Fan Profile: Sarah Elizabeth

Our next community member to get involved in our fan profile features is Sarah (She/Her), a Slytherin who says she’s been a fan of Harry Potter for around 20 years!

A fan fiction writer, Potter blogger and animal enthusiast (specifically rat enthusiast – she said her Patronus is a Borzoi according to Pottermore, but she’d “prefer to imagine it as a rat”), we loved getting to know more about Sarah’s story, and hope you do, too:

1. How did you get involved in the Harry Potter fandom?

I got Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for Christmas about twenty years ago (I’m nearly 30 now!) and was hooked from the very first chapter! I’m lucky in that I was at the right age to “grow up” with the books as they were released, so I used to go to my local bookshop and dress up and chat about the new ones on fan forums and things like that.

As I got older I started writing fanfiction and going on Tumblr, and then I made a Harry Potter Instagram account and blog and found so many more fans and friends that way.

I’ve now kind of moved away from the main Harry Potter fandom into the Cursed Child fandom, as I got completely obsessed with the play when I won the Friday Forty back in January and I’m really enjoying being in that community!

2. Tell us about your blogging story! Why did you decide to start your blog?

I started my blog in 2017, as a space to write about all the things that were a bit too long or rambly to go on my social media accounts. I shared a bit of everything on there, from visits to film locations to product reviews to meeting cast members to my personal headcanons about individual characters.

I then made the decision to step away from my blog and Instagram halfway through this year, whilst I worked out how I wanted to engage with Harry Potter and the fandom. I was and am incredibly upset and angry about J.K. Rowling’s various statements about trans rights, and I didn’t feel as though I could continue to promote Harry Potter in good faith whilst she was openly alienating and othering the trans community. 

Since then, I’ve sort of separated the fandom from the franchise itself in my mind – I’ve got back into writing fanfiction and I chat about it to my friends and other fans on social media (though my accounts are no longer purely Harry Potter themed.) Although I’m not quite as publicly engaged with Harry Potter as I was, it’s still a huge and important part of my life – just in a slightly different and more personal way.

3. Which has been your favorite piece to write so far? 

On my blog, I really loved sharing my meet and greets with cast members from the films – I’ve been lucky enough to meet a handful of actors over the years, and I’m really happy I have the experiences all written up so I can read and remember them!

I’m also absolutely loving writing fanfiction again – I write for the Cursed Child/next-gen era and am working on some Scorbus and Drastoria stories right now!

4. What’s your favourite memory you associate with the Harry Potter series / the fandom?

If I can cheat and have two? My favourite childhood memory is picking up each of the new books on release day – I used to go along with my Grandma, who indulged my love for Harry Potter and always wrote a little message in the front of each book for me. She died a few years ago, so they’re even more special to me now.

More recently, it has to be winning the Friday Forty to go and see Cursed Child! I got given a seat on the very front row of the Stalls and it was such an incredible experience. I completely fell in love with the whole concept; and the characters and the staging and the acting and everything. I love going to the theatre anyway, but that performance was truly magical.

5. Do you have any recommendations for fans of Harry Potter?

I’d inevitably leave someone out by accident if I tried to name all the creators I love, so instead I’ll just give some general advice on how to have a good time in the fandom!

I know a lot of other fans have also found it hard to know what to do and whether to continue being in the Harry Potter community this year, so my main recommendation if you don’t want to lose Harry Potter from your life completely is to engage with fellow fans and creators themselves, and support each other rather than the franchise itself.

Instagram and Tumblr are great platforms for discovering fic writers, artists, bloggers and vloggers, and if you’re not sure how to make those connections then searching hashtags and liking, sharing and commenting on photos and videos and stories is a good place to start!

A03 is where I upload and read fanfiction, and there are some amazingly talented writers out there for basically every ship/AU/genre you can think of.

You also don’t need to be famous/popular/a creator yourself to get involved with the fandom, there are so many wonderful people in it on every platform you can think of and the majority of us are all just trying to have fun, make friends and enjoy ourselves. Start an account, write a fic, draw a character, share your headcanons or just start chatting – it doesn’t matter how many followers you have or how many other people are doing it, there is room for everybody and everybody is welcome!