No Longer a Newbie
I came across an old post I made on a cross-fandom group asking why HP was so different-it’s a year old. Then I look at Ashwinder and notice I became a member on 9/23/05. So I guess it’s official-I’m not a newbie. Harry Potter fandom is different in so many ways, and I thought I’d list them here before I completely forget the shock and take it for granted. I think a lot of it is driven by sheer size, and why that size should be so phenomenal I don’t know-although I do think I remember reading Rowling is now the best-selling, richest author on the planet. I’m curious as to whether others coming from other fandoms had something of the same shock. I came from Trek, but I do think it’s not that Trek is different, but HP that is.
Top Ten Things That Are Different in Harry Potter Fanfic Fandom
1) Size Matters: I’m going to use FanFiction.Net (FFN) as a measure. They list over two thousand fanfic categories and Harry Potter is the largest with 263,987 stories in their directory. The second largest fandom in terms of stories is Naruto, an Anime fandom with 44,207 stories. Anime is huge, with 10 in the top 20, but those ten combined still have a smaller number of stories than HP alone. And, oh yeah, there’s Trek at number 20-a major fandom by any measure and the oldest one in online fanfic-but with just 10,816 stories. So HP is larger by an order of magnitude if you use that measure. And reviews-Oh, man-even the biggest name author in Trek would never get over a couple of dozen reviews for any story on FFN, while HP stories can draw hundreds, even thousands of reviews.
2) Archives, oh my: When I saw the wealth here, my eyes bugged out. The only archive we had in Trek was unmoderated and text-only, Trekiverse You can’t even leave reviews there or contact authors unless they left their email address on the story itself. They are fed by two Newsgroups, Alt.Startrek.Creative and Alt.StarTrek.Creative.Erotica.Moderated. You can’t even self-upload or edit your stories on the archive, and it can take months or even years for stories to finally get added. Basically, in Trek you posted to the Newsgroups or Yahoo Groups and that’s where you got your reviews. Very few in Trek even bothered with FFN or Adult Fan Fiction. You depended on recs basically to drive people to old stories you’d host on your own website and LJ wasn’t much of a presence. Never even got a LJ account before HP.
In my LJ post listing General HP Archives that don’t specialize I list 30 archives-all infinitely more user-friendly than Trekiverse. I think it is size that drives the phenomena of moderated archives. In a fandom as huge as HP, there’s much more of a need for readers to have some kind of filter to sift out the drek.
3) Author Control and Ownership: In Trek the author is the last word on their own fic. Touch it and you die. Those I’m still in touch with in Trek are horrified by the very concept of moderated archives, don’t understand why they exist or why any author would put up with them. (*reviews* ::cough::) Morever, it was taken for granted in Trek that you acknowledge the ideas of others you use in your fic (taking it to even ridiculous extents in acknowledgements at times) and that you do NOT write sequels, pastiches, continuations or borrow others’ original character(s) without permission. You also never saw plagiarism in Trek. We all knew each other and any similarities in a story would be instantly recognized.
4) Betas: were there to help make your story better, and the emphasis was on craft: keeping POV, “show, not tell,” story arc, characterization, etc. There’s nothing in Trek like the Lexicon. No one gave a damn about commas or canon capitalizations. In Trek betas, you’d quote the portion at issue in an email and put a suggestion, correction, or comment underneath. In HP, betas usually insert changes within a text itself. I think this reflects a more intrusive attitude toward others’ stories in HP fandom. I’ve seen HP Betas that would rewrite a story without explanation or comment. Unheard of in my old fandom. We also never had AWOL betas in Trek, and usually a beta would get back to you within a day or two-perhaps because betas only had to answer to the author and didn’t feel pressured to get their author through a moderated archive. Besides, people found betas among fellow authors. You would post a story, build a relationship on list and via email and if you respected the author and they respected you, you’d ask or they’d offer. You wouldn’t pick someone from a site that “certified” betas that had no idea who the hell you were.
5) “One-Shots”: Never heard the term in Trek, and considering the insulting tone many take toward the short form in Harry Potter fandom, I wish I never had. This, after all, is the literary form favored by Poe, Saki, Bradbury, O’Connor, O’Henry, Welty and with masterpieces by Hemingway, Faulkner, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Chekov. Most of the Sherlock Holmes tales are short stories. I’m sick to death of seeing reviews of short stories in HP running along the lines of “Good, for a one-shot,” “Oh, I love this, can’t you expand this into a real story?” ::fumes:: In Trek the short form was far more popular than longer stories which had a much harder time gaining readers. This is a gross generalization, but I think that HP has the best plot-driven fiction while Trek grew by and large better stylists-which makes sense when you look at which form is most popular and respected in each fandom.
