LIT-319: Modern Day Journal of Katherina Minola (Module 3 Journal)
September 19, 2025
My Bedroom
Remember when Taylor Swift got called a snake by everyone in 2018 and then basically disappeared for a bit? I can’t blame her. The world branded her with one word and expected her to crawl away in shame. And for a while, she did, but I don’t blame her for it. I feel like I understand her more than anything.
Apparently, I’m a “shrew.” That’s my whole brand now, courtesy of this delightful arranged-marriage situation my Baba is planning. Baba doesn’t know everyone calls me a shrew because of the very man he expects me to marry.
Snake! – Kanye to Taylor.
Shrew! – Petruchio to me.
People hardly bother with my actual name anymore; it’s easier to reduce me to a shrew, I guess. But here’s the thing…Taylor took “snake” and built her award-winning album Reputation out of it; she turned insult into anthem. It’s one of her most iconic albums.
So, fine. If the world wants a shrew, I’ll give them one.
Snap, snarl, scowl, repeat.
At least then I’m the one who controls the narrative.
But the truth? I’m not actually a shrew. I just have opinions. Allah forbids a girl from having options, opinions, and a fondness for debate. A raised eyebrow here, a sharp word there, and suddenly I’ve turned into public enemy number one.
My future husband would disagree.
I can’t forget that.
My so-called “shrewishness” is armor. It blunts the sharpest retort; it muffles the cruelest laughter and keeps hurtful words at bay. I think it’s better to be feared than be pitied. And yes, most people fear me…or at least find me intimidating enough to keep their distance.
But then there’s Petruchio.
Loud, insufferable Petruchio, who doesn’t flinch from my bite. He treats my cutting words like theatre, like his own personal entertainment. He claps for the performance and then still insists on marrying me. I slash him with words like knives and he just…laughs. Worse, he comes back…pressing, pursuing, and refusing to be shaken by me.
Again.
And again.
It’s never-ending really.
Part of me despises it. Another part, the part I’d rather bury, wonders if maybe he sees through the armor. If maybe he recognizes something softer beneath, a truth I’ve buried so long I’ve nearly forgotten it myself.
Those pieces (fragile, tender, unguarded) are more like my sister Bianca. Pieces that dream of gentleness, of simple evenings filled with kindness rather than combat. I keep them hidden because if I let him see that girl, the one who aches for softness in the quiet of night, then he’d have the power to wound me more deeply than anyone else ever could.
Supernatural magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream dramatizes the irrationality of love and the uncontrollable forces shaping human desire. Shakespeare uses mischievous fairies, enchanted forests, and love potions to highlight how quickly affection can shift when manipulated by powers outside human control. His playful use of magic contrasts with Elizabethan anxieties about witchcraft and spirits and yet, it also mirrors them in its fascination with the great unknown.
Elizabethan audiences, who were steeped in superstition, found both allure and fear in stories of fairies, demons, and witches (Bladen & Brailowsky, 2020). BBC Teach notes that “Even in Shakespeare’s day people were extremely superstitious. During the Elizabethan era people blamed unexplainable events such as the Bubonic Plague, unexplained deaths or unpleasant illnesses – as the work of witches” (BBC Teach, 2025). Shakespeare’s genius was to reframe these dark cultural fears as comedic mischief rather than existential threat, offering his audiences the chance to laugh at forces they might otherwise dread.
Shakespeare’s treatment of magical interference in love is both timeless and adaptable. By softening Elizabethan fears of witchcraft into a comic exploration of relationships, he helped set the stage (literally and figuratively) for future storytellers. From Rowling’s tragic love potion in Harry Potter to the demonic seductions in K-Pop Demon Hunters, the same theme of magical manipulation continues to reveal humanity’s unease with love’s irrationality.
Elizabethan society was deeply concerned with the supernatural. Folklore, sermons, and pamphlets frequently described fairies and witches, inciting both allure and distress (Bladen, V., & Brailowsky, Y. 2020). During the Elizabethan era people blamed unexplainable events such as plague and deformities, unexplained deaths or unpleasant illnesses as the work of witches or magic (“Shakespeare, Witchcraft and the Supernatural,” 2025). While accusations of witchcraft could be deadly, Shakespeare uses comedy of magic for his audience rather than tragedy in Midsummer. His fairies embody playful chaos rather than genuine threats, which was more in line with the highlander’s belief in mischievous spirits who stole shoes and played tricks on unsuspecting folk (Bladen & Brailowsky, 2020). Audiences were likely drawn to the play’s lighthearted treatment of magic in a time when being a witch or demon could have resulted in your burning at the stake.
