The age of Harry Potter is not over, but we seem to be entering Harry’s late period. Like Voldemort, Harry can’t quite die—apart from everything else there’s just too much money in him—but with the arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, it looks like we’ve seen the last of the big stuff. From here on out, it’s all ancillary products and Snape/Harry fan fiction. The canon is becoming fixed and frozen. The Boy Who Lived is a man without a future.

(Actually, J. K. Rowling has said “I feel I am done, but you never know.” So it might not be over. But let’s say it is. For now.)

The world today is very different from the one the Hogwarts Express thundered into 14 years ago, when Bloomsbury printed 500 copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (most of which went to libraries). For one thing, each of those copies is now worth about $45,000.

For another, the fantasy industry has appreciated in value along with them. Harry proved to publishers that there was big money in that neglected genre. This had major consequences for me personally, and by “personally” I mean financially. I wrote a novel about young people learning to use magic—though not always very wisely. It came out in 2009, from a mainstream literary publisher, and it became a best seller. The sequel, The Magician King, comes out this month. No way would those things have happened without Harry Potter.

Which is nice for me, but more important is the way the Harry Potter bubble changed the whole genre. You can say what you like about the books as literature (I’m a fan, and even I have problems with them—for example, I think house-elves are gross), but they made fantasy better. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the 2000s have been the most innovative time in fantasy literature since the 1960s, led by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Susanna Clarke, China Miéville, and [your favorite here]. More writers are getting paid more money to publish more fantasy novels. The ecosystem is evolving and diversifying. All those Harry Potter sickles and galleons helped bring about fantasy’s equivalent of the Cambrian explosion.

Harry made it easier to be a fantasy reader, too. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, back when fantasy was—how can I put it?—not very popular. It’s hard to explain this to people who grew up with Harry, but back then fantasy was a beleaguered underground full of unclubbable children like myself who sucked at sports and had little child-sized social anxiety disorders. The idea that a fantasy novel could be a mass phenomenon, a normal thing that normal people were publicly, unashamedly into, was just not thinkable.

Harry Potter revealed a mass audience for fantasy that nobody was aware of, not even the people who were part of it. We were legion, and we didn’t even know it. Dostoevsky once said, “We all crawled out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” and it’s just as true to say that we all crawled out from under Harry’s cloak of invisibility. He made being a fantasy nerd cool. Or, no, that’s not quite right. We didn’t change. The world changed around us: Harry Potter made everyone a little bit uncool.