6) WIPs: Barely ever saw them in Trek and whenever I did, I skipped right past them. I used to argue in our awards in Trek that WIPs shouldn’t even be allowed to run until and unless they were finished, and WIPs were strictly segregated in their own category where usually only the story’s beta would vote for them. After all, how can you tell if a story is good before it’s finished? And by and large the very few who posted a WIP had (deserved) reps of being the crapiest writers in the fandom. Yet my introduction to my OTP, SS/HG, is a WIP, Falling Further In by KazVL and it is still my fav HP story. I clicked on it in a list of recs for Snape stories, and there wasn’t even a warning there it was a WIP. I probably wouldn’t have tried it if I had known it was incomplete. It’s the story that hooked me on SS/HG, and now I’m writing a WIP myself. In Trek no WIP would ever, ever be rec’d or even reviewed. No way. But as a result I think…
7) Epics: Very few longer works in Trek, and I think part of why is that there was no support for WIPs. The term “mult-chaptered” fic didn’t even exist there; we never even thought in terms of chapters, just kilobites, because there were limits to what would fit into a post on Newgroups or Yahoo. So we’d chop up longer stories, but with no sense of doing it in the sense of chapters, just roughly equal length parts that didn’t go over 25 KB. And on FFN or our own sites we’d post everything in one part, even novels by and large. Even the few longer epics in Trek, were pretty much written and posted as individual stories. Take Talking Stick/Circle, probably the most famous example in Trek fandom. It’s a “braided novel” of over 350,000 words that started as a short story by Macedon that was “answered” by Peg Robinson and led to a collaboration that led to more stories that together could be seen as one novel.
8) “IC” versus “OOC”: It absolutely bewildered me when I saw this in Author’s Notes, particularly when it came to Snape. NO ONE in Trek would ever put this in a Author’s Note. No Way. The idea, after all, is to write the characters “in-character” as you see them. But I came to realize this is pure marketing and has nothing to do with canon characterization. Those looking for “IC Snape” want him dirty, abusive, brutal, and dark to an extent even JKR who called him “deeply horrible” would be taken aback at. Those looking for “OOC Snape” want a Snape fluffy and weepy to an extent that makes me wonder why they don’t just pair Hermione with Lupin or Neville and have done with it.
9) Spoilers: I see spoilers in reviews all the time and warnings galore abound in HP that often give just about every twist and turn away. I know many Trek authors that used to go postal if someone left a review that discussed story points without spoiler space and usually the only warning there could be something objectionable to someone would be a NC-17 rating. I am sometimes disappointed about how much authors and readers give away in HP before you ever get to click on a story. Otoh, I once got into a whole contretemps with one author in Trek of a “mystery pairing” that did not warn for bestiality and rated her story only an “R”-and you only learn who poor Christine Chapel’s sexual partner is (trust me, you don’t want to know) in the last lines. I’m not so sure I miss that aspect of Trek.
10) Wank: We had plenty of it but never called it that. “Flame Wars” is the term we might use but is less comprehensive since it really refers just to the visible wrangles on lists. Flame wars are like the tip of the wank iceberg. In Trek or HP, what errupts on a list is only what bubbles to the surface of long-time simmering resentments and outsiders have nary a clue but a kind of WTF feeling as they watch cliqués fight it out. It’s never about the issue discussed. The issue discussed is just a chance to express the kind of aggression that is the number one reason that most fanficcers burn out and leave fandoms within a few years (including me in Trek). Harry Potter’s saving grace though is that it is so huge. Not hard to find your own little corner where you can play in peace. HP’s size also seems to blunt the bitterest wank we had in Trek: Slash versus Het. We’re large enough here that even SS/HG, which actually isn’t a top five ship within HP, could swallow Trek whole. So we can keep to seperate corners. In Trek the Het and Slash people couldn’t get away from each other, and there was a lot of resentment that Kirk/Spock, a slash pairing, was the 800 pound gorilla.
There are other differences. HP is much more international, more diverse even among the Americans which tend to come from every part of the US. In Trek the highest tribute to a fic was a one-shot off-shoot or sequel to a story, written with the original authors’ permission. That and awards. Here in HP fan art and translations (which I never saw in Trek) seem the ultimate compliment, while I can’t recall a story in HP inspired by that of another ficcer (other than the one that caused some memorable wank on WIKTT when the ficcer involved didn’t make it immediately clear she had permission for her “pastiche”). And we’d never call a story “angst” in Trek, let alone create categories for it. Calling a story angst would be considered an insult, and I still find it hard not to wince when I’m told I write “good angst.”
