Harry Potter and the Lost Children

The boy who lived, and a generation who never figured out how.

Harry Potter.

No, this isn’t fan art, it’s official art from the Wizarding World website - just so you know I’m not cribbing other people’s art without credit.

Is an introduction even necessary? You know what it is. I know you know what it is. I’m fairly certain that illiterate bushmen in the Kalahari that have never held a book in their lives know what it is, if only from the hundredth monkey effect, and, at some point, the entire concept of Harry Potter and his Wizarding World just kind of popped into their heads like some fever dream and they became vaguely aware of it. I reckon they could probably recount the broad, overarching strokes of the plot. Sasquatch has probably read the books, the Loch Ness Monster has probably watched the movies, the little green assholes from Zeta Reticulon probably have the script for the stage-play, and I have a sickening suspicion that when I shuffle off this mortal coil to claim my eternal reward, Saint Peter is gonna put a sorting hat on me to see which half of the divine divide I’ll be spending eternity in. I’d say you’d have to have been in a coma for the past thirty years to be unaware of this series, but, even then, I suspect if you were, the sheer magnitude of the Wizarding World’s psychic presence in minds across the collective noosphere was likely so over-saturated at some point that even people in vegetative states were dreaming about patronuses and Hogwarts and that little minx Dobby busting it down sexual style.

Dobby Pussy Indulgence. Just click the link if you don’t believe me when I say that’s a thing.

So - Harry Potter.

The one. The only. The boy who lived. The one who sparked the new British Invasion and set the stage for the Young Adult Fiction Literary Apocalypse that we still apparently suffer under. It’s difficult to even know where to begin. Not only is the well of Potter deep, dark, and cavernous, this series has been something of my own personal white whale. You’ll see why.

To say that Harry Potter had a profound effect on American culture would be a gross understatement. The wizarding phenomenon was not one limited to the shores of America - there's an argument to be made that Harry Potter irrevocably altered the broader culture of the entire Anglosphere with ripples that extended well beyond the English speaking world. Whether it be the record-shattering book sales, a string of blockbuster films that still rank among the highest grossing of all time, the merchandising empire, the sprawling multi-media expanse, the world-class theme park at Universal Studios, and even an entire musical genre made by people with even less sense than talent - yes, really - there is not a realm or corner of the media landscape that the Wizarding World hasn't crept into like a bad, aggressive outbreak of black mold. Given that spin-off movies, stage-plays, and video games continue to lurch out of Warner Brother’s gates as reliably as bowel movements, and we're due for a television adaptation of the original books, one of the most difficult to comprehend and loathable qualities of the Potter Empire is the fact that, somehow, it's even harder to escape now than it was at the peak of its popularity. Numbers are difficult to discern, but while the colossal fan base is quantifiably smaller now than it was in 2007 with the release of the final novel, the remaining legion of staunch Potterheads have never been more vocal, and certainly never been more annoying.

I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that there is no other Intellectual Property of the early 2000's more influential than Harry Potter. There may be those that are more profitable, but none that did more to inform, influence, and mold the type of adults that the young audience ravenously consuming the books at the time of their release would become. If there's any argument to why stories and culture matter - especially those tailored and marketed towards children - I think the intrinsic connection between Harry Potter and the Millennial Neo-Liberal SINKs¹ that currently embarrass themselves on every social media platform known to man should be the benchmark case study as to what can go horribly wrong when a story for kids is perverted and corporatized into a quasi-religion, and ultimately co-opted into an ideological framework which these people use to understand their lives and the world around them. Now, I’ll be touching on this in future installments - this piece is more or less a primer, so, if sounds like I’m not elaborating… I’m not. We’ll touch on it. For better or worse. Probably worse.

This is so stupid it makes me feel like I’m about to lapse into an apoplectic fit.

And make no mistake - to the most devoted acolytes of the Wizarding World, the Potterverse is the kind of idolatrous icon to them that inspired a kind of lunatic following that would make Ishtar or Baal seethe with envy.

Before we get too deep in the weeds on the topic, or… drink too much of the polyjuice potion or, whatever - fuckin’ make up your own topical turn of phrase - but I feel as I must give a disclaimer or admit disclosure before we begin in earnest.

