Pottermania
Pottermania is an informal term first used around 1999 describing the craze Harry Potter fans have had over the series. Fans held midnight parties to celebrate the release of the final four books at bookstores which stayed open on the night leading into the date of the release. In 2005, Entertainment Weekly listed the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as one of "Entertainment's Top Moments" of the previous 25 years. When the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in the UK, the queues were said to be "massive."
The craze over the series was parodied in Lauren Weisberger's 2003 novel The Devil Wears Prada as well as its 2006 film adaptation. In the story, the protagonist Andrea Sachs is ordered to retrieve two copies of the next installment in the series for her boss's twins before they are published so that they can be privately flown to France, where the twins and their mother are on holiday.
The series has come with its share of criticism as well. Allegations of witchcraft and the Occult found in the text, and legal disputes, one doctor coined the term "Hogwarts headache" in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine shortly after the release of Order of the Phoenix, the longest book in the series, at 766 pages in the UK edition, 870 pages in the US edition, and over 250,000 words. He described it as a mild condition, a tension headache possibly accompanied by neck or wrist pains, caused by unhealthily long reading sessions of Harry Potter. The "symptoms" resolve themselves within days of finishing the book. His prescription of taking reading breaks was rejected by two of the patients on which he discovered this headache. On the contrary, researchers in Oxford found that the admission rate of children with traumatic injuries to the city's ERs plummeted on the publication weekends of both Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince.
Some diehard fans of the series even theme their weddings around Harry Potter, featuring a sorting hat and wands on the escort table, long tables divided into houses, a reception venue that mirrors the Great Hall, a candy bar with treats from Honeydukes, and much more. Bridal Guide featured two real weddings soon before the release of the final movie, which quickly spread through the fandom via Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
Read more about this topic: Harry Potter Fandom