Harry Potter spawned no Fifty Shades–style commercial boom in YA-inspired erotica, but make no mistake: its shipper wars—the conflicts about romantic relationships between imaginary magical teenagers—were epic. The cultural importance of Harry Potter slash in particular—of which there was plenty—should not be discounted, because in an enormous global fandom, even subcultures are giant. Although the sexual life some fanfiction imagines for Harry Potter’s underage characters has long been a source of discomfort for their creator (and for a different set of fans), J. K. Rowling’s post-series announcement that beloved wizard Dumbledore was gay fixed in canon the kind of possibility in which fanfiction had long been dwelling. Harry Potter slash helped shape and challenge attitudes toward sexual diversity among the generation that grew up reading it and arguing about it (a lot) online.
Even today, when YA novels and television shows frequently thematize and represent sex between underage characters, much more often than not these stories present cautionary tales. They are stories of What Goes Wrong when you drink at a party, trust a boy, don’t use protection, go too far before you’re ready. These stories do not represent frank conversations about tastes and preferences and protection, gradations of gender and sexual orientation, or the mechanics of orgasm. Unsurprisingly, teens are eager for that information, and have never really needed adults to tell them that sex exists and that they may find it interesting. Where previous generations may have looked to parental porn stashes and the pages of Cosmopolitan, today’s teens increasingly find such information in fanfiction. They write it in fanfiction—and in some version or another, they always have. They used to write it in notebooks, and now they write it and share it online. Like it or not, this has become normal and public, a part of growing up for millions. If Twilight and Harry Potter have taught us anything, it’s that authorial intent has nothing to do with the afterlives of characters.
Lesson Three: Age Matters
Growing up reading and writing in online fanfiction communities has become widespread and has helped shape the thinking, reading, and writing habits of a generation of future writers. Many professional writers working today began their careers in fic. Some of these writers are erotica writers, sure. But it would be a mistake to see the cultural or even the economic impact of fanfiction only in terms of the number of published books it has generated directly. This shift to writing as a social, communal activity is already having a profound impact on the economics and production of fiction as well as on the relationships this fiction represents and itself forges and relies on.
When I say “age matters,” I mean the age of the fans, the fic writers and readers, but also of the internet itself. Harry Potter helped create the conditions for the Twilight phenomenon, paving its way both in the world of traditional commercial publishing and entertainment and in the online world of fan-generated culture. Not that Twilight fans always acknowledged or even knew of this debt. Although there was some overlap between the two fandoms, and some Twilight fans had participated in other fic fandoms, most—according to my research—had not. This lack of collective knowledge (and acknowledgment) of fan history and custom did not go unnoticed by those who did possess it. The same arguments—“These fans don’t know what they’re doing!” “And they’re doing it wrong!”—have been leveled by older fans against newer fans since literary science fiction fans belittled media fans, since zine producers belittled the internet. Certainly, the same criticisms were leveled against Harry Potter fans, too, but Harry Potter fans were on the front lines of establishing the mechanisms and traditions of online fandom on a massive scale, taking them outside of smaller subcultures to a much broader online audience. By the time Twilight fandom rolled around, internet fandom had set ways and patterns, and while Twilight fans by and large weren’t steeped in them, these established online cultures still provided basic models for fanwriting traditions such as awards, beta readers, feedback, disclaimers, and so forth. Twilight fans took these elements even more mainstream. Twifans were not coming from subcultures; they were often not self-identified geeks; and importantly, they were also more likely to be older, professional women with professional-grade skills and resources. By contrast, the people who built Harry Potter fandom were largely older teens and young adults in an era when web skills were still largely new to everyone—because the web was still new. By the time the Twilight fandom got going, it really wasn’t. In 1997, when Buffy premiered and the first Harry Potter book was released, household internet use in the United States was at 18 percent, and all dial-up. By 2007, two years after Twilight’s publication (but before the films that infused so much energy into the fic fandoms), home internet use was at 62 percent of households, and mostly broadband; by 2011, it was at 72 percent. Age matters.
It wasn’t just age, though, and it wasn’t just the internet. In terms of fanfiction itself, there were key differences between the two fandoms that had to do with fan writers’ attitudes toward their source material. Harry Potter inspired work that, however divergent in terms of the activities of the characters and the worlds they might visit, tended to stay closer to Rowling’s characterizations—emphasizing some, deemphasizing others, but remaining largely recognizable. Twilight fanfiction, however, evolved to maintain only the slightest structural connections to its originals and to draw equally if not more from other fics and fandom tropes. (Although this certainly happened in the Harry Potter fandom, it ultimately caused a lot of controversy.) In terms of fanfiction, then, if not in terms of scale and internet and social media use, Harry Potter operated more or less in keeping with tradition: fans creating works of homage and sometimes parody, but creating them primarily out of love. Twilight fic writers, on the other hand, could be ambivalent about their source. They might love it, but they might hate themselves a little for doing so. Or they might not even love it at all, but love the fiction-writing community, bound by its characters and the actors who play them. Whatever their differences, each megafandom revolutionized fan-based internet culture and marketing in its own way, each led to commercial and financial gain for a few prominent individuals in fandom, and each generated controversy. A lot.
