For those of you who are not on Harry Potter TikTok, you’re MISSING out. As a massive Harry Potter fan and someone who has a guilty obsession with Draco Malfoy, seeing the series finally get the recognition it deserved on TikTok was extremely exciting. Almost overnight, hundreds and thousands of users started posting and interacting with POVs, edits, and rants about the popular book and movie series. In fact, a whole sector of these videos coined “Dracotok” were solely dedicated to Tom Felton and his beloved character Draco Malfoy who’d managed to garner a large, primarily female, fanbase (including me) despite being one of the main antagonists of the series that we’re all technically supposed to hate. (I could go on a tangent about how I whole-heartedly believe he deserved a redemption arc in the series, but that’s for another day). A huge community of devoted fans was coming together on the app causing TikTok to become one of my new favorite pastimes. My for you page became flooded with elaborate edits, romantic POVs, and edits of characters such as Cedric Diggory, the Weasley twins, Nevile Longbottom, the Golden Trio (Harry, Hermione, and Ron), and many more. One of my favorite Harry Potter trends was the “If I were a student at Hogwarts” POVs where people made comedic videos about what they would be like if they were a character in the series. One of the funniest and my favorite TikTok of this trend was made by @willscragg which garnered over 291k likes as well as 886k views.
Inspired by Will and the many others I’d seen, I started to think about all the funny things I’d probably say or do and decided to make one with myself to share with my friends. Of course, I made the TikTok and posted it figuring that the only people who’d end up watching it would be my friends. However, the next morning, much to my surprise, I woke up to see that my TikTok had gotten a couple hundred likes and a few thousand views. Surprising but not viral. Eventually, my likes and views had plateaued so I wasn’t expecting much more. After that, a few days had passed and I’d become busy with moving into my apartment and pretty much forgotten about it. However, after a long day of moving in boxes and organizing my room, I plopped down on my couch to open my TikTok to unravel and scroll through my feed. When I opened it, my notifications had exploded and my jaw DROPPED. I had gained hundreds of followers, gotten hundreds of comments, and a few thousand likes. The next few days, my likes grew exponentially and I began to receive thousands of nice (and a few mean) comments from people saying how they’d thought it was funny and wanted to see more. I’d gotten 123.6k likes, over 2000 comments, and went from having 84 followers to over 2200. Viewers were crediting me and posting their takes on the trend, popular creators were commenting, and MANY users gave their two cents on some of my controversial comments.
Overall, it was a WILD experience and an unexpected story I love to tell everyone. While it was a bit difficult to brush off negative comments, reading all the positive and supportive comments from Harry Potter fans was super fun. Overall, I loved that I could be a part of the Harry Potter TikTok community and bond with others who love the series as much as I do. I always enjoyed being able to make my friends laugh and getting the opportunity to reach thousands of people out there, to put it simply, was pretty cool.
Links to the Tiktoks below!
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJyKoqLY/