Now, suggesting that JK Rowling is a made-up person is certainly an insane theory. Worryingly, though, it isn't the most insane theory a fan has had about Harry Potter. Not, that dubious honour must go to the blog of Mike Bacior, freshman at Penn State, who suggests that perhaps not only is JK Rowling not a fictional construct, but neither is anything she has ever written about. Everything that happens in the Harry Potter books actually happened. In real life. And, just as in the text and films, us muggles were completely unaware of it. Or at least we would be, if Rowling hadn't been on hand to write down and document all these amazing events as they happened. Somehow managing to ignore the concept of an "imagination" whilst displaying a pretty fervent one himself, Bacior asks Do we honestly believe that this woman simply sat down one day and came up with all of these great details? before going on to outline his alternative hypothesis. He suggests that Rowling herself is a "squib" (a person involved in the magical world with no magic powers themselves), and that "she has taken the 20th century history of the magical world and wrote it down as 'fiction' for the Muggle (non-magical) World, knowing that we would be unable to conceive it as reality. We eat the 'fiction' up, not knowing that all of these events actually took place." Erm...right. Then he gets into the nitty gritty of this theory, suggesting that every major conflict since the Cold War has suffered some influence and motivation from the magical world ("Voldemort and his followers used our world in a battle to gain control of the Earth, as the Order of the Phoenix opposed him via the United States of America"), and that the destruction of Voldemort in 1991 coincided with the end of the conflict by the US and Russia. And a Death Eater controlled George W Bush's mind and forced him to invade Iraq to distract us from Voldemort's return. Honestly, we've heard worse explanations...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
