Who Played Sirius Black In Harry Potter?

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How old was Sirius Black when he died

Sirius Black

Human (Films) Dog (Films) Human (Books) Dog (Books)

Padfoot SnufflesStubby Boardman Member of the Marauders Member of the Order of the Phoenix MemberHogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Student (formerly) Azkaban Prisoner (formerly) Orion Black † (father) Walburga Black † (mother) Regulus Black † (younger brother) Andromeda Tonks, † and Narcissa Malfoy (cousins), † and (first cousins once removed ) Teddy Lupin and Scorpius Malfoy (first cousins twice removed) (second cousin once removed) Bill, Charlie, Percy,,, and (second cousins twice removed) James Sirius Potter, Albus Severus Potter, Lily Luna Potter, Rose Granger-Weasley, Hugo Granger-Weasley, Victoire Weasley, Dominique Weasley, Louis Weasley, Molly Weasley II, Lucy Weasley, Fred Weasley II and Roxanne Weasley (second cousins three times removed) (godson)

”	We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.	„
	~ Sirius Black teaching his godson,, about the sides of good and evil.

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” We’ll see each other again, You are — truly your ‘s son, Harry. „ ~ Sirius to Harry.

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” Get away from my godson! „ ~ Sirius to before punching him.

Sirius Black (born November 3, 1959 – died June 18, 1996, aged 36), also known by his nickname Padfoot, is a major character from the Harry Potter series. He was portrayed by Gary Oldman, who also portrayed in Christopher Nolan’s Batman series, voiced from The Legend of Spyro and in the Call of Duty series. James Walters portrayed the character younger.

Who is Sirius Black to Dumbledore?

Sirius Black and Albus Dumbledore may have been allies in the Harry Potter series, but they weren’t exactly real friends. In the Harry Potter series, Albus Dumbledore and Sirius Black were allies. Both were part of the Order of the Phoenix and dedicated their lives to getting rid of Lord Voldemort — even if many thought Sirius was his most loyal follower for a number of years.

Is Sirius Black related to Draco?

7. Draco Malfoy – Draco Malfoy should probably be another obvious connection in this twisted family tree. After all, if Bellatrix is related to Sirius, then that logically means that Draco is as well. And yet that’s a fact that we all often seem to overlook. Draco’s mother is Narcissa Black, which makes Draco Sirius’ second cousin.

Was Johnny Depp considered for Sirius Black?

JD is a fine actor and back in his heyday (remember 21 Jumpstreet?) his looks would have been in line with what Sirius is perceived to look like from the books. But he was never considered for the same reason they wouldn’t take Robin Williams—they wanted all British actors and Williams and Depp are American.

Who did Sirius Black marry

Marlene was born on August 1, 1960 to Michael and Melissa McKinnon, She is their fourth child and only girl. She is a half-blood witch, as her mother is a pure-blood and her father is a muggle. Marlene’s four brothers are all wizards as well. Marlene is the cousin to Pure-Blood Wizard Preston Fawley,

Only a few weeks after her eleventh birthday she is visited by a Dream Messager from Uagadou School of Magic, and wakes up to find an inscribed stone in her hand. She attends Uagadou for her first 5 years of schooling. She attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from 1976 to 1978. Later on in life Marlene becomes the wife to Pure-Blood Wizard Sirius Black and the mother to their children Half-Bloods Aries, and Artemis Black,

She is the sister-in-law to Pure-Blood Wizard Regulus Black, Muggle-born witch Vivienne Price and aunt to Half-Blood Renee Black.

Who was Sirius in love with?

7. He Wasn’t Interested In Romance – Even in the books, no canon romantic interest is ever specified for Sirius. When Harry sees him in Snape’s Pensieve, a girl is eyeing him hopefully and he doesn’t even seem to notice. Since he was 15 in this memory, it seems strange that his hormones weren’t driving him crazy.

Does Harry ever see Sirius again?

Harry Potter – ” Like the fact that the person Sirius cared most about in the world was you. Like the fact that you were coming to regard Sirius as a mixture of father and brother. Voldemort knew already, of course, that Sirius was in the Order, that you knew where he was, but Kreacher’s information made him realise that the one person whom you would go to any lengths to rescue was Sirius Black. Harry Potter, his godson and friend Sirius was Harry Potter’s godfather and acted as a confidant and paternal figure to him. He deeply loved Harry and was the only person Harry felt comfortable confiding in completely. Harry regarded Sirius as a mixture of father and older brother, and Sirius viewed Harry as exceptionally brave and mature for his age, having experienced as much as many adults have.

