When I was eight years old, I stumbled upon the Harry Potter series. My brother had read them a few years earlier, but I was too young and did not have the attention span to stick with the massive books. When I was reintroduced to them as a third-grader, I was instantly swept away. That feeling was only made stronger when I met Hermione Granger. From the first words she says, the audience knows that she is a smart girl who is not ashamed of it. As a young girl, I was taken aback by that. I had been in school for a few years at this point, and I was always raising my hand to answer questions, staying after to talk to my teachers, and helping other students. I was seen as “the smart girl”, and I was beginning to be ashamed of that. Hermione Granger stopped that in its tracks. I saw another girl who was unabashedly smart, and who was admired and praised for that. She used her intelligence to save her friends’ lives, and without her, the story would have been completely different. I saw myself in this character, and that validated my intelligence and made me proud of who I was. Everyone deserves a character, and a moment like that. …show more content…
As a child, characters in novels were the only things that kept me being myself, and being proud of myself. I saw Hermione Granger and Annabeth Chase and other intelligent, passionate girls as myself; the only difference was the adventures they got to go on. When I grew up a little, I realized that not everyone had those characters. People of color and the LGBT+ community does not get the amount of representation that they deserve, and that is what I want to dive into with my T.H.I.S. project. I want to address the amount of representation that different groups get, and how that representation affects people; not seeing someone that looks like one’s family or friends can be damaging, and that is what I want to focus