Harry Potter and The Meme of Malcontent

What is it with the jackasses of this world? I’m talking about the smart alecks of the world who blurt out the ending of The Sixth Sense in English class (maybe I’m still a little bitter). I’m talking about the drunk chicks on the DC metro who blurted out the ending of penultimate Harry Potter book (yeah, I’m definitely still bitter). And, right now, I’m talking about the camcorder and iMovie equipped spoilsports who have been surreptitiously bleeding Deathly Hallows spoilers across the internet.

Seeing how creative people were in hiding the HD-DVD code pretty much everywhere, I was surprised not to see more HP spoilers littering social media sites. It is interesting to look at the path this spoiler meme followed starting with a leaked 759-page book and ending with a whole slew of videos of hooligans shouting spoilers from car windows at queued up fans.

WARNING: Spoilers after the jump

On Tuesday, July 17th, the press became aware that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had leaked online. Within hours, intrepid pranksters were hiding spoilers in videos and moving them to the top of YouTube. I came across one, temptingly labeled “AMAZING leeroy jenkins remix MUST SEE!!,” which started off with your standard Leeroy Jenkins pre-battle prep when suddenly the screen is filled with explicit details of the book’s every fatality, complete with page numbers. The video’s poster, “Cactusblah,” posted another similar video, “Drama Prairie Dog REMIX!!” and his profile explains “I did it for the lulz.”

From there, this malicious meme continued to evolve until zero hour – the official release of Harry Potter. By this point the only logical thing to do is grab your camcorder and megaphone and head off to the nearest bookstore (or six) to enlighten the masses “ruin some lives.” Break.com and eBaum’s World glory was guaranteed to follow, sending your views through the roof as you pwned those chumps in pointy hats waiting in line.

The ever-bigoted Encyclopedia Dramatica chronicles and encourages this “ruination” of Potter-fans, linking to many different spoiler raids. This sort of anti-fan counter-culture is the antithesis of fan culture, but follows many of the same conduits. The Harry Potter hype was too big of a target not to spin-off its own anti-meme which grew very organically and coalesced in an surprisingly coherent way when you look at the many different videos, from all over of the world, of spoilers being unleashed. It’s a cultural zeitgeist that at the end of the day just makes a bunch of kids cry.