Lesson Four: Wank Matters—Even Though Everyone Wishes It Didn’t
Greater wank hath no fan than to lay down one’s fic for one’s friends and then pick it up again and make millions. It’s not that individuals hadn’t profited from fanworks before Fifty Shades of Grey, or that fan writers hadn’t repurposed work or gone pro with other material, but there really wasn’t precedent for the scale of what happened with Twilight fanfiction going pro in 2011–2013. There was, however, plenty of precedent for wank big enough for even the biggest size queens.
Or Snowqueens, as the case may be.
As any Twifan could tell you, long before Snowqueens Icedragon changed some names in her popular fic “Master of the Universe” and published it as Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, the wank surrounding her, her attitudes, and her relationship to the fandom had already reached epic proportions. And long before Snowqueens Icedragon, there was the Harry Potter fandom’s Cassandra Claire—now better known as Cassandra Clare of the Mortal Instruments series (which has 7,000-plus fics on FanFiction.Net). Aside from their fandom origins and being lightning rods for controversy as popular authors, these two bestselling writers’ fandom histories have little in common. Cassandra Claire was a dedicated and central member of the Harry Potter fandom, participating in all kinds of ways, whereas Snowqueens Icedragon by her own account found the whole thing a little scary and preferred to hold herself a bit apart. The controversies that surrounded them, however, share a common element, and that has to do with ascribing credit—and eventually profit—to individuals for creative work that takes place in a collective culture of circulating texts and people.
In a less explicit way, of course, all creative work takes place in a circulating collective of texts and people. This is why fanfiction is interesting beyond the bounds of its own subculture, and why these controversie
s have higher stakes than some bruised egos, hurt feelings, or sour grapes.
The fandom dynamics of wank—though I do not believe they show off the best of fanfiction or fan communities—are telling because they often serve as proxy controversies for working out complex but more abstract arguments about the nature of authorship, textual boundaries, individual v. community ownership, and responsibility. Shipper wars—which long seemed incomprehensible to me, because I didn’t see how people could get so angry at other people for liking to read about the sex lives of different imaginary people—function in much the same way. For many fans, who you ship, and how you tell that story, stands for what kind of relationship you think is right, what fits. In all these fandom dynamics, the central question may be the same: Who gets to tell the story? And whose story is it? Jane Austen—also a popular fanfiction source—makes the stakes clear in Persuasion: when the men are the ones telling the story, only certain stories get told. Dramione shippers apparently feel the same way when too much attention is paid to Drarry. Online fan communities evolved to give as much space as possible to all the different stories people wanted to tell.
Indicative of the many blurring, shifting roles these enormous franchises and their fandoms create and sustain, Chris Rankin’s path within Harry Potter and its worlds took him from fan to movie actor to student of the fandom, writing a university thesis on the Harry Potter fandom. That 2012 thesis is excerpted and adapted here.
An Excerpt from Percy Weasley’s University Thesis
Chris Rankin
(Percy Weasley in the Harry Potter film series)
Joli Jenson, in The Adoring Audience, describes the preconception of fans: “The fan is consistently characterized (referencing the term’s origins) as a potential fanatic. This means that fandom is seen as excessive, bordering on deranged, behaviour.”74 She further suggests that there are two types of fan; the obsessed individual and the hysterical crowd. The interesting thing about the Harry Potter fan community, and something that separates it from the majority of fan communities, is that they are not fans, per se, of J. K. Rowling, Warner Bros., Daniel Radcliffe, or of any other individual. They are fans of a book series, its related subjects. In their hearts, what they connect with is the literature, and the message it sends out.
In 2000, the internet, which had been available for some time, had become massively accessible to users across the globe. With the announcement that Warner Bros. was to cast and produce a film based on J. K. Rowling’s first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, fans turned to the internet to see what they could find out. The answer, at the time, was very little. The solution was to create the information. From this, the Harry Potter fan community, as we see it today, evolved. What is remarkable, in my opinion, is the way that online social media has changed how our culture views fandom.
Personally, I have been active in the Harry Potter fan community since its early days. I joined a forum no longer in existence called the Unofficial Harry Potter Movie Site (UHPMS), which latterly became Harry Potter Connection, in September 2000. I had recently been cast as Percy Weasley in the first of the film series, and was curious to see what the fan world was speculating about the forthcoming films. I was immediately swept along with the outpourings of love and affection for a book series that had been a large part of my life for the two years prior to my audition. The friends I made through that website are still close to my heart twelve years later. That particular forum sparked long-term relationships, and even marriages.
