Once in a lifetime

I find myself almost unbearably affected by all this fuss about the last HP film. It shouldn't matter to me in the least, because honestly I was never able to suspend disbelief long enough to believe that Dan Radcliffe was Harry, or even that Alan Rickman was Severus Snape. (It's a little different with Emma Watson. As much as I disliked her from the very beginning, there was something about how she portrayed Hermione Granger in the two most recent films. I could almost believe that the same Hermione I've been dreaming and writing and thinking about for the last eleven years was her, in Burberry plaid, dancing with Harry in a sad tent.)

So I guess it shouldn't matter. Unfortunately it does. I've stayed away from fan communities and livejournal in an attempt to keep studying for exams and to keep my head down until all the fuss was over--which is basically the same thing I did when DH came around--but with everyone in my class discussing it and with my Facebook feed spilling over with mournful status messages and meaningful, tear-jearking pictures of the actors and of fanart, it's hard to get away from it all.

I know that this is an unrepeatable point in history. Harry Potter, despite what my theatre teacher and my Uncle Johnny used to say, is going to live on forever. It will perhaps be even bigger, on the scale of eternity, than Lord of the Rings or that most adapted, most fanficced creation, Sherlock Holmes. I know that this will never happen again. People from future generations will wonder what it was like to stand in line for the first Harry Potter movie, or the last.

And I don't really want to miss it, but at the same time I do; I get irrationally, unbearably affected when it comes to things fictional and fannish. About a month ago I spent a whole night crying miserably while my mom fussed over me, just because I kept thinking what it would mean if SNUFF came out and it's Terry Pratchett's last book, because he might die/never write one again/both. I couldn't stop crying over the last Harry Potter book, too--I hid from it for as long as I was able, read through it quickly so it would be less painful (in the old rip-off-the-band-aid stratagem), and never touched it again. I'm not ready for big emotional upheavals; I've never been good at dealing with them. I can't study and can't sleep, and eat too much, and I just can't even. I cried for two whole days about Severus Snape back in college, when I found out (through some unwelcome spoilery) that he was going to die.

And now I'm twenty two years old and I still feel the same way, if not more intensely, more tenderly.

And the thing is, what does this say about me and the culture I've been moving around in? Is it still abnormal to get so worked up about fictional things? Given this milieu, what is abnormal, what is maladjusted? Is this on the same level as that three year old on Jay Leno who was crying, without reason, about Justin Bieber?

I don't really understand. Without Severus Snape it might have just been one more children's story. But it wasn't, because he was there, a silent figure, more real than anyone I've ever read about--more beloved, more true to himself. Although, if you think about it, almost everything he did was behind the scenes--taking a backseat, it seemed to me, to balls and parties and butterbeer and all those things that were Harry. I shouldn't have fallen in love with him, but I did.

I know that half of the world can probably relate to the dark mess that is my feelings--I know that a lot of us are crying. And I know that a lot of us who have invested so much of our lives in fic and in actively participating in this fandom, in not just being passive receivers of something wonderful, are both dizzyingly happy to be a part of it, and devastated that somehow it's an end of something. Which is probably irrational because it's going to be there forever anyway.

I think this is called mourning.