I can't find solid numbers to quantify the total membership of the Official Harry Potter Fan-Club. Even if I could, I would imagine that would only account for a fraction of the actual number of die-hard fans who either don't bother or don't care enough to enroll. In the age of the internet, official fan-clubs have been rendered all but irrelevant. Let's just say that I think it's a safe bet that the total worldwide population of self-professed Potterheads number somewhere in the low millions, at the most conservative estimate.

And I am not one of them.

There was a time, however, when I might have been. When I was but a young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed tailless ape around the release of the first movie. I didn't just want to get a letter from Hogwarts - I was going to break my muggle ass into that place one way or another and make those fuckers give me one. For a brief time, I would have told you that, if you gave me a choice between a wand and a lightsaber, I would have taken the wand. If you saw what a little sped I was about Star Wars when I was a child, you would have never guessed that there would have ever been a day where I'd tell you - sincerely - that I'd rather be a wizard than a jedi. This is patently absurd because, obviously, swinging around a laser sword and being able to do all sorts of awesome force shit is magnitudes more cool than pointing a dinky little chopstick at someone and shouting some gobbledygook like Cumbumbulus Blarneypop, just to give someone explosive diarrhea or make a weasel pop out of their asshole, but that's just kind of the effect Harry Potter and his world had on people.

It did things to you, man.

But, just so the record's straight as to where little Yakub Jr.’s priorities really were - I would have rather been a Pokemon trainer rather than either a jedi or a wizard. To be totally honest, I still would. Like, would I rather have a laser sword, a magic wand, or an eight foot tall crocodile that can crush steel girders with its jaws and blast gouts of hyper-pressurized water from its mouth with enough force to total a car?

Yeah - let the kids argue about whether they want to be a wizard or a jedi. The men will be discussing which Eevee evolution is the best².

Need me some Prep H the way my ass hurts from shittin’ on these bitches.

But, even as I got older and I found myself gravitating more towards other franchises than Harry Potter, I still enjoyed the books and movies. Every time a new book or film dropped, you could bet my white ass was there for the midnight release, packed in elbow-to-asshole with a bunch of other middle-class cracker kids from the lily-white suburbs of North Texas to get their wizard fix that were dressed in bathrobes and their daddy’s garish work ties, waving around chopsticks and screeching EXPECTO PATRONUM!

I remember my elementary school banned us from carrying chopsticks because we were all using them as wands and one kid tripped and fell and put one through his arm.

Now, I never dressed up. I can’t say that it’s because I’m above cosplay, because I’m not, I just never felt compelled to slip on a bathrobe and pointed hat for the occasion. And, honestly… I don’t think the original wave of Potter-mania was a net negative. I mean, for one, getting kids to actually pick up a book and read in an age where television, video games, and the internet all existed? Yeah - that’s no mean feat, and, by and large, I think that’s something that should be lauded, especially because the books weren’t bad. Overrated? Yes. But bad? You could do wore than giving a kid Harry Potter book… assuming that they’re able to handle these things in a healthy way, which, apparently, a lot of people weren’t.

But, fandom is like alcohol. Some people - like yours truly - indulge and are able to live perfectly functional lives. Other people end up posted up beneath overpasses and believing that they’re married to tulpas of fictional characters, or that they can actually astrally project their souls out of their bodies, through the multi-verse, and right into the Harry Potter world where they live a second life alongside Harry and chums attending Hogwarts. We’ll touch on more of that in a separate piece about the Potter fandom in particular, but the point is that, the same way I wouldn’t hesitate to hand a freshly-minted legal adult a frosty can of Rainier, I also wouldn’t go out of my way to keep my kids from reading the Harry Potter books. My parents bought me both alcohol and the Harry Potter books. And look at me.

I turned out fine.

Mostly.

More importantly, though, Potter-mania was something of a shared generational experience, an almost universal touchstone by which members of that age cohort can all relate to the same mutual experience - that isn’t a bad thing. Not inherently. In fact, in the 2020’s, where the internet has cracked, fractured, and split the pop culture scene into an ever-growing fractal of ever-smaller, increasingly esoteric subcultures that have little overlap and are often hostile to one another, I think some glue to keep a semblance of cohesion and bring everyone back to a baseline reality might be something of a good thing, even if it is over something as simple as a series of movie or a book that we can all agree is pretty alright. That would be nice.

