never got your hogwarts acceptance letter? / i ate it
A JEALOUS POTTEROMAN post.
Your friend asks what you're doing this weekend. You say "reading", and when they ask what, you have to explain that it's the seventh book, again, and no, you are not going to watch the films first. They look at you as if you had said you were learning Latin. The email never arrives. Everyone else got their house, their wand and their patronus; you refresh the inbox for three days and are left with "unsorted". A teaspoon would have shown more feeling about it. The tap is dry, the kettle is empty, and for an entire evening you stand in the kitchen hissing at the pipes in the faint hope that something old and magical will respond. Nothing does. The plumber is booked for Thursday. A paperback has a still picture on the cover and the picture does not move. You turn it over, tap it, and wait for someone inside to say something. The whole shelf stays perfectly, rudely silent. **Why it caught on:** the picture is a small owl, cut out and pasted onto four diagonal stripes in the colours of the Hogwarts houses: red and gold, yellow and black, green and silver, blue and bronze. It belongs to the advice-animal format, where a creature with a fixed expression stands for one type of person, here the devoted Harry Potter fan who is quietly jealous of anyone who got to the books, the wands or the Hogwarts letter first. It spread because that fan was everywhere, and the captions, in English and in Russian, were all about the same small, heartfelt sulk.