The Two Kids I Finished Harry Potter For

I didn't finish Harry Potter because I loved the wizarding world. By the fourth book I had stopped believing the story was going anywhere I wanted it to go. I finished all seven because of two children I met in the first one, and walking away felt like abandoning them halfway through something.

It took me years to put it that way. For a long time I just knew that I kept reading books that were annoying me, and that I still read fanfiction about them, which is harder to explain to people than it should be.

The boy in the cupboard

The Harry I cared about isn't the Chosen One. He's the boy who lives in a cupboard under the stairs and has learned not to ask questions, because questions make things worse in that house. He wears Dudley's cast-offs and gets none of the fuss Dudley gets, and nobody has ever told him anything true about his own family.

What got me was how small the good things were at first. The letters keep coming however hard Uncle Vernon tries to stop them, until they pour out of the fireplace. A giant breaks down a door at midnight to wish him happy birthday, carrying a squashed cake with Harry's name on it in green icing. On his first Christmas at Hogwarts he wakes up expecting nothing and finds a pile of presents at the foot of his bed, including a hand-knitted jumper from the mother of a boy he has known for four months.

A couple of books later he's under his covers with a torch, doing his homework in secret over the summer because the Dursleys have locked his school things away. That image stayed with me longer than any duel with Voldemort. Before he was important, he was a lonely kid who had just found out the world was bigger than the house he was stuck in, and he was holding onto it with a torch under a blanket.

The girl looking for a toad

Hermione first appears at the door of a train compartment full of strangers, asking whether anyone has seen a toad. It isn't even her toad. It belongs to Neville, a boy she has just met, and she has gone down the train looking for it because he lost it and was upset.

She's also a bit insufferable in that scene, rattling off the spells she's already tried and the set books she's learnt by heart, which is exactly what makes her feel real. She's a Muggle-born girl who has just found out magic exists, and her response is to read everything she can get her hands on and then go and help someone.

The three of them become friends over the troll on Halloween. Hermione was only in that bathroom because Ron had made her cry, and when McGonagall arrives she lies to a teacher and takes the blame so the boys won't get in trouble. The girl who knew every rule broke one for the boy who had made her cry that day.

By the end of the first book she's standing in front of the potions riddle, working it out while Harry waits, and then telling him that books and cleverness matter less than friendship and bravery. Coming from her, that line carries weight, because she has more of the first two than anyone in the building.

Those two were enough for me. A boy who had been treated as a burden his whole life, and a girl whose first instinct in a new world was to go looking for somebody else's lost thing.

Why I kept going

I can't point to the exact moment I stopped being fully inside the story, but somewhere around the fourth book I started noticing things. The books and the stakes kept getting bigger, but the children I cared about weren't growing at the same rate. Terrible things kept happening to them, and a few chapters later the story had moved on to the next mystery, and so had they. Harry kept walking into danger with the courage he'd had at eleven. It was real courage, but it never became anything more considered. Hermione had come from a world with electricity, antibiotics and moon landings, and she never really asked why wizards still wrote with quills. She became the person who had read the book instead.

There's a lot more that bothered me, and I'll get to it in the next part. What matters here is that I noticed it at the time. I was a kid holding the fourth book and thinking that none of this added up.

And I finished anyway. I'd met those two at the start and I wanted to see them get somewhere, even after I stopped trusting the books to take them there. It felt like a promise, and I kept it all the way to a train platform nineteen years later, where everyone had grown older and I wasn't convinced anyone had grown up.

Why I still read fanfiction

That's how I ended up reading Harry Potter fanfiction as an adult, which sounds faintly ridiculous coming from someone with this many complaints about the source material.

I don't read it for more of the wizarding world. I read it for the version where those two kids get the story their introductions promised. I want a Harry who remembers what happened to him the year before and walks into the next thing better prepared, because being scared and going anyway was never supposed to be the finished version of him. I want a Hermione who looks at a society that thinks Muggles are backward and asks the questions that should have made everyone uncomfortable. I want consequences that stay, and friends who are changed by what they've been through together. And since I'm being honest, I want Harry and Hermione to end up together, because the girl who took the blame for him in first year always understood him best.

The best of it does what I wanted the books to do. It takes the boy under the blanket and the girl looking for the toad seriously, and lets them grow up instead of just older.

The story I started reading never quite finished for me, and people who felt the same way have been writing the rest of it. I was reading for those two kids all along, and apparently I still am.