At present, though, with social media continuing to create fissure-like divides in the wider culture and different sects of America’s population continually diverging along more and more radical lines with ontological differences that are simply antithetical to one another, I truly don’t believe something like Pottermania will happen again any time soon, or even can. When the divergent strains of culture in America are becoming so speciated that they can’t even co-exist, I just don’t think it’s possible. And, look - I know someone’s gonna try to say, But Taylor Swift!

I’ve been getting that a lot when I try to make the claim that America’s monoculture has irreparably shattered. And, yes - while Ms. Swift’s sudden and meteoric rise from just another pop singer to the preeminent pop star of the Post-Covid Epoch is fascinating and displays a level of cultural cohesion not seen in some time, it still only binds a select few demographics of the broader American population while excluding the rest, and, in my opinion, feels a whole lot less like some monolithic pop culture phenomenon that touches everyone in some way and more like the last dying gasp of the monolithic mainstream music industry. Just like I don’t think another Harry Potter will ever be possible, I think there’s an argument to be made that Ms. Swift may well be not just the pop star of the 2020’s, but perhaps the last American pop star of any real magnitude.

We can only hope.

But, that’s also neither here nor there. I digress.

The Potter-craze of the mid-oughts, in a lot of ways, feels like the Millennial equivalent of Woodstock.

That may sound like an odd comparison to make, but, hear me out. The number of differences between a series of films and books that were released in a trickle over a decade and a singular musical festival are manifold, but in much the same way that Woodstock defined the boomer generation in many ways as a cultural touchstone, I think the same could be said of the impact the Harry Potter books and films had on Millennials. Just like how not every boomer in the 60’s really gave a shit about Woodstock, and may not have even liked the performers that played there, they still knew it happened, they still remember where they were and what they were doing when it was going on, and, perhaps most importantly, those people who let the event define their lives never shut the fuck up about it. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually listened to someone who went to Woodstock talk about the event, but I have, and it is…

Look, this isn’t about Woodstock, I don’t want to get into it here, but, trust me - you’d have thought that Woodstock was, like, the great mass awakening where hundreds of thousands of humans ascended to the next level of consciousness as the greatest secrets of the cosmos were unveiled to them by a host of angels, and not just a bunch of sex addicts and drug fiends wallowing in mud while Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young tweedled on their guitars in the background³. When you remember that most of them were rolling on enough hallucinogenic substances to send an elephant into the fifth dimension, it kind of makes sense, but the point still stands.

Worse still, they proceeded to spend the rest of their life using that time, place, and cultural iconography as a lens through which they parsed everything, and never - never - seemed to be able to put it behind them, and move. On.

I’d also say a striking similarity between the two is that, just like sober minds of future generations often look back at Woodstock and, rather than see some glorious expression of peace, love, and 60’s counter-culutre, they see a squalid, filthy, drug-fueled orgy of Bacchanalian depravity, the zoomer generation is hearing the rapidly aging Millennials that continue to wax poetic about Potter-mania like some sort of magical franchise that ushered in some great renaissance of cinema and literature, and seeing only a very successful series of movies and films that, while perfectly serviceable, are not deserving of nigh-hagiographic praise that said Millennials heap upon them. When it comes to both Woodstock and Harry Potter, when that praise often verges on deification and idolatry, and mythologized the way that they have been, it’s little mystery why it looks so silly to the outsiders looking in.

The other biggest issue with the Harry Potter craze, so far as I see it, is Warner Brothers’ continued to attempts to brute-force it back into the cultural limelight. That kind of goes hand-in-hand with my previous accusation. The corporate leash-holders at WB really want to ensure that the Potter-cow cash-tit is always ready for a quick squeeze and a fast buck, and in doing so have created a constant glut of mediocre content that pales in comparison to the original books and movies in terms of quality, all of which only really appeal to people who were passionate fans of the original and have, by and large, failed to rope in fresh fans. Warner Brothers keeps trying to catch lightning in a bottle twice, or ignite that cultural inferno once more, but the fuse just isn’t taking, and their desperation is about as unflattering as the fans, who want it to happen just as much so they can feel cool again. I guess. This has resulted in a large segment of the Millennial cohort who just can not let this thing die because there’s such a vested interest in keeping it propped up in a grotesque Weekend at Bernie’s-esque display of trying to convince the wider world that, no, really - there’s still more gas in this tank.

And yes - that is a problem.

