Harry Potter fans create magic at LeakyCon

Largest convention for Harry Potter fans a melting pot of personalities

August 12, 2012|Christopher Borrelli

LeakyCon 2012, summer camp for wizards and mudbloods, the largest Harry Potter fan convention in North America, having occupied the Chicago Hilton for four days, wrapped Sunday. Indeed, it wrapped tearfully, as only a quasi summer camp would wrap. If you weren't there, you're either not a 15-year old girl or cannot possibly understand Harry Potter or be that big of a Harry Potter fan. Please reconsider switching fandoms, loser. All 4,000 or so registrations for the convention — sold through Leaky Cauldron, the popular fan site from which LeakyCon gets its name (all the better to ward off the Dark Lawyers of Copyright Infringement) — were snapped up in a blink, purchased by Chicagoans, Midwesterners, Europeans, Australians, muggle parents.

Muggle Katherine Carter, there with her 13-year-old, Jacqueline, has never read the Potter books and only seen "like five minutes" of the films; still, she flew in from Australia, "because my daughter talked me into it."

Muggle Katherine was a rarity.

Courtney Brother, 17, said: "I came to meet people who like Harry, basically." To which her friend Jenna Sullivan, said: "Yeah, but really like Harry, right?" To which their friend Tony Rossi added: "Like, REALLY like."

Precocious Aidan West of Connecticut — his Adam's apple quite British, his thick, plastic, oval eyeglasses quite Potter — explained the allure to a geriatric newspaper reporter this way: "LeakyCon is for a different level of fan. I wonder, might you be from that 'Star Wars' generation, perhaps? This is 'Star Wars' for young people, OK?"

As with any summer camp, there were uniforms — campers in gray Hogwarts sweaters, school ties, pleated skirts, black wizard robes, scarfs and matching quidditch uniforms. There were cliques: The Potter Puppet Pals passed by, superpopular. There were StarKids and Nerd Fighters. Oh, and (actual) Dalton Academy Warblers from"Glee"! (LeakyCon, though Potter-centric, does offer olive branches to tangentially related fandoms.) There were sports — for the record, the big quidditch finale, between Puddlemere United and the Appleby Arrows, was decided Saturday afternoon, with the Puddles trouncing the Apples 40-20. ("Intense," Emily Harley, Puddlemere captain, proclaimed afterward.) There was morning yoga; Evanna Lynch, who played spacey Luna Lovegood in the Potter films, even led a class Friday.

There were pranks. (OK, who left the napkin taped to the elevator on Friday reading "The dark lord will rise here tonight at 9"? Not funny, people!) There were slumber parties. (Two Hilton employees could be heard saying: "They plan to sleep here?" "No, they just want to see how many people they can stuff into pajamas.")

And by day, there were classes, lots of classes — some serious, some not: Zev Burrows, book critic from Time magazine (and part-time fantasy author) could be heard during a session on vampire dating suggesting a makeover to a teenage girl experiencing mixed feelings ("My problem is I'm 16 and my boyfriend is 107!"). There was a grand debate, argued often in character, on whether Slytherin Hall, the sketchiest of Hogwarts' four houses, should be booted out ("This is not the fault of Slytherin Hall. This is a failure of the culture of Hogwarts!").

Despite the sunshine, these classes, in the drab bowels of the hotel, had an unmistakable air of comparative literature courses. "The Ethics of Severus Snape," a seminar on Harry's occasional antagonist, was standing-room-only at 10 a.m. Saturday. Moderator Nancee Lee-Allen, an activist for teen causes, was saying: "Harry is sitting there and all he wants to do is learn, and this guy is mocking him for being famous." A moment later, Nigel Taylor, a doppelganger for actor Alan Rickman, dressed in the black robes and long, ink-black hair of Rickman's Snape, arrived drinking a can of Coke, looking for a seat. The class cheered. He said: "I heard there was this panel, so …"

There was evidence of minor fissures in this unity: During a Hogwarts Radio podcast, a fan said: "I'm back to basics. I'm get-off-my-lawn-you-kids. I want us to get back to the books. I'm definitely on my rocker about this: 'I remember in 2008 when we were still reading the books!'"

There were hints that, a year after the Harry Potter films concluded, the fandom was not entirely sure what its constituency would be. Arianna Scotti, 14, from Sleepy Hollow, attended LeakyCon last year in Orlando: "I knew the fandom would continue because we've been through so much." But Lynch said she remembers thinking in Orlando, "This is happening now, just enjoy it." Still, Chicago "seems just as huge." Even Melissa Anelli, the 32-year-old from Brooklyn who runs Leaky Cauldron, said: "(The end of the series) was a hard crash for us, so we never expected this."