[fandom, fandom, on the wall]
Happy Saturday, flist! (Or Sunday, if it applies.) I'm really not dead - I've been busy as all hell with Kant and Augustine and Jung and the Bible - there's only two weeks of school left in the semester, and I have two papers and an oral exam to give in that time, so needless to say things are still extremely busy. Regardless, I've had time to do some fun stuff this week!
I posted my Neville/Harry fic that I wrote for reversathon, for one - I'm really proud of it, especially after reading DH. It made me want to write Snape/Neville. For another, I've been chipping away at a bunch of PoT fics - that huge Tezuka/Fuji, a new Silver Pair, the Tezuka/Atobe, Atobe/Oshitari, and I just started a Yukimura/Yanagi. Plus longleggedgit and I are working on a surpriiiiise. AND I started thinking H/D again. >.> So.
But the biggest thing was that I drove down to Albuquerque and met up with mooncharm on Wednesday, which was awesome. She's such a complete sweetheart, and we talked for hours, first in the movie theatre before seeing OotP again, and then at dinner over coconut-honey and strawberry-raspberry margaritas. <33333333 Incidentally, I'm completely amazed by the fact that in OotP, when Harry's fighting off the Voldie!possession, he looks at himself in the mirror, sees Voldemort staring back at him, and Voldemort says... "Look at me." I totally didn't remember that at all when I was reading DH, and GOD how cool was that? Talk about meta! Or fic ideas, for that matter. XD We did a whole lot of squeeing, and I kind of shoved PoT at her, and she tempted me with SPN, and it was just good times.
We did get talking about fandom though, and the state of it, and I've been thinking about that conversation ever since.
It's true that fandom has kind of...splintered. It's not like it's dead, not by any means, but I remember becoming really active in fandom right around the time Order of the Phoenix, the book came out, and it was SO DIFFERENT then. The post-GoF fic was all Draco-in-leather and awkward-fumbly-Harry and Potions-instead-of-Legilimency and so on and so forth - very light-hearted, for the most part, though there was certainly quite a bit of angst. But from OotP onward, the darkness became much more prevalent, and there was such an explosion of really, really good fic. Everyone was writing, everyone had a million and one things to say, and I couldn't scroll my flist without seeing at least half the posts contain fic or fic recs or fic ideas or meta. And it was all so HP-centric. OotP gave us something new, which was angry!Harry, which just provided us with so much to work with as far as that went. And some of the other characters were somewhat more fleshed out as well, which meant we could write with more authority, but still had enough wiggle room to make our pre-OotP characterisations blend into the post-OotP characterisations. I didn't like the book much - it felt like a let-down to me after how long I'd been waiting for it - but I did like what happened in fandom, because I think a lot of other people felt kind of the same, not in that they disliked it, but in that there was so much we weren't given, and hence, fic.
As the time went on though, things sort of started to trickle off. I think the thing about HBP is that it introduced something so huge, plotwise, namely the Horcruxes, and Harry & co leaving Hogwarts, that it sort of threw a lot of us for a loop. Writing plotty fics post-HBP became a whole lot more difficult, and frustrating, and all the framing and 7th-year-fic ideas and so on kind of ended up thrown out the window, and kicked a lot of things back to square one. Granted, we got a LOT more about Snape, and Draco, and of course Voldemort, but it was like a sharp left at the lights instead of going straight through them, and the derailment was enough to throw off the balance. I think by that point, for me at least, my subconscious sort of just...gave up. It wasn't that I didn't want to write HP fic anymore, because I did - I was just too invested in what I'd been writing before, and too tired, to try to assimilate the new canon. It wasn't like with OotP, where it was adding canon - HBP actually changed it in a lot of ways. The fic kept coming though, and I think it was because a lot of people were disappointed with HBP. But at least as far as I noticed, a lot of the post-HBP fic wasn't really tackling the big plot elements anymore. There was a lot more relationship-fic, and a hell of a lot more porn, but it wasn't the same sort of carefully crafted novel-length masterpieces that followed GoF and especially OotP. I like porn as much as the next person, but I just...I don't like PWP. It doesn't do it for me at all. I sort of feel like a lot of the fic went that way because trying to assimilate the new canon, plot-wise, was going to take a lot more time.