I’m curious if others with experience in different fandoms would say my experience of the differences matches theirs.
Top Ten Things That Are Different in Harry Potter Fanfic Fandom
1) Size Matters: I’m going to use FanFiction.Net (FFN) as a measure. They list over two thousand fanfic categories and Harry Potter is the largest with 263,987 stories in their directory. The second largest fandom in terms of stories is Naruto, an Anime fandom with 44,207 stories. Anime is huge, with 10 in the top 20, but those ten combined still have a smaller number of stories than HP alone. And, oh yeah, there’s Trek at number 20-a major fandom by any measure and the oldest one in online fanfic-but with just 10,816 stories. So HP is larger by an order of magnitude if you use that measure. And reviews-Oh, man-even the biggest name author in Trek would never get over a couple of dozen reviews for any story on FFN, while HP stories can draw hundreds, even thousands of reviews.
2) Archives, oh my: When I saw the wealth here, my eyes bugged out. The only archive we had in Trek was unmoderated and text-only, Trekiverse You can’t even leave reviews there or contact authors unless they left their email address on the story itself. They are fed by two Newsgroups, Alt.Startrek.Creative and Alt.StarTrek.Creative.Erotica.Moderated. You can’t even self-upload or edit your stories on the archive, and it can take months or even years for stories to finally get added. Basically, in Trek you posted to the Newsgroups or Yahoo Groups and that’s where you got your reviews. Very few in Trek even bothered with FFN or Adult Fan Fiction. You depended on recs basically to drive people to old stories you’d host on your own website and LJ wasn’t much of a presence. Never even got a LJ account before HP.
In my LJ post listing General HP Archives that don’t specialize I list 30 archives-all infinitely more user-friendly than Trekiverse. I think it is size that drives the phenomena of moderated archives. In a fandom as huge as HP, there’s much more of a need for readers to have some kind of filter to sift out the drek.
3) Author Control and Ownership: In Trek the author is the last word on their own fic. Touch it and you die. Those I’m still in touch with in Trek are horrified by the very concept of moderated archives, don’t understand why they exist or why any author would put up with them. (*reviews* ::cough::) Morever, it was taken for granted in Trek that you acknowledge the ideas of others you use in your fic (taking it to even ridiculous extents in acknowledgements at times) and that you do NOT write sequels, pastiches, continuations or borrow others’ original character(s) without permission. You also never saw plagiarism in Trek. We all knew each other and any similarities in a story would be instantly recognized.
4) Betas: were there to help make your story better, and the emphasis was on craft: keeping POV, “show, not tell,” story arc, characterization, etc. There’s nothing in Trek like the Lexicon. No one gave a damn about commas or canon capitalizations. In Trek betas, you’d quote the portion at issue in an email and put a suggestion, correction, or comment underneath. In HP, betas usually insert changes within a text itself. I think this reflects a more intrusive attitude toward others’ stories in HP fandom. I’ve seen HP Betas that would rewrite a story without explanation or comment. Unheard of in my old fandom. We also never had AWOL betas in Trek, and usually a beta would get back to you within a day or two-perhaps because betas only had to answer to the author and didn’t feel pressured to get their author through a moderated archive. Besides, people found betas among fellow authors. You would post a story, build a relationship on list and via email and if you respected the author and they respected you, you’d ask or they’d offer. You wouldn’t pick someone from a site that “certified” betas that had no idea who the hell you were.
5) “One-Shots”: Never heard the term in Trek, and considering the insulting tone many take toward the short form in Harry Potter fandom, I wish I never had. This, after all, is the literary form favored by Poe, Saki, Bradbury, O’Connor, O’Henry, Welty and with masterpieces by Hemingway, Faulkner, Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Chekov. Most of the Sherlock Holmes tales are short stories. I’m sick to death of seeing reviews of short stories in HP running along the lines of “Good, for a one-shot,” “Oh, I love this, can’t you expand this into a real story?” ::fumes:: In Trek the short form was far more popular than longer stories which had a much harder time gaining readers. This is a gross generalization, but I think that HP has the best plot-driven fiction while Trek grew by and large better stylists-which makes sense when you look at which form is most popular and respected in each fandom.
