Full Grown Muggles in the Wizarding World
Universal Orlando is a gold mine for Potter fans, but it will never give us what we most want.
On our last day in Orlando, as we sat in Harry Potter World waiting for the frog choir concert to start after the Triwizard spirit rally had ended, I got a call from my mom.
“I’ve never known anyone besides you and Emily who went to Disney and Universal without kids,” she said.
I looked around. “If you were here,” I said, “you’d know a lot more of them.”
It’s true: in the Wizarding World at Universal, you’re not just surrounded by kids — although there certainly are a lot of them. At least as common are pairs of adults traveling alone, experiencing the magic of Hogwarts and the wider world of wizardry while having aged out of it years ago. Unfortunately, I’ve been in the older group for a few years now — but, of course, there are still plenty of things for adults to enjoy, which is why so many of them still show up. It had been 12 years since I’d last been to Universal Orlando, back in the spring of 2011. This time, I was a lot older, owned a lot more Harry Potter wands, and had a job.
This time, we spent two days in Orlando, and explored the Wizarding World pretty comprehensively. We saw Celestina Warbeck sing in Diagon Alley, during which I noted that the ending of one of her songs didn’t quite match the way it had gone in the book. We waited an hour and a half to ride Hagrid’s Magical Creature Motorbike Adventure, and we ended up in the front car, which was absolutely worth it. I waited in line to ride the Forbidden Journey, went down the wrong line when I reached the front, got sent back to the beginning, and made my way back to the front of the line only to find that the ride had broken down. We rode Escape from Gringotts, despite the wacky non-canonical storyline that it portrays. We ate breakfast at the Leaky Cauldron one day, and lunch at the Three Broomsticks the next; we went through several frozen butterbeers and some butterbeer ice cream, and bought a chocolate frog and a coconut ice to take home.
As cool as the Wizarding World is, though, as an adult, its flaws are more noticeable. Behind Hogwarts, you can see the edges of the airplane hangar-type building that probably houses some machinery and storage and the like. You start to notice that all the shops pretty much sell the same things. The storefronts that look the most interesting — the wizarding formalwear shop, the book store, the Daily Prophet newsroom, Quality Quidditch Supplies — are all either fake stores, with locked doors that lead to nothing, or extensions of one shop, with a few quidditch products intermingled with the standard-issue sweatshirts and t-shirts and keychain racks.
I can’t get enough of the Wizarding World, but it has a fundamental problem: it was never going to provide what fans dreamed of (not that it promised to), because magic isn’t real. The Hippogriffs and Blast-Ended Skrewts that garnish Hagrid’s rides will always be animatronic. There will never be live quidditch or owls delivering mail or chocolate frog cards that actually move. The experience is closer to magical than anywhere else, but that doesn’t erase the immutable gaps between magic and reality.
That, at least, is the problem I imagine the thousands of kids who filled the wizarding world having. Like me, they’re having the time of their lives; the problems aren’t really problems, but they’re slightly noticeable. Kids are there to immerse themselves in the magical world; whatever small problems they have come from the fact that they’re not wizards, but muggles just pretending.
For adults, on the other hand, these are small problems. The real adult problems are different.
What do adults want from the wizarding world? We want a few things. We want to be able to hang out in the Gryffindor common room eating candy that gives us animal voices. We want a compartment on the Hogwarts Express with our friends, eating candy from the trolley witch and planning for the school year ahead, or going home for summer vacation. We want to be able to walk around the castle, going from lesson to lesson while making plans with friends and nursing enormous, unrequited crushes. We want the exhilaration of finishing an OWL exam knowing that you nailed it, and the communal thrill of a quidditch cup final.
When kids come to the Wizarding World, they’re looking for magic. Magical creatures, wands that (sort of) work, talking portraits in Hogwarts, casting spells in Ollivander’s. All the adults that my mom doesn’t know, on the other hand, the ones who flock back to Hogwarts long after they’ve aged out of it, are coming back for something different. The magic is great, but I suspect we’re there for something else, the one simple thing that the Wizarding World can’t give us. We wish we could be back in high school.