Ultimately, magic continues to shape stories of love well beyond Shakespeare’s time, reflecting timeless anxieties about desire and control. Shakespeare integrates supernatural magic into every plotline of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The most prominent example is Oberon’s love potion, which Puck applies mistakenly to Lysander’s eyes, leading him to fall in love with Helena. As Lysander declares: “The will of man is by his reason swayed, / And reason says you are the worthier maid” (Shakespeare, 2004c). He’s stating that his will is predetermined and cannot be swayed; he does not question the sudden change beyond knowing he is now in love with Helena. This sudden reversal of affection demonstrates how magic influences the characters’ rational choices and creates chaos in the various established human relationships.
Similarly, Demetrius, who had originally pursued Hermia, suddenly becomes enamored with Helena after receiving the potion as well. Poor Helena, overwhelmed by the sudden attention from both males, cries, “O spite! O hell! I see you all are bent / To set against me for your merriment / if you were civil and knew courtesy, you would not do me thus much injury…” (Shakespeare). She is cursing the irrationality of love, while Shakespeare generates comedy from Helena’s assumption that she is the victim of male mockery rather than believing that Demetrius might be enchanted since they are in a fantastical wood.
Placed in its cultural context, Shakespeare’s decision to present fairies as mischievous rather than malicious represents a departure from the darker portrayals of witchcraft in Elizabethan culture. Indeed, Elizabethan audiences, wary of witchcraft trials and sermons condemning sorcery, could enjoy the play because it framed magic as a source of amusement rather than real-world fear and terror. Theatres were society entertainment, where the supernatural could be explored without threatening social order or expectations, like how society today watches TV shows like Stranger Things and The Walking Dead. By presenting Oberon and Puck as tricksters rather than villains, Shakespeare engaged with audiences that magic could be playful, even fun!
Magic appears elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works as well, though with very different effects. In Macbeth, the witches manipulate fate through prophecy, telling Macbeth he “shalt be king hereafter,” a prediction that spurs paranoia, violence, and tyranny (Shakespeare, 2004). Unlike Oberon and Puck in Midsummer, who disrupt love for comedy, the witches create tragedy by weaponizing the supernatural to erode human reason. This contrast shows Shakespeare’s versatility: he could turn the same cultural fear of witchcraft into either laughter or horror depending on genre.
A similar dynamic emerges in Romeo and Juliet, where the supernatural is less explicit but fate and dream imagery drive the tragic love story. Romeo himself declares, “I fear too early, for my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars” (Shakespeare, 2004). Here, destiny functions much like Oberon’s potion or Macbeth’s prophecy: an unseen force disrupting human will. Together, these works show that Shakespeare repeatedly returned to the theme of forces beyond human control—sometimes to amuse, sometimes to terrify, but always to investigate the instability of human desire.
Supernatural magic continues to be applied in modern literature and media. In the early 2000’s kids were reading fantasy exclusively, being drawn to the unexplained and magical worlds. In today’s day and age, fantasy and romance have rebounded in pop culture. Two significant examples from two different eras are J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series from the early 2000’s and the 2025 Netflix animated film K-Pop Demon Hunters.
In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Rowling introduces one of the darkest uses of supernatural magic in her series through the story of Merope Gaunt. Desperate to escape her abusive family and to bind the handsome Tom Riddle to her, Merope resorts to a love potion, or an act of magical coercion designed to create a relationship that does not exist naturally. At first, the potion seems successful: Riddle believes he is in love with her, marries her, and even lives with her for a time. Yet the illusion was fragile. Once Merope allows the potion to wear off after getting pregnant, the fabricated bond shatters, leaving Riddle horrified at his situation: “He left her, never saw her again, and never troubled to discover what became of his son” (Rowling, 2005).
This storyline mirrors Oberon’s manipulation of the Athenian lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the use of a love potion causes irrational, unexplained shifts of affection. Shakespeare presents this situation as a source of comedy, drawing humor from mismatched love and mistaken desires. Yet Rowling reimagines the trope as a tragedy. Merope’s attempt to force affection through magic compels readers to confront difficult ethical questions about consent and the moral limits of love.
