Harry Potter as a Transmedia

¶ … Harry Potter as a transmedia character, i.e. how he appears in different forms of media.

In Lev Grossman's, the magicians, we have a prototype of another Harry Potter. Almost. This Harry Potter, called Quentin, is much older, has had no prior destiny to be an elect magician per se (although he, too was born with the gift), seemed to fit in more with the 'human race' than Harry Potter did (although we get the feeling that he too was a 'nerd') and has his adventure ending in a tragedy, where Quentin loses his girlfriend.

The original Harry Potter actually was a more loveable and possibly morally hygienic figure to many people than this Quentin is. Both are realistic. Both come across as individuals who have initial problems with their identity and seek, at least initially, to conform. Both appear to seek to please others and to feel poor confidence in their skill as student-magicians. Both try supremely hard in school to win the approval of teachers and students and to fit in.

Here the similarities end. Harry Potter seemed to have a more loyal relationship with his friends and relations. Mistreated by his relations, though he was, he still returns to them every vacation and is not unpleasant to them. He is also a better friend than Quentin is, being more sociable and less taciturn and self-centered. Quentin, in contrast, does have parents and these parents -- we are told little about them -- but they seem settled middle-class people who care about him and his education. Quentin, too, was extracted from a school where he had friends. The fact that he could leave his friends and his family, without even wishing to return to his parents and bade them goodbye -- without even, in fact, keeping in touch with them through the many years that he was in the school does not reflect well on this more adult, more self-occupied 'Harry Potter'.

This Harry Potter too engages in sexual exploits than the younger one does not. He uses Alive and is then disloyal to her. This Harry Potter possesses a certain level of grittiness and self-absorption that the other lacks. Had Quentin emerged instead of Harry Potter, I doubt than he would have had the same level of popularity.

Harry Potter too seems to be a greater philosophical commentary on the average human being than 'The Magicians is. Harry Potter grows up amongst the 'average' human being and he is uncommon. This is stressed as is too the mediocrity and triteness of this human called the ' * ' world. Rowling devotes pages to this and to the contrast of Harry Potter and his relations as well as society that he lives in. Grossman, on the other hand, merely slips in a paragraph alluding to Quentin's 'shitty' existence aside from informing us that Quentin was part of the nerds. But then, so were others.' On page 5, Grossman tells us:

He followed James and Julia past bodegas, Laundromats, hipster boutiques, cell-phone stores limmed with neon-piping, past a bar where old people were already drinking t three forty-five in the afternoon… All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn't be it. & #8230; He'd been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.

It may be that the younger Harry Potter was also more appealing in that he escaped from difficulty -- he was severely abused -- and we can relate to him precisely because of this philosophical social commentary: that he was - as many of us feel - 'different'. That Harry Potter had the emphasis on his differentness. In that, he yanks a general chord and relates to us. This one stands alone in that he is simply someone who runs off to explore his individuality.