By Patrick Dixon

Three weeks ago I made what will almost certainly be my most notable contribution to the interminable pop culture deluge that is the internet.

In an effort to bring more attention to what I believed was a legitimate yet overlooked Harry Potter fan theory we posted on this page back in September 2014, I petitioned the collective think tank over at Reddit to analyze or discredit my headcanon as they saw fit. What began as a link with a decent amount up upvotes, mutated into a hulking post with more Notes than four years of Tumbling had ever brought me.



Within the first three days I amassed more than 50,000 Notes. By the second week I was at 100,000. It was magical. It was bewildering. This humble photoset wouldn’t change the world by any means, but the relative success of my creation commandeered my free time and ensured that I would spend every waking moment and restless sleep charting my meteoric rise within a small yet crucial segment of online Harry Potter fandom.



This is what my marginal success on Tumblr has taught me.

1. Approval is Highly Addictive



Up until January 20th, my most notable creative achievement was earning my elementary school’s “Drawing of the Week” honours as a precocious 8-year-old crayon prodigy. Nearly 24 years after that drawing was taped to the wall of the main foyer, a creation of mine was once again viewed by a not insignificant number of eyeballs. Tumblr’s distinct brand of mass approval, however nebulous, has turned out to incredibly gratifying.

I could lie and say I checked Tumblr periodically, dropping in every few hours to witness this turn of events with a sort of detached curiosity. But I’ll be perfectly honest; for all the time I spent in front of my computer, which as a full-time graphic designer was a dangerous amount of time, I was excitedly refreshing my Dashboard just to see all the usernames roll in. Reloading the page within ten seconds would flood my screen with a new crop of fans validating my theory and filling me with an unnaturally heightened sense of self worth.



2. The Backlash Can Be Frightening



For every user that added “MIND BLOWN” to their Reblog, there was a user who questioned and/or refuted the theory. That wasn’t an issue for me, since good fan theory should always be debated, and I was happy that the idea I birthed from my mind’s vagina had encouraged people to engage in deliciously nerdy dialogue. For me, the most frightening part was the degree to which I accidentally pissed off Tumblr’s more impassioned yet well-meaning user base.

Below my photoset in the box reserved for a description, where afterthoughts are tossed around in an almost obligatory manner, I included a satirical bit about Harry’s culpability in his own severe treatment. The description was rife with irony, praising the Dursleys for bravely enduring so many years in proximately to Harry – an unwitting Horcrux capable of warping their minds. Most viewers picked up on the tongue-in-cheek delivery, but a few saw the description as a face-value declaration for my advocacy of child abuse.

Reblogs were snowballing with one angry diatribe after another, condemning my insensitivity, demanding that I banish my work from existence, and labelling me an abuse apologist. Slogging through those damning Notes – my own motivations for doing so were unclear to me at the time – was a confusing and gut-wrenching ordeal, especially for a sensitive soul like me. I’m the kind of person who routinely goes to great lengths to avoid hurting feelings, yet here I was, standing in the middle of a vitriolic shit storm that I had put into motion. Which brings me to my next point…

3. Don’t Fuck with the Tumblr Fandom

At a glance, Tumblr may appear to be scrapbook-style blog where users cobble together pages devoted to their most cherished time-wasters in the same vein as Pinterest, only with less DIY and more Doctor Who. But dig a little deeper and you’ll unearth a world of insatiable fandom that will defend their chosen fiction and the values it represents until their dying breath escapes their lips or their internet connection cuts out. Unsurprisingly, a portion of the demographic that idolized a boy wizard also turned out to be strong opponents of child abuse, and they made sure I was well aware of it.

I was bombarded with Anonymous Asks that ran the severity gamut from concerned inquiry to Spanish Inquisition. A few kindly souls politely concealed their disgust for my work, while the more scorned contingent forewent the pleasantries and told me to fuck right off. Looking back, I wish I screencapped all those messages before sending back my best attempt at a well-mannered reply. I’ve only got this one:



By the second week I was composing so many apologies that I settled into a strangely comfortable rhythm, like a PR professional with years of damage control experience under their belt. Instead of drooling over my increasing popularity, I was mending the wounds of the people I hurt, even going as far as proactively messaging commentors to express my sense of sorrow that, up until a couple weeks ago, I didn’t know I was capable of feeling for the denizens of Tumblr. Daily damage control wasn’t an ideal situation to be in, but at least I was getting exposure, right?

4. Popularity Isn’t Always a Good Thing

Well, as it turns out, the exorbitant Note count on my post isn’t an accurate gauge of my theory’s popularity among the Harry Potter fan base. At first I believed every Like and Reblog came from a first-pumping Tumblrite throwing their full support behind me and my wacky headcanon. A few clicks later and I discovered that a disconcerting amount of what I believed was positive feedback stemmed from those Reblog chains that accused me of being a shameless victim-blamer and all around terrible human being. In some circles, the post was garnering attention for all the wrong reasons, as more and more users took turns denouncing what they believed to my deliberate attempt to justify cruelty. To put it simply, people were Liking me because they hated me.

I’d love like to claim that the 100,000+ Notes that this fan theory has amassed is solely the product of my ingenuity and hours of Harry Potter marathons, but I have to acknowledge that a sizeable portion of that popularity comes from my ultimately disastrous word choice in the description section. The good news is that now I’ve discovered a winning formula for increasing my notoriety on Tumblr, right?

Right?

5. It Will Probably Never Happen Again

Well, maybe not. The average Tumblr post is Reblogged 14 times. Mine average less than that. If you remove my controversial fan theory from the equation, Graphic Nerdity only averages about 12 Notes per post – not exactly a prolific output. Not to mention there are only a handful of fictional universes from which I’ve developed some kind of offbeat hypothesis, and none of them match the sprawling fanfare of Harry Potter.

By no means am I through producing content for the internet, which as far as I’m concerned could always use more distractions, but it isn’t unreasonable to consider that this may be the peak of my success on Tumblr. If that ends up being the case, years from now I will look back on this journal entry and recall the time when a small portion of fandom on a small portion of the internet showed a bit of interest in something I created and I’ll think to myself, oh yeah, that was neat.