In Shakespeare’s play, Oberon ultimately seeks restoration and harmony, instructing Puck to reverse the enchantments that played with love:
“Then crush this herb into Lysander's eye;
Whose liquor hath this virtuous property,
To take from thence all error with his might,
And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight.
… And back to Athens shall the lovers wend,
With league whose date till death shall never end” (Shakespeare, 2004).
Oberon’s intervention ensures that the lovers are reconciled, their temporary chaos resolved into lasting unity. Merope’s actions, by contrast, generate devastation rather than reconciliation: her potion leads not to restored harmony but to abandonment, tragedy, and the birth of Voldemort, a figure incapable of love who becomes the series villain. Rowling makes this connection explicit, remarking that everything would have changed if Merope had survived and raised him herself and loved him (Anelli, 2007). In other words, Voldemort’s incapacity to love is rooted in his very origins. He was conceived without genuine affection, and he was deprived of maternal care, so he grows into the antithesis of the very force that defines Rowling’s series.
In Midsummer, love potions destabilize relationships but ultimately restore them, resolving anxieties about the irrationality of desire with laughter. In Rowling’s narrative, however, the potion becomes a symbol of perverse manipulation. Both works examine the vulnerability of human emotions to magical forces, but in different ways, and both ways work well in the sense of comedy vs. epic.
K-Pop Demon Hunters situates supernatural magic within a post-internet, globalized cultural framework. The animated musical follows Huntr/x, a K-pop group who must navigate their public lives as K-pop idols while secretly fighting against demonic forces trying to steal human souls. Much like Athens versus the enchanted forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the film constructs dual realms: the visible, human world of pop performance and the concealed, magical world of demons. This use of geolocational cues helps the audience in Midsummer imagine the magic existing alongside Athens, in what Johnson (2020) calls a locus amœnus. Similarly in K-Pop Demon Hunters, Huntr/x exists in the human world, but the demons exist alongside them and cause mischief, much like Puck, hidden from the view of Huntr/x’s audience.
The film also explores the theme of emotional manipulation, directly echoing Oberon and Puck’s disruptive potions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In one memorable song, the demons sing, “You know I’m the only one who’ll love your sins; Feel the way my voice gets underneath your skin,” using the song as both seduction and assault in their attempt to prevent Huntr/x from sealing the barrier between worlds. Their voices have a magical quality that makes humans go into a trance, and do anything the demons say, leaving them susceptible to ruined relationships.
For a brief time, Jinu (a demon) appears to admire Rumi’s bravery and resilience, impressed by her defiance of her demon marks and her loyalty to the other two Huntr/x members. Yet this intimacy is originally deceptive. Jinu ultimately betrays Rumi, turning her compassion into a weakness. He manipulates her devotion, transforming two demons into false images of her friends and forcing her to expose her demon lines to the world. In doing so, her love and trust, once her greatest sources of strength, became vulnerabilities that were exploited.
This fraught relationship between Rumi and Jinu recalls Helena’s anguished cry in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind” (Shakespeare, 2004c). Helena delivers these lines during a monologue as she reflects on her unrequited love for Demetrius. She is expressing that love is often irrational and does not adhere to logical rules. Just as Helena’s misplaced love blinds her, Rumi’s faith in Jinu blinds her to his secrets and lies. Both works portray magic as a destabilizing force that reshapes emotional reality, raising enduring questions about the authenticity of love and the ease with which it could be corrupted by manipulation, magic or not.
When compared with Shakespeare’s works, Harry Potter and K-Pop Demon Hunters reflect cultural concerns unique to their times. Shakespeare used comedy to soften Elizabethan fears about witchcraft by aligning it with a love story; Rowling highlights ethics and consent in her story by making the potion the leading cause of the antagonist’s slip into evil; and K-pop Demon Hunters situates supernatural themes within the modern culture, exploring how magic intersects with identity, performance, and love. Despite these differences, all three works share a fascination with how magic influences forces outside human control like love and friendship.
Supernatural magic remains a vibrant theme in literature and media because it captures a universal truth: love and human behavior are often shaped by forces we cannot control. Whether we call it fate, fortune, or fairies—we are all susceptible to it. Shakespeare’s ability to blend cultural anxieties with comic relief explains why his legacy still endures in contemporary culture.
