A lot of drama on the Shifting Community (pretty big on TikTok, but some other places as well.) I say all this as someone who observed this from afar. For those fortunate enough not to have heard of shifting or reality shifting, here’s the theory: We live in a multiverse of infinite realities and in each reality there is some version of you. Because the multiverse is literally infinite, there are infinite realities in which the world of your favorite show/book/movie/etc. actually exists and there’s a version of you in many of those realities.
Shifting is the idea that while you sleep you can consciously access these realities via these infinite versions of yourself and live in them. There’s at least one reality in which you are a Jedi. There’s at least one reality in which you’re an elf in Middle Earth, and so on. You can actually control what happens, which is called scripting. Before you try to shift while you sleep, you write out your age, what you look like, what your background is in your Target Reality (the one you’re trying to shift to.) Therefore, you can script yourself to be a teenage student at Hogwarts and you determine how those characters act towards you. Because realities are infinite, there’s a “real” universe where Harry Potter is the bad guy and you can shift to that world if you want. If you don’t see where this is going, a lot of young folks “use” this method to go to different realities and bonk with their favorite characters and will often report their “findings” and experiences on TikTok.
If you’re thinking “Isn’t this just lucid dreaming?”, “This just sounds like using your imagination.”, or “Isn’t this a lot like that astral projection trend that made the rounds on Tumblr a while back and became a meme?” Let me tell you why shifters believe it’s different. This isn’t playing pretend because you’re actually going to an actually reality that actually exists. Anything you do in these realities has actual consequences because the characters you interact with are real people. If you kill a character while shifting, you are actually guilty of real murder.
So you can see how this goes downhill real fast. Shifting is very popular in the Harry Potter community on TikTok (you don’t want to know about DracoTok...) One person posted a shifting experience in which they took the Dark Mark in Draco’s place and was accused of actually joining a hate movement voluntarily (there was a lot of “you literally joined the Nazis” stuff thrown around...) and a lot of fighting on the morals of actually becoming a Death Eater.
It got messy too when the morals of shifting to bone fictional characters came about, particularly in regards to Harry Potter characters who are under 18 for the vast majority of the series. If you are a shifter over the age of 18 scripting yourself as a teenage student of Hogwarts to be romantically involved with a fictional character, you’re a literal predator. Even if you age up the characters in your shifting script, it’s still problematic because all the material in our reality is based on teenage characters, basically. It’s all very, very weird and yes it’s stupid.
There was a jokey TikTok posted where on person was trolling and claimed they scripted Draco to be a soft and sensitive person (remember, there is a reality where this version of Draco exists according to shifters) and hit him. Then she kept hitting while he cried and ended up accidentally killing Draco Malfoy. Many people missed that this was obviously a joke making fun of shifting and told her that she should go to jail in this reality for actual murder. I’ll be honest, the thought of someone actually standing trial for murdering a fictional character in a lucid dream/imagination exercise is really funny. There’s a link to this somewhere but I don’t have time to dig it up right now.
EDIT: u/irrelevant_probably (sorry if I didn’t tag the user name right) provided the link in the comments below to the tumblr discussion around this last part and here it is:
https://esoanem.tumblr.com/post/647623850838851584/im-glad-ppl-on-tiktok-are-doing-ok-good-lord-yeah