1. We’ll see each other again, You are — truly your father ‘s son, Harry.
2. Sirius Black’s love and eternal gratitude for his godson Harry Potter Sirius felt that Harry should have the right to know difficult truths, and considered him perfectly capable of taking on heavy burdens that many other fully-grown wizards could not.

Molly Weasley, however, criticised Sirius’s behaviour towards Harry, claiming that he acted as if Harry were James rather than the child that he undeniably still was. Sirius shared a good deal of information about the First Wizarding War with Harry, much to the disapproval of Molly Weasley, and supported Harry and his friends’ efforts to sabotage Dolores Umbridge ‘s dictatorial rule over Hogwarts in their fifth year, Harry and Sirius’s affection for each other While Harry craved a paternal figure, Sirius wasn’t equipped to be one and more or less treated Harry like his best friend, the way Harry’s father was before him. Voldemort lured Harry to the Department of Mysteries in 1996 by planting a vision of Sirius suffering in his mind, knowing that Harry would do whatever it took to save his godfather.

Harry was completely devastated by Sirius’s death, having lost the closest thing to a parent he had ever known. Harry felt riddled with guilt over the incident but eventually managed to compartmentalise his grief, knowing that Sirius wouldn’t have wanted him to shut himself up. In 1998, Harry used the Resurrection Stone to summon the spirits of Sirius, Remus, and his parents, all four of whom gave him the emotional support he needed to sacrifice himself.

Sirius assured his godson that dying was not painful at all and was actually quicker and easier than falling asleep. Harry later named his first son after both James and Sirius.

How old was Snape when he died?

Overview – Severus Snape is the Potions teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He is also the Head of Slytherin House and briefly served as Headmaster in book 7. Although Snape is a former Death Eater, Professor Dumbledore places his utmost faith in Snape’s loyalty, though exactly why he trusts him so implicitly is initially unknown.

1. Snape joins the Order of the Phoenix to combat Lord Voldemort, apparently acting as a double agent, though, later, Snape also serves Lord Voldemort.
2. Snape’s true loyalties remain uncertain until the final book.
3. According to the author, Severus Snape’s birthday is 9 January 1960 and he died on 2 May 1998 at the age of 38.

It is unknown what wood and core comprise Snape’s wand.

Did Sirius Black love Harry?

He Guilt-Trips Harry – There is no doubt that Sirius loves Harry and is fiercely protective of him, but he does let his more immature impulses take over sometimes. In The Order of the Phoenix, Sirius wants to visit his godson in Hogsmeade while disguised in his Animagus form.

Who killed Dobby?

Though a supporting character, Dobby was pivotal in Harry’s journey, which made his death all the more notable and pivotal. Warner Bros. Pictures Based on the novels of the same name, the Harry Potter franchise is without a doubt the most popular magical series to ever hit the silver-screen. With a total of eight films, Harry Potter has become one of the most beloved fantasy franchises, even earning its own amusement park at Universal Studios in Orlando, Floria.

Considering that many Millennials grew up alongside Harry and his friends, the franchise has become a comfort to many. One character that is greatly beloved is Dobby, who was torn from the viewers far too soon after his death in The Deathly Hallows Part 1. Dobby was beloved from the moment he entered the franchise in The Chamber of Secrets,

His undying loyalty to his friends only made it that much harder to cope when he was murdered in cold blood. While Dobby’s death was arguably the saddest moment in the entire franchise, it’s not as if Harry Potter ‘s author just threw his death in there to keep the audience emotionally distraught.

Did Sirius Black know Snape?

Sirius Black and Severus Snape hate each other very much. Back during their school days, Sirius played a prank on Severus by telling him how to get to the Whomping Willow and into the Shrieking Shack where Remus Lupin (he’s one of Black’s friends and he happens to be a werewolf) was currently located.

Why does Draco hate Harry

Highlights –

Draco and Harry’s rivalry began when Harry rejected Draco’s offer of friendship, who saw Harry’s fame as a way to boost his own social status. Jealousy played a big role in Draco’s hatred towards Harry, as Draco resented Harry’s talent, popularity, and close circle of friends and caring family. Draco’s belief in the superiority of Pure-Blood status influenced his prejudiced behavior, including calling Hermione a “Mudblood,” but he eventually sought redemption by breaking away from the Death Eaters and saving Harry’s life.

Draco and Harry’s rivalry is one of the most iconic parts of the Harry Potter franchise. The pair’s conflict has created many memorable moments across the series and has helped to fuel the iconic rivalry between Gryffindor and Slytherin. Draco and Harry’s rivalry has existed since their first year at Hogwarts together.