I know I can be pretty disparaging towards the more passionate members of fandom and nerd culture - and, of course, I think rightfully so, in some cases - but cosplay, conventions, fan-gatherings, people expressing their love for a certain story or property… none of that is inherently a problem.

But, all things in moderation, right? Everything has a proper time. Everything has a proper place. I don’t think really, really caring about a story or a franchise is necessarily a bad thing. We all have those stories or properties that we really like, we really enjoy, and, at times, we find ourselves wistfully dreaming about running away to. Sometimes, we need a little something strong and stiff at the end of the day to bring down the heart rate and relax. We all can indulge our little pet fantasies, once in a while.

In that way, again, it really is like alcohol. The problem with booze isn’t when you have a drink or two every now and then. The problem is when you can’t put it down. And if Harry Potter was to Booze, then the worst elements of the fandom are the kind of people who wash their breakfast down with a cold, crisp forty ounces of Olde English 800.

Visualize it like this.

This? This is okay.

This? Man… you might wanna be limit your Potter intake. Maybe think about cutting back on the sauce some. But - but - this was a photo taken as LeakyCon, which, despite having a name that would suggest that it’s a convention for those who suffer from urinary incontinence, is actually a Harry Potter convention. If there’s any time it’s alright to dress up like this, it’d be there. So, as a priest once told me, Okay. Kind of weird. Wouldn’t recommend you do it again. Not a sin, though.

This?

Hermione didn’t even stop Voldemort! What the fuck does this even mean!?

This is where we begin to have issues. This is where that half-off Manhattan on Thirsty Thursday begins to turn into sipping on a flask of grain alcohol when you get into the office on Monday. This is a perfect visual specimen of a person who didn’t know when to stop. This is a culture that didn’t know when to put down the drink and reach for a can of La Croix.

It’ll take a bit more to articulate, but, to put it bluntly - we’ve had almost ten years of every white, urbanite Neo-Liberal comparing various politicians and political events to characters and things that happen in the Harry Potter books and movies. I’m not opposed to people using fiction to digest real world events. Art has always been a tool through which the real world can be processed, analyzed, studied, and understood. But when all you can see is fiction overlaid on top of reality? You’re beginning to lose the plot and wander off into La-La Land. Or Hogwarts, in this case.

Here’s as simply as I can put it using graphical representations.

If this guy -

Was actually, sincerely, legitimately as bad as this guy, as they’ve been saying for fucking years now -

You would not be allowed to do this -

Because you would most likely end up like this -

Just imagine the gun is a wand.

If there was some actual, honest-to-God tyrannical authoritarian despot in the halls of power with a legion of jack-booted thugs at his beck and call, and he had legitimate aspirations of complete and total control, no one would be out on the street wearing pink pussy hats and waving signs with sarcastic zingers that reference a children’s book because this would be happening.

And they would not let you wave some dumbass sign about how Hermione Granger would support abortion rights or how Dumbledore wouldn’t stand for immigration caps. If you stopped an actual neo-blackshirt on the streets and finger-wagged them while calling them a death-eater, they’d probably shoot you where you stood and leave you to bleed out in the street. At best, you’d go to jail, and you’d be lucky if anyone ever saw you again.

And if it sounds as I’m being a super-duper meany-pants to these plucky resistance fighters arrayed against Orange Dorito Hitler… well, where the hell have you been since 2016? This nonsense has been going on since Trump announced he was going to run a year or two before the election. When I say we’ve been suffering through a decade of this silliness, I mean it. Check the calendar. It’s been almost a decade. Trust me - I have a difficult time believing it, too, but it’s true. And this shit was already prematurely old when it started. Like, so old it was creaked out of the womb in a wheelchair and a nasal canula shoved up its nose. I think I can be forgiven for being sick to bastard death of it.

A lot of people are. Even on the hardf left side of the spectrum, there are scads of articles saying that it’s time to leave Harry Potter behind. Seriously, go google harry potter fans read a new book, and most of the articles and think-pieces you’ll find are written by progressives who trying - desperately - to get their own political peers to adopt a different banner to flock beneath, albeit for different reasons than those I would cite.

Given the volumes of apologetics you can find of Harry Potter devotees performing elaborate displays of mental gymnastics to justify remaining a fan of the franchise while also distancing themselves from author JK Rowling’s trans-exclusionary rhetoric, I don’t think these voices are having much success rooting out the Potter weed in their political garden.