The echoes of Oberon’s potion are unmistakable in Rowling’s tragic love potion and in the demonic seductions of K-Pop Demon Hunters. Each retelling reflects its own cultural moment: Shakespeare softened witchcraft fears with laughter, Rowling provoked ethical questions about consent, and K-pop Demon Hunters staged the supernatural within the hyper-modern world of pop stardom and identity. In each case, Shakespeare’s legacy shapes how love and magic are performed, questioned, and reimagined in today’s society where science, technology, and reason are looked to as fact.
Looking ahead, Shakespeare’s influence is unlikely to fade. Even as technology invents new “magic” like artificial intelligence and virtual reality, future storytellers will continue to wrestle with the same complexities about love, control, and desire. Just as Shakespeare’s audiences found comfort in seeing their superstitions reframed on stage, our own era will keep turning to art and music as a guide for imagining how the irrational and the supernatural shape what it means to be human.
References
Anelli, M. (2007, July 30). J.K. Rowling web chat transcript. The-Leaky-Cauldron.org. https://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/7/30/j-k-rowling-web-chat-transcript/
BBC Teach. (2025). Shakespeare, witchcraft and the supernatural. https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/articles/zvfyd6f
Besson, A. (2025). Shakespeare and fantasy: A magical story. Bibliothèque nationale de France. https://fantasy.bnf.fr/en/understand/shakespeare-and-fantasy-magical-story/
Bladen, V., & Brailowsky, Y. (2020). Shakespeare and the supernatural. Manchester University Press.
Creighton, J. E. (2011). Pity those who live without love: The function of love in Harry Potter (Master’s thesis, State University of New York College at Brockport). SUNY Open Access Repository. https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/6283
Johnson, L. (2020). Puck, Philostrate and the locus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s topical allegory. In V. Bladen & Y. Brailowsky (Eds.), Shakespeare and the supernatural (pp. 157–172). Manchester University Press.
Rowling, J. K. (2005). Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Scholastic.
Shakespeare, W. (2004a). Macbeth (B. A. Mowat & P. Werstine, Eds.; Updated ed.). Folger Shakespeare Library.
Shakespeare, W. (2004b). Romeo and Juliet (B. A. Mowat & P. Werstine, Eds.; Updated ed.). Folger Shakespeare Library.
Shakespeare, W. (2004c). A Midsummer Night’s Dream (B. A. Mowat & P. Werstine, Eds.; Updated ed.). Folger Shakespeare Library.
The theme of supernatural magic is central to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bothersome fairies, enchanted forests, and spells drive the plot and highlight how love and human behavior are influenced by forces beyond our control. In Shakespeare’s late sixteenth-century context, the supernatural carried both fear and fascination; audiences believed in fairies, witches, and unseen powers (BBC, 2025). Rather than presenting these figures as terrifying, Shakespeare makes them playful troublemakers who stir up trouble for humans in a realistic Athens in a comedic and chaotic way (Johnson, 2020).
The supernatural theme appears in every major plotline of the play. Oberon’s love potion causes Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena to fall in and out of love, creating a love-square of mismatched couples. Bottom’s transformation into a donkey-headed man adds humor, while also reflecting anxieties at the time about unnatural change and dark magic. By writing his story into both illusion and a believable reality, Shakespeare’s work suggests that love itself is unpredictable, irrational, and magical.
Ultimately, supernatural magic is a prominent theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it reflects humanity’s endless fascination with how love, fate, and emotion create and shape the life they live. While Shakespeare’s audience saw magic as both entertainment and danger, modern readers and viewers still turn to fantasy and magic to explore the same questions. From fairies to demons, to today’s push for more romantasy, the theme of magic continues to be loved by audiences because it captures the universal truth that our lives are shaped by forces that we cannot always control.
References
BBC. (2025). Shakespeare, witchcraft and the supernatural. BBC Teach. https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/articles/zvfyd6f
Besson, A. (2025). Shakespeare and fantasy: A magical story. Bibliothèque nationale de France. https://fantasy.bnf.fr/en/understand/shakespeare-and-fantasy-magical-story/
Johnson, L. (2020). 7 Puck, Philostrate and the locus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s topical allegory. In V. Bladen & Y. Brailowsky (Eds.), Shakespeare and the supernatural (pp. 157–172). Manchester University Press.
Shakespeare, W. (2004). A midsummer night’s dream (B. A. Mowat & P. Werstine, Eds.; Updated ed.). Folger Shakespeare Library.
SparkNotes Editors. (2005). A midsummer night’s dream. SparkNotes. https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/msnd/
