When Hogwarts Isn’t Always There to Welcome You Home: ‘Residual Fandom’, Politics and Practices in Harry Potter’s Transmedia Tourism Spaces

Far from being “a force for social ill” (Kokai and Robson 2020, 6) and visited by “consumption-driven cultural dupes” (Williams 2020, 12), immersive and experiential sites such as theme parks are often sites of extreme affective and emotional importance for the tourists who visit them. Such places also contribute to forms of ‘spatial transmedia’ where ‘moments of narrative extension and world-building […] take place within specified rooted locations’ (Williams 2020, 12) and offer ‘transmedia tourism’, ‘the range of processes and practices by which media(ted) content flows into the tourism sector and involves special attention being paid to how myriad media forms, platforms and technologies are harnessed to assist in the production, consumption, and negotiation of these experiences’ (Garner 2019, 1).

This paper examines sites where transmedia tourist spaces intersect with competing social, political, and cultural meanings. It considers the reaction of fans of Harry Potter to the themed spaces associated with the franchise - the Warner Brothers Studio Tour in London (Larsen 2015) and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter lands in Universal Studios’ theme parks in Florida, Hollywood, Singapore, and Japan (Baker 2018; Godwin 2017; Waysdorf and Reijnders 2018) – following considering a series of backlashes against series creator JK Rowling (Rowling 2020) related to casting domestic abuser Johnny Depp in the Fantastic Beasts series (Driessen 2020), racist caricatures in the books and films (Stevens 2021), and increasingly public transphobic statements (Rowling 2020).

Although work has been conducted on Harry Potter fan-tourism, this was undertaken before the intense fan response to Rowling’s political views. This research aims to consider how fans’ feelings about these themed and immersive sites related to their fan text have been impacted and how wider disavowal of Rowling as the author of the world of Harry Potter has informed reactions to these sites. This research thus contributes to work on fan-tourism and anti-fandom (Gray 2003; 2005). It seeks to understand how fans reject Rowling’s position as author of the Harry Potter text when in these locations, how they reconcile the progressive, liberal elements of the Potter fandom (such as the activism undertaken by the Harry Potter Alliance) with those of the author, and how a sense of trust in a fan-tourist site may be threatened and renegotiated when associations with its origin text change (Williams 2018).