Accio Deathly Hallows
On July 18, 2007, Hank shared a song about his excitement for the final Harry Potter book, which was scheduled to be released that month. Due to the general excitement about the book at the time, and because the Harry Potter fandom was already a huge phenomenon, the video obtained over 200,000 views in one week. Since YouTube was a smaller website at the time and it worked in a different manner, this amount of views meant that the video was featured on the front page, meaning its exposure was very high. By July 25, 2007, John acknowledged the fact that many more people were watching their videos and that this meant that there were some who were not Nerdfighters (which was evidenced by the new commenters’ unfamiliarity with the community).
HPA logo from thehpalliance.org
But the Harry Potter fandom is another social phenomenon that resulted in a community of young people concerned with social justice and similar values, so this community was welcome by the Nerdfighters. Hank’s song served as a medium to connect two communities, and over the past seven years they have collaborated in several instances.
The Harry Potter fandom has become organized through the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), an independent non-profit organization registered in the United States that successfully organizes fundraising and awareness campaigns based on values that emerged from the Harry Potter world– which happen to overlap with the values the Nerdfighters hold. An example of a successful collaboration between the two communities was the Helping Haiti Heal campaign in 2010, which collected over $USD 100,000, with which they sent five charter planes with medical supplies to Haiti. One of these planes was named DFTBA in honor of the help provided by the Nerdfighters.
As Hank’s song represented a moment of growth and notoriety in the community, as well as a moment of connecting with the Harry Potter fandom, the Accio Deathly Hallows song anniversary is remembered by Nerdfighters yearly on July 18, and celebrated by Hank with a new song each year. This date and these songs are important and popular artifacts in this community’s culture.
The narratives explored in this series of posts are the results of the pre-study I did with the aim of finding the most prominent themes and narratives that emerged throughout the first year of the Nerdfighter Community.
Each of these posts explores the stories and themes that are the basis to understand the culture of this community, its activities and overall atmosphere. Each section explains a theme or narrative that Nerdfighters have adopted as shareable stories through which they make sense of their culture.
More narratives:
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