6) WIPs: Barely ever saw them in Trek and whenever I did, I skipped right past them. I used to argue in our awards in Trek that WIPs shouldn’t even be allowed to run until and unless they were finished, and WIPs were strictly segregated in their own category where usually only the story’s beta would vote for them. After all, how can you tell if a story is good before it’s finished? And by and large the very few who posted a WIP had (deserved) reps of being the crapiest writers in the fandom. Yet my introduction to my OTP, SS/HG, is a WIP, Falling Further In by KazVL and it is still my fav HP story. I clicked on it in a list of recs for Snape stories, and there wasn’t even a warning there it was a WIP. I probably wouldn’t have tried it if I had known it was incomplete. It’s the story that hooked me on SS/HG, and now I’m writing a WIP myself. In Trek no WIP would ever, ever be rec’d or even reviewed. No way. But as a result I think…
7) Epics: Very few longer works in Trek, and I think part of why is that there was no support for WIPs. The term “mult-chaptered” fic didn’t even exist there; we never even thought in terms of chapters, just kilobites, because there were limits to what would fit into a post on Newgroups or Yahoo. So we’d chop up longer stories, but with no sense of doing it in the sense of chapters, just roughly equal length parts that didn’t go over 25 KB. And on FFN or our own sites we’d post everything in one part, even novels by and large. Even the few longer epics in Trek, were pretty much written and posted as individual stories. Take Talking Stick/Circle, probably the most famous example in Trek fandom. It’s a “braided novel” of over 350,000 words that started as a short story by Macedon that was “answered” by Peg Robinson and led to a collaboration that led to more stories that together could be seen as one novel.
8) “IC” versus “OOC”: It absolutely bewildered me when I saw this in Author’s Notes, particularly when it came to Snape. NO ONE in Trek would ever put this in a Author’s Note. No Way. The idea, after all, is to write the characters “in-character” as you see them. But I came to realize this is pure marketing and has nothing to do with canon characterization. Those looking for “IC Snape” want him dirty, abusive, brutal, and dark to an extent even JKR who called him “deeply horrible” would be taken aback at. Those looking for “OOC Snape” want a Snape fluffy and weepy to an extent that makes me wonder why they don’t just pair Hermione with Lupin or Neville and have done with it.
9) Spoilers: I see spoilers in reviews all the time and warnings galore abound in HP that often give just about every twist and turn away. I know many Trek authors that used to go postal if someone left a review that discussed story points without spoiler space and usually the only warning there could be something objectionable to someone would be a NC-17 rating. I am sometimes disappointed about how much authors and readers give away in HP before you ever get to click on a story. Otoh, I once got into a whole contretemps with one author in Trek of a “mystery pairing” that did not warn for bestiality and rated her story only an “R”-and you only learn who poor Christine Chapel’s sexual partner is (trust me, you don’t want to know) in the last lines. I’m not so sure I miss that aspect of Trek.
10) Wank: We had plenty of it but never called it that. “Flame Wars” is the term we might use but is less comprehensive since it really refers just to the visible wrangles on lists. Flame wars are like the tip of the wank iceberg. In Trek or HP, what errupts on a list is only what bubbles to the surface of long-time simmering resentments and outsiders have nary a clue but a kind of WTF feeling as they watch cliqués fight it out. It’s never about the issue discussed. The issue discussed is just a chance to express the kind of aggression that is the number one reason that most fanficcers burn out and leave fandoms within a few years (including me in Trek). Harry Potter’s saving grace though is that it is so huge. Not hard to find your own little corner where you can play in peace. HP’s size also seems to blunt the bitterest wank we had in Trek: Slash versus Het. We’re large enough here that even SS/HG, which actually isn’t a top five ship within HP, could swallow Trek whole. So we can keep to seperate corners. In Trek the Het and Slash people couldn’t get away from each other, and there was a lot of resentment that Kirk/Spock, a slash pairing, was the 800 pound gorilla.
There are other differences. HP is much more international, more diverse even among the Americans which tend to come from every part of the US. In Trek the highest tribute to a fic was a one-shot off-shoot or sequel to a story, written with the original authors’ permission. That and awards. Here in HP fan art and translations (which I never saw in Trek) seem the ultimate compliment, while I can’t recall a story in HP inspired by that of another ficcer (other than the one that caused some memorable wank on WIKTT when the ficcer involved didn’t make it immediately clear she had permission for her “pastiche”). And we’d never call a story “angst” in Trek, let alone create categories for it. Calling a story angst would be considered an insult, and I still find it hard not to wince when I’m told I write “good angst.”
I’m curious if others with experience in different fandoms would say my experience of the differences matches theirs.