#1- The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters.

It’s very hard for me to remember the first time I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  I know I was eleven years old and thought the most exciting part of both Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets was the fact that there was a whole world out there that was still a part of our own reality where you could do magic. It seemed like anything bad that happened in the books was insignificant compared to the things I was going through. I remember very little of the bad things in the earlier books until I reread them later. I think I just didn’t want to see bad things happening in this happy, magical world that was my escape. I saw what I wanted to see.

I remember waiting for the final book to come out, just after having graduated high school in 2007 and realizing that what I saw in these books when I was eleven was completely different to how I felt as an almost adult. Many people say they grew up with Harry Potter and his friends, and I think that (selfishly) they are quite mistaken unless they are my age. When I say I literally grew up with Harry Potter and his friends, I mean it. In waiting another year or two (or three) for the next book to come out I had grown up. I changed. I understood things on a different level so that as the series progressively grew darker, I understood. I went through a long period of time in high school where I suffered from major depression, and I still do. I am honestly not able to read Harry Potter now without being biased from my own experiences and the knowledge of events in later books.

            While I am still fascinated by the idea of a world diagonal to our own where magic exists, I no longer see things through Harry’s eyes, or the eyes of Jo Rowling. I see these events and these characters through my own eyes. I am still drawn into Harry’s world, but I am seeing things not with fresh eyes and only Harry to guide me, but with the knowledge that you cannot take people at face value. I read with the knowledge that bad things happen, and people make bad choices and good choices and no matter what you have to deal with the consequences. I know that most of all you have to live with yourself and the choices that you make. That Harry Potter made his best friends the people who were not the most popular, but the people he felt he could trust always stood out to me.  I understand now why Harry would not want to befriend the boy who made fun of the only good people he ever knew. I also understand that the boy who makes fun of people also has problems of his own. I feel great empathy for others and this is one of the many things I am unable to leave behind when I read fiction.

            I would imagine that people who have not experienced being an outsider, loss, depression, etc. would be unable to empathize with the same characters I have, and would feel much different in how they view the events and characters, even though they are still seeing through Harry’s eyes.