author_by_night | OMA: First Fanworks

So I'm doing some Harry Potter fandom entries for the anniversaries of the first and last books respectively coming up. I asked my friends to ask me some things about my time in the fandom/thoughts on HP fandom in general. There's still plenty of time to do so!

I'm going to answer one of

makamu 's questions: The first fanfics I ever read and/or wrote. I'll keep this public.

I should note that I already knew what fanfic was when I got into the Harry Potter fandom, so it didn't take me long to search. Therefore, I can't really say exactly what the very first fics were, but I can list them!

- Cassandra Claire's Draco Dormiens. I actually thought it was going to be a funny fic based on the description (Harry and Draco switch bodies), and was a little disappointed that it wasn't a Freaky Friday parody. So I stopped reading them.

- A fic called Lily, about Lily Potter.

- A lovely fic I forget the title of, unfortunately, but while it's not remotely canon now it's still good. It was about Harry adopting Dudley and his wife's Muggleborn daughter post-Hogwarts.

- A Marauder fic called Snapdragon and Prongs, about Lily and James Potter.

And 10 million other Marauder fanfics. :P Although I still read Harry Potter fanfiction, I actually steer clear of Marauder fics - while some of it is that what we learned in canon was a little different from the Three Year Summer version of MWPP (if not necessarily wholly incompatible*), you can only read so many versions of a story so many times before it gets a little old.

*There are so many interpretations of the Marauders that I could go on for longer than I think anyone has time, but ultimately I think fandom made them out to be... much more honorable and saintly than they were. On the other hand, I think some readers came away with the impression that the Marauders were meant to secretly be sociopathic bullies, which I don't think is true. I think Snape was probably a creepy, weird kid when Lily wasn't around, the equivalent of that classmate IRL who has disturbing things written in his binder and glares at you for bumping into him, and Sirius and James were the kind of kids whose response was to take the creepy kid down a peg... every chance they got.

- Does anyone else remember this? A writer (maybe two writers?) had an MST3K/Austin Powers/Harry Potter crossover where Voldemort held the trio and Draco hostage and made them read bad fics, the fics being submitted by the writers themselves to avoid wank. Then the writer disappeared off of the face of the earth.

As for the first Harry Potter fics I wrote... oh boy. *Hides face behind hands* I wrote one about Ron falling in love with a Slytherin that was supposed to be Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending (guess what I was reading in English class?!), and... I think I've blocked the others from memory, meaning they were somehow even worse. :P

I did actually finish a novel-length fanfic, and while in retrospect it wasn't much better, I am still proud of the fact. It needed some serious beta reading, and while my OC wasn't a Mary Sue per se, she didn't really fit in with the universe very well. It was about Remus Lupin's younger sister and her friendship with Tonks. But I like that I managed to write and finish it, all the whime wrapping up my final year in high school.

I actually tried to fix her up a bit later on, so that she fit in better, and I could post fics about her on LJ sans embarrassment, but then Deathly Hallows happened and I couldn't go through with her character after that. I mean, killing off someone's best friend AND their brother is pretty brutal. JK Rowling has since released Remus's actual family backstory, and I prefer it to anything I ever wrote. :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

makamu

Thank you for answering that question! And I have just realised that we must have got into fandom about the same time (the Three-Year Summer), based on the fic you describe, though I think I am a wee bit younger than you...

Re the Marauders: I loved them to bits since POA (especially Remus - which is one of the major reasons the films don't work for me. My brain keeps going "They all look wrong!" whenever anyone but Maggie Smith of the older generation is on screen (Alan Rickman gets a pass for good acting and his voice, but he still looks off to me), and I was rather disapppointed by OOTP, initially. I still am, but I also admire JKR for making them less than saintly, in the end. I particularly like that Sirius, for all his political choices, is still a Black in some things.

As for Snape: he is one of my favourite characters now, but I am quite capable of distinguishing between fanon Snape and canon!Snape, both of whom push different trope buttons in my brain. And to be fair: canon!Snape being horrible towards Harry and Neville cannot and should not be explained *away* by his past. Though I wonder what it says abut their generation that I get the impression that *none of them* ever grew up? (not even Remus, whom I always wanted to be more mature than JKR ultimately wrote him as being): James and Lily never got the chance to, and the others all in one way or another had their lives defined by '81.

Edited (My mind was composing other sentences than those I was typing, which resulted in SPAG errors) Date: 2017-05-22 05:59 pm (UTC)

From:

author_by_night

Thank you for answering that question! And I have just realised that we must have got into fandom about the same time (the Three-Year Summer), based on the fic you describe, though I think I am a wee bit younger than you...

Yep. I got into fandom riiight before the release of the fourth book, although I don't think I really started reading fanfic until a few months after GoF came out.