Even Zoomers are getting in on the fun, and Liking Harry Potter As A Personality Trait has become one of the largest indicators of being a Millennial, trailing behind Liking Disney as a Personality Trait and Liking The Office as a Personality Trait. Notice a trend, there?

And you know what? The Zoomers have issues of their own, and, in a way, the criticism smacks of pointing out a stick in the eye of Millennials while ignoring the California Redwood jutting out of their own, but they’re right about this one. And they should call it out for what it is. It’s stupid. It’s silly. It’s juvenile.

Though the strict age ranges for generations is always fuzzy and up for debate, 1997 seems to be most widely agreed cut-off year for what constitutes a Millennial. That means the youngest among them will be 26 going into 2024.

And, frankly, it’s unconscionable to base your entire world view and political beliefs around a children’s book from the 90’s. Now, before anyone puts words in my mouth - I’m not saying that nobody can like the Harry Potter books or movies. I’m not saying that nobody can dress up like their own Original Do-Not-Steal Wizard character at LeakyCon or BroomCon or PeePeePooPoo-Con, if that floats their boat. I don’t really give a shit.

The problem is that these people have quite literally internalized the series, the franchise, the story, and the iconography and symbology around it and fashioned it into a lens where they cannot divorce reality from fiction. It’s like they have Harry Potter, or, to a lesser extent, the wider Disney brand, or The Office super-glued to their face. Everything must be parsed through the symbology, iconography, characters, and events of fiction.

And, to be perfectly fair to the Potterheads - this isn’t unique to them. They just have the most visible and most advanced and possibly terminal case of this.

Remember Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Minute to Win It haul to Moscow in June of 2023, and it looked as if there might be some serious in-fighting and rebellion arising on Putin’s own doorstep? Do you know how most of the Western world seemed to be conceptualizing it?

Wooooah, dude! This is some serious Game of Thrones shit!

Which, no, it wasn’t - not even close, because Putin didn’t have that comically thuggish friend of his pop Prigozhin’s head like a grape right in the middle of Red Square - but, if the only fucking thing you can compare a minor military kerfuffle to Game of Thrones, that betrays the fact that you probably slept through history class.

Hell, I remember when Marvel fans on Reddit were soying so hard you could practically hear their jaws dislocating when the lockdowns happened. Partially because they got to work remote for the first time in their lives, which I did, too, and it was the definition of based, but, unlike my mature and level-headed and sober response to the entire thing, they saw this -

And immediately started saying, Bro! This feels just like the end of Infinity War, bro! It’s almost like Thanos snapped half the population away!

Some would say this was the intention, and that Avengers: Infinity War was not-so-subtle depopulation propaganda. There’s… a kernel of truth to that, probably. Predictive Programming has always been outside of my brand of esoteric schizo-posting. But I think the more likely explanation is that it’s just a display of garden variety stupidity from the usual suspects up in the peanut galleries of Reddit.

To bring this back to Harry Potter, the problem at the core of all of this is that stifling lack of self-awareness and steadfast refusal to engage with reality without this safety blanket of pop culture and media iconography is, simply put, just another symptom of the Millennial cohort’s inability to grow-up. It’s a debilitating and a seemingly terminal inability to take things seriously. That’s bad enough in and of itself, as it’s created a generation of manchildren and juvenile women that are in a state of suspended emotional development that leaves them struggling to function as independent, functioning, and productive members of society. There’s a broad swathe of them that just out and out aren’t.

It’s why adulting has become a verb, and it’s something that Millennial’s whinge about constantly, making a joke out of basic every day responsibilities. It’s as concerning as it is pathetic.

I remember my therapist telling me, years ago, that adulting is hard was something he heard so many others in my age bracket say, and he told me it was one of the few things that someone could tell him that made it difficult to keep the calm, detached, and professional demeanor of a mental health professional intact.

I have people come to me and say, oh, Dr. So-and-So, I can’t deal with it. It’s all too much. Doing the dishes, doing the laundry, brushing my teeth, vacuuming the carpet - all that adult stuff, it’s too much. And I just wanna tell them - adulting? Kid… that’s just life.

Not to brag, but… he never heard that kind of talk from me.

I may have been extremely emotionally unstable and incapable of coping with stress in a healthy and productive way, but I could and can, at the very least, adult.

