BENGALURU: I am still thinking about Harry Potter and his wonderful wizarding world. After a marathon session of re-reading the books one through seven, and watching all the eight movies pretty much back to back again, I have been thinking about the end scene of the last book, well after the death of Voldemort, many years in the future when people have coupled off, had children and are sending them off to Hogwarts from good old Platform 9 and 3/4th. I really resented J K Rowling for having written that little epilogue and left little to imagine of the world after Voldemort.
I resented the normalcy of life portrayed there. Shouldn’t big, life-changing events have bigger, greater impacts? Does life really get back to normal so quickly? Where were the death-eaters getting their just ends? Where were the stories of the people living through their traumas? What happened to the poor muggles that were the collateral damage in all this?
For all the people like me struggling with these questions, the wonderful world of fan fiction comes to rescue. There are a thousand times or more written about the characters in Harry Potter as was written by J K Rowling herself, by million different fans all across the world. So many of us just cannot live with stories that end the way they are envisioned by the people telling them.
What we find hard to accept, we create our own little fan fiction, let ourselves fantasize and believe that they are quite different from the printed words in front of us. When we do this for books and movies, is it a stretch then to see we do it to the real stories in our lives, in the stories that happen every other day with the people in our lives?
There is reality and the versions of reality that we see, wish for and might even tell ourselves that such is the case. We see friends go through some thing in their life, and we make a version of it that we would rather hold up. We have our heroes in our lives whose actions we create myths out of and tell ourselves what they really mean.
In love, this happens even more than ever. There are so many things we would overlook, many different motives and intent that we would ascribe to actions that we observe. If a loved one is being really mean to us, we might make a little fan fiction there for ourselves – “They are reacting to something at work,” or “They must be a little tired after running around with errands all day.” Sometimes, the fan fiction can get quite elaborate and even dangerous.
Where a loved one is actually being hurtful and horrid, if we create a different fiction for ourselves (“They are just being friendly with the neighbour, nothing going on there”) we might not ever be ourselves. Fan fiction is great in fiction, but in real life, even if we indulge in some little fictions, it helps to stay rooted.The author is a counsellor at InnerSight