Fandom in general seems to have been one of humanity’s big mistakes. That’s a broad statement, but you see what I mean when you start exploring individual fandoms, from the notoriously toxic corners of Star Wars to unsettling devotion surrounding The Pitt. You know, a show that has only released 30 episodes and already has a fanbase that has developed enough toxicity for several fandoms.
Harry Potter fans are making a strong case for the top spot in the toxic fandom rankings. Case in point: a Welsh beach where a fictional elf was buried in a movie has apparently become sacred ground, and fans successfully stopped a $570 million electrical cable project from passing underneath it.
The key word here is underneath.
Harry Potter Fans Successfully Protected Dobby’s Grave From an Underground Power Cable
As reported by The New York Times, the character Dobby, the enslaved house elf who eventually wins his freedom and then dies shortly thereafter in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. In the movie, Harry buries him at Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, beneath a marker reading, “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.”
Dobby is of course fictional. He was words on a page that got turned into a fully computer-generated character voiced by famed British character actor Toby Jones. Dobby is very fake, and so is his grave, along with everyone who buried him. Fake. Fake. Fake; they’re all fake.
None of that mattered to hundreds of Harry Potter fans who contacted Greenlink after project manager Simon Ludlam mentioned during a BBC interview that the company’s undersea electricity cable would pass beneath the beach. Ludlam initially had no idea who Dobby was. His colleagues eventually explained that, apparently, this was “very, very serious,” as The Guardian reports.
So planners changed the route.
The new cable avoided Dobby’s imaginary grave while also avoiding actual Bronze Age burial remains nearby. We put this in the plainest terms possible: a fictional dead elf got roughly the same consideration as ancient dead humans.
The cable is now operational, and Dobby remains undisturbed. So… win-win, I guess?
Fans can keep on visiting his memorial and leaving stones to honor him, and now they can take pride in the fact that they rerouted millions of dollars of infrastructure as they moved a cable that links the power grids of two nations, all underground, and all because they are emotionally attached to a dead CGI elf.
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