Is Snape really a Death Eater

Magical abilities and skills – All seven novels show Snape to be a very powerful wizard and to have been outstanding while a student. He specialises in potion making and has talent and passion for the Dark Arts. Sirius claimed that Snape knew more hexes and curses as a first-year student at Hogwarts than most seventh-years knew.

1. Particularly gifted in potion making, Snape added major improvements to his Potions textbook while still a student.
2. Also as a student, Snape shows a rare gift for discovering new spells.
3. Lupin describes Sectumsempra as Snape’s “speciality” in Deathly Hallows.
4. Snape is shown using this spell as a teenager against Harry’s father James and in the aerial battle in the last novel when he accidentally hits George Weasley (acting as a Potter decoy) with it while actually aiming for a Death Eater who was trying to attack Lupin, permanently severing George’s right ear.

Despite Sectumsempra’s deadly power, Snape can also heal the wounds it causes. Snape is adept at reversing or containing potentially fatal damage from other dark curses as well, due to his vast knowledge of Dark Arts, as he does when Dumbledore and then Katie Bell are cursed.

Skilful in the arts of Legilimency and especially Occlumency, Snape is able to both access the minds of others and protect his own thoughts—indeed, though Snape does not care for the term himself, Harry forms the uncomfortable impression early in the series that the Potions Master is able to “read minds.” Being an Occlumens, Snape is able to keep his betrayal from Voldemort, who is himself described as being “the greatest Legilimens” in history.

According to Rowling, Snape is the only Death Eater capable of producing a full Patronus, which, like Lily’s, is a doe. Snape is a talented duellist, able to hold off by himself (if only briefly) a group of three Hogwarts professors that included former duelling champion Filius Flitwick,

Is Bellatrix Draco’s aunt

Family –

v t e Harry Potter family tree

Bellatrix is a member of the Black Family and is the cousin of Sirius Black, Bellatrix is the daughter of Cygnus and Druella Black and sister to Andromeda (mother of Nymphadora Tonks ) and Narcissa (mother of Draco Malfoy ).

Who does Sirius Black turn into?

Sirius Black and James Potter attended Hogwarts together, and Sirius is Harry’s godfather. Sirius is an Animagus, which means he can transform himself into a black, shaggy dog named Padfoot at will. Years ago, Sirius was wrongly imprisoned at Azkaban for the murder of thirteen people.

Following his escape, he has been forced to live in absolute secrecy. To keep Sirius safe, Dumbledore demands that Sirius not leave his parents’ home at Twelve Grimmauld Place, lest the Ministry of Magic catch him and return him to Azkaban. In this sense, Harry and Sirius lead parallel lives, since Dumbledore orders Harry to spend his summers with the Dursleys.

In both cases, Dumbledore is simply attempting to ensure his friends’ safety, but both Harry and Sirius resent the lack of freedom that goes along with such isolation, likening it to imprisonment. Sirius grew up at Twelve Grimmauld Place but has long since dismissed the rest of the Black family, who chose to follow Voldemort.

• Being trapped in that house simply reminds Sirius of his alienation, just as Harry’s time at Privet Drive reminds him of his own lack of real family.
• Although Mr. and Mrs.
• Weasley often act as Harry’s surrogate parents, Sirius is the closest Harry has to family, and Harry clearly treasures their relationship.

Whenever Harry is in trouble or confused, he turns to Sirius for advice. Sirius, in turn, is protective of Harry, doing his best to assure his godson’s safety and well-being. As other members of the Order of the Phoenix have observed, Sirius occasionally confuses Harry with his father, James Potter, and Sirius’s relationship with Harry seems to be deepened by his mourning for James.

What is Sirius Black to Harry

Transfiguring friends into family – Perhaps as a result of their unhappy upbringings, both Sirius and Harry’s friendships run deeper than your average playground pals. Arguably, James and Sirius acted like brothers, as well as best friends, emphasised particularly by the fact that Sirius actually moved in with the Potters when he ran away from the Black family home.

Sirius was also best man at James and Lily’s wedding, a place often taken up by the groom’s brother. Harry is similar in this way, and through his friendship with Ron, was adopted into the Weasley family to such an extent that Ron’s mother sent him Christmas presents and thought of him like a son. Sirius and Harry’s relationship is an interesting mix of friends and family too: Sirius is Harry’s godfather and sometimes treats him like a son, but at other times he seems to forget Harry isn’t his best friend, James Potter.

