Harry, A History
I just finished Melissa Anelli's "Harry, A History" and kept wondering why I don't remember meeting Melissa, because a lot of the book reminds me of my own time in the Harry Potter Fandom. How could we have had the same experiences while being hundreds sometimes thousands of miles away from each other. It was very deja Vu-like. I have to say that I enjoyed 99.9% of the book and actually learned a few things that I didn't know. But here's the .01% I didn't like.
pg. 222
"...there was Gryffindor Tower, a distinctly Harry/Ginny-based site in which the most popular fic featured a teenage, pregnant Ginny, who allowed herself to have Harry's child at seventeen years old because Dumbledore had soberly informed her and Harry that they needed to procreate to save the world."
To sum up GT's life on the web with such a sentence, while it may be factually true, gives a false impression of what the entire site was about. Now, I don't mean any offense to Melissa, because she wasn't around when GT was born. I just wish she had asked someone who was or maybe someone who wasn't biased to give a better 32 word description of who we were.
Gryffindor Tower, the first Harry/Ginny based site stood alone among the masses. Although there was no 'un-subtexted' canon to prove the Harry/Ginny ship, the Queens (owners of GT) fiercly believed the couple would come together. Alienation, ridicule, and downright nastiness were many of the prices paid for being a H/G prior to the release of HBP. The site now defunct once housed over 300 authors, artists of unbelievable talent. The message boards were also home to well over 1400 members. Life long friends and enemies were made and still held.
I guess what eats me up inside is that it sounds like GT was a site for the sole use of a psycho-pathic, manipulative, backstabbing, did I say psychotic Teddy-Throwing bitch who'd rather rip friendships to shreds instead of bowing out and moving along like a decent person would have. The "if I can't be number 1, there won't be any place to be number 1", attitude killed a community.
Gryffindor Tower was not Imogen! Gryffindor Tower was Paula and Anne and Sue and Imogen. She was, at first, one fourth of a whole. At the end she wasn't even a 20th of who GT really was. She was an author who had a large fan-girl base for a story that should have ended at part two.
GT was a safe haven for those of us who believed we were reading correctly what JKR was writing. If you weren't there, you couldn't begin to understand what we went through (yeah I know, sob, sob, sob) at the hands of so called class act BNFs. We were a family that was betrayed from the inside from a cult-like manipulator who was having a hissy fit that she wasn't getting all the reviews like she so justly deserved.
Sour grapes? Hell yeah! So please, to the next author who writes a book and mentions GT, please don't.
Melissa, again, it really was a wonderful book and I can't wait to start my first re-read. Thank you for bringing our crazy online world out into the open. If anything it just proves again, we are not alone.