Of course, it would be reductionist to say that this is entirely by choice, or the responsibility rests solely on their own shoulders. Broader economic and macro-societal factors have knee-capped the Millennial generation from the beginning. The game wasn’t just rigged - it’s debatable whether or not they’ve even been allowed to play in earnest. Given that the Boomer cohort has continued to hoard jobs and retard career advancement for younger generations to ensure their own continued success, and their iron-grip on the housing market has effectively locked the healthy majority of Millennials out of the housing market, I think that it can be said that society didn’t really let most Millennials actually grow up. It’s difficult to act like an adult in society when you aren’t really treated like one and all the hallmarks of a healthy adulthood - buying a house, marriage, a good career, or even just living independently - seem like pipe-dreams for many Millennials.

I don’t really want to go too far down this tangent, but I think you could even make the argument that this isn’t by accident. Millennials are like this by design. Boomers in positions of powers have always been working to ensure that their sclerotic reign will continue until the bitter end, and they didn’t want any credible competition that might dislodge them, so -

I’d take it a step further and say that the people in power - the real men behind the curtains, not the bloating, decaying gasbags propped up in the halls of our sacred democracy - wanted a generation of weak, subservient, dull-witted, sickly, and depressed mediocrities who would be so helpless and miserable that they’d be happy to trade away their rights, freedoms, and power of choice away for a bit of material comfort. So they did everything they could to handicap that generation from the start.

I’m not crazy. You’ll see. One day.

But, if it sounds like I’m trying to play defense for these people - I’m not. Despite the societal, economic, and social hardships placed on the Millennial generation, there’s still plenty of them that have managed to mature and develop and become functional members of society. There is a large degree of personal responsibility to it all that these people who whine about adulting refuse to take. The thing is, even if you’re locked out of one game, there are others to play. The whole Boomer-ism of pick yourself up by the bootstraps is, frankly, stupid and dismissive when you’re talking to someone who has no metaphorical boots. But, even if you don’t have boots… you can always buy some shoes and get walking.

Yet, I must digress. This isn’t meant to be another Anti-Boomer screed, or Millennial struggle session. As to why this seemingly endemic inability to take reality seriously and engage with it outside the parameters of pop culture references is a bad thing, again - we’ll get to it. It really should be self-evident why a bunch of manchildren calling for a politician’s head because someone on Twitter compared him to made-up wizard Hitler, but, for the sake of thoroughness, we’ll touch on it.

It’s that’s just one piece to this much larger mosaic. The the dark, throbbing, slimy basilisk heart pounding at the core of the question is not that, is not really how the iconography of a children’s book was co-opted into the de facto choice of expression for a whole lot of emotionally and socially maladjusted young people who went on to be emotionally and socially maladjusted adults. My question is - why? Why Harry Potter? It’s not like there weren’t other children’s books or movies or intellectual properties being published at the time. You don’t see anyone comparing Donald Trump to Jesse and James from the Pokemon anime. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is never made out to be, like, Yoda from Star Wars - you know, another shriveled old prune who looks like a desiccated scrotum - but I’ve seen her compared to Hermione Granger, for… reasons. Presumably because they both have two X chromosomes and not much else in common.

What’s in the magic sauce that’s made the Wizarding World such a resilient property, even after more than a decade of controversy, decay, diminishing returns, even more diminishing quality, and so much more? How did a simple book about a boy wizard who lives in closet, penned by a woman on the brink of destitution, turn into a thirty-four billion dollar global entertainment institution? And why did it have an effect on some people’s developing brains not dissimilar to huffing the fumes off hot glue gun paste?

There’s more to the Gordian knot that is the Wizarding World. A lot more. I doubt I’ll be able to thoroughly explore all of them. But, I’d like to take a stab at it.

Well, my fellow muggles… if you’re feeling brave, if you’re feeling adventurous, and perhaps just a wee bit… magical… grab your wands, throw on your robes, and don’t be late for transfiguration class, because… man, I can’t even finish that sentence. I feel sick to my stomach having typed that.

I’ll see you in the next part. And you best come back for it, too, because I’m not doing all this research for nothing.

The things I do for you people…

Some lovely fanart to cap the article with.

1. Shorthand for “Single Income, No Kids.” Often middle-aged and white.

2. Real ones know it’s Glaceon.

3. This isn’t a stab at CSNY, they were just the first band that I know played at Woodstock and came to mind.