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And now I'm gonna ramble about another fandom entirely
Every once in awhile I go digging through old fic I used to read and I'm always amazed by how well some of it holds up. Most of it doesn't, of course! But I'm somehow always surprised by how good a lot of what I read was, particularly the HP fanfic.
I was never hugely into HP as a fan. I enjoyed the books, of course, but by the time HP came around I was just past that prime age of adolescence where you connect very strongly with certain media you consume. Plus, that spot was already occupied by the PpG, and would be for years to come. But for some reason, despite only a passing interest in HP itself, I got really sucked into the world of H/D slash!fic.
I never wrote for it, at least, not that I recall? I might've handwritten a fic for a friend of mine that I included with her Christmas card years ago, come to think, but I was never an active participant in fandom as a whole. I just remember being... completely and totally floored by the quality of the fic. I was a teenager at the time, and up to that point had only read fic written by other pre-teens and teenagers. It wasn't necessarily bad stuff (though let's be fair, some of it was. Just. Just awful. Awful trash), it was just... you know, a bunch of teenagers exploring things and doing some wish fulfillment stuff that involved pushing two characters together face-first. With the occasional edgelord dude writing more mature fare that tended to deliver on plot (yay!) spiked with a heavy dose of unnecessarily misogynistic bullshit (NO).
As a teenager, though, I thought that was just how things were. So my first few fics fall in that vein, too. A little bit of exploring, but mostly fulfilling wishes, etc. And I was parroting the romance narratives that I had grown up with, which mostly stemmed from the same romcoms and TV soaps that the other (mostly) girls my age had grown up with.
And then I found the HP fic.
I honestly... don't even remember how I stumbled upon it. I don't know if H/D fic is something I went looking for (possibly?) or something I just fell into out of curiosity. My best guess is that I went into the HP section on ffnet to get a fix while I waited for the next book to come out, read some decent fic, and then, somehow, stumbled upon something that was absolutely incredible. Probably something by an author formerly known as amalin. IDEK if her masterpieces are still up anymore.
I think from there I must've wandered onto someone's LJ account via their ffnet profile, realized I could search for HP comms on LJ, and then located an LJ dedicated to excellent HP fic recs. And that's where my fannish young mind was blown.
I wish I could convey how astonishing and inspirational that discovery was for me. I remember reading stuff that haunted me – and not haunted me in the sense of “I need this to be updated, I need to know what happens.” Stuff that haunted me in the way unrequited love haunts you, the way grief does. I read stuff that burrowed into my bones and stayed with me for years. The takes on relationships, on war, on internal conflict and self-denial – I knew that fic was just stories, but HP fic showed me that it could be an art in and of itself.
I think it helped that HP fandom was as big as it was. With as big a pool as it was drawing from, the cream of the crop got identified fairly quickly – anything less than exceptional was overlooked. It wouldn't take off unless it was that good. And that's not to say that there weren't patterns or tropes that you started to see reflected across multiple authors. (I mean, if any fandom could claim to have a circle-jerk of authors patting themselves and their friends on the backs over and over again, it was HP. And ohhhh, the drama and the wank I witnessed in that fandom...)
I think... the other thing that aided HP fandom was the make of the fans that wrote it. Adult women – mostly in their 20s, possibly 30+. (Mostly women, not all.) But that, there, was another perspective that had been missing from my early fandom years. To explore the imaginations of grown women when I had previously been surrounded by fellow adolescents echoing the stories we'd grown up with (and dudes that wrote either gory action fics or porn, always one or the other and never anything in between) was like throwing open a window I had never even realized existed. And oh, the light it cast upon the room.
ETA: If any of you are curious, this is the first of many HP fics I remember reading that floored me from the start. Tied Up Between the Lines.
I was never hugely into HP as a fan. I enjoyed the books, of course, but by the time HP came around I was just past that prime age of adolescence where you connect very strongly with certain media you consume. Plus, that spot was already occupied by the PpG, and would be for years to come. But for some reason, despite only a passing interest in HP itself, I got really sucked into the world of H/D slash!fic.
I never wrote for it, at least, not that I recall? I might've handwritten a fic for a friend of mine that I included with her Christmas card years ago, come to think, but I was never an active participant in fandom as a whole. I just remember being... completely and totally floored by the quality of the fic. I was a teenager at the time, and up to that point had only read fic written by other pre-teens and teenagers. It wasn't necessarily bad stuff (though let's be fair, some of it was. Just. Just awful. Awful trash), it was just... you know, a bunch of teenagers exploring things and doing some wish fulfillment stuff that involved pushing two characters together face-first. With the occasional edgelord dude writing more mature fare that tended to deliver on plot (yay!) spiked with a heavy dose of unnecessarily misogynistic bullshit (NO).
As a teenager, though, I thought that was just how things were. So my first few fics fall in that vein, too. A little bit of exploring, but mostly fulfilling wishes, etc. And I was parroting the romance narratives that I had grown up with, which mostly stemmed from the same romcoms and TV soaps that the other (mostly) girls my age had grown up with.
And then I found the HP fic.
I honestly... don't even remember how I stumbled upon it. I don't know if H/D fic is something I went looking for (possibly?) or something I just fell into out of curiosity. My best guess is that I went into the HP section on ffnet to get a fix while I waited for the next book to come out, read some decent fic, and then, somehow, stumbled upon something that was absolutely incredible. Probably something by an author formerly known as amalin. IDEK if her masterpieces are still up anymore.
I think from there I must've wandered onto someone's LJ account via their ffnet profile, realized I could search for HP comms on LJ, and then located an LJ dedicated to excellent HP fic recs. And that's where my fannish young mind was blown.
I wish I could convey how astonishing and inspirational that discovery was for me. I remember reading stuff that haunted me – and not haunted me in the sense of “I need this to be updated, I need to know what happens.” Stuff that haunted me in the way unrequited love haunts you, the way grief does. I read stuff that burrowed into my bones and stayed with me for years. The takes on relationships, on war, on internal conflict and self-denial – I knew that fic was just stories, but HP fic showed me that it could be an art in and of itself.
I think it helped that HP fandom was as big as it was. With as big a pool as it was drawing from, the cream of the crop got identified fairly quickly – anything less than exceptional was overlooked. It wouldn't take off unless it was that good. And that's not to say that there weren't patterns or tropes that you started to see reflected across multiple authors. (I mean, if any fandom could claim to have a circle-jerk of authors patting themselves and their friends on the backs over and over again, it was HP. And ohhhh, the drama and the wank I witnessed in that fandom...)
I think... the other thing that aided HP fandom was the make of the fans that wrote it. Adult women – mostly in their 20s, possibly 30+. (Mostly women, not all.) But that, there, was another perspective that had been missing from my early fandom years. To explore the imaginations of grown women when I had previously been surrounded by fellow adolescents echoing the stories we'd grown up with (and dudes that wrote either gory action fics or porn, always one or the other and never anything in between) was like throwing open a window I had never even realized existed. And oh, the light it cast upon the room.
ETA: If any of you are curious, this is the first of many HP fics I remember reading that floored me from the start. Tied Up Between the Lines.