Granted, this could be a function of when I entered fandom. I felt like the peak of fandom was really the year after OotP came out. I remember seeing fics with two hundred comments on them. I remember eagerly awaiting the next chapters of novels and the next fic in an arc and the next ficathon/fest sign-up. RPing was huge, and I probably had about ten of them on my flist alone. Everyone had a million things to say, and they were saying it all the time. But it hasn't been like that for a long time, and I really think that's because HBP threw a lot of us for a loop. I haven't written much fic at all since HBP. I'd like to say it was because I was just busy, but I think really what happened is I ran up against a wall with HBP spray-painted on the side in fluorescent green. All the fics I was most proud of were possible because of the vagueness surrounding what exactly it was that Harry had to do, and why, and trying to pigeonhole that into an actual path, the one we were given in HBP, was for some reason too much for me to handle.
I think the other thing was that at that point, I'd sort of become...jaded. I mean, there are SO many amazing writers in fandom that it was inevitable that the great story ideas and character interactions and relationship dynamics and such would be covered ten times over. I really felt by the time we got to HBP that people had started exhausting the really interesting, intricate ideas, and fic was becoming more and more about the porn, and what kink could be used where and in what new way. I don't want to exclude things, because there were some truly amazing fics posted post-HBP, especially at merry_smutmas, which is where I noticed them the most. But I guess...what happened was that fandom became SO BIG that it was hard for me as a writer to carve out a corner for myself that wasn't already taken. Everything had been done. And post-HBP, the only choices I had were to write something plotty incorporating this whole new giant plot device, or write relationship-centric fic. I dunno, maybe that was just me who felt like that, but I guess it sort of made it hard for me to stay so involved and eager, because it felt like everything I wanted to do, a bunch of other people had the same or similar ideas. It was like JKR had suddenly narrowed the playing field by a whole lot, and it became a lot harder to feel like I had something unique to offer. And I really don't believe in beating a dead horse.
In any case, the point of all this is that people started going their own ways, sliding into smaller fandoms that had more room for them to stretch their legs, grab a rope, and start running without worrying about smashing into too many people. Maybe it is a big-fish-in-a-small-pond situation, but I think it's more that people just naturally want a chance to be unique, to do something that hasn't already been done, because it's sort of pointless otherwise. I remember seeing a lot of complaints and hurt and anger when there was that massive exodus into Prince of Tennis/anime in general, and then people moved on to SPN or bandslash or Firefly or Doctor Who or BSG or Stargate, and it felt like the HP fandom was dying. But I guess...to me, looking back on it, it feels sort of like graduating high school and moving on to college. We were all the super-involved, super-prolific, popular kids. Where the party was at, really. Everything we did was a huge deal, and everything our friends did was a huge deal, and it was like a crazy celebration every single day. But after you've done all that you can do, all that you have energy to do, you move on to something else. That doesn't mean you don't care about what you used to do anymore, only that you've grown past it, and trying to shove yourself back into a place you used to fill won't work any better than trying to go back to your old high school now and expect to feel the same connection and challenge and camaraderie as you did then. That doesn't mean you can't still do those things you used to do, but you'll have a different perspective now, a different feel for it, a different approach, and you know what? That's awesome.
The best thing for me about the HP fandom is how absolutely diverse it is. I've always felt that way - I was amazed at the range of ages and nationalities and interests and job fields and personalities surrounding me as I snaked my way through fandom. I met so many interesting and awesome people, people I probably never would have had reason to be in contact with because they're so different from me. And that's exactly what high school is like, isn't it? Especially if said high school is a boarding school, and you're surrounded by these people all the time, and can see just how all these strangers work, and start to find your place as a result. That way, when you graduate, you have a better sense of yourself because your friends and classmates have acted as mirrors, guiding you into the right place, and then you can pick a college and a major and a life path that suits you far better than the one you might have picked as an incoming freshman.
It's especially interesting for me looking at where I am now and where I've come from because of my personality type. Maybe I've just been reading too much Jung, but I can see now why my fandom path turned out the way it did. I'm the sort of person who's interested in everything; I have a hundred different faces, all of which are actually me. As a result, it's really easy for me to get swept up by something and not really realise it until I'm already waist-deep. Looking back at HP, I remember the fics I was so interested in reading were the long, plotty sort, the ones that touched on the big questions like how Harry defeated Voldemort, etc, but those were never the sort I actually wanted to write, because I'm not at all a plot girl. I hadn't recognised that before HP, but the more I wrote in it, the more I came to terms with the fact that what really interested me were the characters, their psychology, their interactions, their relationships, and that's what I wanted to write. That's what JKR gave us too, prior to HBP - there was a lot of plot, but the framework for Harry's development was the way he interacted with other people, Voldemort being only one of them. But when he left the school, Harry's development came from the plot, what he had to do, what he knew, what his role in life was, and that's just...not the way I write. Maybe it would have been different for me, post-HBP, if I'd shipped Harry/Ron or Harry/Hermione or even Harry/Ginny, but there just wasn't much there for me to work with once he basically disappeared into his own world. And it was kind of the same thing with Draco, though I admit I had a lot more plot ideas for him. I just couldn't bring myself to write them.
