Between seeing We are Wizards at SXSW last month, Elisabeth's excellent Geek Beat column on cosplay and costuming (that's her at the right, dressed as Queen Gorgo), JK Rowling squaring off in court with Steven Vander Ark over this Harry Potter Lexicon, and following the wonderful Twilight fan sites more closely of late, I feel like I've been double-dipped in fandom recently. All this has got me thinking on the concept of fandom and fantasy and what drives people (like myself) to obsess about fictional worlds and characters, and where the line is between healthy love and admiration for books and films and unhealthy obsession.

Don't get me wrong here ... I totally love fansites.. Fans who maintain fansites give hours and hours of their personal time to keeping those sites going, and when sites get popular, they have to recruit other obsessed fans to help them out, all while maintaining the quality of the site and keeping away trolls (and, in the case of Twilight Moms, maybe a few irate spouses to boot!) But how much is too much?

A Harry Potter fan broke down on the stand in court yesterday during the trial for the case brought against him and RDR Books by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling over a published version of a Harry Potter lexicon. According to this AP piece over on Yahoo about the trial, Steven Vander Ark, a devoted (some might say slightly obsessed) fan of the Harry Potter series, got turned onto all-things-Harry while working as a children's librarian at a Christian school; since then, the now 50-year-old fan has devoted countless hours to building and maintaining the online Harry Potter Lexicon, one of the most popular web sites for fans of the series.

Of course, we've all been following this story for a while now. Rowling never took issue with the website, which included lists compiling all the characters, creatures and spells from the massive and hugely successful series. The trouble started when RDR contacted Vander Ark about doing a print version of the Lexicon. Vander Ark was smart enough to get a clause in his contract that specified the publisher would be responsible for legal expenses if they got sued for copyright infringement -- bet he's glad now he thought ahead about that.

At a reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Friday night at Carnegie Hall, author J.K. Rowling revealed what many fans have suspected all along: Albus Dumbledore is gay. The outing of Dumbledore came during a question and answer period following the reading, when a young fan asked if Dumbledore ever found true love. "Dumbledore is gay," Rowling responded. Gasps, prolonged applause. So now it's official, Potter fans, Dumbledore is out of the closet.

Rowling, who has since the publication of the final book in her enormously popular series, revealed to fans bits and pieces of the back stories that aren't in any of the books, further elaborated that Dumbledore was smitten by his former friend and later rival Grindelwald, who figures heavily into the last book, and that his love for Grindelwald blinded him for a while to the Grindelwald's true nature. Rowling called Dumbledore's love for Grindelwald, "his great tragedy" before noting with a laugh, "Oh, my god, the fan fiction!"

Rowling revealed that while working on the planned sixth Harry Potter film, she noticed a reference in the script to a girl Dumbledore once loved, and passed a note to the director, David Yates, revealing to him the truth about Dumbledore's sexuality. Fans have long suspected Dumbledore was gay -- he's had no significant relationship with a woman, and his past has always been clouded in mystery.

Rowling noted that some Christian groups already don't like the Harry Potter series because the books allegedly promote witchcraft. Dumbledore being gay, as she noted will give them one more thing to not like about it. Not that Rowling -- or most Harry Potter fans -- seems to care.

The first Harry Potter book begins with Harry's parents dying because author J.K. Rowling, dealing with the death of her own mother, decided to burden her boy hero with the death of his own parents, Rowling said in an interview published in Tuesdays Daily Telegraph newspaper.  Rowling's mother died without ever knowing of her daughter's literary success, and Rowling said her biggest regret is not being able to tell her mother all that's happened. Rowling recalls she had started writing Harry Potter at the time her mother died of multiple sclerosis on New Years Day, 1991. (Note: spoilers after the jump)