‘You’re less like your father than I thought’ Sirius told Harry when he refused to risk Sirius’ safety and meet his godfather in Hogsmeade. A harsh put-down that muddies the family-friend boundary between them.

Why was Hagrid recast?

Hagrid – Stephen Fry – Netflix After the deeply saddening death of Robbie Coltrane just last year, who played Harry, Hermione and Ron’s giant friend, and cuddly confidant, Hagrid, it’s a thankless task to recast such an unforgettable and physically imposing figure. However, an actor who could certainly do the role justice is Stephen Fry, a master orator, empathetic, and sensitive on the big screen.

Who was Sirius Black’s daughter

Family Lineage – The Ancient and Most Noble House of Black is a very old and very wealthy pureblood house. As the daughter of Sirius Black, Cassiopeia is the rightful blood heir to the House, despite being female. As a pureblood, Cassiopeia is related to many wizarding families, such as the Malfoys, Tonks, Weasleys, Prewetts, Longbottoms, Crabbes, Flints, Crouchs, and others.

Who did Sirius Black have a child with?

Sirius Black (Scopatore) 3 November 1959 Islington, London, England, Great Britain

ProfessorHead of Slytherin House

15″, English oak, griffin heartstring

RetiredProfessor of Defence Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (1982–2014)Head of Slytherin House (1982–2014)Auror (1979–1982)

” Sirius. He.he was scared for awhile. He thought he didn’t belong in Slytherin. You could imagine what everyone told him; the Blacks have all been Slytherins for centuries, with the odd Ravenclaw here and there. Sure he didn’t buy into the blood purist belief, but Slytherin is for the cunning and ambitious, not the pure-blood supremacists, something my dear friend failed to realize until later.

• Severus Snape telling about Sirius Professor Sirius Orion Black III (born 3 November, 1959), also known as Padfoot (in his Animagus form) was a pure-blood wizard, the older son of Orion and Walburga Black, and the brother of,
• Although he was the heir of the House of Black, Sirius disagreed with his family’s belief in blood purity.

He was, however, sorted into Slytherin during his years at Hogwarts, which he attended between 1971 and 1978, initially devastating him, as he believed he was different than the rest of his family. However, his close friend,, made him realize that being a Slytherin is not synonymous with being evil, and eventually became proud to call himself a Slytherin.

• During his early years at school, Sirius, was at the receiving end of teasing and bullying from students of other houses, being called everything from a dark wizard to a Death Eater-in-training, all because of the house he was Sorted into and the family he came from.
• Although, what most did not know was that Sirius, in fact, despised his parents’ belief in blood-purity.

This bullying by the other houses led Severus Snape, a Ravenclaw, to defend Sirius and the whole of Slytherin house in front of everybody in the Great Hall, leading to a blossoming friendship between the two. In his fourth year, Sirius began dating Anna Littleton, a pure-blood and fellow Slytherin.

After graduating from Hogwarts, Sirius immediately joined the Order of the Phoenix and went straight into Auror training, becoming a full Auror in 1979. He married Anna Littleton and had a child,, His friendship with Severus became strained after he refused to fight under Albus Dumbledore and moved to France to escape the war.

Although the Order made huge initial gains in the war, they slowly began losing battles. After the Fall of the Ministry and death of Dumbledore, the Order was in shambles and Sirius became the de facto leader of the Order. Sirius led the defence of Hogwarts on Halloween, 1981 and survived, but was devastated after his brother Regulus died in his arms.

After the war, Sirius was hired by the new Hogwarts Headmistress, Minerva McGonagall, as the school’s Defence Against the Dark Arts professor. He and Anna had another child;, and moved in to 12 Grimmauld Place, his family home that he inherited after the death of his parents, after extensive refurbishing.

As a personal favour to his deceased brother, Sirius took in, who lived with his family until the late 1990’s. Sirius retired from his position as DADA teacher and convinced to take over. : Sirius Black (Scopatore)

Did Sirius and Remus love each other?

Harry Potter and the Secret Gay Love Story – The Paris Review In our new monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Man Reading Book, 1914 My micro-generation—that is, the subset of millennials who were born in the second term of the Reagan administration and graduated face first into the Great Recession, and of which the most famous member is probably Mark Zuckerberg—has very little to brag about, so you can hardly blame us for our possessive attachment to Harry Potter.

