Don't you ever get tired of saying its not Shakespeare...

People give you weird looks when you say you love Harry Potter. They give you weird looks when they find out you listen to wizard wrock and read fanfiction and yeah, okay, occiasionally write it. They give you strange looks when you have two hour conversations about the Maurauders who were, at best, peripheral characters, and in some cases, parenthetical.

So why are we still talking about it? Why can't we let Harry Potter go?

There is something beautifully simple in the series. Not the characters, who are wonderfully complex and who explore the whole spectrum of humanity. J.K. Rowling's characters are easy to relate to. They are real. Our hero is not perfect. Those who are mean and bitter are not always evil. Those we like are not always good, do not always make the right choices. The story is occasionally hard to read and sometimes the wrong people die. The plot is most certainly not simple. Rowling weaved throughout seven books a series of intricate details, a web of memories and lies and truths and plotting and manipulation. When we reached the end of the series, not all of our questions were answered, not all of the problems resolved.

The simplicity lies in that there is something to fight for. There is a line in the sand that everyone in the series must step to one side of. What starts out as a simple story of a boy, mistreated, orphaned and unloved, finds himself in a magical new world, complete with its own villians and its own history. As Harry grows up however, we find that there is more to this new world. We find that Harry, as young as he is, does not choose to enjoy his childhood. His close friends do not choose to let him fight alone.

Perhaps what makes the Harry Potter series so great is that it is based on choices. From the very beginning of the story - the parts that we never really read - choices define the characters. They do not simply sit by and let things happen. We have James Potter, who was the only son of rich parents who spoiled him. He was a pure-blood. It would have been unbelievably easy for him to sit back and claim that Voldemort was other people's problem, that it had nothing to do with him. Instead he fought for the love of his life, sometimes against her, and in the end he died protecting his family, choosing to give up his life for the slimmest hope that his love and his son would survive.

Sirius Black could have listened to his family. He could have believed them and he could have been in Slytherin. But he wasn't. He was friends with James Potter and he chose to love his new, adopted family. And when the world he had chosen turned its back on him, believed the worst of him, he didn't give in. He stayed good, even when no one believed he could but himself.

Lily Potter chose James. She, after years of fighting him, we are told chose to love him. And in the end she chose her son over herself. She stood in front of him for almost no chance at all that Voldemort might spare her son.

Severus Snape was not a good person. He was mean and bitter and obsessed with what he couldn't have. He was stuck at age 15 when the smallest things are the end of the world. To the end of his life he retained his anger and his hatred. But he did not stay evil. He, in the end, chose to fight for good, to switch his side of the line and to put all of his energy and effort and lifeblood into making sure that Voldemort did not triumph.

Harry's life was defined by these choices. He was alive because of them, he loved because of them. Not because they forced him into any path but because he chose to learn from them, to take away the idea that loving makes you a better person. That just because the right choice is also the most difficult one does not make it any less right. And he does this by making mistakes. By relying on his friends who chose to stay with him, who chose to stand next to him and fight even when they might die, when they might have to watch loved ones die. And Harry, at the age of 11, when most of us barely know ourselves, decided that he was going to fight, that he would devote the entirety of himself to fighting Voldemort. Harry Potter chose a life that was full of danger and loss and grief on the chance that he could make the world better.

This story shows us a group of people who lived and loved and fought with as much verve as any of us could ever hope to have. They gave up everything to fight not just for what is right, but for the idea that everyone, every single human being has a right to their own existence, to live as freely and as happily as they possibly can. This story shows us that living means making mistakes. It means that sometimes you miss the bigger picture, and that your mistakes do not define you. We can always change our minds. We can always change our decisions and change sides. Harry Potter has taught us that we can always fight, we should always fight and that the chance of making the world better is all we need. Because if we aren't fighting for good, than evil is winning. Even if we are just sitting back and watching. Harry Potter taught us the price of passivity and the triumph of action. Harry Potter taught us that our choices matter and that we can and must choose to love.