But when people started going into other fandoms, it was interesting to see who went were. The prevalence of sci-fi fandoms, BSG and SG and even SPN, showed that there were a number of people who liked to have a strong sense of plot as the root of their fandom and to develop things from there. The people who went into anime fandoms seemed to be more struck by the characters, and they wanted awesome characters as the focal point from which to branch outward. That's not saying that anime people don't like plot or sci-fi people don't care about character development - just that people have a different desire, whether conscious or unconscious, insofar as what's the grounding force. HP used to be a very strong mix of both, but post-HBP, it shifted more into the realm of the plotty as the focal point, and while Harry's character development is a huge element of the series, it rests on top of the plot, rather than the other way around. In the same way, something like Prince of Tennis, the plot is almost a secondary element, even though it's the conscious focus of the series - what really matters is the characters, and the tennis is really just a framework.
HP is so huge that there really is something for everyone. But the balance shifted, and it really made the fandom into two separate factions. It's not much wonder that people started going their own way, between the huge plot element dumped in our laps and the change in focus of the series. I don't think fandom will ever be the way it was before, and that's sort of sad, but at the same time, it's really awesome to see people taking to their own niches, and knowing it's really not that different than it was before - only now, instead of people being at different corners of the same fandom, they're in different fandoms altogether, but still doing what they always did. But considering the huge number of DH posts I've seen in the past week (and god, it has only been a week, you guys), I'm pretty sure that other fandoms or not, there's still that HP force tying us all together, and that's something that'll be around for a very, very long time.
And I've really gone on forever - I don't even know if what I said makes any sort of coherent sense, considering how out of it I am. I just wanted to get my thoughts down. As for me personally, I find myself wanting to write in HP again. I want to write H/D, more than I did after HBP. I want to write Snaco. I want to write about the Malfoy family, and Remus, and Neville. It's not the same sort of burning desire I had before, but it's still there, and considering how un-inspired HP-wise I've been the past couple years, that's saying a lot.
I posted my Neville/Harry fic that I wrote for reversathon, for one - I'm really proud of it, especially after reading DH. It made me want to write Snape/Neville. For another, I've been chipping away at a bunch of PoT fics - that huge Tezuka/Fuji, a new Silver Pair, the Tezuka/Atobe, Atobe/Oshitari, and I just started a Yukimura/Yanagi. Plus longleggedgit and I are working on a surpriiiiise. AND I started thinking H/D again. >.> So.
But the biggest thing was that I drove down to Albuquerque and met up with mooncharm on Wednesday, which was awesome. She's such a complete sweetheart, and we talked for hours, first in the movie theatre before seeing OotP again, and then at dinner over coconut-honey and strawberry-raspberry margaritas. <33333333 Incidentally, I'm completely amazed by the fact that in OotP, when Harry's fighting off the Voldie!possession, he looks at himself in the mirror, sees Voldemort staring back at him, and Voldemort says... "Look at me." I totally didn't remember that at all when I was reading DH, and GOD how cool was that? Talk about meta! Or fic ideas, for that matter. XD We did a whole lot of squeeing, and I kind of shoved PoT at her, and she tempted me with SPN, and it was just good times.
We did get talking about fandom though, and the state of it, and I've been thinking about that conversation ever since.
It's true that fandom has kind of...splintered. It's not like it's dead, not by any means, but I remember becoming really active in fandom right around the time Order of the Phoenix, the book came out, and it was SO DIFFERENT then. The post-GoF fic was all Draco-in-leather and awkward-fumbly-Harry and Potions-instead-of-Legilimency and so on and so forth - very light-hearted, for the most part, though there was certainly quite a bit of angst. But from OotP onward, the darkness became much more prevalent, and there was such an explosion of really, really good fic. Everyone was writing, everyone had a million and one things to say, and I couldn't scroll my flist without seeing at least half the posts contain fic or fic recs or fic ideas or meta. And it was all so HP-centric. OotP gave us something new, which was angry!Harry, which just provided us with so much to work with as far as that went. And some of the other characters were somewhat more fleshed out as well, which meant we could write with more authority, but still had enough wiggle room to make our pre-OotP characterisations blend into the post-OotP characterisations. I didn't like the book much - it felt like a let-down to me after how long I'd been waiting for it - but I did like what happened in fandom, because I think a lot of other people felt kind of the same, not in that they disliked it, but in that there was so much we weren't given, and hence, fic.