Harry Potter is to us what the Beatles were to our baby boomer parents. To say that we “grew up along with Harry” is far too corny to convey the actual experience of being the world’s first children ever to read those books. I remember attending a classmate’s twelfth birthday party in 1998, thrusting into her hands a gift-wrapped copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (at the time the only Harry Potter book available in the United States), and informing her with something like personal pride, “This book has been on the New York Times best-seller list for five weeks !” It would probably still be there today if the Times hadn’t, shortly thereafter, created a separate best-seller list for children’s books on the grounds that J. K.

Rowling’s success was unfair to the other novelists. It was a classic everybody-gets-a-trophy policy, a fitting legacy for the foundational text of millennial childhood. The fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was published in the summer of 2003, by which point Harry was fifteen and those of us growing up along with him had discovered sex.

• The Harry Potter years also happened to coincide with the Wild West era of the internet and the rise of abstinence-only sex education; as a result, for better or for worse, erotic Harry Potter fan fiction played a major and under-discussed role in millennial sexual development.
• This was especially true if you were queer—or, not to put too fine a point on it, if you were me—and had picked up on the secret gay love story that existed between the lines of Rowling’s text.

I refer, of course, to Sirius and Lupin. A quick refresher: book 3, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, introduces us to Sirius Black, the titular prisoner, on the lam after twelve years of incarceration for mass murder, and to Professor Remus Lupin, a wry, gentle schoolteacher carrying a terrible secret (he’s a werewolf).

1. At the novel’s climax, the two of them come face to face and, much to Harry’s surprise, fall into each other’s arms.
2. In an awkward info-dump of a monologue (the only structural flaw in what’s widely agreed to be the best book of the series), Lupin reveals that he and Sirius were very close friends in their school days—so close, indeed, that the brilliant young Sirius secretly taught himself to shape-shift into a large dog, just to keep his werewolf friend company during the full moon.

It turns out (naturally) that Sirius was framed, and even after their twelve-year separation he and Lupin remain fiercely devoted to each other. By book 5, the two of them are living together in secret. Despite their outlaw status (Sirius is still a fugitive) and poverty (Lupin was fired from teaching after being outed as a werewolf), they begin to take on a quasi-parental role for the orphaned Harry.

Then Sirius is killed in battle, Lupin is undone with grief, and so ends Order of the Phoenix and the tragedy of Sirius and Lupin. I have exaggerated nothing: all this is directly stated in the text. You could be forgiven, though, for having blinked and missed the point in your own reading. Sirius and Lupin are minor characters, and everything we learn about them is filtered through the point of view of Harry, who is, like most kids, too self-involved to notice anything that doesn’t directly affect him.

Queer kids, however, were directly affected by the suggestion of a gay love story happening in the background of Harry’s life—and so we noticed it. Oh, did we ever. The summer of 2003 was the summer of noticing. It was the summer I sat alone for hours in my mother’s parked car, blasting Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” (track 17 on my favorite CD) and luxuriating in body-racking sobs of grief for Sirius Black, sorrow for Remus Lupin, and ecstatic rapture that I’d noticed,

• We took to the internet, those of us who had noticed, and compared notes.
• Often these notes took the form of fan fiction, which I read ravenously, hungry not so much for erotica as for the full novelistic experience Rowling had invited us to imagine—a boarding-school romance turned wartime tragedy, Maurice meets Atonement by way of Animorphs.

(Seriously, can you imagine?) But for much of that summer we simply studied Rowling’s text, searching, scrutinizing, noticing. To put it another way: we invented close reading. I’m not sure whether any of us understood this at the time, since it didn’t feel at all like schoolwork.

1. It was pure pleasure; it was pure joy.
2. One of the definitive works of scholarship to come out of the summer of 2003 was posted on LiveJournal by a British schoolgirl writing under the name elwing_alcyone.
3. Current mood: jubilant,” the essay begins (opening with one’s “current mood” was LiveJournal house style, the equivalent of the MLA header), and then proceeds to track, cite, and analyze every mention of Sirius and Lupin in the entire series.

At one point she counts the lines of text that appear between two phrases: “Lupin’s eyes were fixed on Sirius” and “said Lupin quietly, looking away from Sirius at last.” The number is forty; Lupin stares at Sirius for forty lines’ worth of plot action.

JKR didn’t have to write that in,” she gushes. “I can’t think of any other examples of one character spending so many lines simply looking at another.” Current mood: jubilant, indeed. It’s easy to forget how fully we trusted Rowling back then, how total her authority appeared when the series was still in progress and its ending known only to her.

