Questions to Ask a Harry Potter Fan

The questions

Open any question to see why it works.

1. 1

   How old were you when you started, and who put the first book in your hands?

   The person who handed it over is usually part of the memory: a parent reading aloud, a teacher, an older cousin showing off. Someone who found the books alone at nine has a very different attachment from someone who read them at twenty-five to see what the noise was about.

2. 2

   Was it the books first or the films first for you?

   This decides which version of every scene they are remembering, and it will explain half of what they say later. Film-first fans tend to describe the story visually and mix up details of the middle books, which is worth knowing before you correct anyone.

3. 3

   Which one do you reread when you are ill or sad?

   The comfort reread is almost never the one people name as the best book. It is usually one of the first three, because the school year still feels safe there, and the answer tells you what they go to fiction for.

4. 4

   Which house did the quiz give you, and which one do you actually live like?

   Nearly everyone has a claimed house and a lived one, and the interesting answer is the gap. Watch for people who insist the two match, since that is usually the answer they have given since they were eleven and have never rechecked.

5. 5

   Which character did you think you were at twelve, and who do you resemble now?

   Twelve-year-olds pick the hero or the clever one. Adults tend to name a background adult and sound slightly embarrassed about it, and that shift is the most honest thing this conversation will get out of anyone.

6. 6

   What is your Patronus, and do you believe it or did you just like the animal?

   There is a real difference between the answer a website gave someone and the answer they would defend. Ask which memory they would use and the question stops being a quiz result.

7. 7

   Which scene do you skip on a reread?

   Skipped scenes are more revealing than favourite ones. Some skip out of boredom, which points at pacing, and some skip because it still upsets them, which points at something else entirely.

8. 8

   Is there anything the story taught you that you later decided was wrong?

   Common answers involve loyalty above all, or the idea that a bad childhood explains a person, or the way the books sort children at eleven and stop. A fan who has never questioned anything in them has usually not reread as an adult.

9. 9

   Which adult in the books failed those children the most?

   Almost every adult in this story is negligent in some way, so the choice says what kind of failure the person finds hardest to forgive. Dumbledore, the Dursleys and the Ministry all get named, and each choice comes from a different place.

10. 10

    What does the wizarding world do that the books treat as completely normal?

    House-elves, Azkaban, the injuries in a school sport, the fact that nobody teaches these children anything useful about the outside world. This is where a casual fan and a rereader separate, because the rereader has a list ready.

11. 11

    Do you think Hogwarts is actually a good school?

    This is the funniest serious question in the set. Once someone starts counting the qualified teachers, the survival rate and the curriculum they generally cannot stop, and you get a clear view of how they think about institutions.

12. 12

    Which of the films holds up as a film, separately from the book?

    Asking for a film rather than an adaptation forces a different judgement, about direction and pace rather than fidelity. Book loyalists find this genuinely hard, and the struggle is more interesting than the answer.

13. 13

    Did you ever write, draw, roleplay or make anything set in this world?

    A surprising number of adults have a fanfiction, a forum account or a hand-drawn map in their past, and most will not mention it unless asked directly. Ask what they made and whether it still exists somewhere.

14. 14

    Is there a piece of fandom lore you accept even though it is not in the books?

    Fandom fills gaps, and after twenty years a lot of readers cannot tell which details came from the text. Naming one is a small act of honesty about how memory and community reading work.

15. 15

    If you could cut one thing from the whole series, what goes?

    The epilogue is the popular answer, so push past it. What comes second is more revealing: a subplot, a pairing, a joke that aged badly, or a character they think the story never needed.

16. 16

    What do you do with the author now?

    Ask this late and only once, because it carries real friction for a lot of people. There is no right answer here, and the useful part is how someone holds a thing they loved as a child alongside how they feel about it as an adult.

17. 17

    Do you talk about these books differently depending on who is in the room?

    Plenty of fans have a work version, a friends version and a private version of this interest. Finding out which one you are getting tells you roughly how much they trust you.

18. 18

    If a letter arrived for you at your actual age, would you go?

    The childhood fantasy assumes you get to be eleven. Asking as an adult forces the question of what they would leave behind, and answers split between people who would drop everything and people who suddenly start listing obligations.

19. 19

    What did these books give you that you did not get elsewhere?

    For a lot of readers it was somewhere else to be during a hard stretch of childhood. Let this one sit; it is the question in the set most likely to get a real answer if the earlier ones went well.

20. 20

    Would you give them to a child now, and what would you say first?

    This is where nostalgia meets judgement. The answer usually covers the author, the reading age, the darker later books, and whether the person still thinks the story says what they thought it said.