Potterpalooza

Rowling struck a match in 1997, and Anelli's is not the only world that has been transformed.

Fourteen-year-old Cody Wild from State College, Penn., was attending Phoenix Rising with her mother, Sandy. Home-schooled through the sixth grade, Cody is now a ninth-grader. The night before the conference, she had been awarded the Bronze Pen English prize. Cody also recently wrote an article about how the media paid more attention to the deaths at Virginia Tech than they do to the casualties in Iraq.

"Cody's dad was a real staunch Bush supporter," said Sandy. "She grew up in a Republican household, so it's nice to see her developing her own perspective on things." Cody credits the allegorical nature of the books -- and the politically interested fan world -- with opening her mind about politics. One of her favorite panels at the conference was on how Rowling's literary style changed after 9/11, and she was proud to tell me that she purchased the last of the "Republicans for Voldemort!" buttons at the conference.

And then there's Harper Robertson, who in the fourth grade began drawing floor plans for Hogwarts castle based on textual clues in the early Potter books. On Saturday, the 16-year-old San Franciscan presented a lecture called "Hogwarts: A History." After taking a year off from high school to intern at an architecture firm, Roberston has created a scale model of the castle, built of cardboard. She'll be taking architecture classes at Stanford next year.

Robertson showed slides of her model to a full house that ooh'd and aah'd. Afterward, when I asked what her friends think of her pursuit, Robertson gamely explained, "They respect it as a very in-depth focus on something completely pointless."

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Saturday night was Artists and Authors Night, in which the hotel conference rooms were packed with people drawing Potter art and writing fan fic on demand.

I walked into a reading by "Mad Maudlin," who had to remove the papier-mâché snail she was wearing on her head, and who would not give her real name. (The 22-year-old St. Louis resident, who will join the Peace Corps next year, doesn't want her parents to track down her often racy online work.)

Maudlin read two stories, one about Ginny and Harry eating muffaletta in New Orleans, which Maudlin explained had been inspired by a volunteer trip to the city with the Campus Crusade for Christ, and a "Damn Yankees"-inspired tale about Ron selling his soul to the devil to be a better Quidditch player and making out with Harry in a locker room.

When I asked Maudlin to theorize about what women found exciting about male-on-male sex scenes, Maudlin explained that she identifies as bisexual, and likes to explore dynamic relationships between characters "regardless of their gender."

Which makes sense. But does she write lesbian slash about Ginny and Hermione? "Not really," she said. "Mostly because I don't identify with a lot of the female characters."

At this point, the "prefect" in charge of the room for the night, a writer who calls herself Fyrdrakken and who'd been knitting quietly through the readings and interview, piped up to offer, "Some of the women are cardboard caricatures. A lot of people don't like Hermione at all. She is self-righteous and kind of creepy." Maudlin nodded.

Hermione? A cardboard cutout? The smartest in the class, with the frizzy hair and muggle parents, the responsible girl who maintains friendships with the irresponsible boys, the girl who has the good taste to pine not for our dashing hero but for his red-haired, dunderheaded friend? "A lot of people don't like Hermione at all?" This was heartbreaking.

I asked the women, since they take their right to alter stories seriously, why they couldn't gussy up these purportedly cardboard girls and let them have some hot lesbian sex of their own? Maudlin looked at me with something like pity: "The whole challenge is to keep the characters in character, just participating in a different plot." All right then, Ms. Muffaletta. I guess my ambivalence about fan fic means I'm just a sucker for authority, a consummate good girl, a Hermione.

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My frustrations evaporated on Sunday when I found practically the whole conference lined up to get into the grand ballroom for the "Snape: Friend or Foe?" debate.

The debate was fabulous. It centered on whether Severus Snape, Rowling's ingeniously ambiguous character who concluded the sixth book by knocking off his staunchest defender, is a good guy or a bad guy. It's the question that for me -- and apparently for many of the couple hundred people filling up the ballroom -- is at the crux of Rowling's narrative.

If Snape were really a baddie, pro-Snape playwright Meg Belviso pointed out smartly, it would be something of an anticlimax, considering that at the end of the last book, he killed the series' most benevolent protagonist. Good point! But, countered the anti-Snapist Nick Rhein, "it will be a much deeper and a much better written book if she doesn't redeem him."

You're wrong! But I get it; it's a debate, someone's got to argue the dumb side.

Hilary K. Justice, assistant professor of English at Illinois State University, was the pro-Snape star, taking it to a rather poetic level. "There are many kinds of love in these books," she said, "and not just the healthy kind. There is also obsessive love, cataclysmic love, the kind of love you're willing to die for." It is this last kind of love that Justice believes Snape felt for Harry's now-dead mother, Lily Potter. She hypothesized that Snape might have made an unbreakable vow with Lily to protect her son's life, watch over him, and perhaps even complete the task (killing Voldemort) for which Harry is destined if Harry is unable to complete it himself.

In the audience, knitting needles clicked as audience members wove their red and gold scarves and rapt listeners twirled their wands. People stood to ask questions, including a great one from a woman who pointed out that Rowling, whose sensitive streak is as long as Book 4, would never endorse bullying by making Snape -- an outcast kid with dingy undergarments who was teased by the popular kids -- truly evil. Excellent point, person who can read!

In the final question of the Great Snape Debate, the moderator asked both sides: "Is Snape going to live or die?" "He's going to die," said two of them. When it got to Justice, she said simply, "Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

The conference was suddenly making me very happy. As Justice said, while discussing Rowling's borrowing from the Egyptian myth of Osiris, Horus, Isis and Set, "The way Rowling's mind works is beautiful." I had to agree, and take her point further: The way the minds of Rowling's fans work is nearly as impressive.

Despite my quibbles with overzealous fan-fic authors, this was one hell of an accepting crowd, one in which a teenager was as welcome to weigh in as a professor, where discussion of philosophy was as compelling as discussion of technology, where it didn't matter if you were from a Christian fundamentalist or Wiccan background, and where even the fiercest debate could teach an ardent fan something new.

Next page: Wizard rockers roughhouse at the masquerade ball