At the time, Warner Bros. was still very wary of the fan community. Filming was taking place under a veil of secrecy and very little was allowed to be said. I wasn’t allowed to announce my role in the franchise for almost six months after I had been cast, in order to stave off press attention. My presence on these particular message boards was relatively anonymous. Initially, I registered under the username iampercyweasley, proclaiming that I had been lucky enough to be cast in the role. I was shot down in flames almost immediately. Thankfully, one of the moderators, Richard Cresswell, contacted me to confirm this claim, before suggesting that I re-register under a more subtle name and continue my participation anonymously, until such time that I could prove, and people would be able to believe, that I was indeed a member of the cast.
For my eighteenth birthday celebrations, I invited members of the forum to a charity screening of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which had opened the weekend previous. A number of them came to visit from as far away as Toronto and Seattle, and thus began for me a wonderful relationship with the fan community. Today, I am still actively involved with the community and am a regular guest at conventions around the world. I have spoken at length about my views on the fan community and its importance to the continuation of the franchise, and I have taken part in academic discussions about the films and books. I cherish my relationship with the fans, simply because, at heart, I am one of them. I am just very lucky to be involved with the franchise in many different ways.
The Harry Potter fan community is arguably the biggest and most dedicated of them all, and it can be divided into two main camps: book fans and film fans. Of course, these camps often overlap, and others have sprung forth from them: those devoted to creating fanfiction, fanart, etc. This community of fans is special for a number of reasons. Not only have the founding members been dedicated to the cause since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in June 1997, but they can also be held predominantly responsible for the creation of the first truly global internet-based fan community. Harry Potter fans can find solace in hundreds of websites dedicated to all things Harry Potter. MuggleNet, The Leaky Cauldron, HPANA (The Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator), Veritaserum, SnitchSeeker, Harry Potter Fan Zone, and others all dedicate their time to providing news and speculation on the books, films, related actors, production teams, and the like, along with hosting forums for the users to share their views, create discussions, share author fanfictions, and share artwork and, generally, everything they love that has anything to do with The Boy Wizard and his friends. This online community spirit has sparked successful ventures into the real world. A company called HPEF, Harry Potter Education Fanon, Inc., is “a US based educational non-profit organization committed to producing academic symposia on the Harry Potter books and cultural phenomenon.”75 Over the past ten years, HPEF has held these conventions in cities across America, including Salem, Massachusetts; San Francisco; Las Vegas; Dallas; and Orlando, Florida, to celebrate the opening of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal’s Islands of Adventure.
The fansites are, however, only the tip of the iceberg. Another huge and more recent development in this fan community is Wizard Rock, known to its fans as Wrock. These are bands who write and perform songs about all things Harry Potter. There are literally hundreds of them, from 142 Staircases, a name dedicated to the number of staircases in Hogwarts Castle, to The Zabini Machine, named for Blaise Zabini, a minor character in the series. Some of these bands have made it to the “big time” in the fan world: their albums are available on iTunes, and they tour the United States, and sometimes even farther afield. At an HPEF convention in Florida in July 2010, the autograph line for the Wizard Rock bands was longer than that for actors in the films.
There are two key figures in the internet culture surrounding Harry Potter: Melissa Anelli, web mistress of The Leaky Cauldron, and Emerson Spartz, webmaster of MuggleNet. These two people are veritable superstars in the fan world. Anelli is a New York Times bestselling author with her semiautobiographical account of the history of the Harry Potter phenomenon: Harry, A History. Spartz is a successful entrepreneur; he founded MuggleNet at age eleven, and now acts as CEO of several websites. He oversees 120 volunteers and paid staff for MuggleNet alone, which in past years has raked in over $100,000 a year in advertising revenue. Fan musicals have become the latest trend to hit the community, with a group called Starkid Potter leading the way. They describe themselves as “an ensemb
le of writers, actors, directors, designers, producers, and other goof-offs [who] blend . . . live performance with the accessibility of the internet . . . [taking] the long-revered art of parody and fumblingly march[ing] forward with it into the 21st century.”76 Their first show, “A Very Potter Musical,” has nearly five million views on YouTube. They followed this with “A Very Potter Sequel.” Their brand of spoof has taken the fan world by storm, not only because they are unique, but because their productions are well penned and incredibly witty. Their leading man, Darren Criss, is now starring in Glee.
When podcasts became the latest craze in online media, the Harry Potter fan community leapt at the opportunity, with both The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet leading the way. Actors from the films started taking part in the early days of Leaky Cauldron’s podcast, PotterCast, in September 2005. As of this writing, there have been 265 MuggleCasts; PotterCast is planning to end its regular podcasting soon with its two hundred and fiftieth episode.
Harry Potter’s effect on the world of social media has been profound. The franchise began and boomed at the same time as the World Wide Web became widely accessible to users from the comfort of their own homes. Its brand managers soon realized that the internet was going to be a key player in their marketing strategy.
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 18