As the time went on though, things sort of started to trickle off. I think the thing about HBP is that it introduced something so huge, plotwise, namely the Horcruxes, and Harry & co leaving Hogwarts, that it sort of threw a lot of us for a loop. Writing plotty fics post-HBP became a whole lot more difficult, and frustrating, and all the framing and 7th-year-fic ideas and so on kind of ended up thrown out the window, and kicked a lot of things back to square one. Granted, we got a LOT more about Snape, and Draco, and of course Voldemort, but it was like a sharp left at the lights instead of going straight through them, and the derailment was enough to throw off the balance. I think by that point, for me at least, my subconscious sort of just...gave up. It wasn't that I didn't want to write HP fic anymore, because I did - I was just too invested in what I'd been writing before, and too tired, to try to assimilate the new canon. It wasn't like with OotP, where it was adding canon - HBP actually changed it in a lot of ways. The fic kept coming though, and I think it was because a lot of people were disappointed with HBP. But at least as far as I noticed, a lot of the post-HBP fic wasn't really tackling the big plot elements anymore. There was a lot more relationship-fic, and a hell of a lot more porn, but it wasn't the same sort of carefully crafted novel-length masterpieces that followed GoF and especially OotP. I like porn as much as the next person, but I just...I don't like PWP. It doesn't do it for me at all. I sort of feel like a lot of the fic went that way because trying to assimilate the new canon, plot-wise, was going to take a lot more time.
Granted, this could be a function of when I entered fandom. I felt like the peak of fandom was really the year after OotP came out. I remember seeing fics with two hundred comments on them. I remember eagerly awaiting the next chapters of novels and the next fic in an arc and the next ficathon/fest sign-up. RPing was huge, and I probably had about ten of them on my flist alone. Everyone had a million things to say, and they were saying it all the time. But it hasn't been like that for a long time, and I really think that's because HBP threw a lot of us for a loop. I haven't written much fic at all since HBP. I'd like to say it was because I was just busy, but I think really what happened is I ran up against a wall with HBP spray-painted on the side in fluorescent green. All the fics I was most proud of were possible because of the vagueness surrounding what exactly it was that Harry had to do, and why, and trying to pigeonhole that into an actual path, the one we were given in HBP, was for some reason too much for me to handle.
I think the other thing was that at that point, I'd sort of become...jaded. I mean, there are SO many amazing writers in fandom that it was inevitable that the great story ideas and character interactions and relationship dynamics and such would be covered ten times over. I really felt by the time we got to HBP that people had started exhausting the really interesting, intricate ideas, and fic was becoming more and more about the porn, and what kink could be used where and in what new way. I don't want to exclude things, because there were some truly amazing fics posted post-HBP, especially at merry_smutmas, which is where I noticed them the most. But I guess...what happened was that fandom became SO BIG that it was hard for me as a writer to carve out a corner for myself that wasn't already taken. Everything had been done. And post-HBP, the only choices I had were to write something plotty incorporating this whole new giant plot device, or write relationship-centric fic. I dunno, maybe that was just me who felt like that, but I guess it sort of made it hard for me to stay so involved and eager, because it felt like everything I wanted to do, a bunch of other people had the same or similar ideas. It was like JKR had suddenly narrowed the playing field by a whole lot, and it became a lot harder to feel like I had something unique to offer. And I really don't believe in beating a dead horse.
In any case, the point of all this is that people started going their own ways, sliding into smaller fandoms that had more room for them to stretch their legs, grab a rope, and start running without worrying about smashing into too many people. Maybe it is a big-fish-in-a-small-pond situation, but I think it's more that people just naturally want a chance to be unique, to do something that hasn't already been done, because it's sort of pointless otherwise. I remember seeing a lot of complaints and hurt and anger when there was that massive exodus into Prince of Tennis/anime in general, and then people moved on to SPN or bandslash or Firefly or Doctor Who or BSG or Stargate, and it felt like the HP fandom was dying. But I guess...to me, looking back on it, it feels sort of like graduating high school and moving on to college. We were all the super-involved, super-prolific, popular kids. Where the party was at, really. Everything we did was a huge deal, and everything our friends did was a huge deal, and it was like a crazy celebration every single day. But after you've done all that you can do, all that you have energy to do, you move on to something else. That doesn't mean you don't care about what you used to do anymore, only that you've grown past it, and trying to shove yourself back into a place you used to fill won't work any better than trying to go back to your old high school now and expect to feel the same connection and challenge and camaraderie as you did then. That doesn't mean you can't still do those things you used to do, but you'll have a different perspective now, a different feel for it, a different approach, and you know what? That's awesome.