In those days, we were Talmudic scholars and she was God. “The Case for R/S” still holds up as a stunning achievement in Potterian exegesis, but what’s striking about it now is its unwavering faith in “JKR” and her control over her material. Lupin, who was staying in the house with Sirius but who left for long periods to do mysterious work for the Order, helped them repair a grandfather clock OotP, p110, UK; p118, US “Lupin, who was staying in the house with Sirius.” Not “Lupin, who was staying in the house to be closer to the Order,” or “Lupin, who was staying in the house because he had nowhere else to go,” or even just “Lupin, who was staying in the house.” He is staying in the house with Sirius,

• JKR didn’t spend three years writing this book to shove in things that didn’t matter.
• Why?” elwing_alcyone writes at the conclusion of her essay.
• Why has JKR left it so open-ended? She could have sunk this ship in a sentence.
• She didn’t, and now, the odds are that she won’t.” Smash cut to the summer of 2005, when book 6 was released.

Hello, darkness, my old friend Those of us who were growing up along with Harry were by then college age—old enough, in other words, to put away childish things—so when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince unexpectedly paired off Lupin with a random woman, we were not only shattered but ashamed to be shattered.

1. It was, after all, just a children’s book.
2. Surely the whole Sirius/Lupin thing had only ever been a game to us; surely we had never believed it.
3. Elwing_alcyone quietly appended an afterword to “The Case for R/S” acknowledging that, clearly, she had misread the entire series.
4. Some of us tried to reassure her that Lupin’s sudden heterosexual romance didn’t contradict the possibility of an earlier romance with Sirius—after all, Lupin could be bisexual!—but no one’s heart was really in it.

The straight romance was explicit in the text; the gay one was not and never would be. The author had spoken. The spell was broken. To this day, I continue to ache over this in an unironic, unfunny way that I can’t quite explain even to myself. I was so sure.

• We were all so sure.
• How could Rowling have written those words and failed to notice what we noticed in them? This beautiful, delicate palimpsest that we’d read between the lines and so lovingly restored on our own—how could it be that it had never existed except in our heads? On some level I still don’t believe that we were wrong.

If anything, it was Rowling who was wrong. It doesn’t help that Rowling refuses to let the subject die. In 2007, after the series was officially complete, she announced that Dumbledore, of all characters, was actually gay the whole time; it just never came up in the books.

In 2013, as if determined to add insult to injury, she that Lupin’s werewolf condition was, as we had always suspected, “a metaphor for HIV and AIDS,” but also that he “had never fallen in love before” meeting his heterosexual wife in book 6. Come on, JKR, can’t we have anything? Rowling is, like all her best characters, a gifted and flawed and profoundly silly human being—a fact that has become in recent years.

As a new generation of fans grapples with their complicated love for her imperfect work, I’ve noticed the phrase “death of the author,” coined in 1967 by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, invoked with surprising frequency in online discussions of Harry Potter.

1. I doubt many Harry Potter fans are steeped in critical theory.
2. Nonetheless, if you search the phrase “death of the author” on Tumblr (the social-networking site that has replaced LiveJournal in fandom circles), the site auto-suggests “J. K.
3. Rowling” and “Harry Potter” as related search terms before displaying countless blog posts arguing that Rowling’s authorial intentions are irrelevant to her readers’ interpretation of her writing.

It’s almost as if her fans have invented post-structuralism, just as we invented close reading—necessity, in both cases, being the mother thereof. Nowadays, when I meet women my own age, I can guess within minutes whether they noticed Sirius and Lupin in the summer of 2003.

There are certain signals we give off, certain coded questions one can ask. Often, upon identifying each other in the wild, we’re reduced to schoolgirlish squeals, lapsing into an ancient but well-remembered shorthand: “The forty-line stare!” “And the joint Christmas present!” ” Together? I think so,” Such encounters are especially common with my fellow writers and academics—which is to say, those of us who have gone on to make a living in close reading.

Close reading is queer culture, always has been, so perhaps we would have gotten good at it regardless of Rowling. Still, I like to think that our fate was sealed in the summer of 2003. Of everything the Harry Potter books have given us, this might be the most precious gift of all, one that can never be taken away: the discovery that a text can contain more than the sum of its words, that a whole other story—a whole other world—may exist in the cracks and spaces between sentences, accessible to any reader paying the right kind of attention.

1. It’s a form of magic.
2. Even now, I’m jubilant.
3. James Frankie Thomas is the author of “The Showrunner,” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology,
4. His writing has also appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol.1 Brooklyn,
5. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

: Harry Potter and the Secret Gay Love Story – The Paris Review