by Michael Swain

Created on: October 02, 2008

The Harry Potter Series has been written, the facts, as its creator Ms Rowling dictates, are set, and that should be an end of it.

The series already contains romance, violence, fantasy, action, lust and desire both sexual and otherwise, and as each book takes on the next year of the characters academic lives it mirrors the adolescent groans and growing pains of countless young people today. In this role there is already plenty in the series to satisfy the theme of teenage lust and yearnings. Envy of friend's boyfriends or girlfriends, secret meetings and snatched kisses. Brief episodes amidst the whirlwind of lessons and adventures and the nuts and bolts of growing up. this is the stuff that puberty is made of.

The innocence of the characters as they learn to understand their romantic attachments and sexual instincts is one rarely found in modern media - usually characters come ready packaged for love, and miss out on all the fumbling and misunderstandings that exist in the real world. There are few such successful series in our contemporary world that teach our children how to go about growing up without overstepping boundaries that they will later regret.

In the final chapter of The Deathly hallows, JK Rowling brings sense to all the urges of the seven books, when she demonstrates how the central characters have grown up, worked out for themselves who they are and what they want from life, and each built a family with their chosen partners. They represent a solid role model for children looking for an example to follow. Four kids with honour and integrity, who makes some mistakes, go through some learning curves, betray and are betrayed by each other and others, like Cho, but in the end pull through, make some right choices and find some measure of happiness.

What more romance could Rowling place in the stories than for three friends to grow up together, for two of them to develop feelings for each other, to realise after some ups and downs that they like each other, and for them to marry - and for the other friend, having had a few failed attemtps to find love, ahving looked in the wrong places and having been friends with some great girls who turned out to be nothing more than friends, to marry his friends little sister, for whom, looking back, he has always had something of a soft spot.

I am at a loss to see what romance might be added that could speak greater volumes than that which is already in the books, and i can see no benefits to increasing the sex appeal. Some stories are about romance, others are about life, which includes romance, and Harry Potter, though a fictional world, is firmly in the latter. To add more to it would be to detract from its other great qualities. Leave Harry be.

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