The best thing for me about the HP fandom is how absolutely diverse it is. I've always felt that way - I was amazed at the range of ages and nationalities and interests and job fields and personalities surrounding me as I snaked my way through fandom. I met so many interesting and awesome people, people I probably never would have had reason to be in contact with because they're so different from me. And that's exactly what high school is like, isn't it? Especially if said high school is a boarding school, and you're surrounded by these people all the time, and can see just how all these strangers work, and start to find your place as a result. That way, when you graduate, you have a better sense of yourself because your friends and classmates have acted as mirrors, guiding you into the right place, and then you can pick a college and a major and a life path that suits you far better than the one you might have picked as an incoming freshman.
It's especially interesting for me looking at where I am now and where I've come from because of my personality type. Maybe I've just been reading too much Jung, but I can see now why my fandom path turned out the way it did. I'm the sort of person who's interested in everything; I have a hundred different faces, all of which are actually me. As a result, it's really easy for me to get swept up by something and not really realise it until I'm already waist-deep. Looking back at HP, I remember the fics I was so interested in reading were the long, plotty sort, the ones that touched on the big questions like how Harry defeated Voldemort, etc, but those were never the sort I actually wanted to write, because I'm not at all a plot girl. I hadn't recognised that before HP, but the more I wrote in it, the more I came to terms with the fact that what really interested me were the characters, their psychology, their interactions, their relationships, and that's what I wanted to write. That's what JKR gave us too, prior to HBP - there was a lot of plot, but the framework for Harry's development was the way he interacted with other people, Voldemort being only one of them. But when he left the school, Harry's development came from the plot, what he had to do, what he knew, what his role in life was, and that's just...not the way I write. Maybe it would have been different for me, post-HBP, if I'd shipped Harry/Ron or Harry/Hermione or even Harry/Ginny, but there just wasn't much there for me to work with once he basically disappeared into his own world. And it was kind of the same thing with Draco, though I admit I had a lot more plot ideas for him. I just couldn't bring myself to write them.
But when people started going into other fandoms, it was interesting to see who went were. The prevalence of sci-fi fandoms, BSG and SG and even SPN, showed that there were a number of people who liked to have a strong sense of plot as the root of their fandom and to develop things from there. The people who went into anime fandoms seemed to be more struck by the characters, and they wanted awesome characters as the focal point from which to branch outward. That's not saying that anime people don't like plot or sci-fi people don't care about character development - just that people have a different desire, whether conscious or unconscious, insofar as what's the grounding force. HP used to be a very strong mix of both, but post-HBP, it shifted more into the realm of the plotty as the focal point, and while Harry's character development is a huge element of the series, it rests on top of the plot, rather than the other way around. In the same way, something like Prince of Tennis, the plot is almost a secondary element, even though it's the conscious focus of the series - what really matters is the characters, and the tennis is really just a framework.
HP is so huge that there really is something for everyone. But the balance shifted, and it really made the fandom into two separate factions. It's not much wonder that people started going their own way, between the huge plot element dumped in our laps and the change in focus of the series. I don't think fandom will ever be the way it was before, and that's sort of sad, but at the same time, it's really awesome to see people taking to their own niches, and knowing it's really not that different than it was before - only now, instead of people being at different corners of the same fandom, they're in different fandoms altogether, but still doing what they always did. But considering the huge number of DH posts I've seen in the past week (and god, it has only been a week, you guys), I'm pretty sure that other fandoms or not, there's still that HP force tying us all together, and that's something that'll be around for a very, very long time.
And I've really gone on forever - I don't even know if what I said makes any sort of coherent sense, considering how out of it I am. I just wanted to get my thoughts down. As for me personally, I find myself wanting to write in HP again. I want to write H/D, more than I did after HBP. I want to write Snaco. I want to write about the Malfoy family, and Remus, and Neville. It's not the same sort of burning desire I had before, but it's still there, and considering how un-inspired HP-wise I've been the past couple years, that's saying a lot.