Magic at the Crossroads: How Global Readers Repair Moral Dissonance in the Wizarding World

The international Harry Potter fandom faces a major cultural paradox: the love of a wizarding world that supports inclusivity and has become a life-long obsession, compared to the controversial communication of the writer of gender identity issuing. This disjunction paralyzes the cultural reader with moral confusion which is a danger to their emotional investment in the text. Although scholars have analyzed this phenomenon using fragmented prisms, such as social media activism, cognitive engagement, translation, pedagogy and fan creativity, there is no unifying model that can be used to understand why reading pleasure endures. This article seeks to fill this gap by studying these strands of research in a divergent manner by adopting a convergent mixed-method study. Based on neurocognitive (EEG) values, cross-cultural focus groups, social media analysis and corpus linguistics, we outline the terrain of reader coping mechanisms. We find separate fan fractions (“Author-icide”, “Text-Loyal”, “Re-Moralizer”) and consider the practices corresponding to them. The results are summarized by proposing a model called the Moral Dissonance Repair Loop which is a theoretical model that shows how translation smoothing, pedagogical reframing and fan-based re-moralization interact with one another in creating a system that enables the reader to be collectively able to get their relations with the text back to a manageable point and continue being engaged. This model makes a theoretical contribution to new areas in the study of fans, moral psychology and cognitive literature.