Those born around the turn of the millennium — even in Central and Eastern Europe — had little chance of escaping some influence from Harry Potter as a subculture. More than 400 million copies of the complete book series have been sold: a reach so vast that, in cultural-historical terms, it is very rare, a phenomenon of similar scale to the Beatles or Star Wars.
J.K. Rowling may have recognised the desire to be somewhere else, and created a world to satisfy it that has a low threshold of entry yet can also meet somewhat more demanding needs if someone wants to go deeper into the story. So although this is not a superficially built world, we can easily make the young wizard’s story our own — a boy who at first doesn’t know himself that he is special and doesn’t really belong to this mortal world.
The worlds in which stories like this are set, however, are frameworks magical worldswhose culture-creating effect is undeniable. Fantasy has no unified traditions, merely a freely variable framework in which anything is imaginable. So consumers of fantasy culture, as they imagine and relive these worlds, continuously renew the genre itself, even if not directly.
Időcsapda’s Magic World rooms likewise try to express this generational experience, make it something you can live through, and carry forward today’s highly fertile fantasy culture in the form of puzzles and experiences that are tangible, encourage team play and entertain.
If you like, this is a story that never ends — only the authors change.
These fantasy worlds work so effectively because they consistently leave undiscovered, hazy details within them, which continually offer scope to shade and refine some character’s backstory. Dumbledore’s character is one example: everyone can decide whether to take the story on in the usual over-romanticised way, or to form a different picture of him from his relationship with the brother who appears after his death.
So what characterises the fantasy-geek, Harry Potter generation? Never growing up, boundless imagination, a longing to be elsewhere. The everyday practices attached to this have become part of our daily lives to such a degree, unnoticed, that we probably couldn’t imagine our days without these habits — who feels like going to work or school every day if that covers the whole of reality? In this sense the wizarding world is part of the process that lets us go to work day after day with our mental health intact: without the mental practice that creates these worlds we would probably go mad with monotony. But because the wizarding world is at the same time a denial of the work-based world, it also stands in conflict with it, even as it serves it in the way described above. It is up to us what we use this for: everyday survival, answering life’s big questions, building community, or even participating in the political sphere — as has appeared through history in anarchists building alternative communities, or students occupying universities and streets.
Everything that happens in imagined space affects reality, even when that effect isn’t direct; fictional phenomena can stand behind events that shape our lives fundamentally, which is another reason it is worth taking part in shaping such cultural spaces in some form.
