutions.

While it’s nice that modern dudes, including my middle school aged son, don’t have to worry about becoming social pariahs for spending 20 hours a week after school working on their intricate Minecraft labyrinths, by the same token, does it mean that basically nobody in their generation gives the metaphysical layer of reality the importance and reverence that it deserves? Because at this point, all fiction, magic, illusion, suspension of disbelief, temporary pocket dimensions, fairy tales, legends, myth, religious allegory, ethereal energies, and make-believe, are all kind of the same level of real, level of importance, and level of respect, because they’re all so commonplace now. This is not a healthy thing.

Magic, while fun and whimsical at times to indulge in a story, isn’t real. But spiritual things, those that come from God, and even the evil things that come from God’s fallen creatures, are QUITE real. This goes back to exactly the concerns of the moral panic of the 80’s. I thought that was retarded growing up, but when you see how supernatural shit is taken for granted in a world where liking Harry Potter is normal and popular, you can see how people might downplay very REAL interjections of evil spirits in their own lives. Particularly when they submerge themselves into interactive make-believe situations, the liminal form of being, where one isn’t quite positive if their experience is “real” or not, or “super-real,” etc. They could be too engaged in Young Adult Fiction, in a game, or in online platforms where people feel like their online persona is “who they really are.” (Read almost any article by Katherine Dee.) In fact, our society is so far gone on blurring the line between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, that several people J.K. Rowling would rebuke have decided that their will should determine what sort of body they have in real life! The Queen of Fiction—FICTION!— says “Hogwarts!” Er, “Hogwash!”

That was part of why I gave Harry Potter a chance. I mean, a female author wrote a series with a young (Anglo-Saxon) male protagonist, that apparently was broadly attractive and relatable enough to warrant a full 7+movies to produce. Hell, it was popular enough to attract the Eye of the Cathedral and get a bastardized race-swapped version, very timely! Not sure why she let them get away with that, but then again, the YooKay, amirite?

But still, I have mixed feelings about the post-HP real world. On the one hand, great, I guess you can be into imaginative stories and intellectual properties and games well into adulthood without social stigma. Is this not contributing to the manchild crisis, though? With nobody ever growing up? Is this acceptance of the supernatural leading anybody back to religion easier? Or is it cartoonifying religion into something equally fictional and trivial? There are only trade-offs. I suppose we all need to be creating our own realities responsibly.

Oh, and, the Harry Potter series was good. Just good, though, not great. Not deep, not heady, didn’t make me think, just a fun adventure story with a good twist ending when they finally explain the lightning scar on his head, cool idea. It’s been done before of course, but then again, what hasn’t?

Stranger Things, I’ll get back to you when I finish season 5. Hopper asking if Will was a faggot in the first five minutes of the whole series was a great start, hah. Plus the only thing I have more of a raging boner over than Turning Undead is Psychic Powers, so that’s a gimme.

NINJA EDIT 8/19/26: Finished Stranger Things. I was okay with it, generally speaking. Outside of the obvious one. The ENTIRELY UNNECESSARY coming out of the closet speech with a bunch of hugs because if Sodomy Doesn’t Win, the universe is cooked. I suppose my reference to Hopper’s line in literally the last paragraph there happened to be accidentally foreboding. In fact, it made me wonder if the entire series was really just a Trojan Horse for sneaking that scene in, specifically, because that exchange with Hopper kinda plants the seed, and then seriously I forgot all about it until like Season 4 or something, whenever Will being gay becomes super highlighted. I didn’t actually think he was, I thought it was just kids being dicks to each other, y’know, like MY ACTUAL CHILDHOOD in the 80s.

I did like the psychic powers. But the other thing that did bother the shit out of me was how they GROSSLY avoided explaining ANYTHING about the context of the whole damned plot. Did this world exist prior to Henry creating it? Why was the military conducting these psychic experiments? Was it even the military?? Were they covering up their mistakes, or legit defending themselves from a pre-existing invader? How exactly are the kids getting their psychic powers? Like all these things are just kinda gestured at, but there’s never a definitive “the military wanted superior soldiers, so they were doing experiments with nutrients and genetic modification to produce the Super Soldier Serum” exposition. So I had a shit ton of unanswered questions, but I did like the “years later” epilogue and the cracked door open for a continuation. My foid really hated all that, actually. I dunno why that’s the part that bothered her so much, lol. She wanted it more open-ended, for the audience to invent their own epilogues, I think she said? That’s like… the exact opposite of my issues, there was closure there, there was not closure elsewhere and that infuriated me.