As far as the Marauder goes, I do think fandom - myself included - made them out to be more collected than the third book even implied. I really think that the trio is actually who MWPP could've been, and the trio basically learns from them not to make those mistakes. I mean, Peter even almost ruins Ron, Harry and Hermione's friendship by faking his own death again. And Remus went the whole year keeping a huge secret about Sirius because he was ashamed of the lie he told Dumbledore.

I actually think being so trapped in the past and overall pretty screwed up actually makes them more interesting as characters, but it also makes their story tragic, rather than the more hopeful story the Three Year Summer fandom went for. As I remember it, hardly anyone envisioned Sirius or Remus being killed off, or even that they would have a lot of the issues they ended up having. Snape seemed to be 50/50, and a lot of fics had him become nicer post-GoF, or at least more "on board" than he ended up being.

From:

makamu

Yep. I got into fandom riiight before the release of the fourth book, although I don't think I really started reading fanfic until a few months after GoF came out.

Well then, you were slightly ahead of me - I changed fandoms from anime to LOTR and HP (though I was way more into the former than the latter) right after the English release of GoF. I remember it so clearly because GoF was the first book I read in English rather than in translation.

As far as the Marauder goes, I do think fandom - myself included - made them out to be more collected than the third book even implied. I really think that the trio is actually who MWPP could've been, and the trio basically learns from them not to make those mistakes. I mean, Peter even almost ruins Ron, Harry and Hermione's friendship by faking his own death again. And Remus went the whole year keeping a huge secret about Sirius because he was ashamed of the lie he told Dumbledore.

That's a very good observation you made there, regarding the Marauders and the Trio. I think we all assumed back then that MPPW were the positive predecessors of the Trio and the twins and not their negative mirror image. I think on the whole the TYS assumed that the Wizarding World was a whole lot less traumatised and fucked up than it turned out to be.

Oh, and I agree that it makes them all more interesting. I think that the only problem I have regarding the Wizarding World and JKRs world-building is that she built up the acknowledgment that the rise of Voldemort depended on the social structures he could exploit (blood status, House rivalries and House hierarchies etc) and then ultimately fell back on easier explanations at the end. I am still a bit angry about the lack of named Slytherins in the DA, or the fact that Albus Severus was still afraid of being Sorted there twenty years later...

Edited Date: 2017-05-23 01:36 pm (UTC)

From:

author_by_night

I think on the whole the TYS assumed that the Wizarding World was a whole lot less traumatised and fucked up than it turned out to be.

Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, it was there, but it was mostly Fudge who was screwed up. I don't think anyone ever believed Hogwarts would be affected to the degree that it was in OoTP and DH.

I DID read a few fics where Lily and James were an obvious Ginny and Harry parallel, and history was in danger of repeating itself. What's funny is that re-reading the books, I see the parallels way differently. I think Harry is more like Sirius (screwed up family, taken in by the Weasleys/Potters, can be very hotheaded and cynical, although he's more rational than Sirius was), Ron is more of a James (takes Harry in like family, always by his side, and anytime Harry is without Ron nothing is the same), and Hermione is a combination of Remus and Lily. But that's another entry.

I am still a bit angry about the lack of named Slytherins in the DA, or the fact that Albus Severus was still afraid of being Sorted there twenty years later...

Yeah... on one hand, I can kind of see where the House had so many Draco types, it was pretty easily corrupted. On the other hand, I think Slytherins all being evil (which apparently wasn't Jo's intention) was one of those things that came from the books initially being for younger readers. There's a certain Roald Dahlness to the first few, and things like the Slytherin being the Bad House never quite went away, even as more mature themes arose. It's one of my few issues with the series as well, and I'm not even sure I blame JKR entirely, because I can see how she would've run out of room to write a redeemed Slytherin. (Although I guess you have Slughorn*, and presumably Andromeda Tonks, but we never see them as students.) At the same time, DH wasn't exactly favorable towards them. JKR said she envisioned Slytherins helping in the final battle, but that's not what she showed.

*Who I realize isn't portrayed as that great either, but I honestly kinda saw it as him being very broken after unintentionally helping a future Dark Lord.

Edited Date: 2017-05-24 11:53 am (UTC)

From:

pauraque

ultimately I think fandom made them out to be... much more honorable and saintly than they were. On the other hand, I think some readers came away with the impression that the Marauders were meant to secretly be sociopathic bullies, which I don't think is true.

Yeah, I definitely saw a lot of rigid black-and-white thinking about MWPP. There were also some people who promoted a very annoying false dichotomy where if you liked Snape you must also hate MWPP, or at least Sirius and James (here's where the "sociopathic bullies" interpretation got especially bad) because somehow readers were supposed to take sides in a conflict among fictional characters? I never put any stock in that, and more than a few times I was flamed for "betraying" Snape by failing to condemn Sirius and James as the cruel villains Snape believed them to be.

A writer (maybe two writers?) had an MST3K/Austin Powers/Harry Potter crossover where Voldemort held the trio and Draco hostage and made them read bad fics, the fics being submitted by the writers themselves to avoid wank.

This sounds amazing and I'm sorry I never saw it!